3 Tax Changes for 2025 Every Business Owner Should Know

California continues to evolve its tax landscape, and 2025 brings several important changes that affect small business owners, freelancers, and corporations. Here are three significant changes you need to know about.

1. Updated California Franchise Tax Rates & Brackets #

California adjusted its personal income tax brackets for 2025 to account for inflation. This affects:

• Self-employed individuals paying California income tax on business profit
• S-Corp owners taking distributions and W-2 wages
• Sole proprietors reporting business income on Schedule C

The top marginal tax rate remains at 13.3% (the highest in the nation), but the income thresholds where you hit higher brackets have shifted upward. If you’re close to a bracket threshold, this could impact your tax planning strategy.

Agents still can't do job applications

The Problem #

It takes forever to find companies worth applying for, find openings, tailor resumes and cover letters and apply for jobs. There’s multiple chrome extensions and even an ‘AutoApply’ service that blends humans and AI to do it for you. Lifymycv, JobScan, etc..I tried browseruse (agentic browser), hyperbrowser and suna. All failed miserably as the ATS (ashby, etc…) were different for each company. LinkedIn banned me after 20 minutes. Agentic browsing is still hard - you have to give the agent your credentials for LinkedIn and stop it along the way.

Bot Text Messages: A Missed AI Opportunity

The Problem #

As someone actively looking for tree services, I was surprised to receive automated text messages from two different tree service providers. Great targeting. The outreach was automated - clearly generated by a bot to reach potential customers. However, when I responded with interest by replying “YES” to their offers, there was no automated follow-up.

This is a classic example of a half-implemented automation strategy. The business invested in automating the outreach but failed to automate the most critical part: the response handling.