Free and Easy Business Set Up

Sounds like a catch should be lurking in there somewhere doesn’t it? Well, I’m proof that it can work. I have spent less than AU$50 in setting up my business and advertising in the past month and I only spent that money after I had my first paying client.

I do secretarial services from my home office. I am lucky in the sense that I already had a computer, printer etc so didn’t need to buy equipment or worry about office space. What I needed to do was establish my business identity and try to attract some clients. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, because I’d heard that a huge percent of small businesses go broke in the first year, just because they have over-capitalised. Failure isn’t something that sits well with me, so I was determined to get things started without spending money.

I was spending hours researching domain names, web hosting, advertising costs and memberships to associations and all it was doing was confusing me more and more. Could I trust these domain people; why was one so much cheaper than the other; how can they do this? I’d bought a web design book and was keen to get started, but didn’t know how to start. (I’ll bet we’ve all been there!) I was at the point of just giving up altogether and going back to a part time office job. Then I found a free web page company and that gave me the little feeling of excitement that this could work. After overcoming my doubts as to how safe this sort of thing was, I thought I would give it a try as an experiment and so I could have somewhere to direct potential clients when they arrived (positive thinking is always a good partner to work with).

OK – there isn’t necessarily a lot of choice when it comes to styles and design on these free pages, but I was lucky enough to find one I am kind of happy with and is easy to use. It does what I want and I can see there are a lot of other more technical things I can do when I get time to play.

Next step was how to get people out there to find me and look at the site. I started finding forums and groups that didn’t charge membership fees and a lot of them have free listings for your business or you can set up a profile with your business details. I actually found Bizknik as a link on the site of someone who does similar work to me. Well – that’s a good start I thought – maybe people wanting to hire me would look in these places. 

Then that set me in another direction – if I was a business owner looking for someone to type my reports off-site, where would I look for one? Type in “free web directory” to Google and be prepared to be amazed! There are so many out there and, yes I know, many may end up being fly-by-night or collapsing or (with my luck) selling details to spammers, but I figure that being on their directory may help me get my name in the search results. I found a lot of local directories and set to work registering and then adding their links to my page as a thank you. 

In less than a week, the Gods were smiling and I received a phone call from a small business operator who was having trouble finding a secretary and his reports were backing up – could I help him. After my first feeling of panic, I arranged everything, hung up the phone and started jumping up and down and screaming! I was so excited – he had found me through the local council directory as he was looking for someone in his local area. I had spent no money and had a client – who has now decided that my work is so good that he is going to continue using me for his reports and just hire a part time employee to answer his phones and do the filing in the office. I’ve gone from $0 per week to $200 with one client and it cost me nothing and only too a week.

I printed my own business cards using a box of blank sheets from the stationers – I admit they don’t look as good as the bought ones, but they do the job and I’m pretty happy with them. I used a picture from Clip Art, so I haven’t breached anything and I played with it in Photoshop to change colour and make it a bit sexier, so it’s also individual. That is now becoming my logo and again, for free. (I did already have the box of business cards at home from my husband’s days of setting up, so I cheated a bit there)

In the next few weeks I will pay to get my business name registered with the relevant authorities, now that I am confident there is a business to register. In Australia you can be a subcontractor as long as you have an ABN (Australian Business Number) and this doesn’t cost anything either. You can register online in 10 minutes and be ready to issue an invoice. If you earn less than a certain amount you don’t have to charge GST (Goods & Services Tax) and there are other things about tax etc, that make it easy to set up a small business without having to worry about income tax etc in the early days. Most accountants are happy to provide some upfront advice on what you need to do and the Government has a lot of resources on starting a business – all of which costs nothing.

I’ll be getting my professional looking business cards and might even start printing some marketing material to local businesses to encourage them to use my services. I can afford to do that now that I have a regular client and am not using my savings to do all of this. Of course, I will still be looking for the cheapest deals! I put an ad in the local paper and got a job last week too. That one was only small and barely covered the cost of the ad for the week, but at least I know that my name is out there and someone saw it. They were happy and I know that word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool.

Getting started doesn’t have to cost a lot of money and using free resources on the internet doesn’t guarantee you will make money.