The Setup Essentials
There is no quick way to go about the legal and tax side of things so we won’t cover them here, we’ll cover what you need to be in business online.
The 1 Week Business Setup is written on how we’ve set up ourselves and all of it is easily replicated for another business like yours.
The Checklist
Website: We needed a website that would work perfectly on desktop and mobile, and with a focus on making it easy to contact us.
Email: We needed an email, simple enough but we wanted to use Gsuite emails to make things easier later on (Google apps).
Phone: As a digital agency we’re not always going to be in the office, so we needed a flexible solution for customers to contact us by phone.
Social Media: Where would we be without our social profiles, but we wanted them to do more than just serve as an advertising space.
MONEY: We needed a way to pay and get paid, but it needed to support multiple currencies, and manage our expenses for our team.
The Solutions
We’ll keep this brief and to the point on the solutions that we were able to put in. The special thing is this 1 week business setup has worked for us.
Website – WordPress & Elementor
We could have custom coded our website, but we wanted to prove that custom coding sites really isn’t needed anymore, it’s slow and expensive for our clients so we put the better value solution to the test.
WordPress
If you use the internet (which we’re certain you do) you’ve been on a WordPress website every day, 455,000,000 websites are built using WordPress. We choose WordPress in most website builds because of the huge amount of Plugins (54,000 to be exact) available to Link WordPress with so many amazing applications.
When a site is built with these plugins easily available and scalable our website and that of our clients is able to scale so easily.
Elementor
Elementor is the best website page builder out there, we know we’ve tested all of them to be sure. Website use to be coded from start to end, it was a timely and expensive process, but that’s how it was done.
Things have moved on as the industry and technology grew. Tools like Elementor can reduce the build time significantly and so results in a website price that clients do not need a bank loan for.
We even have a special offer for a fully responsive, mobile-friendly, SEO optimised and conversion-focused website for just €799 for new clients.
Feel free to contact us today if you would like a new website.
GSuite Business Account
We know email is free, well with Gmail or your hosting provider it is. But, if there is one Google product we feel is an absolute must it’s G Suite. G Suite gives you access to the majority of Google’s apps through a dedicated business account. This account gives you an email name@yourcompany.com, like our one fearghal@indigial.ie.
This email is super quick to set up, and it will give you access to all of Google under one account. This means your Gmail, Analytics, GoogleAds etc can all be used from your business email. This can be set up manually but isn’t smooth, and for €4.99 a month it’ll be the best fiver ever spend.
Phone – Google Voice
What should be as quick as plugging the landline in, and picking it up is more complicated for us, as it is for many new businesses. We’re not often in the office, and right now we can’t be so the solution was obvious.
Google (yes those guys again) offers a service in G Suite called Google Voice. This is a virtual phone number that is linked directly into your Google account. These are localised and take up to 48 hours to setup. It’s €10 per month for each number.
We choose these options because it’s super quick and easy to set up, and it’s easily scalable, we can even have a number for each country we work in. Most of our team already have their phones and are tied into contracts so we won’t be getting company phones soon. Most importantly there is no extra sim card and so it connects into any mobile we want.
Social Media – Buffer & Canva
We don’t hold any secrets for getting social media @s and Page names that others have, so we’ll focus on how we’ll use it efficiently.
We setup Canva for designing the majority of our visual content. It has 10,000s of ready to customise templates for all of the content you’ll ever need. We signed up for Pro (€10 per month) as it allows for instant resizing for all platforms and 60+ million stock photos for us to use.
The free version is wonderful and will suit most businesses.
So one the content is ready to go we need to get it onto social quickly, but more importantly at good times. Also, we need to reduce the time all of this takes to just a few hours a week. Buffer lets us do exactly that.
The free package works for 3 social platforms, which will cover most business needs. Buffer lets you write the content to match those images from Canva and automatically schedule them to post on all of your social platforms. You can tweak the post for each platform, like adding # to Instagram, and image sliders to Facebook.
The Money – Revolut Business
How did we figure out how to get money quickly? We didn’t. Our team combined have many years of university education and industry experience and we haven’t found the secret sauce to make it quickly. Providing value to clients so that they grow is the only way we know.
But what we did do was get a bank account in 1 day! Revolut a new fintech bank that most people have probably heard of by now recently launched a business option. It allows you to hold a Revolut account in your own name (freelancer/sole trader) or in a business name.
Beyond the speed of getting the account, we choose revolt because it allows us to quickly get paid in 30+ currencies. It automatically categories expenses, meaning fewer visits to the accounts office with coffee-stained receipts trying to see what was €12.99.
For our team it’s also a great help, we can give everyone a prepaid debit card to use for business expenses, that can be approved from our manager account. It also quickly links with our Slack page and account software.
The 1 Week Business Setup Done
There is no quick way to come up with the business idea, the team, your offering, your education or your experience. But setting up the essential digital services doesn’t have to take forever.
Your digital marketing also doesn’t have to feel like trying to pick what to watch on Netflix 2 months into a lockdown. Get in touch with us, we’re here to help businesses like yours, and we’ll have a quick and efficient call.
