I have a couple quick q’s I cant get answered, and I have given it some effort (just take my word for it).
I plan to clean windows in various cities of San Diego County, in which i live in an unincorporated area of (which i should mention does NOT require a business license) My question is about a business license and if I need one in some form. Some employees of the county say I need one for every city I work in (seems excessive especially if i work in 20 cities) some say I need an ein ( but i dont plan on hiring anyone…)
Some folks say I may need to submit my FBN to the county, although I will be using my full name in the company name…
I want to do everything legit, and put a form of id on the truck (along with the insurance) but dont onow what to do? should i put my tin # on there?
You should be good with just a DBA from the county , even thought a LLC or S-corp would be better for tax and liability purposes.
The only licenses you need is if you’re doing construction clean up , then you need a licensed contractor d-63 license.
An EIN number is a substitute for your Ssn . Sometimes you have to give a Client a w-9 , you can put an EIN instead of your Ssn to prevent fraud. So you just don’t need it if you’re having employees .
You can just put in your truck insured window cleaning service. Some guys put insured and bonded . Licensed and insured . Insured and bonded . And so forth , I wouldn’t over think it if I need to put a license number on my truck
Yes because you will want to open a business bank acct and more than likely they’ll ask for a DBA . Also you want to make sure no one else is using that name , you also don’t want someone to take the name after you have been using it .
You need to check with each city. Some cities require you to have an out of area business license to do business in their city. We are based in Thousand Oaks and I have about 13 different business licenses I have to renew every year. Costs about $800 for all of them every year. Now that being said, I have never once been asked to produce this documentation for anyone…
Thousand Oaks - what a beautiful area.
Looks like I will be selling my business in a near future and will be moving to Moorpark, CA. Is Ventura area saturated with window cleaners? I wonder how hard it would be to start from scratch in that area.
Thanks
I don’t know about saturated but most of the companies that are here are pretty legit. There’s probably 7-10 that are pretty good. We do a lot of work in LA county. Very little in the Ventura area. Lot of 9wner operators down in Ventura that charge about 30% less than we do on average.
There was a guy out of Ventura trying to sell his business about a year ago.
Why would you want to start from scratch and move to Ventura?
I know a few guys from vta used to visit this site often.
