Shore Thing

You formed your LLC. You got your EIN. You opened the bank account. You feel done with the official stuff. You might not be. Depending on what you do and where you’re located, there’s often a second layer of paperwork underneath the business-formation basics: local business licenses, city or county permits, and sometimes industry-specific registrations that have nothing to do with your LLC or your EIN and everything to do with the fact that you’re operating in a particular pl

Here’s something most people don’t realize: the moment you start doing business and getting paid, you are a business. The government already considers you one. If you never filed anything, never picked a structure, never made a single official decision — congratulations, you’re a sole proprietor. You didn’t choose it. It chose you. And that’s the part I want to talk about. Because being a sole proprietor by default is not the same as deciding it’s the right structure for you.

My business setup page says I’ll help you avoid the expensive mistakes I already made for you. People sometimes assume that’s just a clever line. It is not. It is autobiography. Let me actually tell you a few, because the whole reason I do this work is that I learned a lot of it the hard, costly way. I’m not going to pretend I started every venture I’ve run with a perfect foundation. I didn’t. I’ve mixed money I should have kept separate. I’ve put off paperwork that would hav

Nobody starts a business excited about the administrative plumbing. But the plumbing is what keeps the whole thing from leaking, so let’s talk about a handful of unglamorous essentials that are easy to set up early and genuinely annoying to retrofit later. A real business email address. Not yourname1987@gmail.com. An address at your own domain — something like hello@yourbusiness.com. It costs very little, it makes you look established, and it keeps your business correspondenc

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.

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