C (9:12)

Running a business is complicated. There's dozens of software programs that you need and they're all so expensive. And since they come from different companies, they don't always play nice with one another.

B (9:23)

But what can you do, right?

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Odoo. That's what Odoo has all the software business owners need. We're talking sales, CRM, manufacturing websites, literally every kind of software. And it's an all in one platform. So it all works together and it's quality software so you're not sacrificing.

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It's simply a better experience than a hodgepodge of programs trying to fit together.

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You'd expect to pay a premium for it, right? But that's the most amazing part about Odoo. This interconnected suite of business software costs less than the mismatch of disconnected programs you're currently using. So the question is, why spend more on software programs that are less efficient when Odoo's simple software program can handle.

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Everything for a fraction of the price?

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Discover how Odoo can take your business to the next level by visiting odoo.com.

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That'S o d o o.com step four set up your business bank account. This is quite simple in most places in the world. Now I know it could be quite complicated in some other areas, but in most, you know, I would say business friendly countries, this is going to be quite simple. And also if you have difficulty, there's options online as well. There's a lot of banks online that will be open to allowing you to open up a bank account with your information. So the whole point of this step is not to mix your business with your personal finances. Just remember that your business finances need to be separate, okay? Because again, it's its own entity. You're filing your own taxes with that business. That business has its own expenses and owns costs and own revenue, right? It's its own person. So it has to be separate from your bank account. So you want to open up a bank account under your business name. This keeps your account clean. It simplifies things on tax time. It makes your business look more professional, of course, because when you invoice your customer, customers, they're going to see that they're going to pay a business, not you directly. And of course this makes it super simple for you when it comes to at the end of the day, looking at your P L, looking at your profits, your loss, your costs, your revenue. Now you're going to go to the bank and you're just going to ask, I want to open up a business bank account, okay? And that's pretty standard. Now they're going to give you like a bank account, a checking account with a debit card, maybe it's a savings account. I would recommend asking for three things. One, a debit account, which is, is also called a checking account in some places. You also want a savings account so that maybe something that can accrue some interest. And if you have like an abundance of revenue, you could put some in the savings so that you're making some money. And then third, a credit card, if available, that is under the business name. Now this is not to run up a bill. You want to make sure that this is kind of a safety mechanism when you're buying products or services or supplies. You're using a credit card so that if anything happens, fraud, somebody hacks your card, there's recourse. It's not that easy to get your money back with a debit card. Step five Accounting and bookkeeping. Even if you're not making big money yet, you need to track every dollar. And here are some options I recommend. You want to use software like Xero or QuickBooks or Wave. These are great pieces of software to easily do your bookkeeping and accounting. It kind of does a lot of things automatically. We use Xero. I absolutely love it. It's super simple. You want to hire a bookkeeper or an accountant, even part time if you can. A bookkeeper actually is not going to cost that much if you're starting out. But they're going to be able to reconcile everything and make things easier for you come tax time. And when I say accountant, you can just pay your accountant for the work they do. So for example, you're going to need your account to help you file taxes and make sure that you're saving money in every way you can. And that's just a one time thing that happens every year. And you can negotiate that with an account again. I recommend joining a coworker space just for the networking and getting to know who has an account. A lot of accounting firms have bookkeeping services which are pretty inexpensive. It could be 50, 100, 200amonth. And they'll make sure that all your bookkeeping is reconciled. When I say reconcile, basically it just means that every time you pay for something, every time a revenue comes in, the bookkeeper has notes on what that is, right? Oh, you bought a flight for a conference. Oh, this is a ticket for the conference. Oh, this is a hotel. This is actually office supplies. Right. You got to be able to reconcile all these expenses so that you can know where the money's going as well as when it comes tax time, things are clean. Same thing with revenue. Where does money come from? Was this a sale, was this a product, was this a consulting? Does this happen in your country, outside your country, all that kind of stuff. Now I gotta be honest with you. I didn't have a bookkeeper when I first got started. I did all the bookkeeping myself. It was very time consuming. I actually waited too long to Get a bookkeeper. I should have got one a lot earlier when I realized it's actually not that expensive and how much time I was saving. So my recommendation is if you can get a part time bookkeeper. Usually if you have an accountant that's going to help you, you know, you and they're going to be more than happy to help you set things up and help you with filing for your business taxes. They have a bookkeeping service and you can see what the price is. And then from there you can see, hey, do I have enough incoming and outgoing expenses where it's taking too much of my time to do the reconciling that I'll hire somebody part time. Regardless of what you do, you want to keep a monthly spreadsheet and keep things lean. Have a P and L sheet where you have everything so you are on top of your finances and your cash flow. If you don't have a P and L sheet, you can use our template. We create a template for our community. You can just go to100mba.net templates could download all our templates including our P and L sheet template. Now here's a pro tip. I talked about software like Xero and a lot of the software like I mentioned is automated where you could just connect your bank account to Xero and it can automate all the, you know, tracking of expenses. And then once you kind of reconcile it once, say okay, this expense is a