Building CAUSL - Episode 1: The Woes of Admin Work

The survey

Last week I sent out a survey asking my network on LinkedIn if I should document my journey. I only asked because I don't write for myself, I write to share with others. I paint and draw for myself but the purpose of writing for me has always been to share, otherwise I probably wouldn't bother.

As you can see, the response to my survey was overwhelmingly positive and 95% of people (n=93) who engaged with the survey suggested that I should document the journey. Not being one to put out meaningless surveys without action, here I am, documenting, in the hope that someone will read this.

I love Star Wars, so as a nod to George Lucas, I'm calling each post an Episode.

The woes of admin work

Starting a company from scratch is mostly admin work as I've come to realise and all of this is stuff I've had to learn on the go.

There's the job of incorporating with companies house. This is when you officially become a registered company here in the UK. In all fairness, I should have just given this to someone to do for me, but I saved about ￡50 doing it myself. There are so many new terms to learn - I never should have dropped business studies at school.

Then you have to register a company address. I could have just used my home address, but this is publicly available information and I didn't want to share my home address with the world. So now I have an "office" somewhere in King's Cross where all my post goes and they just forward it to my home address.

You also need business insurance to protect you incase you royally f*ck something up. Hoping to never need this!

If you want to make money and get paid, which I do, you'll need a business bank account. There are soooooooo many to choose from. Make sure you get an accountant as they will help you set up the company properly in terms of taxes, pay yourself and make sure you don't get shafted by HMRC. You can do this yourself but who wants that headache.

You'll also need a lawyer to help you draft the shareholders' agreement, update the articles of association (which needs to fit in with the shareholders' agreement) and draft the board minutes and shareholders' resolution. I don't know what any of those words mean, I've just copied and pasted that from some advice a Lawyer friend gave me. We're still working on this.

And finally, you'll need to register a domain if you plan on having a website - which, let's face it, you do because you don't live in a cave. I took the liberty of building our website (www.causl.co.uk) because, again, I was trying to save money and I know how to make one - even if it looks a bit shit. Although, I actually don't think it does. There are other admin things I was able to fast track such as finding a hosting service, creating a company email address and setting up SEO and Google Analytics as I've done this many times in the past.

If you're really pedantic about setting up a business properly you'll do things like creating a business plan, performing market research and building a pitch deck as well... I am, so I did.

Stay tuned for the next episode where I talk about the crippling fear and doubt of starting a business and how talking to some amazing people in the industry helped me overcome this (mostly).

#WEARECAUSL #buildinginpublic

Bhav