Do you enter into business relationships, acquisitions, property investments, partnerships, or enter into a transaction without first verifying a companies identity, associates and affiliations? If you want to know about how to start an llc in Texas please read this article.

Most people do and your not alone. However most entrepreneurs still enter into business relationships with curiosity and unanswered questions they may have regarding a company or associate of a particular company. Wouldn't it be beneficial to you and or your company to limit liability and risk by conducting due diligence before entering into business relationships?

By limiting your risk and liability your business will have a far greater chance to succeed. By conducting simple due diligence and developing your own profile on any person or business you will have a much better understanding of a particular business and its associates which is vital to your business decisions. 90% of the information you need to know can be found on-line. You just have to know where to look for it, and how to look for it. I will show you how you can develop your own profile on anyone or any business on-line for free.

Example on a property investment acquisition. I contacted an individual who had placed a classified add through an on-line newspaper under real estate finance/services for hard money lending, private money lenders. I was really just trying to get a feel for the market in that specific area of the country. I do this by contacting various types of real estate professionals such Agents, brokers, title companies/escrow, private/hard money lenders, bird dogs, wholesalers, etc. When I call I get their personal name and the company name they work for (if any). If it's a company its usually an LLC which is very common in the real estate industry or another type of corporate entity. A lot of times people talk fast or not very clear on the phone. So I always have them spell out their name and company name and have them provide me any additional contact numbers that they can provide should I need to speak with them at another time.

When the subject I'm speaking to on the phone tells me the name of the company he or she represents and it is a corporate entity such as an LLC, S-Corp, partnership, etc. I know right away I can get the corporate members names within a few minutes. I will first go to the states web site in which the individual claims to conduct business in and lookup the entity online by the name of the company.

Just about all the states in the U.S have free online searches at their web sites where you can lookup information about a corporation by company name or agent names. Just go to your favorite search engine like Google or MSN and type in the name of the state and corporations. Example "Arizona Corporations", "Texas Corporations", "Nevada Corporations". The search engines will typically return the results your looking for within the first two organic search result listings. Once you get to the states web site you will need to find where on the web site you can lookup a Corporation. Usually it will just read "Look up Corporations". Type in the name of the company and you can find out all corporate members, addresses, resident agents, corporate status- good standing- dissolved, revoked, etc. What I typically do is find out if the name the subject provided to me on the phone is indeed an actual member of the corporation, and then I run his or her name through the states database and see if he or she is involved in any other types of corporations. I find that is quite common to have members involved in several corporations.

Sometimes you will not find a companies name in the specific states database. There could be a few reasons for this. The company may be a sole proprietor, or the company is registered in another state but has not filed as a foreign entity in the state they are doing business in. Sometimes companies operate this way. In this case it would be wise to search the Nevada and Delaware corporation web sites to determine if the company or agents are registered in either of those two states. There are a great number of corporations that register in Nevada and Delaware simply because of the asset protection. It's difficult to pierce the corporate veil under the laws of those two states and that alone drives many, many companies to register in those particular states.