Are you a small business or investor who needs to form a Florida LLC or corporation really fast? Not a problem. Fortunately, the state of Florida provides several opportunities for you to accelerate your llc formation or small business incorporation.

Quick Tip #1: Do-it-yourself LLC Formation and Incorporation

Not all states let regular business people--entrepreneurs, investors, microbusiness owners and so forth--form their own limited liability companies and corporations. In the state of Illinois, for example, while you can form a corporation or LLC without the help of an attorney or accountant, the check used to pay for the formation needs to come from an attorney or accountant. And in the state of South Carolina, articles of incorporation must be filed by an attorney. You don't get the option of "do-it-yourself incorporation," therefore, in South Carolina. (Note: In South Carolina, just to be fair, you can form your own LLC.)

However, Florida does provide entrepreneurs with the option of filing their own articles of formation or incorporation. The Secretary of State even goes so far as to provide simple, free forms and instructions on her website.

By the way, taking the do-it-yourself route saves you lots of time. You can file your organizational documents today (or in a few hours) rather than needing to work through a local professional who may not even call you back for a day or two... and then will probably take several days or get to your project.

Quick Tip #2: File Your Articles Online

This sounds almost too simple to be true or too obvious to be useful. But I'll make the point anyway: File your articles of organization or articles of incorporation online. By using the Florida secretary of state's website to file, you'll not only eliminate the time required to move documents through the mail, you'll find that the actual articles get processed more quickly by state employees.

Note: Some states (California, for example) don't allow you to file your documents online. Instead they require by-mail or in-person filings.

Because the exact URL for the page to file online changes every so often, I won't give it to you in this article. However, if you visit the sunbiz dot org website, you should be find the web page that allows to you file online in few minutes.

Note: In the state of Florida online filings take only a day or two to process, as opposed to paper filings, which take as long as a week.

Quick Tip #3 - Use Standard Governing Documents

Another way to speed up the formation of your Florida corporation or limited liability company: use boilerplate corporate by-laws or a boilerplate limited liability company operating agreement instead of hiring a local attorney to prepare the custom-tailored documents.

Though it's important that your agreement or by-laws are written well, the net benefit of a custom-tailored document is quite small when talking about single member limited liability companies and family LLCs and corporations.

To be clear, a boilerplate operating agreement or by-laws document will never be as good as customized, professionally-written documents. The catch is simply that these documents are expensive, and take extra time to prepare.

Because of this, some LLCs and corporations (particularly those with one owner or husband-and-wife owners) might be inclined to use a simple, cheap, bare-bones operating agreement or by-laws document. Using such a document should save you several days of time when forming your new corporation or LLC.