~by Haley Lynn Gray~
A confession: I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of girl when it comes to business.
Not because I enjoy paperwork. Because a handful of these things are painful and expensive to retrofit, and getting them right at the start protects your family if something goes badly.
The trick is knowing which handful. Most of what people delay their launch for isn’t on this list.
The things genuinely worth doing first
Structure and, if you have a partner, an operating agreement. Incorporating provides legal and financial separation between the business and you. If you’re going into business with someone, you need a document setting out how you get out of business together, agreed while everyone still likes each other.
I’m not an attorney, and rules differ considerably by state and region. Find a good local business attorney and ask what applies where you are. This is worth the consultation fee.
Separate bank accounts. Personal and business, as far apart as you can manage — and, as I learned the expensive way, ideally at different institutions. It supports the legal separation, and it makes tracking income and expenses vastly easier at tax time.
This is the single easiest item here and the one most frequently skipped.
Insurance, checked properly. Depending on the business you may need professional or general liability cover.
And one that catches people: if you use your car for business, your personal auto policy is unlikely to cover an accident that happens during business use. Worth a phone call to find out before you need to know.
An umbrella policy is also worth considering. People tend to assume business owners are a source of money, whether or not that bears any resemblance to reality.
Knowing your break-even. Not a thirty-page business plan — the numbers. What each unit of what you sell costs you and earns you, roughly what it costs to run the business monthly, and therefore how much you need to sell to cover it.
That single calculation tells you whether the thing is viable, and a startling number of businesses operate for years without it.
Cash to survive the start. Several months of expenses set aside. Many people keep their existing job or work part-time through the early period, which is sensible rather than a lack of commitment.
What you don’t need yet
Equally important, because the list above can become an excuse to prepare indefinitely.
You don’t need a finished website, a logo you love, business cards, a photo shoot, an email sequence, a course, or a perfect description of your services. You can get your first customer without any of those, and most of them are easier to make well once you’ve met a few real clients.
The test: is this painful to fix later, or merely unfinished? Structure, insurance and the bank accounts are genuinely awkward to retrofit. A logo takes an afternoon whenever you like.
Do the awkward ones. Start selling. Do the rest as you go.
Getting found, minimally
You need some online presence whether you want one or not.
At minimum: a business page on whichever platform your customers use, and a Google Business Profile if you have any local element. The profile is free, takes an afternoon, and determines whether you appear when someone nearby searches for what you do.
Directories beyond that are optional and depend entirely on your industry. Some are genuinely worthwhile; many are a subscription that produces nothing.
On people selling you things
A great many people will try to sell you things you don’t need, alongside some things you genuinely do. Telling them apart is a skill worth developing early.
There’s almost always a more expensive and a less expensive way to do anything here, and the expensive way is not reliably better — it’s just better marketed.
Two questions before any startup purchase: does this get me closer to a paying customer? And what happens if I simply don’t buy it for three months? Most things survive that question comfortably.
The order that works
- Structure and, if relevant, the partnership agreement.
- Bank accounts.
- Insurance conversation.
- Break-even numbers.
- Then start selling — before everything else is ready.
Set the foundations, set a budget for the rest, and don’t let the preparation become the business.
More on the mistakes I made that this list would have prevented and why waiting for prerequisites stalls people.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
