By: Jill Dockins
So, you're thinking of starting a business with a
partner. I am one of two teachers who
decided to create a partnership to sell products on Teachers Pay Teachers.
In the Beginning…
Cary and I drove 5 hours to a conference in East Tennessee
this year. During that drive our
conversation steered into my successes with my husband loading his lessons and
our math and science activities on Teachers Pay Teachers. Cary was full of questions ???? and I was more
than happy to talk about it. 
The last three hours of our drive was discussing the
possibilities of joining together. I
shared with Cary the difficulties I was having with launching a huge
kindergarten-2nd grade product line.
I was wavering on doing this myself or trying to wrangle my hubby into
another venture. When Cary showed so
much interest and I got a feel for her strengths, I offered the partnership to
her. I needed someone with energy
and expertise that would compliment my
skills.
1. First, you need to
decide if you really need a partner. Is
this something you can do by yourself. Sure,
I can do this myself. But, creating this
business, will help me set goals and use my talents as more than just an extra
budget for travel and charity.
2. Your abilities and
skills should compliment one another.
While I am artistic and creative.
My business partner, Cary, is detail oriented and business driven. Right this minute I have about 37+ products I
have developed and at least 15 more ideas that haven’t been developed. I never seem to finish them. I am constantly improving and redesigning
without posting a thing. Cary is coming
to my rescue. She can comb through and
fine tune each product with her magic designing eye.
3. #2 leads us to
discuss how the business will be divided.
While I have some products near completion that I am excited about, Cary
is going to finish, polish, post and market the products. We agreed at this time, that would create a
50/50 input into each product.
3. Plan your goals
and dreams for this partnership. During that 5 hour drive we discussed my
families success with becoming debt free after following many of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover strategies. Cary’s goal is to be debt free. My goal is to pay off our mortgage. Nothing is more freeing than paying off
debt. So, our venture will hopefully
help us realize our dreams.
We arrived at our conference motivated to investigate the
possibility of going into business together.
We were full of excitement and tossed ideas back and forth for
days.
Let’s DO IT!!!
10 Steps to Start your Business Partnership for Teachers
Step 1. Partnership Agreement
Once people get to know me, they find out I plan for ANY
possibility. People who work with me are
horrified when I state, “If I die in a fire death this weekend, the testing
material is…” . Its just me.
I always plan for the worst.
Maybe that is why I am so easy-going?
When life throws me or my family a ‘bump’, I usually know things can be
much worse. I tend to be happy and feel
blessed with everything in my life.
So, when I throw out some of the following topics at Cary to
agree upon, she was also very surprised.
I told her, while we are friends now, you never know what could happen. While we are healthy now, what happens when
one of us cannot continue. So, many
things have to be discussed before forming your Partnership Agreement. I have piece of mind now knowing what will
happen to our partnership in the event of a dispute, death, or even health
issue.
These topics need to be written
out as detailed as possible. It was the
outline for our Partnership Agreement
Partnership Name
Other
names/logos
Contributions
Cash
Investment
Contribution/
% of ownership
Compensation
Pay
– How/When
How to divide profits/losses
Future Business Decisions
Scope
of individual authority to make decisions
How
to handle disputes
list
arbitrators you would use if possible.
How
partnership will be dissolved
Management duties
Divide
up who does what
*Contact
similar partnerships for any advise (if teachers, contact us!)
*If your
business name is anything other than your last names, then you may need to
register your fictitious name. We used
our last names.
*Legal
Review (should be cheap, since you have done most of the work prior to the
review)
*Sign
Partnership Agreement (notary not necessary)
Step 2. State ID
This was a simple process and the first major expense ($20
in Tennessee). To register your
partnership, you will need to have the following items:
-partnership
agreement (specifically the pages that detail partnership authority)
-alternate
names or TPT store names. Anything
someone might try to search for your company.
For us, it was Dock Right and LOL with ESL. Our partnership logo is a play on our last
names and looks like Dock Right, but the INS in my name and the W in Cary’s
name is between to form ‘wins’. If
someone were to just look at the logo though they may assume we are named “Dock
Right”.
The State Acknowledgment letter arrived in 5 days.
Step 3. Tax ID
The tax ID was needed to open a joint business account with
the bank. Paypal and Dwolla may aslo
require it. This was simple in the state
of Tennessee. I was able to apply in
minutes online. There were no fees to
apply. The tax ID letter came approx.. 4
days after applying.
Step 4. Joint Bank Account
Now you are ready to open a joint business account. It is important that you research different
banks. Cary went to major banks, credit
unions and local banks. We found the
fees attributed to those accounts vary drastically. We just needed a place for Paypal or Dwolla
to ‘dump’ our earnings. Cary finally
found a local friendly bank with only $100 start up. We opted for the least expensive
account. The only draw-back, is we do
not have online banking. That would have
been $10 per month. We just didn’t want
to spend that kind of money to start up our business. So, we will do it the old fashioned way!
To open a bank account you
need the following documents:
Partnership agreement
State ID letter
Federal Tax ID
2 forms of ID
And, in my case, I needed to
unfreeze my credit line.
Your probably asking yourself, why would she freeze her
credit records? Our school system was
‘hacked’ a few years ago and we found freezing our credit line was a free way
to protect our family members from identity theft. In my state it is free to unfreeze and freeze
the credit line. Also, you only have to
freeze one of the credit reporting agencies and it will lock all attempts to
open credit lines and or accounts under your name. I used Experian to freeze my credit. I found it very simple and fast to unfreeze
online. Just remember to keep your pin
number from the reporting agency to temporarily unfreeze your account when
needed. It works great!
