- It's 2018.
There are a lot of you who want to start your own business,
and I think that's why you clicked on this video.
My name's Roberto Blake.
I'm a creative entrepreneur.
That means I'm an entrepreneur
who deals in creative services,
things like intellectual property, video,
content marketing, you know, that sort of thing.
I'm also a public speaker.
I built a successful six-figure coaching business
in addition to my personal brand in YouTube.
One of the questions that I get the most,
especially in my live streams
and also from a lot of my coaching clients,
is what do you need to do
in order to start your own business?
Now, there are a couple of things to unpack here.
First of all, I live in the United States,
which means that if you're somebody who is in Canada,
the UK, or abroad watching this video,
there are certain things that you need to look up
and do your own research for,
and I'm gonna kind of give you a little bit of advice
regarding some of those things.
And also, because of government regulations,
there are some questions regarding taxes
and things of that nature
that I straight up am not allowed to answer for you.
But I'm going to tell you how to get the answers
for those things on your own.
So if any of that interests you at all,
you're on the right video.
If not, there are over 1,000 other videos on this channel
and maybe one or two of them can help you.
So I would invite you to subscribe, get notifications,
and also just check out what's in the library here.
The Internet and the digital age
has made entrepreneurship more accessible
to people than it's ever been.
That doesn't mean it's any easier or any less complicated.
It just means that more people can get started
with a lot less money and with a lot less time to put in.
That being said, you should always take the time
to do your research.
For all of the legal things that you need to know,
you have to look up what the rules and codes
and regulations are for your local area.
Even down to the county you're in
might require you to have a business license.
You also should consider whether you need to do
a certain legal entity.
Now, there's a book that I'm gonna recommend
that can help you decide what legal entity
that you should start
and which one's gonna be advantageous for you.
It will also give you some advice on your taxes.
That's a book called Start Your Own Business 7th Edition.
I'm going to link to it down below.
I'm also going to link to a list
of 100 books I used to build my business.
I have a very extensive book collection,
and it's been helpful over the years.
For direct questions about your taxes,
you should look at talking to a certified public accountant.
You should consider talking to a tax agency,
like H&R Block or somebody, whoever's local to you,
or even your attorney or legal counsel.
These are people who are allowed to get detailed
with those kind of questions
and they can answer what you need,
and often they will not charge you
to answer those basic questions.
Oftentimes, a lot of the FAQs on their website
will also answer those questions.
If you're in the United States, you can go to irs.gov
and most of the questions are answered there.
It won't be in a convenient, easy-to-use format.
It will be a lot of reading.
But it will answer the far majority of your questions.
I'm also going to link to any content I've found
from legal experts that are here on YouTube
and you can just choose to take whatever they say
with a grain of salt.
But it at least will be informative for you.
So I'm going to link to those in the description down below
along with other resources that you should be looking at
and that can help you
with those kinds of specific questions.
If you're going to get legal or tax advice,
the reality is you should be getting it from an expert.
You should be getting it from somebody who
specifically focuses in only doing that type of thing.
It's gonna be the best answer.
There are also great books that I'm gonna recommend
that can help you begin to wrap your head around it.
There's a lot of jargon to unpack.
So maybe that's useful to you.
Also, like I said, your geography matters.
Your state, your country, your city
will have different codes and regulations
and things that go along with it.
So I could only ever give you the information
on my situation, which may not apply to you
for anything legal or tax wise.
So it's not really that helpful at the end of the day.
Just being upfront about that.
With regard to building your online digital business,
you need a website and a domain name.
I'm gonna recommend Bluehost.
It's who I use for a lot of my different websites.
And they give a massive discount to this community.
They're not sponsoring.
It's just a discount that I found to hook you guys up with
and I get an affiliate commission.
So we're good there.
Link's in the description.
You also, if you're not someone who wants to use Wordpress,
which I definitely would recommend,
you can also just use Wix.com.
I'm gonna link to that as well.
That's just a drag-and-drop visual thing
that you can use to build your website.
The importance of having a domain name,
owning your own .com,
is that when people search for you and your business,
they're gonna be able to find it.
You have a place where you control the information.
