30/01/2023
We are planning to start a blog over on our website once we have it live. We will mostly focus our blog on developing solutions that appeal to Gen Z. But one of the things we've overcome this month has been the very basics of setting up a small business - unless you've had to do it before, you have to figure it out as you go along, and the costs were unknown.
So in the spirit of starting small to get bigger, here are our thoughts on making those first steps in starting out as a business development consultancy.
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Company brand 🎨 : We always knew that our commercial skills needed to be front and centre of our company brand, and we wanted a clear-as-day company name. Living in the Peak District, with a view to Kinder Scout, and aiming for Peak success, this was our natural fit. Before we registered our company, we undertook research to ensure that there were no other UK companies sharing our name, and no one in our business area with a similar name. We also checked for the same, and similar trademarks on the government’s website.
We knew that having a great domain name would be essential to building credibility as a new business. We checked whether this, and similar, were available.
Registering our business 💻 : When we were satisfied that we were unique in our field, we registered as a limited company with companies house, adopting the model articles and rules (you can always change these later). We also agreed that we would set up a company secretary function and registered Lizzie as the director, and Phil as the company secretary. This cost £12 and took around 15 minutes, mostly due to the two-factor authentication that the government gateway uses (Our top tip is to keep a record of your ID and passwords somewhere secure but accessible).
We then purchased our domain name via 123-reg, for the princely sum of £0.79/month + VAT, and used their existing service to set up an e mail address (approx. £11/yr + VAT).
Banking 🏦 : Limited companies legally needed a bank account. We checked moneysavingexpert for the cheapest business bank account. We don’t expect to have million-pound turnovers, to be selling products, handling cash or making international transfers, so we only need to have a simple bank account that is still FSCS protected. For us that was Starling bank. Registration for this bank account was completely online via the app, and even when we made a rookie error (one of us – LIZZIE – put the wrong e mail address in), their contact centre was able to set us straight quickly. The registration did require some ID documentation, and took around 20 minutes, and then we waited around 7 hours for approval, meaning that our account was ready to go the next morning.
We had created our business!
