The first thing that I get to participate in is to help with the business entity set up. Once it is set up, it will be the legal owner of the Poke bowl business. Then the entity, in turn, will be owned by my dad and his partners. This entity/owner relationship is necessary to avoid various legal issues.

Our business entity is going to be in the form of a partnership called a Limited Liability Company("LLC").

So today my dad and I went to to the California Secrertary of State office located in Downtown Los Angeles to form the LLC. However, we found out that the LLC forms are usually filed online and then must be mailed directly to the Sacramento office. It turns out, in order to do an in-person expedited service, we would need to drive all the way to Sacramento. So we came back home and did online research to figure out a way to resolve our issue. It was ironic that we went to the physical office to expedite our filings, but ended up wasting time instead.

(To provide a little bit of explanation on why we needed to expedite our filings: we are targeting our store to open at the beginning of the new year. We did not want to begin any related business and tax paperwork during 2016 just in case it created 2016 IRS tax filing requirements. I learned that unless the entity is <14 days of year end, a filing of the tax return is necessary, which means that even if we are only in business for two weeks, we have to pay a full $800 to the California State and have to incur the cost of preparing the entity's tax return. This means the total cost of being in business for two weeks will be a lot higher than the money we would be making during the same two week period. This basically answered my question as to why don't we open as soon as we can? So we decided to wait until 2017 to start our business formation and expedite it as much as possible.)

Upon researching, we found a business called SunDoc Filing that provides a service that included an in person drop off at the Sacramento SOS office. So we filled out their application and paid various fees including: filing fees, service fees, and extra expedite fees. This added up to be a whopping $600. Extra fees were paid, but hopefully, it will pay off in the end by being able to start our business on time in addition to avoiding 2016 tax filings.