Yes, social media is free
and you should take advantage of it,
but marketing yourself,
you want to be able to control your messaging,
you want to own your own platform,
because the platforms change the rules.
They can decide that you're not a good fit for it
or they could decide that your business
is somehow something disadvantageous to the platform.
We see this happen all the time.
So you want to own your own website,
your own platform, your own domain name.
The other great thing about having your own domain name
is it means you have a professional email address.
When starting a business and wanting to manage things,
having people get in touch with you
with a professional email address is always helpful.
You also want separate email addresses for different things.
You might want one that is your name.
You might want one that is info@, content@, payments@.
You want to separate a lot of these things
so that you have diversified systems.
The other thing is you want to go ahead and have accounts
where things can be paid from
and where you can also receive money.
Part of this is obviously setting up a PayPal account.
I also recommend setting up a Stripe account.
Just having some of these different online payment gateways
is actually very helpful for your online business
because there are platforms and services
where you can receive money
where one is viable and the other is not.
Also, some of you are abroad internationally.
Some of you can't use PayPal for whatever reason.
Stripe and Venmo and Square are great alternatives
to PayPal for the rest of you.
Also, just a general rule,
the smart thing is to separate personal
and professional finances.
Again, I can't go super deep into this.
But literally, if you can have a bank account
for every little different thing,
I would set up a bank account
for every different little thing,
and you'll, again, probably want to tie
one of those specifically and exclusively to the business.
In terms of making sure you're getting paid,
just depending on the type of business you have,
you might need invoicing software.
You also might want to have software
for keeping track of everything.
There are a lot of people who use QuickBooks from Intuit.
You could also FreshBooks.
If you're doing freelance services
and you also want to do contracts,
which I highly recommend you use contracts,
there is something that makes that simple
called Hello Bonsai.
I'm gonna link to that down below as well.
Most of these resource links in the description
are affiliate links.
Some of them are not.
The majority of them probably are, so just disclosing that,
'cause that's the other fun thing
about being a business owner.
You have to have disclaimers and disclosure for everything.
So you also want to make sure you get
the proper legal forms and templates.
So you want to hunt those down.
LegalZoom is a great resource
for getting all of that taken care of.
I don't have an affiliate link for them,
but just use the link down there
and get what you need from them.
And it's usually helpful for the majority of people.
I also recommend that you look
at getting business insurance.
I'll link to somebody else's video on business insurance
because it's something that you can't really gloss over
and requires a dedicated video.
But in the same way that you have insurance on your car
just in case the worst should happen,
or hopefully you have health insurance,
you want insurance for the health
and financial security of your business as well.
You also want to insure any of your equipment.
So like I said, I'm gonna find somebody else's video,
I'm gonna link to that,
and you can go into the details there.
So just get business insurance if you can do it.
If you're just starting out,
you don't have the budget for all these things,
don't worry about it.
You can do these things incrementally.
Just take things slow and steady
and work within your budget,
but all of this is really important,
and you guys said you wanted kind of an FAQ-style video
on all the things you need to know to start a business,
and this is just kind of my best case scenario of that.
Now, obviously, in terms of just practicality,
you should probably write up a business plan.
I don't think they're nearly as formal or necessary
as you would think a couple of years ago,
but this business plan is a set of guidelines for you
to understand the nature of your business,
and it probably will help you explain
what you do and how you make your money to other people.
The majority of you watching this,
you're not gonna go to the bank for a loan.
You're not going to get investors.
You're going to start a business out of your home office
or out of your garage or out of your bedroom,
and that's perfectly fine in 2018,
and people have been doing this successfully for years.
And if you've ever read
the book Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk
or Crushing It!, the follow-up to that,
you'll see that there are so many great
digital entrepreneurs that only started a few years ago
and are very successful,
and they started with little of nothing.
That's why entrepreneurship is so accessible today
is that you don't need to take out that bank loan,
you don't need to go out and get
other people's money to do this stuff anymore.
You can start small and it's okay to do that.
Knowing how you're going to market yourself
and your business,
that's something that is ridiculously practical
and that you're gonna have to give a lot of thought.
You have to look at social media platforms.
