Our History 

Harvard Business Services, Inc. was formed on March 2, 1981, by its President, Richard H. Bell, II, (Rick) and his wife, Paulise Bell. Prior to forming the Company, Rick was the business manager for The Company Corporation, a small Delaware Registered Agent and before that, the first National Circulation Manager for Rolling Stone Magazine, in its early years.

When Rick & Paulise started Harvard, most formations were done by attorneys, who would then serve as the Registered Agent for their clients, as the law prescribes. However, Rick saw the entrepreneurial tsunami coming and focused on forming companies for individuals, without a lawyer, at rock-bottom prices. Attorneys still charge about 5 to ten times Harvard’s prices.

Rick priced his annual Registered Agent fee at $50 per year, and he took it a giant step further… he guaranteed the annual Agent Fee would never increase as long as you keep your company. Even today, almost five decades later, our annual fee is still $50/year.

Since we have been in business, more than 50 new Formation Agents have entered the market, all competing for the entrepreneurial client. Of all these players, it is our performance since 1981 that has made us the leading specialist in Delaware business formations with more than 400,000 companies formed.

Harvard became successful due to a different attitude about serving the customer. From the beginning, Rick and Paulise, built strong relationships with customers through attention to personal service. During the first few years, the Bells operated Harvard out of their home. They answered every phone call, and they knew every customer.

Harvard became known for its personal and friendly service, providing customers with everything they needed, quickly and efficiently, and Harvard still focuses on the client, today. In fact, most of the new formations we get every month come from existing clients.

Our staff in Delaware are friendly specialists and experts in forming and maintaining your corporation or LLC. Among the 50+ employees, 21 have been there more than ten years, and 9 have been there more than 20 years.

Rick’s youngest son, Michael, started working in the summers while finishing high school and college. He came on full-time in 2009 after graduating from Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida in Communications. He brought a new perspective and started by creating a series of videos that helped expand Harvard’s marketing on the internet. Michael worked in every department to learn the entire business. Rick placed Michael in charge of marketing where he took the initiative to learn about SEO, PPC and how to manage the technicalities of a website. He attended various conferences to make the website more prominent and managed the SEO, PPC and the redesign of Delawareinc.com to meet Google’s standards.

As technology continued to evolve Harvard became a pioneer in forming Delaware companies using microcomputers and technology.

In 2017, Rick named Michael Vice President with the task of developing the company to meet the demands of today’s educated entrepreneur.  Once an software devolpment department was up and running our V.P. of Software Development and his Senior Software Engineer began working on an online portal so our clients can manage their companies all in one spot. We call it My Control Desk (MCD). MCD is a free portal that we launched in 2018 where Harvard’s clients can login into their private account and manage all their companies in one place. They can form new companies, order documents, good standings, pay bills, pay franchise tax, etc.

Once MCD became a reality, in-house development projects grew for all the departments, and it became necessary to make our processes more efficient due to the high demand. That led to a need for an infrastructure engineer and now, through Michael’s initiatives as President, Harvard’s databases, application tools and infrastructure is maintained as a state-of-the-art system and we maintain a military grade security system over our network and email servers.

Prior to the pandemic Rick named Michael as President and when the pandemic started and work from home became the norm, there was more of a demand for people to incorporate their own companies.  Harvard’s formation services started taking off faster than ever before and Harvard is forming more than 20,000 new Delaware companies every year since 2020.

Since, 2019 as President Michael has accomplished the following improvements:

• Organized Redesign of our Spanish website.
• Organized search to hire an Infrastructure engineer to lead upgrade of internal infrastructure and improve cybersecurity.
• Organized a work from home policy, comp-time & kid activities PTO request.
• Organized remodel of Conference room to create a new office.
• Implemented a new user-friendly pricing scale for HBS Filing Fee for Franchise Tax. 
• Organized a more automatic check system for OFAC.
• Organized a vendor to assist clients with Fincen report for Beneficial Owner Report.
• Organized a vendor to provide clients with Operating Agreements and Bylaws for all 50 states.
• Organized design and content for new 50 state formation website called IncNation.com.

Today Harvard Business Services is at the top of our game in a very competitive environment. We work hard to make forming your company easy for you.