Shore Things

Let me tell you the most expensive shortcut in small business: falling in love with a name before you check whether you can actually use it. I know this one personally. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Picking a name, building around it, and then discovering someone else already has a claim to it is a special kind of frustrating — and it’s entirely avoidable with about five minutes of looking. Before you order anything, register anything, or design a single logo, do these

Later is doing a lot of heavy lifting in small business land. Later I’ll set up a real business bank account. Later I’ll get the LLC sorted. Later I’ll figure out what I’m actually supposed to be paying in taxes. Later, once things slow down a little, once I have more clients, once I have more time. Here’s the problem with later: the IRS doesn’t care about your timeline. And neither do the fees, the fines, the personal liability exposure, or the accountant who’s going to char

One of the quiet reasons people put off setting up their business: they’re convinced step one is hiring a lawyer, and that sounds expensive and serious and like a thing you do once you’re a “real” business. So let me take some pressure off. For most small businesses, the core setup doesn’t require a lawyer at all. Forming an LLC in South Carolina is filing Articles of Organization with the Secretary of State and paying the fee. Getting an EIN is a free ten-minute form on IRS.

Let me start by saying something important: none of these are stupid mistakes. They’re incredibly common, completely understandable, and almost always the result of nobody ever explaining how travel agency finances actually work — because the travel industry has its own financial rhythm that generic business advice doesn’t account for. Here are the five I see most often. 1. Treating commission income like regular income. This is the big one. When you book a trip, you don’t ge

There’s a lot of advice out there about starting a business, and a frustrating amount of it is vibes. Follow your passion. Build your brand. Show up authentically. All lovely. None of it tells you what to actually do on a Tuesday when you’ve decided you’re really doing this. So here’s the un-vibey version: what you actually need to handle in your first 30 days, roughly in order, so that the foundation is solid before you build anything fun on top of it. Week 1: Decide and nam

Let me save you some time: if you want to work with me, you’re going to be in QuickBooks Online. That’s not negotiable, and I want to explain why — because “my bookkeeper requires it” is not a great reason to pay a monthly subscription fee, and you deserve an actual answer. First, what it is. QuickBooks Online is cloud-based accounting software. It connects to your bank accounts, tracks your income and expenses, generates reports, and keeps everything in one place. Your bookk

I talk to a lot of people who started their business in the wrong order. Not wrong like catastrophically wrong — wrong like they’re going to have to redo some things and it’s going to be annoying. Here’s the order I recommend: 1. Name your business and check availability. Before you fall in love with a name, make sure it’s available as an LLC in your state, check the USPTO trademark database, and grab the domain. In that order. 2. Form your LLC. File with your state’s Secreta

Nobody talks about this part, so I’m going to. When small business owners avoid their books — and most of them do, at some point — it’s rarely because they’re lazy or irresponsible. It’s because looking at the numbers feels like a verdict. And if you’re not sure the verdict is going to be good, it’s easier to just not look. I get it. I run my own business. I know what it feels like to be afraid of your own bank account. But here’s what I’ve learned from working with a lot of

Every time you drove to a client consultation, a styled shoot, a venue walkthrough, a bridal show, a travel conference, or a networking breakfast you didn't really want to attend, your car was doing something useful: generating a tax deduction.

“Do I need an LLC?” I get asked this more than almost anything else. And the honest answer is: it depends, but probably yes, and sooner than you think. Here’s what an LLC actually does. It creates a legal separation between you and your business. That means if someone sues your business, they’re suing the business — not you personally. Your house, your savings, your personal bank account? Generally protected. Operating without one means there’s no wall between your business a

It takes about 20 minutes. It will save you hours of confusion and possibly a very uncomfortable conversation with your accountant. Open a separate business bank account. We know. You've heard this before. You've been meaning to do it. It's on the list somewhere between 'update website' and 'actually respond to that networking email.' And yet here we are. Here's why it keeps getting postponed: when you're running a small creative business, especially in the early years, the l

You're self-employed. You have a lot going on. Here's the thing the IRS is counting on you forgetting. Let's talk about estimated taxes. Specifically, let's talk about the look on someone's face the first time they get hit with an unexpected tax bill in April — not because they did anything wrong, but because nobody ever explained that self-employed people pay taxes four times a year. If you work for someone else, your employer withholds taxes from every paycheck and sends th

Let me tell you something your CPA probably won't say out loud. When you hand them a shoebox of receipts in March, or share a QuickBooks file full of uncategorized transactions and question marks, they don't just fix it and move on. They spend billable hours — your billable hours — doing work that could have been done throughout the year for a fraction of the cost. And they do it under deadline pressure, which means there's less time to catch things, ask questions, or think s

Be honest with me for a second. How many times have you said it? Or thought it? Or typed it into a mental sticky note that lives somewhere in the back of your brain alongside "call the dentist" and "organize the junk drawer"? I'll deal with it in January. I'm not judging you. I have said those words. I have believed those words with my whole chest in the middle of a busy October when the bookings were flying and the last thing I wanted to do was sit down with a spreadsheet. J

I want to tell you something that I wish someone had told me years ago. There is no such thing as books that are too far gone. I mean that. I have seen the shoebox receipts. I have seen the bank accounts that haven't been reconciled in eighteen months. I have seen the spreadsheet that someone built in 2022 with the best of intentions and then quietly abandoned sometime around March. I have seen the business owner who has been "categorizing" transactions in QuickBooks for two

Let me tell you something that happened to me more than once when I was running Mouse Tales Travel. I'd be trying to explain my expenses to someone — an accountant, a financial advisor, whoever — and I'd mention a FAM trip. Familiarization trip. The kind where a resort or cruise line hosts you at their property — usually comping your stay or offering it at a steep discount — so you can experience it firsthand and sell it better to your clients. You're getting yourself there,