Do you have many contacts in the industry? I work a lot with tradesmen (financial services) and when discussing growth avenues our best success has always come from General Contractor, material vendors, and similar contacts. Not just customers, but getting in touch with more people than in turn have easy access to customers.

Particularly, GCs with B2B contacts are best. Businesses will always have the deepest pockets. We found that we could push business relationships with B2B GCs and developers and then turn over tens of thousands working multiple houses or commercial buildings in a neighborhood/development/shopping center.

This is at least in part the function of an accountant.

In a large business, this would be divided across the functions of accounting and finance. The accounting department works with past figures and collaborates with finance and operations to project future figures with various scenarios and branching option trees. The CFO usually has the last call on projections and then presents and discusses it with the rest of the C Suite.

In a small business, that set of teams is consolidated into whatever the owner takes on to do themselves + an accountant, if that accountant fulfills that kind of work. Many accountants are still old school and restrict themselves to doing tax meetings once or twice a year. I noticed this early in my career and decided I liked the strategic decision making of a CFO but didn’t want to work up a ladder for a large company, so I stuck it out on my own.

Really I don’t think the actual work is that hard, but I think a lot of business owners don’t know what it looks like when done right. How do you pull, scrub, and extrapolate from the data? What does a good return on asset ratio even look like? Why do I need to know something like the after tax cost of debt? What decisions does it help me make?

I did some of this with a client last week and you could see the lightbulb turn on. I work with a lot of tradesmen and it’s a common phenomenon that they have very strong revenues but never seem to actually take any money home. After about 3 hours I watched him go from “I’m very good at what I do but I don’t know why I don’t have money in the bank” to “We’re going to track our cost of goods sold better and keep a handle on these specific vendors because they’re gutting me”.

I take a lot of pride in it. Lots of people think the field is soulless and derive no enjoyment from it but I find it so fulfilling when non-financially inclined individuals go from feeling like they’re missing something to feeling like they’re in control.

Rant over.

Love this answer, makes me nostalgic about taking Corporate Finance in college.

If you use an accounting system with bank feed imports, a lot of the manual work will be done for you. You can keep your payment processor and keep your accounting simple simultaneously.

As for fees, I usually keep track of it in the accounting if I can because that kind of information is a driver for some of my clients. Sometimes with the information I’m given it’s not tenable, but I would always rather know the full extent of revenue than not.

Toxic employees are a cancer to a small business. You must get rid of them, otherwise they will poison the rest of the staff. As for employees considering stealing your clients, it’s important to get back on top of your relationships with high end clients. My field is somewhat relationship based so this isn’t a huge issue for me (I have to stay in touch to keep my business) but I can recognize what a rogue employee could do.

Have an action plan and don’t react with emotion. Mitigate risk, get back with your best clients, if you think an employee is poised to snatch them, get them off those accounts. You can very easily explain it away by saying you want to ensure you’re contributing to the success of the company and that it’s your way of keeping touch with the day to day and what your employees have to wrestle with.

I work in financial services, it can be very easy to slip into a mindset of “I don’t know enough to do this” because I haven’t memorized every little aspect about the tax code or formulas for some ratio.

What helped me was realizing that if I’m a 6-8 on the scale of professional skills and knowledge (out of 10), my clients are usually a 1-4. I provide a genuinely helpful and oftentimes necessary service, and while I might not be the best I could possibly be at any given moment (a 10 with every ratio and code reference memorized) I’m still far more helpful to my clients than if I wasn’t in business at all. I don’t have to know it all, I just have to know how to improve when I encounter the limits of my skill or knowledge.

I am making the assumption that you are a sole proprietorship that did not take the S Corp election.

An LLC is a legal entity that is disregarded for the purposes of taxation in the eyes of the IRS. You are a pass-through entity. This means that any income earned in the process of business is taxed at the self employment level. You pay both halves of the employer/employee FICA tax as well as your personal income federal and state withholding rate.

All of your business income is treated this way. Income earned this way is taxed regardless if you put it in your personal bank account or leave it in the business bank account. You do not have “wages”, you have draws. Your taxable business income is reduced by ordinary and necessary expenses incurred in the operation of your business. Accounting software is useful for this purpose.

Happy to answer any other questions.

I tried it briefly but it didn’t seem terribly useful when I was first starting out. Now my sounding boards are my entrepreneurial brothers, my old employers, and a couple clients that I get along very well with.

My big issue with SCORE is that it usually feels like I’m talking to someone who no longer has skin in the game. My brothers and I understand each other while also staying in the trenches day to day.

There’s a lot to comment on here.

To get a couple things out of the way, remember that running a business is hard. Many fail. You are statistically likely to fail. Before you drop your inheritance money into this venture, consider that.

I would take a portion of that money and not look at it for a second, put it somewhere it will make you money and forget about it for a while. Don’t put all your eggs in the basket of self employment on your first rodeo, especially lacking a stable source of income. Diversification of assets reduces risk.

I can’t say I know the business model surrounding content creation well, but it’s almost always worthwhile to crunch out your existing runway, expenses, and income over a determined period of time. How much money do you need to make for your business to be reality? What data point needs to go up (customers, views, etc) for you to reach that target? How long can you afford to bleed money?

There are retirement accounts available for the self employed. If you are set on not replacing your day job income and going fully SE, you can explore that option. It is recommended you do.

In terms of deductions, credits, etc. there’s a lot of misinformation on social media so it’s best to be careful about it. The general rule is that expenses incurred during the operation of a business that are ordinary and necessary reduce your taxable business income by that amount. For things like credits, taxes, deductions and whatnot it is recommend you discuss it with a professional.

An accountant can help you with this. And yes, I generally recommend avoiding FInancial Advisors.

Wave Accounting is free. Fewer functions than most but for a small operation it does the job.

You’re tussling with a subtopic of accounting that I’d feel safe saying even most accountants don’t interact with on any kind of regular interval. That’s not to say we couldn’t learn, but it’s one of those specific-to-an-industry things that some don’t touch after ACC 301/302.

My first recommendation is to get outside professional help. If you want to give yourself a brief primer on the topic, I recommend you look into (these being the key phrases and terms) cost basis, cost accounting, and the following accounts: Raw material, in process goods, and finished goods.

If you have direct labor and overhead outside of yourself, it can get quite involved. Cost allocation becomes very detailed for manufacturers and is a learned skill.

Happy to answer any specific questions you have on the topic though.

You’re fighting over $60 a month. Consider that.

That’s pretty cheap. My optimal small client is $500 monthly, at least. If you throw payroll quarterlies on top of that I’m definitely charging more.

Bookkeeping goes through QBO, reports get pulled, cleaned, and made presentable in Excel.

Dashboards, forecasts, and data vis of varying kinds go through Excel.

Used to play EVE Online, became an accountant, now I play TFT casually and Star Citizen with friends.