Have any of you guys run into small towns requiring a city business license to allow you to operate in their town? I live in a fairly rural area, and I have clients in at least 6 or 7 small towns, ranging in population from approx. 20,000 to about 1,500. My physical business address in is one particular town, so I can see why I might need a business license for that town, but why do I need one for the other towns I operate in? This seems to be really discriminatory against small, mobile, service providers, compared with large, fixed businesses, such as restaurants or stores. They only need 1 business license, yet their turnover might be 10 or 20 times mine.
I live in Missouri, so maybe this is just a Missouri anomaly. Does anyone have any experience with this?
Same in California
Sent from my iPhone
I just found a thread from 2010 that dealt with this, but if anyone has anything more recent to add, I would be interested to know. Thanks.
are you not liscensed in your town?
here anyone selling anything to homeowners must be liscensed and bonded with the city. i am not talking about bonded as in all our employees are bonded this is a performance bond and the value is assessed by the city according to risk they see, size of jobs, stabilty, of your company etc and it to protect residents and other businesses from fly by nighters and poachers (businesses that are transient and do not contribute to the local tax base and take business from those that do)
in a previous business i had a rural dealership and one day a guy pulls up to the house we were working on asks if i have “a peddlers liscense” i said “no i didn’t know needed one”. he told me to follow him to the town office RIGHT NOW! he asked me about my business, said there were no local companies that did my service so he allowed me to pay a small fee and continue.
my company must be liscesned $800 per year and anyone who sells estimates or knocks on doors must also be liscensed at $100 each per year.
Yeah, the cities can make you get a license. It depends on how anal they want to be. A lot of small towns don’t care - big cities care even less. Until some city clerk gets a bug in their ear and calls you up asking to get a license.
That’s what happened to me, cleaning in a neighboring city for over a year and we get our picture in the paper (in an article about unemployment no less) and the next day I get a call from a clerk saying she couldn’t find my license.
or… i ran an ad once that said i was properly liscensed and bonded with the city and i got a call from a guy at the city who told me that that was a requirement and i was not allowed to advertise it!
while it’s been a law here for years out of the blue 3 cities made a stronger push for it. Provided a letter 90 days in advance. You could pay the fee’s and save sign up cost or fines or something. Or not sign up and if they catch you, pay for license, pay admin fee and small fine.
… My business address is in Prescott and most of my business is there and no license of any kind is needed. In 2 of the smaller towns nearby I am supposed to have a license to do business there. …Ce’ la vie.
Wow! Those prices are steep! Maybe I should quit complaining. My licenses are quite a bit lower. Yes, I am licensed in the town in which i live, and for the neighboring town. It just seems so unfair to target a service business that travels, while a stationary business just pays for 1 license. The fees should at least be pro-rated according to your annual turnover. Thanks for the responses, guys.
when i had a store here i paid realty tax on the space, and business tax. Had a transient business been allowed to compete with me without paying any support to the community it would have hurt my business and my community.
you are looking at it from your current perspective.
not long ago (well quite a while ago) the aluminum siding salesman was a a scam that went across the US and Canada several times. the salesman knocks on the door,
salesman “hello vee are selling alumeenum siding for your home, eet never needs painting, eet’s the best theeng since sliced bread and will only cost you 90 million dollars”
homeowner “ooooo sounds wonderful but i don’t have 90 million”
salesman " spahshall deel for you… $2000 today only"
homeowner “great when can you start here’s my life savings”
salesman “vee come next week all gud you like”
of course they either don’t come or come but do the crappiest job ever. no one knows who they are or where they’ve gone.
drivers licenses TRY to protect us against bad drivers business licenses TRY to protect citizens from bad businesses.
they are just another cost of doing business.
I guess I have a hard time understanding how a mobile service provider (or “transient business”) like a window cleaner would be competing with a guy that owns a store. I’m not selling squeegees, and the guy with the store isn’t offering to go and clean people’s windows. So how exactly are we competing?
Secondly, I fail to see how requiring a mobile business to pay a separate business license for every little one horse town he operates in, protects anyone. It’s clearly discriminatory against mobile businesses, as opposed to businesses with fixed locations. A guy who operates in one large town only has to pay for one license. I operate in maybe 8 or 10 small towns, so I need 8 or 10 licenses. Yet my annual income might be way below that of the guy operating in the large town. It’s an inequitable, unjustifiable system, and it needs changing. I have no problem buying a license for the town I operate from, to protect the honest, hardworking townsfolk from scam artists. I guess I have a hard time understanding why it’s my responsibility to protect the citizens of all the towns in a 50 mile radius.
wow
