Shore Thing

A lot of small business owners treat their pricing like it’s a moral statement about their own worth, which turns a straightforward business decision into an emotional one every single time it needs revisiting. Let’s take the emotion out of it for a minute. Your rates aren’t a referendum on how much you deserve. They’re a number that needs to cover your actual costs, your actual time, your actual expertise, and leave enough left over for the business to be sustainable — inclu

There’s a specific kind of business advice that circulates endlessly in small business Facebook groups, and some of it is genuinely useful. A lot of it is confidently wrong, delivered by someone who did one thing once and is now certain it’s universal law. I don’t say this to be dismissive of community advice generally — some of it is great, and peer support matters. I say it because “someone in a group told me” is, alarmingly often, the actual foundation of a decision that s

Nobody thinks about business credit until the moment they need it — a loan, a lease, a large equipment purchase — and discover that a business with a spotless personal credit score can still look invisible to a lender, because the business itself has no credit history of its own. Business credit and personal credit are separate systems. Your personal score doesn’t automatically transfer over, and if you’ve never done anything to build a credit profile specifically for your bu

I hear a version of this constantly: “Everyone else seems so much further along than me.” Said by business owners who are eight months in, comparing themselves to accounts and colleagues who’ve been doing this for six or eight years. That comparison isn’t just unkind to yourself. It’s mathematically off. What you’re actually seeing. When you look at someone else’s business — their polished website, their fully booked calendar, their confident social media presence — you’re al

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

I want to give you some permission you didn’t know you needed. You don’t have to enjoy bookkeeping. You don’t have to find it interesting, or satisfying, or anything other than necessary. I work with plenty of people who are great at their businesses and genuinely uninterested in their finances, and that’s completely fine. What’s not fine — what I’m going to push back on gently — is using “I’m not a numbers person” as a reason to not know your numbers. Because here’s the thin

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

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

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

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