Crash Course on Starting a Business

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. So I have been working around the clock, ferociously with Fervor, with an obsession, because I am so excited about what we’re building right now. We’re building beyond the apex community. And I’ve been talking about this for months. But the problem is the scope of what I want this to encompass. Would I want this community? Would I want this training? Would I want this, this coaching program to offer just keeps expanding. The idea behind it is that this is a community for driven entrepreneurs who want to maximize their return on life. And initially, I went into this with a very singular idea, which is I wanted to get more group coaching experience.
I wanted to work with people. But I charge so much for my hourly coaching that is just inaccessible for most people. Unless you’re already doing seven figures in your business, I’m not a good fit for you as a one on one coach. But there are so many people who are in that they’re doing five figures and six figures in their business, and they want to scale to seven and eight figures. And I love those people because I spent so much of my life over the last decade building those types of businesses. I was there and I was like, how do I get from six to seven? How do I do that? How do I make that jump? And so this program, the beyond the apex community, what I really want it to be is an all encompassing masters of business. So that it lays out all the frameworks, everything that you need so you can build your business and you can scale from five, six, seven figures up to eight figures. And then maybe, you know, at some point, we can work together one on one.
That’d be awesome. But the idea behind this is I want to be able to help people at scale. And so small group coaching, where we bring together, you know, a community of entrepreneurs simultaneously into one group coaching. Call each week and actually give people personalized feedback on their, on their machines that they can continue. You’re growing. That’s the dream. That’s the vision here. But as I started laying out the program, I was like, oh, man, there’s actually a lot here for building a business.
There’s a lot of things that we need to go through. And the way that I’m kind of thinking about this right now is in like four distinct sections. You have what I call foundational skills, like founder foundational skills. This is really the mindset, the beliefs that you need to have as the founder to be able to build any kind of successful business business. Second is the executive functioning section. This is more like apex skills that the founder needs to have. These are things like decision making, critical thinking, vision casting, prioritization, the ability to communicate, team building, those higher level skills from there. Then we talk about business fundamentals, like how do we select a market, how do we deliver value? How do we design our systems and our operations? How do we, how do we grow our company? Right? Those are the basics.
And then we have the business apex skills, which is like getting really deep into the nitty gritty of, okay, for developing a product, here are the systems and processes. Here’s how you do that for operations, for delivering this product, or for doing payroll. Like, how do we get into the nitty gritty systems that people don’t often talk about? And it’s that last part that’s been taking up a lot of my time and energy, because it’s very easy, I think, to talk about business from a very high level, but then to actually get into the weeds and show you the systems and processes, say, that we use at Invictus or that we used at escape or in any of my other businesses, that takes more time and energy. And I’m really excited about it. And I’ve been working this last week specifically on advanced tax strategies and legal structures for businesses. And that doesn’t sound super sexy, but trust me, that right there is going to be worth the price of admission anyhow. All that’s to say is, as I was going through all this, I was like, okay, here’s the, what’s the most important thing? If I’m coming into a program, if I want, if I’m working with somebody, it’s, I want to get them a win as quickly as possible. The sooner we can get you winning, we can get the momentum going.
Momentum is, is magical. It has a power in and of itself. And so that’s the first thing that we need to do. We need to get flywheels going. So if you’re at five figures, we need to start moving forward towards six. If we’re at six, we need to start moving forward. And so we can’t get bogged down in the, the learning and the information gathering. We also need to be executing simultaneously.
And so what I wanted to do today is I wanted to lay out just this crash course. Here’s 20 ish ish things that if you were starting out right now, or maybe you’ve already started your business and you could be doing a solid already, you know, one hundred k a year in your business and maybe not have gone through this crash course and done all these steps yet, and I know this from first hand experience, because I’ve built, oh, God, at this .6 or seven businesses. But along the way, I’ve built these things and then built the foundation and the systems after the fact. And let me just tell you, it’s way harder to build like the business as you’re falling down the cliff. It’s very much easier to lay out the foundation and then start building upon it. So here’s the crash course. Here’s the 20 things. If you’re just starting out, or if you have started to go through this checklist and say, okay, I need to get these ducks in a row.
