At 2002-10-21 14:44 -0800, Bob Paddock wrote: >Any one know how I go about setting my self up as a leagal contractor?
Despite that I am trying to get you a new job, I think that you indeed should start your own business. Here in the Netherlands it's quite easy: You go to the local chamber of commerce and have them fill out a form. Costs you half an hour and $50 or so a year (and you get a free quarterly newspaper with local business news). They can also help you with all kinds of issues but I didn't need that. You also have to inform the tax 'service' within a week or so. I quit my old job as an embedded systems programmer in januari 1997, which wasn't easy because my boss desperately wanted to keep me. (That was not during a recession. ;-). Anyway, I started working on the Chipdir 'full-time', but didn't bother registering a company yet. (You don't need to be a company to do business.) I did that early 1998 and asked the person at the chamber of commerce to ante-register it as of january 1997 and that was no problem if I was willing to pay from that date onward which wasn't a problem for me of course (only $50 extra). I didn't know that the tax 'service' needed to be notified on such short notice and called them some weeks later to inquire how I should notify them. I got a letter 'that they had discovered that I started a company' and summoned me to register my company with them as soon as possible. I did it and that was that. Haven't had any troubles with either of them since. The only problem in the beginning was that it was unclear if I should charge VAT (value added tax) to foreign advertisers or not. I called them about it and the expert I discussed it with couldn't tell me because the WWW was still so new and there was no legislation/directive about it yet. So I did what I thought was best and later that turned out to be the correct way. My experience with the Dutch tax 'service' is, that they are very helpful when you ask them about how to do things. They also gave new companies a book and later CD-ROM's explaining all tax matters (and much more) in detail and currently there is a good WWW site, explaining it all. If you have any doubts starting a business you shouldn't worry about these details much. Both organizations will offer all kinds of help. Strangely enough, in those days, you would have to register a company to get the information that you needed to make an informed decission to decide if you wanted to register a company... Luckily this information is now available for everyone on the WWW. Of course you must worry about the business side of things: Can you make enough money to support yourself (and your family)? Before I started the Chipdir I didn't have a good enough business idea that could support itself yet and I had a friend that did (or thought he had), so I worked for him. By the way, even if you don't know what your business should do, just start with something and make sure that people notice it. When you're good it's amazing how many people will come to you and ask you to design and sell products that you had no idea that existed, was a market for, but that those clients need. This happened to my friend's business. He started out with an idea for a combined modem, answering machine, fax (what every $20 modem card has standard now) and winded up making all sorts of other things like last-call-recorders for post offices, digital harddisk/tape recording devices for the police, communication systems for retirement homes, automatic taxi-call systems for bars, electronic locks and a lot of other things. >> Be a consultant specialist? Safety expert (protecting them from >> lawsuits? People love it when you know the things that need to be done to >> keep them out of court. > >I have been studying for my Certified Quality Software Engineer certification. >Was going to take test in December, with every thing up in the air now, not >sure about that. Some day maybe I can set my self up as a software inspector >to see that the embedded code is written safely. Following guide lines like >ISO9001, UL1998, MISRA, ISO9899, DO-178B and more alphabeat soup. >Any one here ever hear of such a thing, or better need such a service? If you should start out for yourself, don't underestimate the power of press releases and/or small advertisements. When we had just started and had finished our first product (the last-call-recorder PCB)we sent out press releases to all technical magazines that we could think of and most of them honored us with a small article. (Most magazines appreciate ready-to-use, well written, free, content, especially when it has an easy to use relevant picture.) We never sold much of those PCB's or products based on it, but it gave us an enormous amount of contacts and therefore ideas for products that companies and governmental organizations wanted instead. One of the most important lessons we learned was, that you should never underestimate the popular (low-level) magazines. We got most of the response from the articles in Elektuur and Computer!Totaal which are popular electronics and computer magazines of quite unscientific level, but which obviously also get browsed through by a lot of experts (or managers) to get inspiration (?). Here is the WWW site of the company of my friend: http://www.ii.nl/idd/ (I have given the link earlier on this list. I played and worked there from about 1985 until januari 1997 and I wrote most of the software during that period). As regards small ad's: Another friend used to put a couple of small ad's in each saterday issue of the Telegraaf, the most populistic Dutch newspaper in which he offered PABX's (telephone exchanges for businesses). What he would do was buy the existing PABX of clients and sell them a new one, with the main difference being that he had reprogrammed the three EPROM's with the latest software version. Greetings, Jaap -- Chip Directory -- http://www.chipdir.biz/ -- http://www.chipdir.info/ -- http://www.chipdir.net/ -- http://www.chipdir.nl/ -- http://www.chipdir.org/ -- And about 30 other mirror sites world-wide. -- -- To subscribe to a free 'chip issues, questions and answers' -- mailing list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with -- in the body 'subscribe chipdir-L'. About 500 experts are -- willing to think with you about electronics problems etc. -- Author: Jaap van Ganswijk INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
