So here's what we've got for HFS Industries - Myself, Eek, Fikes, and Doctor Deimos from N@W, in addition to Lyas as an outside contractor.
I'm thinking Todaki for our home base, but I don't know what to look for in a corp HQ. Fikes, if you find a system you'd like to base us in, give me a holler and I'll set things up.
Todaki seems to be a starter system 1.0 sec status, only one station; School of Applied Knowledge. If it is a starter system, the station will be crowded with newbies all the time, which might be pretty annoying. Plus, it's only four jumps from Jita, which will probably mean that it's pretty crowded, even if it's not a starter system.
What you want for a corporation headquarters depends on what your corp wants to do. A mining corp will want plenty of close asteroid belts, mission runners will want a good agent close by, explorers and pvp-people will want access to low-sec (at least when the explorers get covert-ops ships, until then high-sec will probably be fine). For most of these, low population is good, since it means more unexploited resources (asteroids exploration sites), mission runners can base out of crowded systems to the point where they start to lag, though.
Jita is the largest trade hub in the game. Honestly, I'd recommend settling further away from Jita than 10 jumps, since most of Caldari space is full of people. I always preferred more sparsely populated places, and honestly, you can get pretty much anything you need from any of the other trade hubs anyway. The only things you need to go to Jita for is really rare and expensive deadspace and officer mods.
I'd love to help out with the Bay 12 corp, but I'm currently running a WH corp with a few RL friends. I'll answer any questions anyone has , to the best of my knowledge, though. I'm Avaan Eclipse in game if you want to say hi, and I'm always in the Bay12 chat channel when online.
Ehh, that is a good point. If you have an idea for which system might be better to base our selves in, let us know. What skills should our guys be training up? Obviously some need to get mining going but I don't really know what the good mining ships are and what the other half the equation is.
Also, any reason we should try and get our hands on BPOs at this point?
I spent a long time doing exploration as my main source of income, and during that time I based myself out of Stacmon. It is a system in Placid (Gallente space), just on the edge of low-sec with a small high-sec 'island' just three jumps into low-sec. I don't know about the asteroid and agent availability around there, though, so if you take up mining or mission running you might want to check up other places. Speaking of mission running: if you decide to pick that up (level 4 missions are probably the most lucrative thing in high-sec when done fast, even though they are really boring), decide on one (NPC) corporation the whole corp will run missions for, and don't pick one of the navies. The empire navies are the most popular misssion running corps, but other corps are give exactly the same rewards, so if you don't want to mission run in a crowded system, pick some other corporation to run missions for.
I'd start by training up general ship support skills, things that apply to any ship in the game, things like engineering, electronics, turret or missile support skills (depending on what you do) and tanking (shield or armour, again depending on what you want to fly). You don't necessarily need mining skills, that new players can only mine is not true, you can easily make money from mission running or trading as a new player. In fact, mining is not very lucrative unless you have skills for a mining barge and someone hauling.
As for BPO's, tech 1 production has seriously small profit margins these days, so unless you can get hold of a researched BPO (it takes a several months to fully research a BPO, and they cost a fair bit), don't expect to turn much of a profit.
There are a couple of passive income sources you might want to look into: planetary interaction and R&D. R&D is simple, just train a science skill, get an agent to research for you and watch the RP roll in. You then trade the RP for datacores which you sell to people doing Tech 2 production. it's not all that much money, but since you don't put any active effort into it, it's worth it. Planetary interaction is more work intensive and more complex, but pays a little better as well. Pretty much any PI good will sell, but POS fuel (oxygen, mechanical parts, enriched uranium, coolant and robotics) is always a good thing to produce.
Of course, don't believe that all I've said here is the absolute truth, I might have made a mistake, or some of it is old information, so check up everything before you go ahead and commit. That's the spirit of Eve, in my eyes, being prepared.