Number one, you need to register your LLC with your state. If you’re an LLC or a state, LLC, corp, whatever you are, like, you need to make sure that you have properly filed. And you can do this very simply. Usually by going to your, the state that you’re in or whatever region. If you’re in a different country, it’s going to be different rules, but you’re going to go and register with your state and then you want to make sure that you are renewing that LLC registration every single year depending on the different terms and conditions. Right. We have a legal team that handles that for us. But when you’re first starting out, you just need to put it on your calendar, make sure that you do it.
Next, you’re going to go, if you’re in the US, to the IR’s website and you’re going to register for a tax ein, you’re going to get that information because you’re going to have to pay taxes. And so now we have enough to be able to go to step three, which is you go to the bank and you open a bank account. Now for, there’s all sorts of great banks. We use a lot of regional banks because we do a lot of real estate that are also financing the assets that we acquire. But you could use something like mercury. It’s a very great resource that I’ve heard really good things about. I don’t personally use it, but I know a number of entrepreneurs who do. They say it’s great.
So, Mercury, go start an account. Okay. I don’t get any kickbacks from this, by the way. It’s important that you create a business checking and savings account or whatever, like, so that you are not commingling funds. Your money should never be coming from your business into your personal account and then being rerouted. It gets very, very messy very, very quickly. All right. So we have our llc, we have our ein, we have our bank account.
Next is we are going to get our domain. So we are going to go to GoDaddy. We’re going to go to Bluehost or Google domains. We’re going to buy the website or the business domain. This can be tricky because a lot of domains are taken, but you need to get your domain, get that set up. Next, you’re going to get your domain hosting so that you can set up your website because you do not want to be sending your emails from your Gmail account, your personal account. That’s not going to be a good look within your business. So we’re going to get our domain, we’re going to set up the hosting.
You can do this through Google. You can do this through GoDaddy. It’s very simple. It will only take you 2030 minutes to do this. And then you’re going to set it up so that you have a professional email that is coming from your business and you can link this to your personal Gmail account so everything lands in the same inbox. You can do that, but just make sure that the emails you’re sending out on behalf of your business are coming from your business URL, that domain. It’s very, very important. Now, if you’re going to be doing like a direct to consumer, a product business of some sort, you could set this up on Shopify, by the way.
That’s what we did at escape. So there you go. Okay, next is we’re going to set up our payment processor. You can use wise, if you’re doing international payments or taking invoices. I personally use stripe a lot and PayPal. So go set those up and get them integrated so that as you have customers coming in, you can invoice them. It can all be handled in the same place. You don’t want to be trying to figure out how to take money after you’ve already got the customer.
It’s a headache. Next is you’re going to set up your bookkeeping software. You could go, I’ve used Xero. We use that at escape. We’ve used pay. Not paypal, quickbooks. We use that invictus. I use that on my personal brands.
Go set up your bookkeeping software. This is very important. Even in the beginning when you don’t have much money coming in yet, you’re like, what’s the point of setting up the bookkeeping software? It’s so that you start developing the systems early. You start developing the financial rigor that is required to run a business. Accounting is the language of business, and you need to make it as easy as possible for you to read the books. So go get your software set up. Even though you don’t have a lot of sales coming in at this point. I get this is an expense coming out of your pocket, but that is the price of doing business.
It’s gonna save you a lot of headache down the road, trust me. All right, next step is you’re gonna go set up your social media account. That means you go to Facebook, Instagram, you go to LinkedIn, you go to Twitter, you go to YouTube, and you create accounts for your business. You want to own those because one of the first things people are going to do when you tell them about your business, they’re going to go Google you. And it depends on if you have those social media accounts already locked down, if they’re going to go and see them or not. We’re going to talk about creating content in other episodes of this podcast, but for now, you want to go and get those locked down. Next is you’re going to set up your softwares. These are the softwares that you’re going to use both internally and externally for delivering products to your customer.