As a business owner, I don't think in 2018 it's wise for you
to think that you can operate outside of the Internet.
In addition to having your own website,
you need to go where people are
and you need to drive traffic.
And the good thing about social media is it's free.
It's free, it's accessible, it has the eyeballs,
it has people's attention,
and they're doing it from their phones.
So when you set up your website,
ideally, make sure that looks good on a smartphone
because that's probably the first experience
most people will have of it.
The other thing you want to do
is be accessible in social media
and have content in social media
that's favorable to your business, shows what you can do,
and provides some type of value to your ideal end consumer,
something that's helpful to them
that also gets you their attention and their traffic
and a little bit of their time every day.
Obviously, there are several videos on this channel.
There's over 1,000 videos on this channel,
200 of them dedicated specifically
to you using YouTube as a free platform for video marketing.
We've also covered stuff on Instagram,
and I'm gonna be talking a lot more
about how you can use Twitter and LinkedIn
for your business as well.
But I've covered social media and marketing
and email marketing, in particular,
quite extensively here on this YouTube channel.
I hope that you'll subscribe, get notifications,
and watch some of those other videos in the backlog,
because if you're just getting started,
there's a wealth of information here and it's all free.
You're not even gonna have to buy a course.
By the way, there's nothing wrong with buying courses,
or selling them for that fact of the matter.
It's a really good business model.
Try to think about your budget and how much you can spend
to maintain your business every month.
A lot of people go out of their way,
they try to start way too big.
They start a business.
They go and they buy a $500 office space
or they sign up for a $100 a month coworking space
or whatever.
They spend a lot more money than they have,
but yet they don't have cash flow coming in
and they haven't established their client base yet
or made a minimal viable product to sell.
So I mean, just really try to keep
your budget as low as possible,
your operating expenses as low as possible
when you're just getting started.
And when you start making money,
really try to set some of that aside
or invest some of it back into the business.
Do not try to pocket that money.
And also, don't increase your operating budget
just because you're making some money now right away.
Keep your margins good, keep your money,
and make sure that you have a buffer.
It is so important for the health
and growth of your business,
especially when you're just getting started.
That temptation is always there.
In terms of marketing your business,
you might be looking for people
who can design your website, do your visual branding,
your logos, your graphics,
social media, all of those things.
I am not going to personally recommend Fiverr.com
even though it's super cheap
and it's something the far majority of people do
when they're starting out.
I just can't put a guarantee on the work,
and I can't guarantee that there won't be copyright issues
with anyone you hire from Fiverr.
It's a dice role.
I've done a video on whether it's worth it for freelancers,
but I also talk about whether it's worth it, in that video,
for the entrepreneur.
You might want to watch it.
I'll link it up here for you guys and in the description.
But the bottom line for me with that is
for that type of work, I feel it's too risky.
Now, if you want to hire an onscreen talent with Fiverr
or a voice actor or voice actress
or something of that nature,
that type of work I feel is easier to guarantee
in terms of the talent.
But if it's anything visual, design wise,
or if it's something that has to be written up,
I can't guarantee that it won't be stolen or plagiarized.
So I don't really want to recommend that service.
Upwork.com, I think, does a better job of vetting people
because it's harder to get into that platform
and they are not marketing for the low-budget client.
It's going to probably cost a little bit more
to get talent over there,
but I think the quality is gonna be slightly better,
and that's been my personal experience.
They're not sponsoring this video.
I don't have an affiliate link for them.
It's just what my experience has been
and what I've seen and what my friends,
both who are creatives and business people,
have told me about.
Freelancers have told me they've had bad experiences,
entrepreneurs have told me they have had bad experiences,
but they've also been some who've told me
they had good experiences.
I'm just trying to help you minimize risk,
which is what something every business owner
has to think about, how do you minimize risk?
That being said, something else you could do
is you could reach out to a friend who started a business
and find out who they hired to do their visual branding
and their graphics to help them market themselves.
The other thing is with marketing yourself,
do not hire somebody from one of these freelance websites
to do your online marketing.
For that, I worry about the traffic not being organic
because you say you want x amount of thousands of followers
or x amount of site visits.
