Two years ago, I started an IT consulting practice in a very niche market for Customer Relationship Management. I am lucky to have been in this space for the past 12 years and have grown to know quite a great deal about specific products and performing data migrations, conversions, upgrades, product customization etc. for hundreds of companies over the years. Two years ago my partner and I started our own practice with nothing more than a few thousand dollars and the idea that clients would find us due to my personal knowledge and abilities with the product.
It worked, but we needed to start a business in about a week from nothing, so here is what we did and how we've succeeded over the past 2 + years.
It worked, but we needed to start a business in about a week from nothing, so here is what we did and how we've succeeded over the past 2 + years.
- We registered as an S Corporation through www.incorporate.com, this was an easy process, but I would really recommend that someone actually just go to your municipal building to register your corporation since using incorporate.com cost us ~$700 to start, and then ~$200/year for statutory representation. note S corporation registration has to be done after you already have a working C corporation and you file within 45 of registration to obtain S corp status from the Federal Government.
- For accounting, we did a lot of research and found www.freshbooks.com I can't stop recommend this product to everyone I know that owns a business. They make invoicing painless, it does time tracking, invoice generation and branding for you and makes you look extremely professional from day 1. Cost is ~$35/month.
- Logo, I technically built ours myself with the experience I have with Adobe Photoshop, but I've had friends that have used services like www.99designs.com and similar products very easily and you can get a quality logo from them for ~$400 or less.
- For the website, I used wordpress, its simple and effective. We bought our template from www.woothemes.com and had this up and running within a day. Thankfully being a technology company we had our own servers and host it ourselves to save money. If you don't have this luxury, there are about a million hosting companies out there to help you, or you can simply use GoDaddy to do the hosting for about $9.99/month, which brings me to..
- Domain Name, this is probably the most important decision any technology business will make, and for us, we had to make sure the business name was available as a domain name before we registered the corporation with the state (we didn't want to have to register a DBA name as well). We used www.GoDaddy.com for the domain and I recommend purchasing it for a 5-year minimum term, this will assist you with SEO (Search Ranking) since Google looks at this as a factor.
- Taxes, we registered pretty immediately with the federal site www.eftps.com to file our payroll federal taxes, and then chose a provider within our bank (Bank of America) to provide payroll services for paying ourselves. This was purchased by intuit, so technically we have Intuit Payroll, provided through Bank of America, and the cost was free for the first year and then $30/month moving forward.
- CPA / Accounting Firm - This was a must for us because neither myself or my business partner were business or accounting majors (we are techies), so being able to ask hard questions about how to handle tax payments, how much we needed to pay ourselves in distributions, and how this process was handled were all important things we needed to figure out. I highly recommend simply paying a few hundred bucks for some time with a CPA to get these answers for yourself. I don't recommend paying them to run payroll for you as it will only take 30 minutes of your time once every 2 weeks to do so.
- Telephone - While its not the best solution in the world, we use www.grasshopper.com for our toll-free number. We wanted to be professional so the first thing we did was register a toll-free number and have it forward to our cell phones. They use an asterisk system (linux based phone switch) to provide VOIP calls directly how you want them, and it allows for a personal assistant voice to answer the phone and then route the calls based on extensions or choices (press 1 for sales type of thing). It is well worth it, and costs ~$30/month.
- Email - Being that we are a Microsoft reseller (known as a Partner Organization) we receive www.office365.com for free, that said, it is a fantastic product and will cost you anywhere between $4/user/month for email or up to $20/user/month for the enterprise plan which we receive that includes a copy of your own file sharing service (SharePoint) and internal communicator (Lync), which we use religiously each day. One trick here is also that if you're a technology-based corporation you can sign-up for Microsoft BizSpark which is a small-business assistance program and provides free copies of things like Office and Windows Server to companies that are under a certain size. We did this and it saves us a ton of money each year. http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/