When I first started my business about five years ago, I made a ton of mistakes that cost me hundreds if not thousands of dollars by watching this video till the end. I'm going to be going over the essential things that you need to do before starting a business or a side hustle to make sure that you start off on the best foot possible. Starting with number One, you need to go ahead and make sure that you properly register whatever business you're looking to start. Now just as you have your own social security number, all businesses have their own identification number which stands for an EIN.

This year provides legal recognition with the Federal government and it also gives you protection as well as that unique identifier to help you establish credibility with customers and vendors. Now, registering your business will also allow you to obtain important licenses and permits if you happen to be within a market that needs those things, as well as getting applications approved for business loans, business credit cards, and other financing. On top of that by getting an EIN. It also helps you to avoid personal liability where if a business is all under your personal name and for some reason it goes bankrupt or you get sued, you would not have to worry about assets such as your car, your house, or anything under your personal name to get all caught up up in the mix.

So how do you register your business? Well, The specific steps and requirements are going to vary depending on what kind of business you have, how you try to set it up, and where you live. But here are some general guidelines that should apply to just everyone. First, go on Irs.gov and get yourself an EIN Next, choose a legal structure. This could be a sole proprietorship, a partnership, an LLC, a corporation, or any various other types of entities.

Now, each structure has different requirements and benefits, so it's important to do your own research and choose what's best for you. But if you're just starting out as a complete beginner, you've never started a business before. Most likely you're going to fall within the category of getting a sole proprietorship first. This is exactly what I've done before moving over it, eventually into an LLC.

Once I was able to make enough money, and then eventually moving over into an S corporation. Once you determine what kind of structure your business is, you're able to then get that Ein and all you have to do next is register it with your state. Now, this typically involves filling out an application, paying a small fee, and providing information about out who owns the business which is yourself. Now, be sure to research any specific requirements and guidelines or if you know any local business owners, just ask them what are some of the things that they did I know for me personally I Live in the state of Maryland It was very, very easy.

I Did everything online five to six years ago, just typed it in. registering for a business within Maryland Put in my Ein in there and I was good to go. There are a ton of other services that do this for you just in case you mess anything up because this stuff is definitely important. But if Young Brian Jung back when I was 19 years old was able to do this I know that you guys can too.

Now the second most important thing that you want to do is to get a business bank account early on back when I first started my business I made the mistake of putting everything under my personal name I had the Ein I had what the business name was supposed to look like but I kept putting off the small task of creating a business checking account. The whole reason that you want to do this is so that you can mainly separate your business and your personal income and expenses. This is essential for several reasons. One of the biggest ones is legal protection if you separate your personal and your business assets just in the case of a lawsuit or any legal action.

Another main reason you want to do this is to just make it a lot easier to keep record of your business income and those expenses. So whenever you're doing some accurate reporting for tax purposes, you're going to be able to separate it and make it a lot easier for yourself or any bookkeeper that you decide to hire In the case that you're audited by the IRS or for the fact that you're preparing for a tax return for that year, by keeping a record of separate personal business expenses, you allow yourself to take advantage of tax deductions and credits. Last but not least, by separating a personal business finances, you can also help to keep a bit more of a professional image. it would look a little bit whack if someone needs to pay you for your services and then you tell them oh yeah, just uh.

venmo it to me. to my personal account, people might think you're not running a legitimate business and you could run into some more issues and overall this could just lead into a more disorganized, chaotic type of entity. Now there's a ton of different business checking accounts that you guys can go with. There's a lot of these newer Fintech Banks but for the year of 2 2023, we have Banks collapsing left and right.

For the last half decade I've been going with Chase uh, JP Morgan Chase especially and with them they're great because they have many different business checking accounts where if you don't have that much money you can sign up for their basic one and as you continue to get more business you can move up the ranks and eventually you can get into their Platinum business checking account which is what I have which is in line with their Private Client Services the benefits are great you get like a private wealth manager, you get access to someone on their team and if I ever need help with a customer support like reason I don't need to go through the customer support line I could call someone directly who works in one of those offices that can help me out instantly. At the time of filming this video, chase us three different checking accounts that you guys should know about. One of them is the Chase Business Complete Banking. They also have Chase Performance Business Checking and then like I said the chase Platinum Business Checking which is what I use right now and with the Chase Business Complete Banking basically the beginner one, you would either pay 15 a month or you'd have a zero dollar monthly service fee as long as you keep two thousand dollars a minimum daily balances which I feel like most people should be able to do once you have your business checking account set up.

There's a few other things. Make sure that you have a competitive offer because most times if you walk into a Chase branch sometimes they'll give you even more money just for signing up with them I Know even with American Express they've sent me countless amount of mail-in offers by setting up a savings account directly with them too or a business checking account and they had offered me before a couple thousand dollars to move my money over so that right there our free welcome. Bonus incentives I Want to make sure that you guys at least know about it so you don't miss out on free bread. So once you get your business checking account set up, make sure that for any type of money you're supposed to receive, you have your new account number and your routing number inputted into the platform.

