I have my Web site, my products and a marketing campaign. The school provides 1-to-1 and group critical thinking, logic and English classes to adults.
Next step is to register as a business.
At the moment I’m the only teacher, but I hope to expand in the future and hire part-time hourly online teachers. I have an APRC and a Taiwanese friend to help with paperwork.
I have zero experience in business, only as a teacher and a journalist. I am looking to do as much of this on my own as possible.
Would an LLC be my best bet?
Do I need to invest capital?
What are the mistakes which people generally make in setting up businesses here?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
You will. It’s almost impossible to do it by yourself. You will almost certainly need a CPA to open and run a business here.
You’ll also need to do VAT, or as I like to call it, GST, every two months. It’s completely in Chinese. If you’re not paying your friend to do it as it’s quite complex, when getting started.
Eventually I have taught myself how to do it for my own company. But often when you build a relationship with a CPA, they will do them for you for a small monthly fee. You’ll also need to calculate income taxes, of which the CPA will do in a way to help you save on your taxes as if you’re just starting up, you probably won’t have an inhouse accounting team.
