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Starting your own business can, and certainly should, be an exhilarating experience. It means you’re taking your fate into your hands in a way that few people do, with the possibility of complete financial autonomy stretched out before you.
Of course, starting your own business is no picnic. Businesses can — and very often do fail — and it’s likely that you’ll need to experience a fair few failures of your own before achieving success on your path.
That being said, there are certain things you can do in the early days of getting your business off the ground which can help to streamline the entire process from the outset, and reduce the risk of things going wrong.
Here are some suggestions.
Buy a web domain and set up an email forwarder
No matter how professional you are, or how adept you are at what you do, clients are unlikely to come away with a very positive impression of your brand image if you don’t have your own, privately hosted website, and a corresponding email address.
Blogs and sites hosted on free domains present an amateur, fly-by-night image, and what’s more, you don’t have the degree of control over them that you absolutely must have over your business resources.
Before launching your business in earnest, find an affordable and high-quality web host, buy a domain name that matches your services, and create your own website (or have a professional website designer create it for you).
Once that’s done, use your new web host’s services to set up an email forwarder using your new domain name. The process for this will differ between different email services, but is usually quite straightforward. Guides exist all over the internet for achieving this.
Once this process is done, you’ll have a domain-focused email address. For example, instead of “123mybusiness@gmail.com”, your email address would be something like “mybusiness@mybusiness.com”
If you’re running your new business from home — which is a very common thing for new entrepreneurs to do — you have to be careful about what you do with your home address and who has access to it.
In other words, you don’t want your private address prominently displayed on your website’s “contact me” section or anything of the sort. But, of course, you may still need to send and receive physical mail related to your business.
Using a mailbox forwarding service such as https://physicaladdress.com is a good solution to this problem. These services will set you up a professional sounding “virtual address”, will receive your mail for you, and then will forward you the scans of your letters by email.
Set up a dedicated office space in your home
You may have very limited space in your home or apartment, and a whole room set aside to serve as an office may be impossible for you at the current time. That’s fine, but you do absolutely need a dedicated workspace of some sort, where you do work, and only work.
This could be a small table and chair in the corner of your bedroom. No problem. But you cannot expect to be properly productive or maintain the right frame of mind while sitting in bed, or on the sofa, working.
Before your business gets off the ground, be sure to prepare your workstation.
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