How we work
Most small business advice online is written by someone who gets paid when you act on it. That is the problem this site exists to solve, so it matters that we are specific about our own position.
We never get paid
We take no money from visitors and no money from providers. No referral fees, no affiliate commissions, no per-lead payments, no sponsored placements.
When we point you toward a company — a payroll provider, a PEO, a lender — that company may well earn its normal commission from you as their customer. We are not pretending otherwise. What we will do is tell you how the person across the table gets paid, because that is usually the most useful thing you can know walking into the conversation.
Most small business owners do not know that a PEO broker earns a recurring commission calculated on their total payroll spend. Once you know it, the sales conversation reads completely differently.
How we decide who to name
We wrote these criteria before we had any provider relationships, because it is much harder to write fair rules once you have them.
- We teach you how to evaluate a category before we name anyone in it. The evaluation framework is the point; the names are secondary.
- We only name large, established, widely-used providers. We do not send people to boutique brokers or small shops, however good, because we cannot supervise that relationship.
- We name several options in every category, never one.
- We accept nothing of value from anyone we name — no fees, no gifts, no sponsorships, no data-sharing arrangements.
- We say plainly when a category is one you may not need at all. Sometimes the honest answer is that a business your size should not be buying this yet.
What we cannot do
We are not lawyers, accountants, or brokers, and nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice. Reading this site does not create a professional relationship of any kind.
Our report is a starting map, not a compliance audit. It works from what you tell us. It cannot see your contracts, how you have classified your workers, your industry licensing, or your local ordinances — and any one of those can change the answer.
Rules also move. Every item we publish carries a citation to its primary source and the date we last reviewed it. Where we have not yet had a human verify a row against the source, we say so on the item itself rather than hiding it. If something matters to your decision, follow the citation.
What we collect
The assessment does not ask for your name, your email, or your business name, and we do not want them. We store the answers anonymously so we can see which thresholds people are actually hitting, and use that to decide which states and industries to build out next.
There is no account to create and nothing to unsubscribe from.
Where this is going
We are building state-by-state coverage, starting with formation content, and deep industry compliance guidance a few verticals at a time. The site tells you honestly how much coverage we have for your state rather than implying we have everything.
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