That's just a rookie business owner mistake. He should have used something like Justworks to handle the "employee" part of the business until he grew enough to have a dedicated HR person.
Totally off topic, but I loved JustWorks sooooooo much. When we got big enough to hire an actual dedicated HR department, people were unhappier in comparison, though JW is pretty expensive past a certain scale so it makes sense. It's like Heroku for the employee part of the biz: use it starting out and until you scale and then switch to something less expensive but more time consuming.
+1 for Justworks. There are other competitors like Gusto (I think?) that do it too. They have the tax and regulatory stuff figured out for every state and city and are basically the actual "employer" for your employees. I think it's called a PEO
Uh, Justworks is for employment and payroll, not income taxes or Secretary of State filings. The blog post is about the latter.
As it happens, I did use a payroll service, Gusto.
No. When you use Justworks, they are the actual employer for your employees. So you're not doing any business whatsoever in another state.