marketing expense, it will recognize that and every time you, you know, pay that vendor or you pay that expense, it will reconcile it automatically. So that saves you a lot of time. Step six Set up invoicing and payments. You want to make it easy. People pay you. This is especially important if you're in the services. If you're doing consulting, you can use something like Stripe or Square for card payments wise. For international payments Wise is a great option. And of course zero freshbooks for invoices. They can create invoices in those apps. The easier you make it for people to pay you, the more likely you're going to get paid. Is that simple and, and you want to make sure they pay you on time and these invoices have a deadline and it makes it easy for them to pay via credit card or whatever they want to pay with. So if you want a kind of simple solution that can get going, Stripe is a good option and then wise if you're helping people internationally because it allows them to pay with their local currency. Step 7 Business insurance. This is optional but depending on what you do Insurance may be worth getting early. If you're by yourself doing your business online, you have no employees and you don't have physical space and you don't do live events. Maybe this is something that you could do later on, again, speak to a lawyer. But the point I'm making here is if you do anything in person, if you have any teammates or consultants, you may want to consider this because business insurance will cover you for public liability. For professional indemnity. People, you know, saying things that are not true. Product liability, cyber insurance, if you're storing customer data, you want to start with a basic policy and grow as you need it. This is actually not as expensive as you may think. For example, I just got a quote here for business insurance for $30 a month. So it's not super expensive and it's more of those pieces of mind. I know that a lot of people don't love insurance, but it's kind of a good backup plan just in case. Even if you're not legally required to have it, business insurance can give you peace of mind and help you appear more professional. Especially, especially if you're running events or pop up events. If you're creating content that could be legally problematic. Like for example, if you have a personal finance channel and people take your advice and then they go bankrupt and they're like, oh, I did what you said and I went bankrupt. And obviously it's not your fault, they probably did something else. But my point here is, is that you might get into a legal situation and these insurances help you with that. Now, I don't wish down on anybody, but you have to understand, as you build a business, you need to think about the future. Again, maybe you can't afford this right now. In the beginning you don't have a lot of clients, but it's something to consider. And lastly, you may want to get insurance to protect intellectual property. Now, in my opinion, most intellectual property is kind of hard to defend, right? In terms of people using it, stealing it, whatever. But if you have some really serious intellectual property, something signed, scientific, something that's medical, something that is, that's worth a patent, something like that, you may want to get insurance for that. Step 8. Set up a simple website so when people Google you, they can find you. Okay? You don't need to spend $10,000. You just need a clean, even single page site. You can use tools like Webflow, Squarespace, or even just a simple WordPress template. And on the site you just want to explain who you help, what you offer, why it's valuable and a way to contact or buy what you have. Pretty simple. Number nine Set up a business email and an online presence. Highly recommend this over early on. Don't use your personal Gmail for customer interactions. You want a domain name based email. So for example, my domain is 100 MBA net and if there's a George working in my company it would be george00mba.net this is easily set up with your domain with Google Workspace or with Zoho Mail. I use Google because I love all the tools that come with it like G drive and sheets and docs and all that stuff. You also want to set up your social handles. Even if you don't use them now, you want to claim them right now, like online real estate. So go to TikTok, go to Instagram, go to YouTube, go to Facebook, all the social profiles you'd like to use, even if you're not thinking about using them. Just secure your handle, secure your username so that way it's easy to find with your brand name. Step 10 Start tracking your metrics from day one. Your revenue, your expenses, your leads, your conversion rates. All the important metrics that allow you to track the success of your business. If you want our P and L template Again, just go to 100mba.net template. Download all our templates right there. This will help you stay focused. It'll make it easy to make a decision with data and spot problems early. And that's pretty much it. Setting up a business doesn't have to be expensive or complicated, but it doesn't need to be intentional. Okay, so just to recap, you want to wait until you have five to 10 sales validating that people are going to pay you for what you have. Okay? Then go and register and get some finances in order and make it easy for you to scale. Speak to a lawyer, speak to an accountant to set you up properly. You're building the foundation of something great. Do it right. Don't procrastinate. Get this done. So there you have it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'll admit this stuff is boring, okay? It's not fun, it's not interesting. It's not like the thing that you're looking forward to doing. It's not the reason why you started a business, right? But it's got to get done and it's going to save you a lot of headaches and time and energy and all that kind of stuff in the future. So what I recommend you do is take the money you made from the sales, that first five to 10 sales and invest some of it into getting some help. Get a part time per hour per project, lawyer and accountant to help you with these things. You could sit down and say, I want to do this. I want to set up my business, I want to set up my bank account, I want to do all this stuff. I want to make sure I have bookkeeping, I want to make sure I have this software. And they'll sit down, they'll say, okay, this is how much it's going to cost you. This is how much time it's going to take and get some help because it's going to make it easier for you to just get this done, okay? By getting help, you're getting the experts to work on it for you. They're going to just give it to you on a silver platter, get you to sign some papers and you're good to go. That's what I recommend. And I recommend it because it's going to get you to get it done. That's why I don't want you to put this off. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts by hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

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