EP 80: Starting A Business In Under $3,000
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My name is Joanne Bolt, and I am intent on helping women stop playing small in their businesses, get out of the messy middle, and into profitability. I'm a Southern mama with a snarky attitude who built a $56 million real estate empire just to prove I could, and now I work from home and run a seven-figure immersive coaching business, all while sipping coffee in my fuzzy slippers. To

Together, we'll uncover the tried and true tactics to building a business you love while giving you the real deal on how to make them work for you so that you can get out of your way and into action. Is it all rainbows and unicorns? No way. So put your big girl panties on and get ready because we'll dive into it all from failures to success to money and emotions and everything in between.

Think of this as your girlfriend's guide to business. Grab your coffee or pour yourself a punch bowl of wine because this is the B-Word Podcast.

Hey friends, and welcome back to the B word. I'm your hostess, Joanne Bolt. And today we are going to dive into just what it takes to start a business. That is one of the most asked questions that I get. And I know that if you're listening to this at the time of the episode drop, it's around mid December and you may be thinking of quitting the job you're in and taking that side hustle that you've been doing part-time to fly.

So the first thing that I want to point out to you is it can be expensive to start a new business. You can look up on the Small Business Administration website and they'll actually tell you what it costs right now for most small businesses to get started. But I would say it's going to be anywhere between $2,000 to $1,000.

and $7,000. If the thought of dropping that kind of cash into a new endeavor gives you hives, I don't blame you at all. Here's my recommendation. Although I know that it is one that most people will not advise you on, but it's what I did and it worked for me. I do advise taking out a small business loan. You can get super affordable loans based on your credit score and a few other factors where the interest rate really isn't that bad.

And what I did when I started all of my businesses, I go and take out a loan for $10,000.

And here's why. At $10,000, that is a monthly payment that I can do not too difficultly, or I know I want to pay it back in a really quick way, which motivates me to put a little bit more effort into getting that business up and running because I want to get that loan paid off. The beauty of having the loan is as unknown expenses come up when you start a business, you've got a little bit of cushion there.

in your bank account to take care of them. And here's the bonus at the end of the day.

If you hit profitability faster than you anticipate, you can always pay that loan back really quickly so that you can stop accruing the interest on it and just get it off your books. Or at the end of that first year, you can take what you paid in interest to your accountant and have them help you with it for tax purposes. So I'm coming at you today with seven things that if I were going to start over right now, here's where I would invest.

The very first thing is licensing fees. Your licensing fees can go anywhere from $500 to $250, depending on what you're licensing. But you definitely need a really good LLC. That is prepaid.

probably one of the first things you actually need to do, which is why it's listed as number one in my seven things to do list. Get your LLC, file it with your state. An LLC protects you from people who could knowingly or unknowingly take advantage of you or what you offer or just you in general. It protects your money. It's like putting an umbrella up for when rain comes down. You want that LLC and that's also how you'll file for your taxes.

Immediately after getting the LLC, open up a bank account in the name of said LLC because that's where all you're going to want your money to go in. Now, depending on the state that you're in, this could range anywhere from $25 to $600, depending on how much you invest into it. Personally, I think if you're really trying to start this out for cheaply, you can go to LegalZoom.com.

you can file for about $500 and then your filing fees, which brings you up to around, let's call it $750. Now here's the other thing I want you to understand. Depending on your type of business, you might also want to invest in legal contracts for your clients to sign so that it protects your interest in what you're providing them and the services. Do not assume if you are opening a franchise or

or running your business under someone else's license, like a mortgage brokerage or a real estate office, that their LLC and their insurance and filing protects you. You want to check with your franchise or company that you're running under in order to see what else you might need from a legality standpoint to protect yourself. Go make sure that that is step number one.

The second thing that I would invest my money in is an email and marketing system. I love Kajabi. Now, Kajabi is about $150 a month, so that's going to run you roughly $1,800 for the year, and you can go with a cheaper option like Flowdesk, which is $35 for a month, and that will bring you up to $420 for the year.

Each one does a little bit of the same stuff. I just like Kajabi because it's a little bit more robust. It's got a couple more features. Both of them will help you create landing pages. Both of them will help you create beautifully templated emails that you can send out to your database. Both of them will help you use your landing pages to put people into your database and

And both of them will allow you segmentation. The thing I like about Kajabi is you can also host your website on it, which for me brings that whole package together into one kit and caboodle. So I've got one login, one set of templates, one place to go for almost everything that I do. And it just brings my headache down just a little bit more when I'm running my business. So I will pay extra for that. If you're considering online,

Adding things into your business like a podcast, Kajabi will allow you to run your podcast straight into there. So you might want to take a look at the difference between Kajabi or Flowdesk and really map out what your vision is for your business to see whether you want to go for the little bit pricier one Kajabi that's got more bells and whistles or keep it simple for now at $420 a year and go for Flowdesk.

Either one of them is fantastic. I just encourage you to get one of them. Thirdly, Canva. Yep, I am a broken record on this one, guys. But I truly think, and I am so sorry to all you graphic designers out there, I truly think Canva is somewhat replacing graphic designers for small businesses, for people that really can't afford a full-blown graphic designer and want a little bit more do-it-themselves option.