So if you're doing ubereats, if you're doing Amazon FBA Drop Shipping E-commerce YouTube you name it Affiliate marketing I Don't know whatever business you're in, make sure that money starts going into that new business checking account first. Now the third thing you want to do is to make sure that you bookkeep your expenses. So this is something that I did not do a good job of way earlier on and and later down the road. I Had to reap the consequences of that by hiring a whole bunch of new accounting firms, having them reconcile and go through all my older books.

So I wish I put in just a little bit more work or hired a proper service to do this in the beginning because if you live here in the United States I'm sure most of you guys are whatever country you're in, you're gonna have to pay taxes and in order to do that, there's been just uh I Want to say it's a dumb system? A dumb system that has been created by lobbyists that pretty much has the liability put on the business owners to make sure that all your taxes are reported for and that you're solely responsible in making sure that every penny is good. What this means is that not only are you responsible for setting up the business and making sure that the business is actually making money, but you also need to make sure that for every single tax deduction that you find the right person to help you properly input it into your expense, and that you're the one that is properly keeping track of all the money that goes in and out. Now, although a business bank account is going to help you a lot in getting organized, you're still going to need to file taxes at the end of every single year as long as you make a minimum amount of money which depends on your state and depends on how much you're trying to go for. But for the most part, anyone who starts a business if you're making at least ten thousand dollars a year, you're gonna have to report that to the IRS And that means you're gonna have to categorize transactions periodically just to make sure that you don't ever get in trouble by the IRS Now in the last few years I've been doing business I've tried nearly everything I've done Excel sheets and manually logging my expenses, but after a few years I realized just how much time that it takes.

So eventually I decided to Outsource that part. I've also used things like zero QuickBooks and pretty much any new bookkeeping service that has come out at the end of just going through all that and wasting my money. Now, the company that I use is called Bench. This is not sponsored by them at all.

They've been great with us. I have a number of full-time employees right now on my payroll and without them, it would just be a lot more of a headache if you need a good virtual bookkeeper. I Highly recommend them. The price was competitive, they've been solid, and I also have a little referral link Down Below in the description if you want to check it out.

Now, the next thing that you want to do as soon as you start your business is to utilize any additional business credit or loans that you can get. Now I'm not a huge fan of loans because it's very rare where you're going to need a loan and then you can actually put that to use where you're beating out the interest rate that you would be paying. But I'm a huge fan of business credit cards because as you know, as long as you pay off the amount in full or if you're going through even like a 12 to 15 month no interest APR Promotional period, you would never have to pay additional interest to leverage other people's money. Now business credit cards offer huge welcome bonuses where you can also get anywhere from 10 to even 20 000 cash back.

Not only that, but you also get additional access to credit to manage cash flow. You get valuable rewards and perks. You get cash back, airline miles, discount on business expenses, you get travel benefits, and having a business credit card can help you responsibly establish that business credit score so it makes it a lot easier in the future. If you're trying to buy a warehouse or an office building that you have something that you can show some of these lenders that you have experience in paying off debt that you borrowed.

Another reason why I love business credit cards is the fact that allows me to separate my business expenses even further. So we have a business checking account that would pay for the business credit cards and within the business credit cards. Whether you're with Amex or with Chase or any of the other type of credit card companies, usually you can go ahead and Mark what kind of detail that transaction was. you can categorize it and they also even give you their own proprietary software to organizing what goes into pie chart or how much money you've spent.

So if you don't know the first thing about getting a business credit card I Made a full beginner's guide on how you can get started on my channel and that video will also be linked at the very end of this and also in the description of this video. Now the next thing that you're eventually going to want to set up, especially right now in the new day and age of the internet, is having a proper business email address, a website, and a way to host your website now. I'm very particular about some of the sponsors that we have on our Channel Now, but this here was a perfect integration for a video that I was already making and that leads into Hostinger. So with them you can go ahead and first register a domain name for free.

You can set up a profession no business email address completely for free. You can optimize your workflow with managed WordPress hosting and you can also launch websites very quickly with hostinger's website builder without any additional costs Now to create a website with them. It's actually really simple, so all you have to do is select Hostinger website builder and then all you have to do is connect the website to The Domain that we've registered before. After that, you have the option to use a designer made template and customize it to your own liking.

If you don't want to do that, you can also utilize their AI website builder, which is very convenient as it will only ask you a couple of questions about your website and it'll help you create it instantly. Now the good thing about this is that after they create the website for you, you can still customize or personalize it by editing the contents. So for this section, I would just go into use AI Website Builder. Then here we're going to put the brand name, the website type, and the business description.

Then we'll just click on create a website and that's it. The AI tool just created a website for US based on the information that we provided. As you can see, they generated the layout, that text and they already chose the font and font size. Now what's so cool about this is that they have three templates that you can choose from and after this, you can edit the template on how you want your website to look and you can even click on style to edit the font and colors if you want a little bit more personality going into it.

or you can add additional Pages If you happen to not like what the AI tool created for you, you can just click create again in the top right corner for the AI tool to generate another set of layouts and from there you can edit it even more If you feel like the website needs to be a bit more personalized. after you're done, save and preview your website and here you can see what it looks like if you view the website on a computer or a phone. And when the website is ready and completed, you can click on Go Live and that's it. Your website is now ready to go now.

