Call your insurance broker and report a potential data breach. You have steps you need to take immediately to be in compliance with the law and your policy.

You’re well into the zone of stolen confidential customer and employee information being exposed.

Call your business litigation lawyer, many states consider this specific act a felony, and unlike the kia thieves and shoplifters, I’d bet there’s a good chance of both criminal and civil court wins for you.

The courts will absolutely nail him to the wall for white collar crime.

They do this because of the amount of online fraud that happens every day, even WITH these checks in place.

They are all also now required to issue you a 1099 every year you sell more than $600 on their platforms.

Part of doing business, you’re going to have to play the game the way the game is played.

There’s no way to avoid it.

Spend the money to survey your customers and potential customers as to the quality of your offering and what you could do better and/or solve additional problems for them in your niche.

You can write this off as r&d or marketing depending on how you structure it.

In the US, a w2 is when you work directly for someone else on their payroll as an employee. It’s called a W2 because that’s the form your employer issues at tax time.

A 1099 is an independent contractor that works for themselves and works for other companies but isn’t direct employee. 1099 is what you get from anyone you do work for in excess of $600 now…

Focus on ONE project, one path to bring income in…or get a w2 job for a while until you can start working on your own again.

It’s the argument about the jack of all trades. Make money first, add extra stuff later.

I do sourcing for others as part of my business, and I can tell you that, at least for products used in real estate, almost nothing is valid or accurate online.

Side deals and special programs, terms and prices that aren’t advertised are the name of the game, and are based on your volume or potential volume with those vendors are the only way to operate.

Just create a vendor performance scorecard and build some processes for vendor management - always be shopping, negotiating and tracking.

Relationships matter also, and those always get reflected in a scorecard if you’re keeping one.

Personally, this sounds like they went into breach of contract and you were materially damaged by their lack of action.

You could be a multi millionaire if you get good legal counsel, hope you have good records.

When people play hardball, you need to play harder.

Beware ads on instagram - according to a mess of redditors over there, once you pay you have to keep going.

If you stop paying, no one sees your stuff from that point forward

I had it for 3 years. Didn’t even help with SEO, total waste of money. For me especially, I don’t do anything B2C, everything is B2B.

Depends on how you set it up, honestly.

I can record a podcast episode and release within about 30 minutes if it’s solo.

I record in OBS, and have a mess of audio filters in place to remove most of the post-processing requirements for audio.

I drop it into audacity to clean up the audio the filters miss (but no cuts - full length), loudness normalize to -19lufs, hard limit -1.0db, export it as a .wav, drop it into adobe with the video and then add my intro/outro clips, produce the video and THEN go into the single track recording and cut out silences and ramblings.

Back in the audio only file in audacity I add the intro/outro, cut the ramblings and silences and export as a fixed rate mp3.

Both of these take less than an hour for a 30-40 minute solo podcast.

The recording filters help a LOT.

There’s two reasons to form an LLC - 1) personal asset protection 2) tax savings from electing to be taxed as an s or c-corp.

If you’re doing this just to build writeoffs, you don’t need to go LLC, just work with a CPA who does small business work full-time (NOT H&R block, a real CPA) and they’ll tell you what you need for both state and federal.

You should really consult with both a qualified cpa and a small business attorney on this - or call your local SCORE office.

That being said, I’ll attempt to answer this anyway (I’m not a lawyer or a CPA, I’m a business strategy, management and operations consultant who pays way too much for his E&O every year).

This depends on HOW you own the business, if there is an LLC with 3 members or you’re working as a dba/partnership both are taxed as partnerships. In both cases, you have to pay self employment taxes from the earnings if you’re actively a partner, if you’re silent/money only, non-participant it’s passive income on a K1.

If you’re an LLC, you can file to be taxed as a c-corp or s-corp, then you’d be able to write off your salary and your partner’s salary and the company would eat 7.5% of the employment taxes - but you all need to have official jobs/positions and be paid a “reasonable wage” for that job 12 months a year.

Partnerships and DBA’s don’t get to choose to be taxed in another fashion, you’re stuck.

Also, you give w9’s to people who hire YOU. You give 1099’s to people you pay as subcontractors. They are due Jan 31st this year.

In any event, you should pay your self employment tax at the federal rate for your earnings - closer to 22-25% if you’re making any real money - every quarter. This keeps potential late fees and penalties down.