Starting a business (in Alberta) - what do I do and how much will it cost?

Getting all your administrative, online, and marketing ducks in a row

Starting a business is an exciting opportunity to do what you love AND get paid for it. But for most people (ie. non-marketers), the marketing and administrative tasks involved do not spark the same joy. It can be tough to figure out what you should do to get set up. So I have decided to help by sharing what I did to start a business and how much they costed.

Obviously the costs will change depending on many factors, but I wanted to provide this as a sort of benchmark to help.

Start with branding

First things first, what will you call your business? This seems super simple until you actually think about how you'll be married to this name for all your invoices, emails, website URLs, etc. And it's more than a name, it's branding - how you want to be perceived by your customers, and design for cohesion across all your platforms.

I brainstormed a few different ideas for my business name before ultimately choosing Jan on Toast Design. There were a few factors I had in mind, so considering the versatility of the name you choose (logo design idea, short-form name/abbreviations, etc.) Jan on Toast Design incorporates my name (Janet - Jan), the idea of jazzing-up some bread-and-butter (a term for someone's job or business) and it could easily be shortened to JOT which is also relevant to what I do - design (ie. jotting down an idea, drawing, etc.).

Then came colours and logo design which was a labour of love with a lot of feedback from people in my community. Your community and trusted sources can be a very helpful resource.

Then I created a branding book for myself and came up with values and mission statements.

This may seem like a lot of preliminary work, so if you're feeling overwhelmed - [I can help]!

Set up your email

I just set up a Gmail account because that's easy and free.

$0.00 for business email.

Register your business

So now that you generally know what you'll call your business and what it'll be about, you need register your business. You can start a sole proprietorship, partnership, or incorporation. And you can have a numbered company name or a custom name (which has to be unique).

My sister-in-law recommended setting up my business as a sole proprietorship with Ownr.co which makes it super easy. For a Sole Proprietorship I think it was around $50 to set up, but my sister-in-law gave me a referral code which nearly covered the whole cost.

$2.75 to set up my business.

If you want a referral code, feel free to Contact Me.

Set up a business bank account

So when you register with Ownr, it asks if you want to set up an RBC bank account with it, and even if you select yes, it won't actually set up an appointment for you, so I had to do that myself. I just called up the bank and told them my story and gave them the information needed and it was very simple.

$6.00 bank fee / per month.

I also requested a credit card cause my sister-in-law told me it was easier for tracking expenses and such. Unfortunately it took a little while to get it, so some of my start up costs were made on my personal card, but I kept track of them in a notebook.

Extra pro-tip: Keep a journal of all the things you need to do to set up your business, payments you've made, and a log of what you've done each day (ie. purchased a domain, transferred money into my account, etc.). Also, the list of things you need to do (or, business plan, one might call it) doesn't need to be anything fancy, just make a list of the things you think you need to do and add to it as you learn more.

Set up your domain

This is where the costs go up, and obviously there's a free way to do this - use a website builder that will just tack a ".websitebuildername.com" to whatever you want to call your website. But if you want a more professional feel, this isn't ideal.

So I bought my domain on Domain.com which was maybe slightly cheaper than more common ones like GoDaddy.com. I learned a lot through this traumatic experience, namely, double check your domain before you buy it and make sure it's the one you want. This may seem obvious but I actually bought two domains because I didn't buy the one I wanted in the first place. But you live and you learn and sometimes your lessons cost $92.50 and you must live with an additional useless domain for 5 years.

$51.95 (CAD) for a three year domain.

Set up your website

If you're a little overwhelmed at this point or don't feel confident in your website design abilities, [I can help]. But I tried a couple website builders until I landed on one that was simple enough and reasonably priced. These are the ones I tried:

1. Showit.com - very cool but expensive

2. Shopify.com - this one definitely seemed more for ecommerce which isn't what I'm doing.

3. Wix.com - this is where I landed.

4. Squarespace.com - pretty good, but a little pricier.

5. Webflow.com - this was on my list to try out but I was bored at this point.

It's free to use and to design your website on Wix (and probably most builders) and it's just when you want to connect your domain that you've got to fork out some cash.

$340.20 for two years

Set up Social Media

This is optional and also free, but incase you were interested, I set up a LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. (I'm not sure that I recommend setting up a Facebook page but my circa 2010 self was telling me that was the right thing to do so alas, here we are.)

Keep in mind that social media takes work to keep up, you have to craft posts, visuals, etc. It can seem like a lot of work - I can help!

Getting business cards

This is the last (-ish, if you want you could spend money until you die if you wanted) purchase, and also optional. But I do think it's a good idea to have some sort of physical collateral. Probably you can just add yourself as a contact in someone's phone or direct them to your website on the spot, but sometimes people forget their phones, sometimes people are like "hey, I don't need you, but I know a guy" and then you can give them your card and they can pass it along.

Luckily you did all that branding work upfront and this should be pretty straight forward. I designed mine on Photoshop and then ordered them from a local print shop called Little Rock Printing. I ordered square business cards with rounded corners and a fancy finish just because I wanted to, which made it slightly pricier. So you could actually save more money here if you wanted.

$65.10 for 100 cards

Now you're ready to sell!

And that's it! Although it took a lot more time than I originally thought, and there were a few bumps in the road, but that's how we learn and grow.

In total I spent:

For your business, if you want to cut to the chase quicker - I can help with the design work!