I filed papers this week for my new company. I decided to form a single owner limited liability company. Since I was the only owner, the accountants pointed me in that direction. In Wisconsin, the forms are all online and for $130 you can have you own legal business entity.

I needed to come up with a company name for all of the paperwork. I always liked the name of the videogame company Rockstar Games, producer of Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne. I decided to look for another occupation with the same punch and a slightly cleaner image. The first thing that hit me was astronaut. It was probably all of the talk about the Mars rovers lately. I just liked the images it conjoured up – honor, adventure, pioneer, elite. The name for my new company of Astronaut Projects, LLC.

Your next question is going to be, “What are you going to do?”. Well, I have my fingers in a lot of different things and I am waiting to see what develops. The nature of the work is going to be project based. It is going to be a combination of business development, marketing, sales, and business strategy for people. You can call me a contractor who can perform those services.

My first project is working with KaosPilots (a Danish business school) and creating a wider audience for their book. To do that, I have created The Penny Store and we are going to start by selling it direct. I am going to talk more about the book this week.

There have been some great connections I have made through talking with other business bloggers and the Business Blog Book Tour. As more things develop, I will share them.

Lessons Learned the Hardest Way, by Going Belly Up is a piece that ran in the NY Times on Feb. 24th. It tells the stories of four business owners and the closure of their businesses. Take note of which failures came from factors that could be controlled (one dominant customer leaves) and which failures were beyond control (D.C. sniper shootings keep customers home).

[via inluminent]

Check out this great write-up on Small Business Trends. The post summarizes a discussion from Joi Ito’s blog about the difficulty of starting a business in Japan. I thought it went well with our discussion last month about the similar situation in France. The included chart shows France only slightly better than Japan for entrepreneurial activity.