How To Start Your Own Business: Thrive In The First Year

Table Of Contents

• About this guide
• My story
• Get set up legally
• Budget for success
• Build your business through marketing
• Handle your money with care and keep good records
• Pay your taxes
• Invest carefully in employees and equipment
• Learn as you go

About this guide

Starting and running your own successful small business is a dream for many people. It can bring income and purpose to your life. It can help your community thrive. Importantly, the products and services offered by great small businesses can solve real problems and help their customers live better lives. Starting a successful small business – and keeping it successful – is also very challenging. Every small business is different, but there are fundamental basics that can help you get through the first year with your mind and your money intact.

This is the second guide in Level’s entrepreneurship series. We recommend starting with the first guide, How to Start Your Own Business: Prepare to Launch. The first guide helps you decide whether to start a business and how to choose what kind of business will serve the needs of your community. In this second guide, we assume you have made the decision to start a business, know what kind of business your community needs most, and are ready to get going in your first year of operation.

This guide, like the one before it, is intended for people starting a small business that makes money by selling products or services to customers. These products and services will be provided by you, the small business owner. We assume that the costs to get the business started are relatively low, and that these startup costs will be covered by savings, a small amount of manageable personal debt, or a personal loan from friends and family. This guide is not intended for people starting expensive or high-risk businesses that require a lot of money from investors. As you saw in the title, this guide is focused on just the first year of going into business and starting to grow.

My story

Hello, I’m James. I’m an entrepreneur – a small business owner. I’m also a business coach with a passion for helping those who have chosen to persevere through adversity. I have worked in a variety of different businesses and have started several successful ventures of my own, including operations in commercial truck driving. Before that, I spent more than a decade incarcerated for some harmful decisions I made as a young person. Since finding my way, I made the decision to give back by sharing tips on entrepreneurship with those starting out.
When I’m working with new business owners in their first year of business, I like to tell them that while the road is hard and many sleepless nights are likely in their future, the pathway to prosperity through small business ownership is absolutely achievable. To me, and to many other business owners I have talked to, the journey of entrepreneurship is worth the hard work. I know you can do it, especially if you’re willing to follow best practices and learn constantly. Right now, you have taken the important first step of finding out how to thrive in your first year of small business ownership. Give yourself a pat on the back for showing up for day one. I hope that this guide can be a helpful companion on your business journey.

Lesson 1

Get set up legally

Once you have done all the research outlined in Level’s previous guide in this series, How to Start Your Own Business: Prepare to Launch, the first step is to get set up legally as a business. This is less interesting, but it has important implications. You might endanger your business if you don’t meet all the legal requirements for your field. How you legally structure your business determines how your taxes will work and what’s at risk if you get in a legal dispute. You will need to decide on a business structure at the beginning of your business journey, though you can change your structure as your business changes over time. In this section, we will go through the pros, cons, and implications of each option.