Step 5. business email accounts (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL)
I opened up email accounts for all the major free Email
providers. I played with a few and Cary
played with a few. We decided Cary would
manage and use the gmail account and I would manage and use the yahoo
account. No particular reason. We just got use to using them and found sending
attachments easy with both. We wanted to
ensure all communications were kept for our records in mutual accounts. Both accounts were opened with the same
information so we both have access to both email accounts. The trick is to check these accounts
daily.
Step 6. Paypal account or Dwolla account
This took hours!! I
remember signing up for Paypal in 1999 to buy my daughter adorable Gymboree and Baby Lulu outfits on Ebay. It was so
simple and easy. Not true today in
2015. I was so disgusted with the
process, but thought I had no other options with Teachers Pay Teachers. Paypal was NOT user friendly at all. Infact, I found it quite rude. I’m not sure how an online process
accomplishes this, but I was intrusive and ridged. At the end of the process, you have to wait
for banking verifications, identity verification, residency verification, id
verification…oh…and tax id verification.
ARGH!!! While I waited (which
will take DAYS!), I decided to open our Teachers Pay Teachers account and get
it ready to sell. Low and behold…you do
NOT have to use Paypal.
I have never
heard of Dwolla. After quick research,
it was and easy and simple option.
Selling on TPT, we will never need the Credit Card flexibility of
Paypal. We just need to dump $ into our
banking account. The fees for Dwolla
sold me instantly. If you plan to sell
products on a website, sure Paypal is the only option now. But, that will be a few years out for
us. Dwolla was so EASY and user
friendly. It wasn’t as cumbersome as
Paypal and the first question asked was, is this a business. Yes!
Things flowed flawlessly. I only
have to wait for one id check and we will be ready to receive revenue. YEAH!
Step 7. Teachers Pay Teachers Account
Thankfully, this was an easy process. You do not need anything to open your account
or even begin designing your TPT store. See ours here:
You do however need to decide if you are going to have a
free account or a premium account. While
this was a no-brainer for me, I had to educate Cary on the importance of
choosing the Premium account. The first
major difference is the amount of royalties you receive from TPT. The free account is currently 60%. The premium account is 90%. So the difference for every $100 sold will be
$30 in TPT fees. The cost of the premium
account is $60. If we sell $200 the
first year, it will pay for itself. Now
for the newbie with little products in development, it may not be cost
effective. But, for us, I project we
will probably sell $200 per month within 6 months. For us, the Premium TPT account is a must!
I first worked on the banner. I had this idea I had worked on for a
while. To make this a banner, I had to
rework it 3 times for it to fit properly in the banner window of our
store. Then, I did a quick re-design of our
store front logo to make a button logo for out profile picture. Now, we need to load products and start sell,
sell, selling!
Marketing Yourself
Steps 8 – 10 deal with marketing your products. I heard this called “gorilla marketing” on
the radio. These are three easy and FREE
steps you can do yourself to get your products visible to potential
customers. Yes, you heard me right, FREE
marketing you can do yourself!
Step 8. Pinterest Account
People LOVE pinning!
They see something they like and don’t want to forget about the
idea. I use Pinterest myself. I have a Kindergarten Board with all things
for each letter sound unit I teach. I
fill it with fun and funny media to engage my little ones. These pages are loaded with online stories,
video clips, live animal webcams, and songs.
Who doesn’t love to dance to Stray Cat Strut as you teach Catina the
Cat, letter C?
Anyway, back to marketing.
Creating a Pinterest account and allowing your pictures and elements to
be pinned on your website and blog will generate countless contacts you would
have not made without it. For example,
my husband started a blog. In his blog,
he pinned one of his pictures. That
picture was pinned by 3 people. Those
three people progressed until he noticed a week later it generated 60 re-pins
and a spike in our TPT sales in the day following his pin/blog.
This is not my thing.
This is Cary’s thing. I, in fact,
dislike Facebook. But, if you are in
this business, I do recognize it is a
valuable tool. Every time I update our
website, the popup asks me to, “Share on Facebook”. Since we are not completely up and running
yet, I say, “soon, little intrusive one, soon.”
10. Website/Blog
We went with a free website with Tripod/Lycos. http://lolwithesl.tripod.com There are many options out there, Weebly
etc. They offer free templates and
fairly easy to begin. I do hate the
limited ablitity you have with a free site.
I want to move things and add things that just are possible in a free
website builder. Also, those pop –up ads
are so annoying. But, we decided not to
purchase a domain or web service to start up and save a little money.
The blog is essential.
We decided to create a free blog with Google’s Blogger. So, you should now be looking at our site http://lolwithesl.blogspot.com. Something brought you to see this very
post. Some key word you typed in a
search engine, or even a pin posted on Pinterest or Facebook or even a picture
in a Google search may have helped you travel to this very spot. I thank you for your interest! I also thank the power of the BLOG! It allows me to market our products and help
two hard-working teachers realize our financial goals. Well, we aren’t all that ‘scrooge-ish’. We do hope to bring value, education and
inspiration into the lives we touch. We
didn’t become teachers to make money, that is for sure!!
Consider the Expenses
We are trying to keep our expenses as low as possible. We spent $20
to register our business with the state, $100
to open a bank account, $60 for the
premium TPT account. This doesn’t count
the expenses you may have with the legal review of your partnership. You may be able to use legal aid or a family
member. So, your ‘bare bones’ expenses
could be as low as $180 to start your
partnership and sell on TPT. With product design, you will need fonts,
clipart, backgrounds etc. too. You can
find many things for free. It is all
about time though. So you many have to
pay to save you time.
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