Start Your Own Corporation: Why the Rich Own Their Own Companies and Everyone Else Works for Them

Garrett Sutton, a corporate attorney and one of Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad Advisors," wrote this book to answer a question he says he hears constantly from clients: why does forming a corporate or LLC entity matter so much, and how does someone actually go about doing it? His central argument is that in a litigious business environment, operating as a sole proprietor or general partnership exposes a person's personal assets — their house, savings, and other property — directly to business debts and lawsuits, while properly formed and maintained entities create a legal shield between business risk and personal wealth.

The book opens by walking through the major entity types available to U.S. business owners — sole proprietorships, general and limited partnerships, C corporations, S corporations, professional corporations, and limited liability companies — explaining the liability exposure, tax treatment, and practical tradeoffs of each. Sutton is blunt about the dangers of the "default" options: he uses case examples (some framed as illustrative scenarios, some drawn from real client situations) of business owners who lost personal assets in lawsuits specifically because they never formalized their business into a liability-limiting entity.

A substantial portion of the book focuses on jurisdiction and structure strategy: why Sutton recommends Nevada and Wyoming entities for many clients (favorable corporate law, privacy protections, and no state income tax), how to use multiple entities across different states to compartmentalize risk (for example, holding real estate in one entity and operating a business in another), and how corporate formalities — separate bank accounts, proper documentation of major decisions, annual meetings, and clean recordkeeping — are what actually preserve the liability shield in court. Sutton is emphatic that failing to observe these formalities is the single most common way business owners lose the very protection they thought they'd secured, a legal vulnerability known as "piercing the corporate veil."

Later chapters turn to specific tactical topics: choosing and understanding the roles of directors and officers, structuring employee compensation and benefits plans to maximize legitimate tax advantages, using business tax deductions correctly, and building business credit independent of personal credit. Throughout, Sutton writes in plain, non-technical language aimed at entrepreneurs and real estate investors rather than lawyers, consistently returning to his central thesis: the specific entity chosen matters less than actually choosing one deliberately and maintaining it correctly, since an unprotected sole proprietorship is, in his view, the single most dangerous "choice" a growing business can make.