What You Need to Start Your Own Business
As a small business owners and founders of a number of small businesses, we often get asked what it takes to start a business and the tools and services needed to get going. While things are a little different right now for everyone, we thought it might be a great time to write up our experiences getting a small business off the ground, for those considering starting up a new business or shifting gears with their career.
Business Plan
A business plan is always a smart place to start. Although it may seem daunting, you should at the very least, put together a one-pager outline to organize your thoughts and overall goals. As you refine this document, it can act as a guide to refer to often, as you start, grow and change your business.
Start with:
What you plan to offer
Who is your customer
What areas/regions you’ll serve
What separates you from everyone else
How you plan to promote
Who’s going to be working with you
How much will you charge
Get a Website
After you have started and refined your initial Business Plan, this will help to start detailing more information about yourself and business, which in turn, is key to populating your website. Starting a website may seem like a daunting task, as there are millions of articles selling you on the plethora of website platform products on the market. We recommending starting with a straightforward website service, such Squarespace (this site is a Squarespace site, but they didn’t sponsor this post), Weebly, or Wix. They are all designed for non-technical folks, so if the idea of “building a website” seems scary, don’t worry.
A Domain Name
You can start building your website before getting a domain name, but all the hosting companies will also sell you the domain name registration, which is fine to buy if you don’t already have a name registered. You can search for an available domain through your hosting provider, or get one separately at Google Domains for $12/year. We don’t recommend GoDaddy, as they are more expensive and tend to up sell you on a number of things. They may even take your name if you search for one and don’t end up buying it. There are a few technical things you’ll need to do to point a domain name to your hosting provider, but not entirely difficult if you’re good at following directions.
Adding Content to Your Website
Many platforms are designed to give you all the tools needed to help you fill in your businesses’ key information, contact information and imagery.
Building your site can take weeks because you’ll quickly realize all the other things you’ll need such as:
A business name and domain or website address (not always the same thing!)
Logo and branding
Email address
Phone #
Defined products and services
Pictures of your products or service
Headshot or team photo
Pricing
Scheduling Software
If you’re taking on clients, you might need a business calendar and a way to set business hours and availability. There are services like Calendly and Accuity that primarily provide scheduling for clients to select time with you. You can sync your personal calendar, add blocked off times, and reduce all the back and forth that can come with setting up appointments. You are also able to receive an inbound lead and send off an invitation to grab a time slot. If you’re running a class or provide consulting services and need clients to see your schedule, you may need something more robust for handling class setup, drop-ins, packages, or monthly subscriptions.
Payment Solutions
Now on to other important things, such as getting paid! This is only possible with a way to accept credit card payments, and while Venmo is free and fast, as you grow, it’s more difficult to run end of year reporting and keep track of revenue. Products like Freshbooks allows you to setup clients, itemize hours, send invoices, run P&L Reports and take various payment methods, but it doesn’t offer scheduling.
Phone, Email and Messaging
Using your personal accounts for email and text messaging is great up to a certain point. It gets messy as your business grows, or you bring on team members, and need to share all your personal services with someone else. Services like PocketSuite provide a professional messaging app that runs on your phone, but provides a separate way to manage your business contacts and messages. It even gives you a phone number tied to the app, so you can have a separate number for people to reach you on your cell phone without exposing your personal phone number.
Team Members
Growing your business is great, but things get complicated when adding new members to the team that need access to all things like client info, tracking jobs, getting invoices rolled up, and keeping tabs on all the messages they have with your clients. PocketSuite also offers team functionality where if you have a handful of coworkers doing parts of the work, the app allows you to take inbound leads, schedule appointments for specific team members, and track everything they do. At the end of the job, the app enables you to send invoices, payout your employee, and have all the records in one place for taxes at the end of the year. As a designer for example, you can have a team member check-in to a job site and take pictures of the workplace.
Mileage Tracking
Keep track of those business expenses. They come in handy when it’s time to do your business expenses and tax write-offs. Other apps like MileIQ help track all your driving and you can organize and separate business mileage from personal. At the end of each month or year (or anytime you want), the app allows you to export your mileage and drives, with a handy calculator to use for expenses and tax time.
Setting Up Social Media Accounts
Lastly, there is Social Media. Depending on your business, some channels might make more sense than others, but social media accounts are a great way to build your brand, have others discover you, and also have potential clients find you.
Instagram (there is a business acct option, but not completely necessary).
Facebook (Business Page)
Google Business
Pinterest are ways that many businesses express who they are as a company, share their work/services, and interact with the community at large.
In Summary
There are so many tools out there, but as we’ve shopped around, there are two buckets of packages to consider:
If you spend most of your time at home behind at a desk, don’t have a lot of appointment juggling, have a handful of payments, and comfortable using all your own accounts for business:
Squarespace for your website if you’ll publish a few things and don’t touch it too often
Google Apps (add a new ‘business calendar’ to your calendar for your business for team members, and manually schedule appts)
Freshbooks for managing your books (invoicing, payments, reports)
MileIQ for keeping track of mileage
If you’re always on-the-go, rarely on your laptop, have lots of clients to juggle each week on a regular basis with weekly recurring payments, clients messaging you all the time, and the need to separate business from personal communication:
PocketSuite for:
scheduling, which will sync w/ your personal calendar (instead of only using your personal calendar)
business messaging (instead of personal text messages)
client payment app (instead of venmo or paypal)
online booking for single or regularly booked services like classes, weekly services, or packages (instead of an upgraded version of a website solution like Squarespace that offers eCommerce)
MileIQ for keeping track of mileage
These tips can apply to any type of business. For a future post, we will focus on interior design specific tools and resources!
*Full disclosure: John is doing some work with PocketSuite, but only endorsing because it’s the only solution we’ve found that has a solid all-around offering.
