Alternative Legal Structures for Your Business

Written by Rolfe Larson | Edited by Rory Hart
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    Close up of a lawyer holding a legal contract document and a pen

    There are now many choices in legal structure for a new business. That’s both a good thing and bad thing. It’s great to have options, but sometimes the details can become overwhelming. For a business with a social as well as financial purpose, there are different ways to set things up, depending on your motivations, your target market, your access to capital, and how much control you need.

    Some of the alternatives include for-profit, for-profit with a social overlay, hybrid, nonprofit with a mission-related enterprise, or nonprofit.

    A very thorough article on just this topic can be found in the Spring 2011 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. SSIR is a publication well worth a subscription, but in this case, the article is available for free. It’s call “For Love or Lucre,” and was written by Jim Fruchterman. Here’s the URL:

    http://bit.ly/oTcnxo

    This is a good thing to get ironed out early in your business planning process.

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    For more resources, see our Library topic Business Planning.

    Rolfe Larson