Real Life in Paradise

For a long time my business partner, Dave, and I have been talking about the need in Playa Del Carmen for a consignment store.  So many people come and go from Playa and all there are a lot of goods passed around.  I have purchased many of the items in my house from people who are leaving town and need to get rid of their stuff, so we figured it was time to capitalize on this phenomenon.

Starting a business in Playa Del Carmen takes a lot of little steps, but I think it will be worth it.  The first thing we had to do was add change our incorporation papers of our corporation to include owning a store and buying and selling merchandise.  This took a few days and a notary, but it got done last week.

Next, we had to rent a Bodega, I showed some pictures of it the other day, but I will take more later.  Now that we have rented the bodega we have to get it ready to be a store.  First of all, there is a special license in Solidaridad called “Licencia de Uso de Suelo”, which is a special land use permit that everyone has to get in order to do anything in PDC.  This land use permit is kind of funny, because the owner had to get an Uso de Suelo upon termination of the building in order to rent out the property, then anyone that rents the store-spaces from her has to get a separate uso de suelo to do their own business.  Uso de suelo isn’t the actual business license, it is just a step towards the business license, and every time a business opens this is required.

Before I get the Uso de Suelo, I have to get approval from Hacienda(the tax authority) to open a business.  They take my paperwork and look it over to see that everything is right, then they should give me the go ahead.  Since we already have a business set up, we will be adding a branch to our business.  The accountant says that I can do this over the internet and that it is fairly simple.

Here comes the catch, once we add the business-branch to the tax authority, we have just 30 days to get all the licenses in order.  Hacienda sends somebody out to check on the business after these 30 days, if they show up and we are not in order then we get a “Clausarado’d”.  They stick a big sticker over the front gate of the business saying that we are not legal to do business.

We are in the process of getting a bunch of signs made up, but we are a little leery about actually putting them up yet, because in Playa Del Carmen, there is a sign tax, and if you put the sign up without paying the tax, you can also get the signs “Clausarado’d”.  They put a big sticker over my sign, then I have to pay a fine to get it taken off.   We have heard that we also have 30 days for the sign tax as well, but I am going to check on that on monday when I am downtown to see if it is true.

I was just starting to feel worried about having all this work to do and not enough time to do everything, when I got a phone call this weekend from a guy who used to work for me doing construction.  I taught him everything I know about building and he is very motivated and a great problem solver.  He has been back in Chiapas for the last 6 months, building a family home, but he gets back to Playa Del Carmen today and is looking for some work to keep him busy for a while.  This takes a huge load off of me, because he can take care of all the building stuff that needs to be done and I can spend my time doing administrative stuff.

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