I continue to enjoy Rush Nigut's fabulous RushOnBusiness.com blog. Besides having a cool name, Rush is a lawyer with a cool blog. He posted just recently about how to avoid wage and hour claims.

Here is a bit of what Rush shares:

According to the Department of Labor approximately 70 percent of businesses are out of compliance with wage and hour laws.  That's right - 70 percent!  According to Shanti Atkins of the Compliance Training Blog, some experts believe this number is even higher.

But you might be asking yourself, "How could my business be out of compliance?  Everyone is salary.  I don't need to pay overtime.  Besides employees can volunteer their time."  As Mark Twain said,

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.  It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
 

So, the rest of the post explains some of the common mistakes businesses make.

When I had 35 employees at one time over three offices, I could walk through my offices and count on having at least a dozen violations. If anyone from the gubmint had poked their nose into my business they could probably have taken me to jail. And I wasn't any worse than anyone else.

The deck is stacked against you when you have employees. Fortunately, if you are on your own, in your little business, you are much less vulnerable. No employees means that nobody is going to go complaining to the labor board. Nobody is going to get OSHA onto your case, or get any of the half dozen other state or federal agencies after you.

If you have a home based business, even better. It is harder for the authorities from the city to barge into your home to check on your business license. I am sure it happens. But not as often. And without employees, you can maintain a lower profile.

Nowadays I subcontract just about everything. I have people all over the globe doing work for me. I have never found better people than the ones that I count on every day and not one is an employee. They all have other clients and I enjoy their knowledge and experience. They don't look to me to pay them when they are not working and they are in their own business themselves so they can relate to my need to be profitable. They need to be profitable too and the connection between my profit and theirs is crystal clear.

So my take on Rush's post is, just avoid having employees in the first place. A home based franchise business opportunity without employees beats the problem.