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Thursday, February 19, 2015

Setting Up a Small Business in 2015


It looks like I have an opportunity to consult on a wireless project, which is good news.  With the pickup in the US economy and some diligence in trying to find opportunities, we (my partner and I) are seeing at least two major consulting opportunities that are promising.

The resources to set up and run a small company today like our consulting company are light years ahead of where we were in the 90's.

  • You can get the legal work to set up the company done inexpensively by an online service like Legalzoom.
  • Setting up a website, getting an email address, getting promotional materials and business cards is fast and cheap with services like Godaddy and Vistaprint.
  • You can get all your office software for free and a cloud service from Google or Amazon or Microsoft for little or no money.  You can create and edit documents together with your partners and customers in real time using the software and cloud service.
  • You can get a free business phone number and voice mail from Google.  You can also run online video meetings with free Google hangouts or use another service like Skype.  Your long distance charges can be minimal if you use Skype for calls, and the call quality is great.
  • Meetings with your partners or clients can be held at Panera Bread, Starbucks, or McDonalds with free wifi and outlets to charge your laptop.
  • You can do your own bookkeeping with Quickbooks and your taxes with Turbotax.
  • There are multiple free services to create invoices and you can accept payments using Paypal or Square.
The out of pocket expenses to set up a revenue generating white collar small business LLC can be as little as around $1,000.  It is pretty amazing compared to the old days where you had to purchase business phone lines, pay to get in the Yellow Pages, print promotional material at the printers, pay lawyers, maybe rent an office, etc.

Photo credit: Flickr

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