I am a big fan of notion for internal processes. I use this as our company’s playbooks because it’s a searchable database that everybody on the team can come and contribute to. They can search it. It’s a little bit complicated and a little bit robust of a software, but honestly, it will take you from zero to nine figures. It’s so powerful. We also use Google Drive for hosting documents internally, for shared documents that we all want to collaborate on. That’s a little bit cleaner than notion. I like to use notion as like the, the foundational piece.
And then Google Drive is more like the day to day. Here’s where daily things are moving around. I use Dropbox for external reasons, for sending links to people, to certain resources outside of the company. We use Google Drive internally. I did a blog breaking down how we use those three softwares, notion, Google, and Dropbox. I think if you go to anthonyvasino.com blog and it’s the eight figure blueprint, go check that out. All right. Also, you’re going to want to get a Zoom account because you’re going to be doing a lot of Zoom meetings.
You’re going to get us. You might not need this yet. Is a slack account for internal communications. I would put that aside until you actually have a team get a calendly link so that you can make it very easy for people to schedule time with you. You’re not having to go and go back and forth with people to figure out a good time to have meetings. And then you’re going to set up a loom account. And the loom account is very powerful because this is what you’re going to use to create your internal trainings and processes. As you start hiring people, you need to have a way of onboarding them and getting them up to speed so they can contribute meaningfully to the team.
Loom is going to allow you to do that. Okay. The final software that you’re going to create, and this is maybe the most important, is your CRM email list. This is where you’re going to be collecting information about your customers and tracking where they are in the process of doing business with you. I personally use Convertkit for my personal brand. We use activecampaign for Invictus. You can use pretty much anything. There’s a lot of great softwares out there.
You can use HubSpot, but I find that the convertkit is the best one for if you’re like a personal brand newsletter. Activecampaign is also very good. HubSpot is very good if you have an outbound sales team. Next you’re going to go get a credit card because you can rack up those points with your business purchases. Buy everything on your credit card. That buys you an extra 30 days on accounts payable, which is very nice. It helps with the cash flow process and you can get those points so you can start paying for great vacations. Right.
Next is at this point, depending on where you are in your business, you might start thinking about hiring. If you’re going to hire externally outside of the country, you can use resources like shepherd, where they go and they find you, you know, international help at a steep discount. That can be really great. Virtual assistants per let’s say if you’re hiring internally within the United States, then you’re going to want to find a us based recruitment service. And then finally as you start hiring people, you’re going to need to set up your payroll tool. I use gusto for domestic, for us based employees and then you can use something like deal for international employees. And then finally you need to have a mechanism for delivering product. That could be if you’re a community, an instructor, a coach or whatever, you can use school, you can use mining networks.
You just have to have some way of delivering the product. That could be Dropbox, could be Google Drive. Again, we talked about how to use that a little bit more in that blog article that I told you about before, anthonyvasino.com blog. And then just look for the one that says eight figure blueprint. I think it did it about a year ago. So that is the crash course. That is the checklist that you want to make sure. And if you’re already in business, you’re already taking money, you already have some customers think through it.

Okay, which part of these am I missing for a lot of entrepreneurs that are in that five and six low six figure range? The ones that stand out to me is bank accounts, bookkeeping software, and then the softwares as a whole. Like that, I think, is one that people typically put off thinking, oh, I don’t need that quite yet. But getting the foundation set just makes it so much easier to grow quickly rather than having to kind of patch work and put things back together after they start breaking as you start to scale. So hope this brings you guys some value. I’m going to go back to work on the beyond the apex community. I will let you know as it is coming to fruition. We’re about to launch it. We’re going to keep the first cohort because I think we’re going to do this in quarterly releases so that we can onboard people slowly and methodically rather than just deluging with thousands of people in the community simultaneously.

So that first batch of people we’re going to keep relatively small. If you want to be notified of when that goes live, go to beyond theapex.com. You can register there on the jotform, and then we will reach out to you if you’re a good fit for the program as it, you know, comes to launch time. So we’ll catch you guys in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.