Business and Tax Lawyer Blog

The Beaver Street Enterprise Center is a small business incubator that opened its doors in Jacksonville, Florida in 2003. It was established by the nonprofit group, FreshMinistries, to nurture small businesses by providing entrepreneurs with reasonably priced office space, mentoring services and opportunities for networking with other business owners.

In the incubator’s first year, fifteen fledgling businesses provided jobs for sixty two Floridians. By 2007, the center’

s businesses provided almost five hundred jobs to Florida residents, most of them from Jacksonville. The total revenue produced by these businesses has grown to close to $10 million.

Successful businesses to come out of the incubator include A. Harold & Associates, Xeye, Inc., and a Burger King Franchisee who owns six Burger King stores. The University of North Florida’s Small Business Development Center also has a presence there. Most come for the $10 per square foot office rent, but stay for the networking and relationships. Entrepreneurs credit the center with providing them the focus they need to build their businesses, the contacts with other business owners who can provide guidance, and the opportunity to meet local bankers who can help finance their operations.

The Beaver Street Center is currently home to fifteen small business tenants, and has room for two more. The Center also supports fourteen home-based businesses with shared office space, equipment and training. In addition, the Jacksonville Hospitality Institute offers a nine-week course, held in the Center, which prepares students for a career in hotels or restaurants.

Find out more about this small business incubator at Jacksonville small businesses get chance to grow on Beaver Street.

If you live in the Jacksonville, Florida or Orlando, Florida area and run a small business, please contact Wood, Atter & Wolf, P.A. for business legal counsel.

Arguably the most versatile of the forms, the LLC is somewhat of a hybrid, in it allows for the management flexibility of a general partnership, but features the limited liability of a limited partnership. LLCs can be member-managed or manager-managed and no personal liability on behalf of the entity attaches. LLCs are taxed either pass-through or as a corporate entity. Florida requires the filing of articles of organization for LLCs.

The advantages of an LLC include: no shareholders, the option to operate like a partnership or elect one managing member, no personal liability for any of the members, and the option to choose tax treatment.

Before registering a business, every new business owner is confronted with the task of deciding what business form/entity to use.

Well, the basic common business forms come in 6 flavors. They are the sole proprietorship, the general partnership, limited partnership, limited liability partnership (LLP), limited liability company (LLC), and the Corporation.

This is the first in a seven-part series, where I will provide a brief introduction to the options that best suits a business owner's needs.

In Jacksonville and northeast Florida we have just about all of them—McDonald's, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts; I am talking about the major franchises in the growing business of selling specialty coffee drinks. Recently, I posted a blog on succeeding in difficult economic times by finding a niche (Lucrative Niches +Established Marketplaces =Better Chances for Franchise Success). In that blog I explained that one way to be successful in a tough economy is by finding a niche that separates your company from the other businesses in the same market.

In this blog I would like to show you how the few franchisors I already listed, along with Tim Hortons and Caribou Coffee, a couple of the other major players in the specialty coffee market (neither of which have locations in Jacksonville), use their niches in the coffee and food chain restaurant business to compete. Here is a brief explanation of what helps each of them succeed in garnering a portion of the market share.

McDonald's, the largest franchisor, uses its buying power to provide the product at a slightly cheaper price and sells it along with its wide array of breakfast and burger meals.

Starbucks is probably the originator of the specialty coffee boom, so it can rely on the fact that it was the first in the market and that it is primarily a high-end coffee business.

Dunkin Donuts combines its primary product, donuts, with coffee to reach its particular market, and prior to Tim Horton's entering the marketplace, Dunkin Donuts, was the only one of these businesses offering its customers a wide array of donuts. Dunkin Donuts has recently added breakfast sandwiches in order to compete with McDonald's and Tim Hortons.

Tim Hortons, like Dunkin Donuts, sells a wide variety of donuts, but it also sells breakfast sandwiches and other foods, including soups and lunch sandwiches.

Caribou Coffee, the only other primarily high-end coffee focused chain besides Starbucks, competes by selecting smaller unexploited markets to locate its stores, avoiding direct competition with Starbucks.

Whatever your business is, you can still find a way to compete in a crowded market by finding your niche. Drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think. As always, I look forward to hearing from you