Sometimes those services are not legitimate.
I would say work with consultants and established firms
and not tie the results to how much traffic
or how many views or how many followers or subscribers
because, again, that creates an incentive
to fake those numbers,
and that could risk the account,
that could risk the YouTube channel,
whatever it is you're doing.
I don't recommend that at all.
Again, granted working with those more established people,
probably gonna be more expensive,
probably not an early thing you need to blow the budget on.
Focus instead on just trying to build your network.
And also, I would say try to legitimately
grow your email list.
When it comes to email marketing software,
MailChimp is free and I have a link down there.
I don't get an affiliate commission, I don't think,
but I get some kind of credit for it.
I think it just depends on whether you're using
the free version or if you're paying for it.
If you're paying for it,
I think I do get a commission from that same link.
Now, if you want an email system
that is set up specifically to help people
who are selling products or services,
I recommend ConvertKit.
Again, I've used both of these.
I actually have active paid accounts with both of these.
And again, affiliate links are down in the description
if you want to use what I'm using.
But ConvertKit has been very good.
It does a streamlined process.
MailChimp is good too.
It does have some limitations that I don't like
in some of its automation.
But I think it's good as far as a place to start
and it is free.
When it comes to hiring people,
volunteers are nice, but you do get what you pay for often,
and I also think that hiring is something
that you should take as slowly as you can.
I do a lot on my own and I freelance out certain projects
to people on a one-off basis.
The best investment for me is a virtual assistant
and a personal assistant.
I think that those are things you should take a look at
because by hiring those folks
to manage things like your email, your inbox,
day-to-day tasks, scheduling, and also hold you accountable,
it's usually going to eliminate the bottleneck
of the majority of your time,
and it's also going to help you prioritize
your communication, who to get back to,
what emails need a response
and need them now rather than later.
So I feel like that is a good place
to offset some of your anxiety and a lot of your time.
I think email becomes one of your biggest time sucks.
So that's something that I would say is a good investment
when it comes to hiring folks.
Just be patient with this process,
and if something isn't working out or you're uncomfortable,
it's time to move on.
Don't keep putting good money after bad is what,
I think that's how the saying goes.
Like, something like that.
Just don't flush your money down the toilet.
It's not worth it.
Final thoughts.
Entrepreneurship, more accessible than it's ever been,
available to more people than ever,
and I would really love to see you try
to start something of your own
and build financial freedom.
Don't get discouraged.
This is a slow process.
It doesn't happen overnight for people.
It's not like anyone here is promising
you're gonna be a millionaire
or even build a six-figure business,
but it could help you in terms of having a side hustle
or just feeling a sense of pride in ownership
over something you built with your own hands.
That being said, entrepreneurship isn't for everyone.
Just because anyone could, theoretically,
use the resources and tools in the digital era
to build a business and become an entrepreneur
doesn't meant that everyone has the skills
or the patience or the temperament
to actually do it and to deliver value.
So I think that's something important to just kind of say
and put out there.
This may not be for everybody.
But I think it's for more people
than it was 10 or 20 years ago by far,
and hopefully this video makes it feel
a little bit less intimidating
and helps you feel like you're informed.
Like I said earlier, the thing that I would ask from you
is that you consider subscribing to this channel
for more topics on freelancing, entrepreneurship,
or marketing yourself in social media,
or building passive income.
Those are a lot of the topics I cover here on the channel.
So if you want that, hit Subscribe,
hit the Notification bell, and I'm happy.
Also, in terms of resources,
I've linked everything I talked about
down in the description below,
whether that's other people's video or content,
articles that I could find that were helpful,
or affiliate links to the products and services
that I use to run and operate my business,
whether that's my online coaching,
the things that I do for my speaking engagements,
or what I do for my social media marketing
here in YouTube and other platforms.
So if that's something that you guys
want to take advantage of,
those links are down below and you can use any of them.
They do help me out one way or another.
Question of the day, what type of business
are you interested in starting?
Let me know in the Comments section.
Like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome stuff here on the channel.
Share it with a friend.
As always, you guys, thanks so very much for watching.
And don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today.
Maybe it's a business that you're very proud of.
Take care.