Our Manifesto

We’re an Independent Company

No investors. No debt. No sketchy third-party “partners.” We don’t farm out our services. In fact, we design and build all our services in house, even though it takes longer. We buy our own buildings and staff them with locals.

We do it this way because when you’re beholden to no one, you can do what you want. You can take the long way to get where you’re going, without backseat drivers. Building our own services mean we have more control. And when we have more control, we can give you more control. Starting a business should set you free, not put you back into someone else’s pocket.

Our Customer Service is Legendary

While other companies are entering their chatbot era, we’re going all in on real people. We think that when you’re doing something as important (and as frustrating) as starting a business, you deserve to talk to a real person who gives a damn. That’s why we employ over 1,300 people nationwide—and we’re growing. These are our famous Corporate Guides®. Just like a local fly fishing guide knows every honey hole of a river, our Corporate Guides® know the ins and outs of local business and care about your safety and your experience.

We Build Business Identities

When you start a business, you’re creating a new thing. It has a separate existence from you, and it needs its own identity: name, address, phone number, email address, website, domain name, maybe even trademarks. This can take months or even years to set up, and can be even more time-consuming to manage, with dozens of logins and invoices to handle. Not with Northwest. This is what we do. We can set up your entire Business Identity in just a few clicks, and you can manage everything—from your LLC’s paperwork to your website—in one easy portal.

We’re Just Not Annoying®

Have you ever bitten into a chicken sandwich that had no chicken? Next, you waited on hold for an entire day, only to find out that they’d refund your money once you signed up for a credit card and downloaded an app, but when you tried, they said your password was wrong and you could only get in if you knew your childhood best friend’s dog’s maiden name? This happened to one of our employees, but because of Privacy by Default®, we won’t say who.

We hate this kind of thing so much that we trademarked We’re Just Not Annoying®. Here’s how it works:

• You will never receive a “no reply” email from us. 
• We will never sell your information to third parties.
• Our phone number is on the bottom of every page on this site. 
• In like unlikely event you call and get a voicemail during business hours, you’ll get a return call within two hours. 
• All support and operations are US-based.
• All emails are answered the same day.
• Every email from our staff will include a proper signature with contact information. No hiding. 
• You will never be forced to deal with logging into a system to reach customer service.
• IN ONE CLICK—you can see our email, phone number, mailing address, or start a chat with real human customer service. We will never hide from you in your client account.
• EVERY SINGLE EMAIL we send you can reply to. A Corporate Guide® will get back to you before the end of business hours. 
• Unlike the state, we’ve never charged a late fee.

Just call us. Just email us. We don’t use automated systems to keep payroll costs down. Our customer service is just a team of good humans focused on how happy our clients are. We try to make the experience our staff has working here less annoying, too. Our goal is to not to be one more annoying interaction you have to make today.

The Right Foundation

Anyone who has dealt with foundations knows how important they are. Every part of it affects something else. Dig too deep and good luck getting your compaction back to where you need it. Cheap out on compaction and you’ve got a disaster on your hands at some point. Forget about the grunt man spraying water on your rock and get too much water and lose your fines? Might be good today, but not in 6 months. Everything goes good or gets worse based on your foundation. You can tell a lot about a business by the foundation it has chosen to build its future upon. The big guys wouldn’t want to waste their shareholder profits on our foundation, and smaller registered agents couldn’t afford it.

We don’t care about growth or revenue

It’s easy to chase growth and revenue. All our competitors do. They use these hook’em low, bill’em high strategies like initial cheap price, higher price next year; free now, normal price next year; cold calls; sending advertisements; and selling your data to “partners.”

We pick up hundreds. Not tens. 100s of new customers every day that are changing to us after being exhausted with our competition. It’s a MAJOR part of our day, just helping people change to us.

We’ve never made a move to increase our EBIDTA. Heck, we can’t even begin to figure out the lifetime value of our clients. We just have never had the luxury to sit around and analyze the revenue like that. While our competitors negotiate lower rates with their sub contractors in each state to improve their bottom line, we buy a building, hire more employees, and focus on doing business the right way at the foundational level.

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Smack in the Middle

We’re a medium-sized business. We’d like to be as transparent as possible. We’re not small and we’re not big. We’re not a startup, and we’re not a legacy kind of company that has been stuck in its ways for 50 years. We’re smack in the middle. If you had to summarize us, I guess you could say we’re middle class folks with a leaning towards blue collar backgrounds. Most of us have had a crappy job at one point that was absolute misery, so we know what a luxury it is when the biggest problems you have in a day are answering some emails and enduring the smell of the barbeque smokies a co-worker brought for the office to enjoy. Oh Aspen problems. Pity us, what will we ever do?

Are we the best company we can be? No. Absolutely not. We’ve done a lot of great things, but are nowhere near our potential. We’re constantly figuring out what we suck at and need to improve upon. It’s a constant battle to stay under our level of incompetence. There’s more days than you could count where something comes up and we scratch our heads wondering how something so weird or not right has gone on for so long. Here’s some interesting things we’re working on:

• What’s the right amount of internal company governance? Too much middle management and oversight, and everyone that makes the company run feels like an unimportant robot. You turn the very people that make your organization function into a number. Not enough procedures and you end up sending the wrong signals to employees. Too little oversight, and we start to become inefficient and slow to react or change as needed. You might hit the perfect balance this week and not the next. It’s a day-in, day-out battle to find the right amount of internal oversight to help train and let employees reach their potential without smothering them.
• What’s the right balance of taking care of clients without letting them walk all over you?
• What’s the right amount of service offerings to bring stability to your company without over complicating what you do and losing focus on your core?
• What’s the right amount of money to save vs spending on the future?
• Almost all the things that made you good and competitive at one size, now become problematic at the next stage of your business growth. Every month we realize things are different and we have to adapt. There’s a reason Sears, JCPenney, and old school giants fail all the time. Complacency kills.

Being a medium-sized company is an interesting place to be. It’s incredibly challenging and rewarding. What we can offer you is the stability of hiring a medium-sized company that won’t be sold and has no intentions of making you a revenue goal for shareholders. We offer more long-term stability than any other option you’ll find. We’re the right size, we have the right foundation, and the right commitment to you, to do business the right way.