The mistakes that don’t show up until year two.

Most formation mistakes aren’t obvious the day you make them — the wrong entity, a registered agent you skipped, personal and business funds mixed in one account. They sit quietly until a lawsuit, an audit, or a funding conversation surfaces them at the worst possible time. This checklist is the order to actually do this in, not just a list of terms.

1. Entity Type

• LLC — the default for most first-time founders: liability protection, flexible tax treatment, minimal formalities.
• S-Corp election — a tax election on top of an LLC or corporation, not a separate entity type. Worth it once profit is consistently high enough that the payroll/tax tradeoff pencils out — not before.
• C-Corp — the standard if you plan to raise venture capital or issue equity to a large number of investors/employees. Overkill for most service businesses.
• Whichever you pick, the entity alone isn’t the protection — how you run it (see #4) is what actually holds up.

2. Registered Agent

A registered agent receives legal notices — including the notice that you’re being sued — on your business’s behalf. Skip it or let it lapse, and a lawsuit can proceed with you never having been properly notified, ending in a default judgment against you. It’s a small annual cost against a genuinely large risk.

3. Licensing & Annual Reports

• Check state, county, and city-level license requirements — they’re separate, and missing one is one of the most common early mistakes.
• Every state requires an annual (or biennial) report to stay in good standing. Miss it, and the state can administratively dissolve the entity — quietly, with no dramatic warning, just a deadline you didn’t track.

4. Banking & Insurance

• Separate business bank account, day one. Commingling personal and business funds is the single fastest way to lose the liability protection the entity was supposed to give you — a court can decide the entity was never really separate from you personally.
• General liability insurance at minimum; add professional liability if you give advice or perform a service that could cause a client financial harm.

This is the checklist, not the filing itself — the actual paperwork, state-specific fees, and registered-agent setup are still real work. That’s exactly what the Business Formation service inside the portal handles end to end, filed correctly the first time.