💼 Subcontracting Business in a Box
What everyone loves to talk about - the Tech Stack
In Phase 1 of our business in a box, we established the less flashy points of our business
EIN and LLC documentation
Insurance
Agreements
Legal and Accounting
If you already have a business where you perform this work, you could probably skip this phase, but for many wanting to start a business this is the first step.
Now we get to the fun stuff, the technology behind how all of this works (and most of it involving no-code!)
Banking
This should be simple, and the tools I’ve used are just that.
Mercury Banking
The easy way of setting up a business bank account. I remember trying to open a business banking account *in person* and it taking multiple hours where I could have been spending time setting up my business. Mercury goes through the same verification and setup process, but you don’t have to sit there waiting for someone to manually enter data and take time away from you. The interface when you’re online is also amazing. Highly recommend.
Credit Cards
Everyone has their opinions here, so I’m not going to rehash theirs. Get one that you can assign expenses (software subscriptions, insurance, fees, etc) and has some decent rewards attached to it). Be sure to document what you use it for and keep that in your documentation of the business (helps from a legal and auditing standpoint) and you can manage to write off quite a bit!
Business Site and Software
This is where you can have as much (or as little) design input as you want. I went ahead and did most of the setup for this manually, but paying someone to save you time to work on other parts of the business (hiring, legal, onboarding) is also something I would recommend if you have the means
Google My Business
You’ll need your business name before you can request a Google My Business card, which they’ll verify by sending to the address of your choosing. Make sure to be there, because that code is what will get you to the next steps of placing ads on Google. This is a must do step!
Gsuite
For a small business this is a no brainer. $12/month for basic services which include your own Drive suite and templates, domain linked emails, and much more. No need to complicate things, just get it.
OpenPhone
If you don’t want to use your personal phone like I did, and also don’t want to be carrying around two (or more) phones, use something like OpenPhone. I love the interface of OpenPhone and the price is reasonable at $13/month for the basic features (you don’t need more than that at this stage). The big feature it has is recording calls so that you can use it for
training
grabbing information if you forgot it
Wix/Webflow/Squarespace
Simple website builder. You can choose to build your own or use a template depending on how much time and money you have at your disposal. I went the wix route and used some inspo from Alex Lathery to essentially copy what he used.
I will always recommend copying someone else’s work for things like this because they have done the hard work of validating it for you. All of Alex’s sites are for clients that he has worked for, so these are in the wild with actual humans looking at them.
BookingKoala and Jobber
This is the core of the way a subcontracting business is run. BookingKoala and Jobber have made it super simple (and cheap) to connect contractors and clients. They also provide in house options for landing pages, quotes, and booking if you don’t want to have a separate site builder.
BookingKoala is what I used, and they have an hour long tutorial of getting everything set up. At $27-50/month its something that is an insane value for the services it provides.
Gusto
Payroll can be a pain. Gusto is to payroll what Mercury is to banking. I love that they help connect you with an accountant if you don’t already have one. They also make it super simple to walk through adding contractors that you’ll pay through the business. Some software has issues with getting checks to clear. Gusto does not seem to have this problem in my experience.
What’s the total price of all of this?
Great thing about software is that it is cheap and can provide a ton of value.
Mercury - free
GMB - free
Wix or website builder - $20-30/month
Openphone - $13/month
BookingKoala - $27/month
Gsuite - $12/month
Gusto - $6/month/contractor for our purposes (assume $12/month for two subs starting out)
Total cost for software for our business - less than $150
Now this doesn’t include the domain name reservation or hosting which isn’t expensive either and is for a year timeframe rather than a monthly subscription.
Now image if you tried to do everything from scratch without any of this software…
The time commitment itself to building out these systems would cost more in the first day than using this stack for years!
And that’s the leverage that you have with this business. Near foolproof and able to get going within days or weeks, not months or years.
Phase 3 will go over Scaling and Operations of the business. Then with the basics set I’ll go over potential ideas and areas you can build businesses in with this model.
Until then talk soon!
GJ