M-Advocates & Partners
Your Trusted Legal Partner for the Business of Today!
75% of all startups fail within the first 6 months of launching. Sometimes, not because their product is not good enough, but because they started on the wrong foot. Although this is probably the least fun part of launching a startup, founders and co-founders need to familiarize themselves with the basic legal requirements that they need for their long-term success.
Following are a few simple “DOs and DON’Ts” to help you get your foot in the door.
A job loss can be a difficult experience and cause significant challenges, but it can also raise a number of legal issues and questions regarding an employee’s rights. If you have resigned, been fired, or are being subjected to a layoff, this section can provide tips on severance pay, non-competition agreements, wrongful termination claims, and much more.
Intellectual property, or IP as it is commonly referred to, consists of all the pieces of your business that you or your employees have thought of. It’s the things that differentiate you from the competition that you came up with using your intellect – your brain.
IP is the original concepts and ideas conceived of and developed by employees, or workers and advisors under contract to do so, that become corporate assets. This includes things like:
In the modern information economy, where disruption is the name of the game and teams working smarter frequently beat established players out of the market, employees are a company’s biggest asset.
Employees who stay in companies longer not only make for better team leaders due to their experience. They also help improve knowledge retention and inspire newer hires as positive examples of an in-company career path. Not to mention how they help a business avoid the costs of training new people to fill their role.
In management lore, there are all sorts of signs that one of your employees is about to quit.
Some claim you should worry if an employee suddenly starts showing up to work in a suit, or alternatively if someone starts dressing much more casually. Others say it’s a red flag if a team member misses work more than usual.
In the predigital era, some bosses lurked by the printer to see if employees had left their résumés lying around.
Human resources leaders we’ve interviewed and surveyed about the current state of HR and human capital management identified finding and retaining employees as their top challenge. Running a close second on the list was maintaining HR compliance, specifically developing, communicating and enforcing policies and procedures across the organization.
Setting a clear, effective vacation policy is an important part of your people and culture strategy and should be at the top of any employer’s mind.
Ensuring that team member vacations are well taken care of can help prevent team member burnout and boost retention. And don’t forget about the benefits to your people and culture professionals; a well-thought-out policy for managing vacation time and pay will save them plenty of headaches.
Roughly 50% of employees, in case you’re curious–and you should be, because they are working for you right now–show up to work, watch the clock waiting for lunch and 5:00 p.m. to roll around, kill time, and do the minimum required, with rare extra effort.
You don’t want to hear what the remaining workers do.
A generous employee benefits package can be an excellent way to keep the talent you have, and to recruit the cream of the crop.
There are many ways to measure the success of an entrepreneur, including the number of new ideas launched, the revenue and profits earned, and the ways in which he or she serves an industry or a community. But perhaps the chief among these is the impact the entrepreneur is able to have on the lives of employees. Beyond tangible rewards such as pay, and intangibles such as mentoring, a business owner can profoundly shape a worker’s life by providing a generous package of employee benefits. Indeed, many entrepreneurs acknowledge that the effect they have on the lives of workers is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a business owner.
If you are planning to register a new limited company, you must first decide whether it will be limited by shares or limited by guarantee. The vast majority of companies are set up as limited by shares. This is an ideal legal structure if you want to keep business profits for yourself.
