 Some of the People Other People Listen To in the CRM business have been touting the tremendous promise of CRM as applied to government services. In some cases, there are truly obvious and wonderful applications (such as the 311 mini-trend, bringing together dozens, hundreds, even thousands of municipal call centers into one cohesive, coordinated system), but the problem I've had with really embracing this concept is the fact that many, if not most, "customer" interactions the average person has with the government certainly don't feel like they have a lot of potential for value-add. It's mostly about paying unwelcome bills, sometimes as a "death and taxes/fact of life" affair and sometimes because somebody said you did something wrong—in any case, hardly anything to jump up and down about, no matter how easy they make it.
Starting up CRMuse LLC, the corporate entity, changed my mind. (A little, anyway.) I still can't get over how ridiculously easy it was. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if it shouldn't be made a little harder than it was, but that's another matter. And while one could argue that having to pay any money at all to the state to enjoy a little legal protection is an unpleasant imposition best avoided, on the whole I can't say I have too much to complain about.
The first step was registering the company. The last time I was involved in the creation of a small business was in the mid-1990s, an S-corporation that required some fairly detailed research and a non-trivial amount of paperwork. LLCs were still strange and mystical. Now they're commonplace—so commonplace that the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions, to my surprise, helps you file them through a web form. Totally online. You simply fill out the names of the registered owners, specify a few details, and pay the filing fee by credit card. A few days later, I received an e-mail confirming, in effect, that I had created a corporate entity. Not bad, not bad at all.
The next step was obtaining an employer ID number (EIN) that I was going to need in order to have any sort of revenue properly recorded. Wouldn't you know it, but the IRS will let you do that online, too. I simply punched in the details of my 10-minute old company and, on the spot, obtained a provisional EIN. I was starting to get slightly nervous about how easy this was.
I decided to push my luck and took my freshly minted EIN to a credit card issuer and applied online for a corporate card. Wouldn't you know it, but my 20-minute old company was approved for a rather staggering amount of money, given that we had been in business since breakfast and had no revenue. (In their defense, they did ask me for my personal social security number and clearly figured I was good for the money. But still.)
The upshot? State and federal government came together to provide a smooth, automated process to get a small business off the ground. In effect, I started a company—a full, legal, separate entity, complete with five-figure line of credit—without leaving my desk or using a single postage stamp, which if you had asked me before I started out would have been the way I said I wanted to do it. Honestly, looking back, it frightens me ever so slightly that it was such a friction-free process, because I now know just how easy it is for someone with malicious intent to set up a business that looks legitimate on the books. But that's the flip-side of accessibility, and always has been.
It's a boring and over-used sentiment but I say it because it's true—Amazon.com and the like have led me to feel that I should be able to transact virtually any kind of business online, and lo and behold, government is catching on.
None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC or Jason Compton for at least the past six months.
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However, I suspect this has to do with the legitimacy of the operation (the ones who had difficulty were frequently trying to do fancy dance steps to avoid taxes), and comprehension of basic business (those same companies frequently went to collections within a month or so).
So congratulations, you're intelligent and legitimate.