Starting Your Business in 2024: The Practical Approach

The entrepreneurship landscape in 2024 has changed little compared to last year. Both in terms of opportunities and challenges.

Technological advancements are still providing plenty of options for business owners when it comes to optimising recruitment and operations. For example, cloud computing allows you to have an experienced global workforce at a fraction of the cost compared to hiring from the US.

Also, the growing development of AI makes business processes way more efficient, which you as an entrepreneur can use to avoid overstaffing.

However, 2024 comes with challenges. The unchanged global geopolitical situation can negatively affect your supply chain, which may lead to delayed shipments or even a complete overhaul of suppliers your business may rely on.

The knock-on effect of this global instability is the continuation of the struggle with inflation in the US, which surely affects business people who are dipping their toes into the sea of entrepreneurship.

With the entrepreneurial opportunities and challenges in your rear-view mirror, let’s dive into some useful information and practical advice on starting your own LLC in California.

Setting up your business in California

California is a state with the most registered LLCs every year. This comes as no surprise when you consider the benefits it offers to businesses.

Benefits of registering an LLC in California

1. There’s a clear distinction between personal and business liabilities
2. Business debts can’t affect your assets
3. Personal investments are safe from business risk
4. Profits taxed as personal income tax
5. You can deduct up to $5000 yearly on business expenses, which can be useful for offsetting LLC filing fees and associated costs
6. You can register as an S-corp and reduce tax fees due to self-employment
7. Solopreneurs and foreign investors are allowed, 
8. An LLC will stay intact after membership changes

The list of the benefits doesn’t end here but it’s more than enough to entice you to learn the ins and outs of starting your business in the Golden State.

How to start your LLC in California?

1. Register your LLC name 
2. Choose a registered agent
3. Submit LLC paperwork

1. Make the LLC operating agreement
2. Fill out the Articles of Organization form (LLC-1)
3. Fill out the Application to Register a Foreign Limited Liability Company form (LLC-5), if you’re opening an LLC in California from out-of-state
4. Fill out the LLC-12 form (you should do this every two years)
5. Apply for an employer identification number (EIN) with the IRS
6. Pay the following taxes:

1. A yearly minimum franchise tax of $800 (even if not doing business in the state)
2. Income tax
3. Sales tax
4. Self-employment tax for sole proprietors with a net profit of $400 or more during the taxable year

It’s a streamlined process that you will be able to follow along easily. To find out more about the steps above, read Tailor Brand’s article on how to register your LLC in California.

Things to keep in mind!

a. Naming restrictions: The Secretary of State Business Program Division stated that the following words may not be used when registering your LLC name: bank, trust, trustee, incorporated, inc., corporation, corp., insurer or insurance company or anything pointing at being an insurance-related business.

b. Extra steps while naming a business: if you as a sole proprietor want to use a different business name from your own or you’re in a partnership that won’t use partners’ last names as the business name, you’ll have to register for a DBA/FBN (“doing business as” / “fictitious business name”). 

c. Foreign businesses: in addition to the LLC-5, a foreign business would have to submit a certificate of good standing issued and verified by the state where the LLC was formed.

d. Tax consideration: The initial tax filing and payment are due on the 15th day of the fourth month after filing your Articles of Organization.

Once the legislative and financial tasks are behind you, it’s time to focus on the customers. You’ll surely showcase your products/services on a website and/or an app. You’ll also definitely use different marketing channels to attract traffic there and that’s why you’ll need a perfect performance tracking tool.

Tracking business performance with Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

There have never been more touchpoints a customer makes while interacting with your business. Knowing which interactions matter more is especially important if you’re just starting your entrepreneurial career. You may have just one chance to succeed so better make it count.

Since all customers must finally land either on your website or your app, you should know where they came from and for what reason. To find that out, we’ll discuss the most important Google Analytics KPIs.

GA4 – the modern crystal ball

Let’s say you want to promote a discount for annual subscriptions on social media, display ads, newsletters and industry-relevant websites. Google Analytics has a way for you to see which channel draws the most traffic – acquisitions report.

Acquisitions report – a way to see which traffic source brings in the most visitors

Traffic sources that you can compare in this report are:

• Direct
• Organic search
• Cross-network
• Paid search
• Referral
• Organic social
• Affiliates
• Email
• Organic shopping

For each of these sources, you’d be able to see metrics like: 

1. Total revenue
2. Conversions
3. Time on the page
4. Bounce rate
5. Engagement rate

Use this data to understand what works best when it comes to attracting ideal website/app visitors. Total revenue and conversion metrics are key here. If you run an e-commerce store, there’s an even more granulated report.

