Help from people who own their own businesses or have experience

http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/smallbusinesses.html

 

I am not sure what you mean. As far as I know, there is no such thing.

 

I'm not sure if there is an official federal designation but I think individual states have their own requirements. For my company the state of MN requires us to post official material explaining that we can't discriminate and what employees can do if they lose there job.

Since we're a two person company and we're both owners (and minorities) we always get a laugh out of getting the official posting and threaten to discriminate each other.

 

There are requirements for EEOC compliance but you don't register them. They do apply to businesses with more than 10 or 12 employees, but beyond that there is no registration.

You do have to be registered to be a women or minority-owned business if you want to qualify for government contracts based on that status. Many governement-awarded contracts require that a certain percentage go to women or minority-owned businesses, but you have to be designated as such.

 

My company is registered as a minority owned business on the state level. Its come it handy at times but has also been a pain too. The federal registration is pretty complicated and there are companies that specialize in guiding someone through it. Unless you've got a big project that requires minority registration federally its probably not worth dealing with.

One interesting side note about minority registration was that right after we got minority registration one of the firms we were partnering with on a government project has us hire they're contractors as our subcontractors. It helped the other firm greatly since they could show that they were doing a lot of business with a minority owned partner business but it was a huge pain for us as suddenly we had to pay and bill for with several subcontractors who weren't actually working for us.