Long Weekend Coming Up
Filed under: Business
I’m looking forward to this upcoming long weekend… No, I’m not taking Monday off, so I’m only getting the weekend off, but this is the weekend I finally sit down and finish my business plan and fill out all the forms to start my new business. It’s going to be a loooong weekend.
Starting a business is a labor of love and requires the love of labor. It’s no easy task to keep track of all of the things you need to do, forms you need to fill out, new taxes you have to pay that you didn’t know about before, etc. For this business, I will be keeping it simple and build it as a sole proprietorship. That means I have less legal stuff to do up front, but have potentially more liability in the end. For the anticipated size of my business, this is the right choice for now, but I do expect that it will grow to the point where it will be in my best interest to incorporate… just not yet.
I have read a number of books about starting one’s own business and they always talk about how to build your business plan. All of them say it’s generally a good idea to have it written before you start your business or to at least have it almost done by the time you go live. Mine will likely be in the latter category.
Originally, I wasn’t going to write a business plan because I’m only going to be working the business on the side and not taking it full-time until I have a large enough reserve or enough regular clients. But after reading, I realized that not having a plan could doom me before I start. To paraphrase one of the most compelling quotes I read on the subject went something like,
When you build a house, you need structural plans, electrical plans, plumbing plans, and more. Building a business is far more complex than building a house and not having a plan would be like buying a bunch of lumber and hoping that your “good ideas” will form the wood into a house.
So that pretty much convinced me that I need a business plan and since I don’t want the house to be a mere shack, I will need to put my best effort into it.
I’m curious what other entrepreneurs out there have done. If you have started a business, did you choose to write a business plan? Did you use a template and fill in the blanks or did you sit down and write it from scratch? What kind of issues with starting the business did you face that you didn’t expect?
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