Hostinger went ahead and hooked up y'all with a significant discount and to access this all you have to do is choose a plan, go to, add a cart, apply the coupon code Brian Jung 10 for an additional 10 off after signing up. The next steps are quick and easy, and in addition to all of that, you get unmetered traffic. You get extremely fast servers. It gets smooth onboarding.

you get one click WordPress installation and on top of that, My favorite part is a 30 day money back guarantee just in case you find out that you don't like it. Now thanks again to Hostinger for sponsoring this portion of the video and on to the next. So at this point we should have a checklist of all the major things completed. The next thing you want to do is hire an accountant.

When you have your bookkeeping all set up, it makes the job for an accountant very easy and now you don't need to hire like the best accounting firm in the world. You can use a contractor, you can use a family friend, but generally when you're starting out the business, you're now going to be in the situation where you need to file your own taxes. And not only that, you want to make sure everything's filed right. An accountant is going to make sure that everything is properly deducted and you have things in the right line.

And you can also make sure that they are incorporating different types of little loopholes that you can do to maximize how much you save on your taxes. A few little pointers and examples: I Moved over from getting taxed as just a typical business, over into getting taxed as an S Corp and then getting paid as my business. You can bring bring that up to your accountant. Generally, if you make more than 70 80, 000, sometimes even less money than that per year.

Depending on the state you live in, you'll still save more money with that simple deduction. On top of that, you can write off certain vehicles that weigh a certain amount you can write off you know, different office equipment or you can also depreciate things that you buy. You can also get a deduction on your taxes based on how much payroll you pay, or even things like the interest that I'm paying on certain real estate that I might have. So there's a lot of different methods and ways that you can save additional money, but chances are you're going to want a professional or someone who's certified within that type of Market to make sure they're taking care of it just because the legal repercussions of messing this stuff up is pretty extreme when it comes to taxes and the IRS you don't need the most expensive tax accounting firm I personally use Markham based out of Pennsylvania and I've gone through about five to six different accounting firms at the end of the day.

Make sure you find someone who's worth it. You don't need to get the best accounting firm in the world. don't get the worst, but get someone that fits within your budget it at where your business is currently at. So at this point we've completed nearly all the back end processes for setting up your business.

but now we need to make sure that everything looks good on the front end or what customers or other companies would see. So for this, here are a few things that you can do One A lot of people don't know, but you can actually get a free phone number using Google Voice Now Google voice is just a free service offered by Google where you can set it up in order to make sure that people don't have access to your personal number. You're not putting it out on the Internet Or if you've got weird clients calling you at 2AM you don't have to worry about that going into your personal cell phone. You don't have to worry about them selling your information or spamming you all the time when you can use this app.

Now this next thing here is optional, but I Also highly recommend it. and this is to go to your local post office and set up a PO Box address. So whether you're in E-commerce or you're just running a digital business I think it's so important for you to have an address that is not your home address so you can add an extra layer of privacy. And once you set up your business and you have it registered with the state, anyone can find out what address owns that business.

Now if you own a restaurant or a brick and mortar store, this won't really matter to you because you know you're out in public already. But for me, as an example, I work from home and I don't want my address leaked everywhere. So I go ahead and I make sure that I can cover it up using a PO Box address. If you go to the post office, instead of getting a PO Box number two, you can also get the address written out.

So as an example, my address is PO Box 83368 in Gaithersburg Maryland. But I can also have the address State 618 Center Point Way with the number 83368 which is the PO box number and use that as an alternative form of communication and as another way to just protect my identity. Now last but not least, ladies and gents, what you're going to want to do is make sure that your business is properly organized. In the past, I've used apps like Evernote Asana and even more, but the one that my team currently uses now is Notion.

Using an app like Notion could help you stay on top of your tasks, projects, and ideas in a more efficient and effective way. If I wasn't using Notion I Really don't know if we would have scaled the way we did because every part of the business that we rely on is all catered towards this one Central app. So regardless of whatever industry you're in I think it's always key to be organized and if you happen to be within the online space, this is definitely an essential for you to start implementing into your business. And even if you don't do it with your business, ladies and gents, let me tell you, for personal reasons, Notion can also be great too.

So in conclusion, look, starting a business alone is challenging, but it's a very rewarding journey. And by following these eight checklist tasks that I mentioned in today's video, you'll be well on your way to building a successful Foundation to create that business that you dreamed of. Alright, so ladies and gents, if you did enjoy today's video, be sure to drop a like down below, subscribe to the channel and send this video to a friend who's trying to start a business too to make sure that they didn't miss out on any one of those things. Be sure to check out the links to all the tools and resources I mentioned down below.

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram Thank you for watching and I'll see y'all soon! Peace.