Canva really can handle your graphics and your branding needs. It is my go-to resource for social media quotes, graphics, pieces I want on my website, almost quite frankly, anything I do and its versatility is so amazing that we've even got a course for it on Roboss Women that's like $29 a year because I want to make sure you can use Canva to its fullest potential and

and learn all the amazing things that I've learned along the way. Like, heck, you can use Canva to embed a graphic into your website. And anytime you want to update it and change it, you can do that from Canva and not even have to have your website editor get involved or you don't have to retouch your website. It's beautiful. You can do so much more than just remove backgrounds on it. Canva

is going to cost you about $120 for the year on the pro version. And it's one of those expenses. I will tell you, if you skip any, don't skip that one. It's one of the cheapest you can do. And it's the most bang for your buck.

Fourthly, your domain. I already addressed this when I talked about Kajabi. You can host your website, but where do you get your domain name? GoDaddy.com is my go-to for website domains. They can cost anywhere between five and a hundred bucks depending on what the name of your company is. And you do want to check URL availability before you get into almost anything else.

Because if you can't grab a URL for it, you might want to reconsider what you're naming your company or your team or how you want your internet presence to be known. So here's a fun fact. I own probably 20 different URLs because I assume that people will misspell things. So you can go to realbosswomen.com, women, M-E-N or women.com.

woman, W-O-M-A-N.com. You're still going to reach my website. You can go to joannbolt.com. You can hit my website. Various aspects that I might be pointing you to along the way, they're all going to forward right from GoDaddy into my website. Here's one of my best pro tips for you. If your business involves Zooms, we've all gotten used to doing webinars in the last couple of years and Zoom has become a really big thing for most businesses. I

I definitely, definitely, definitely recommend going to GoDaddy.com.

you can actually grab a Zoom URL. Mine is zoomwithjoann.com and you could forward it to your Zoom link. And that way you can tell people to meet you in Zoom super, super easily. There you go. There's another little bonus tip for you. All right, moving right along to our fifth thing that I would recommend you spend your money on when you get started, stock photos. You can do a brand photo shoot that may run you at about $1,200 or

Or you can go and get some beautiful stock photos that you can use on your social media or on your website. We use Social Squares. They are a membership company, women owned, fantastic. I have been so impressed with the amount of photos and the availability of stuff that I can download with my membership. They've even got video and it's about $420 a year. So not bad at all, guys.

Invest, invest, invest, because you can use them over and over and over again. All right, number six, grab a project management platform. We use Asana here at Real Boss Women.

There is a free version of Asana you can get on and you don't have to upgrade it until your business grows to the extent that you need more capabilities than it has. So I love that because it allows me as a new business owner to start out on a platform at the free version that can grow with me as my business grows exponentially.

And as my profitability increases, that allows me to then pay for Asana. So go grab Asana. If you don't like the look and feel of Asana, monday.com is also one that I've got a lot of my students in. It is also very versatile, very flexible. It has really good pricing options for smaller teams, and it allows you to

Go from unorganized and into organized in one spot. So either Asana or monday.com. Great, great, great options. Finally, give yourself roughly $500 to invest in technology on a yearly basis. Some of the technology pieces that we use over and over and over again, of course, I've already talked about Zoom. Zoom's gonna cost you, I think it's $150 a year. So really it's not that bad to invest in. It will allow you to get that...

static URL that you can then use a GoDaddy domain to point toward. We also use Tailwind. Tailwind

Tailwind allows us to auto post to things like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. So when you're creating a lot of content that needs to go out at specific times, Tailwind is a really good one. I love the analytics of it. So it helps you really determine where your content is landing and who all is looking at it. And you can even use their ghost writing feature if you are like me and sometimes you just get stuck on like,

What kind of captions to say? That's another good one. So for all of the things I just discussed, you're coming in at roughly $3,100, give or take a little bit, depending on if you go the Kajabi route at $1,800 a year or Flowdesk for $420. Obviously, that's going to change the amount that you pay per year. But you can see how a business loan for $10,000

would really give you then a lot of buffer room in that first year or two or three even of your business while you're doing roughly $3,000 or so a year in the expenses. As you develop more things, as you decide you need different technology, different platforms, as you really grow your group, it will give you that buffer zone in which to do so and keep your profitability at a high level.

It doesn't have to cost a fortune to start a new business, but don't think you can do it for free. That has never happened in the history of this world. So don't think that you're the only one that can make it work.

There is so much that goes into starting and launching a business, but you're the boss of yours. You get to make all of the decisions. A lot of times I find that my students procrastinate on the simple decisions because they get stuck in analysis paralysis on, oh my gosh, which system is the best, which one to do. So I'm telling you right now, these are

Six things you need to start investing in, make a decision, move forward, make it the business that you want it to be. If you want a little bit more help with this, I am putting links to everything I have mentioned in the show notes. You can also find them on our website, www.realbosswomen.com under podcast. You can go to this episode, episode 80 on what you need to spend your money on to start a business or on our homepage. Heck you

you can sign up for some freebies like photo shoot tips or setting boundaries to avoid burnout in order to help you get from point A to point B in your business, because that is what I'm here for. I'll see you guys next Tuesday. Same time, same place.

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