GA4 KPIs for e-commerce

GA4 has a dedicated report for e-commerce purchases, nested in the monetization report. However, you’ll have to do extra work in both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for it to display relevant data like “items viewed by item name over time” or to let you compare item views with add-to-carts and e-commerce purchases.

The benefit of doing the extra work, however, is incredible. You’ll be able to recognize seasonal patterns, see discrepancies between high item views and low sales and much more.

The importance of monitoring website performance with Google Analytics 4 

By constantly tracking website data with Google Analytics, you can draw conclusions that exceed marketing performance insights. You can learn how engaging your website content is or who your unexpected referral websites are. You can also recognize unnatural peaks in website traffic and prevent a DDoS attack and more. The better data scientist you hire, the better takeaways you’ll get from GA4.

However, until you start acting on the information you gathered, you won’t do much to position your business at the forefront of your industry or at least try to do so. For that, you’ll need actionable tools that can turn the GA4 data into meaningful marketing campaigns. These tools are called customer engagement platforms (CEPs). They’re especially useful for client retention and increasing the customer’s lifetime value.

Marketing, taken up a notch with CEPs

Customer engagement platforms also rely on data analysis but unlike the Google product, they have an actionable segment. With the analytics integrated into the tools, you can tailor and execute multi-channel marketing campaigns according to customer base criteria like demographics, purchase history or website activity. All from one place.

A great but complex CEP is Braze. In addition to email marketing, it offers CRM integration, comprehensive lead management, social media & SMS marketing and more.

For a business at its conception, it might be overwhelming to use it. That’s why we suggest you start with some Braze competitors and focus on email marketing first. We prioritized ease of use and pricing when deciding on alternatives.

Two alternatives that are user-friendly and affordable are SEINō and Campaign Monitor.

SEINō’s strengths

Since one of your first marketing efforts will surely be newsletters, it makes sense to start off with an email analytics tool like SEINō. The following features make it a great choice:

• User-friendly interface
• Integrations with various sales, marketing, and analytics tools
• A/B testing for subject lines, CTAs and email body
• Great data analysis features (customizable data graphs, advanced reporting and segmentation)

The basic SEINō plan costs €59/month for 50k emails sent.

Campaign Monitor’s strengths

If you are a more visual type and don’t need the robust reporting of SEINō, then Campaign Monitor is a great tool for you. Also, if you are at the very beginning, you may choose this one because of the price. Here are some of its key features:

• Easy-to-use visual interface
• Basic email analytics (opens, clicks, bounced emails, spam reports)
• Forms
• A/B testing for subject lines, email body and send times
• Similar integration to SEINō plus CMS integrations

Campaign Monitor pricing starts at $11 for 2500 emails and essential features. Fortunately, the advanced features aren’t that much of an upgrade so you’ll realistically need to pay for a bigger package only once your email list outgrows the 2500 contacts limit.

How to ensure the maximum impact and ROI of your marketing campaigns?

Since we focused mostly on email marketing so far, let’s see what metrics can show us the success of our newsletter campaign.

Reach and awareness: by measuring the open rate and even more importantly the click-through rate (CTR) of your newsletter campaign, you’ll know how close to the next step of the sales funnel your audience is. Open rate can deceive because email clients often trigger open signals in email marketing tools when scanning for malicious data.

Engagement: this is where your email campaign and Google Analytics can work hand-in-hand. By analyzing the traffic coming from your email campaign, you can know how long you can keep your audience’s attention. Key metrics here are scroll depth and time spent on the page.

Conversions: these can be anything – purchases, subscriptions to webinars, downloads. For example, a detailed product brochure. After learning more about a product, a prospective customer may become a real one soon.

ROI: to measure return on investment, you need a calculator. By dividing the revenue generated by the money spent on the campaign that generated that revenue, you’ll know your ROI. To know that a campaign has contributed to revenue, you’ll have to optimize it well so there’s no second guessing. UTM tags are a great asset for doing just that.

Conclusion

As you now know, starting your own business in 2024 requires you to have all eyes everywhere at once as an entrepreneur. Before you even start the journey, you must juggle bureaucracy, legislation, and taxes. And then you have to make sense of endless streams of data coming from tools like Google Analytics 4, SEINō and Campaign Monitor.

It’s not easy but it’s entirely possible, especially when you have the dream of entrepreneurial independence in your sight at all times. We hope this article helped you untangle the yarn of business management enough to motivate you to take the next step. Upwards and onwards!