Start a Business

The real steps, costs and mistakes of starting and running a company.

I started my first company because I was bringing in the business myself and handing a large share of every commission to an agency that said it supported me and did not. If I was doing the work, I wanted to control it and keep it. I have started companies more than once and they are still running. So this section is the real steps, the real costs and the mistakes, in the order you hit them.

Start with how to start a business from scratch, which is what my first company taught me: know your per-sale math before you open, expect the bills to start the day you do, go where the referrals already come from, and do not quit right before the first customer shows up. Then read how to start a cleaning business, where I go through the three risks an insurance agent would cover first, broken items, missing items and slip-and-falls, why the car you drive to the job is probably not covered for it, and what to buy first when money is tight. If you are still deciding whether to do this at all, 29,000 jobs and a job board full of ghosts has the numbers behind that decision: 29,000 jobs added in September against the 84,000 economists expected, July revised from a gain to a loss, and a large share of the openings you are applying to that were never real.

Every post here comes out of running my own companies, not out of a template. What the job market is doing to the people thinking about this is in Jobs and Work, and the money side of running one is in Money and Income.