Next up, have a financial investment person you trust. You may already have one, but if you don’t, go find one. Then sit down and talk to them for an hour and explain everything you’re planning on doing with your company. Explain what you plan to do, based on your accountant’s recommendations how much you plan to be putting into savings for the business, how much into a 401K, etc. The next thing that your financial person can do for you is to set up all your business accounts. Depending on what you choose to do, you may need to set up a 401K program for you business, and this isn’t as easy as it sounds. It turns out that there are quite a few options available to set up a 401K for your company. The type you choose will have a lot to do with how much growth and how many employees you expect to employ. If you plan to just be a 1 or 2 person operation, you can probably use a Solo-K, but if you plan to have a full staff that you will be providing the 401K benefits to, you’ll need to look at other options. You’ll also want to figure out exactly how you’ll plan to invest your money. If you’ll primarily be investing all your earnings into yourself, or back into the company, your options are pretty easy, but if you’re a consultant like me, you’ll need to keep some money put away for any periods when you are without a contract. You can also think about investing that savings into CD’s or bonds or something else you can keep relatively liquid. These are all of the different things you should sit down with your financial professional to talk about. They may have a lot of suggestions for you and a lot of things you never thought about.
You’re next member of your team is an insurance person. This could be your financial person if they also deal in insurance, but often you’ll need someone separate. It’s easiest to find an insurance broker, just because there are so many different types of insurance, and they can find you the best coverage for the best price, since they are not locked into a single company. Some of the insurance coverages you’ll need to consider include, business auto policy, business liability, professional liability, errors and omissions coverage, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, workman’s comp, etc. I had no idea that there were so many insurances policies that I would need. Every one of my contracts has had different insurance requirements. If you do consulting, often you’ll only need a policy for the length of a contract, and then your next contract won’t require it. So be sure that you can cancel a policy at any time (and often you can even get a refund for the unused portion if you pre-paid.
Mike