A question I get a lot once people find out I run six businesses: are these six separate companies, or is there some structure tying them together? There is — Linkedd LLC is one LLC, and all six businesses are brands it operates under d/b/a (“doing business as”) names, not separate companies or subsidiaries. I want to explain what that actually means in plain terms, why I set it up this way, and be upfront that this is my own operational experience, not legal or tax advice for your specific situation.
What a holding company actually is, in plain terms
Strip away the jargon and a holding company is basically a parent entity that owns other legal entities (subsidiaries) underneath it. That's not how Linkedd LLC is set up. Instead of six separate LLCs — or a parent company with six subsidiaries — there's one company, Linkedd LLC, and each business is a d/b/a brand of it. Think of it less like six separate companies that occasionally share a founder, and more like one company with six distinct product lines, each branded and operated as its own thing to customers.
That's the plain-English version. The actual legal mechanics of business structures — holding companies and subsidiaries, d/b/a registrations, how liability works — vary a lot by state and by how things are specifically set up, which is exactly why I'm not going to pretend I can give you a one-size-fits-all legal explanation here.
Why I structured things this way
I didn't start with six businesses and then decide to unify them after the fact — I built toward this structure early because I knew I wanted to run multiple ventures under one roof, not accumulate a pile of disconnected companies with zero relationship to each other. The main reason was simplicity. Managing six completely separate legal entities, each with its own full administrative overhead, would have meant six times the paperwork, six times the bookkeeping setup, six times the "wait, which entity does this expense belong to" confusion. One company, with each brand tracked clearly on its own internally, cut a lot of that overhead.
The other reason was that I wanted the option to share certain resources and services across businesses — tools, some infrastructure, general operational patterns — without pretending each business was its own island reinventing everything from scratch. One company with several brands makes that kind of resource-sharing a lot more natural than six unrelated LLCs would.
The practical day-to-day and financial benefits
In practice, here's what this structure actually buys me:
- Simplicity in how I think about the whole operation. There's one overarching structure I'm reasoning about, with six businesses inside it, rather than six totally separate mental models for six unrelated companies. That sounds abstract but it genuinely reduces the cognitive overhead of running multiple things at once, which ties directly into the attention constraints I write about in how to run multiple businesses without losing your mind.
- Shared resources and services across businesses. Certain tools, certain operational patterns, certain general infrastructure — things that don't need to be unique to any one business — I can build or buy once and lean on across all six, instead of setting up six redundant versions of the same thing.
The honest tradeoffs
This structure isn't free of downsides, and I don't want to sell it as a strictly-better setup with no cost. The biggest tradeoff is that it requires real discipline to keep the brands clearly distinct in practice — in how you track finances, how you make decisions, how you present each brand to its customers — rather than letting everything blur into one undifferentiated blob just because it's convenient day to day. It's easy to get sloppy about which business an expense or a decision actually belongs to when they all sit under one roof and one person is making every call. That sloppiness is exactly the kind of thing that can undermine the benefits of the structure if you're not careful about it.
One more tradeoff worth naming plainly: because the brands are d/b/a names of a single LLC rather than separate LLCs, they aren't separate legal entities and aren't legally walled off from one another. If liability separation between businesses matters for your situation, that's a question for an attorney.
There's also a real difference between "this structure is convenient for me operationally" and "this structure is optimally set up for tax or liability purposes for my specific situation." Those aren't automatically the same thing, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I implied otherwise.
This is not legal or tax advice
I want to be direct about this: everything above describes how I've operated Linkedd LLC and why, from a founder's perspective — not a lawyer's or an accountant's. If you're deciding how to structure your own businesses, talk to an actual attorney and a tax professional who can look at your specific situation, your state, and your specific businesses. What works for my six businesses may not be the right structure for yours, and the details that matter most — liability protection specifics, tax treatment, formation requirements — are exactly the kind of thing that needs professional advice tailored to you, not a blog post from someone describing their own setup.
If you want the fuller operational picture of how I actually run the day-to-day across all six businesses inside this structure, the guide goes into a lot more of that detail, and I post ongoing updates on how things evolve at the membership. You can see the businesses themselves at Linkedd LLC.
Frequently asked questions
What is a holding company, in plain terms?
A parent entity that owns other legal entities (subsidiaries) underneath it. Linkedd LLC isn't set up that way: it's a single LLC, and the six businesses are d/b/a brands of it, each branded and run as its own thing to customers.
Why run everything under one LLC instead of six separate LLCs?
Mainly simplicity — six fully separate legal entities would mean six times the paperwork, bookkeeping, and administrative overhead. One LLC with each business run as a d/b/a brand, tracked separately internally, cuts that overhead and makes sharing tools and infrastructure across businesses more natural.
Is this legal or tax advice for setting up my own holding company?
No. This describes how I've operated Linkedd LLC from a founder's perspective, not a lawyer's or accountant's. Liability protection specifics, tax treatment, and formation requirements vary by state and situation, so talk to an actual attorney and tax professional before structuring your own businesses this way.