When you’ve had a great career and then start thinking about starting your own business, after the visions of you enjoying all the freedom that comes with being your own boss, finances are often one of the first things that you’ll think about.

This brings up a lot of questions, one of which is how much it will cost you to get started.

The short and annoying answer is – it depends…

You can use this Start Up Costs Checklist to help work out what the start up costs will be for your business.

Even though there are a lot of variables to consider, it’s still a worthwhile and really important question to consider because there’s very few things that will handbrake your creativity and happiness faster than financial stress.

When you’re thinking about your business start-up costs you need to think about things like:

• What’s your business model?
• Are you selling a service or product?
• Are you going for a lower priced point and so you’ll need a high volume of sales?
• Or are you offering a higher cost item that you’ll need to sell less of to make a decent income?
• How fast can you be ready to sell something?
• Even considering things like how much time you have to dedicate to the business will impact the costs you’ll need to cover.

Your skills and experience will also play a part in the costs you can avoid by doing things yourself versus what you might need to pay someone else to do for you.

Here’s some practical examples from members of my group program called ‘Women In Transit’: 

Service business

Tanya is a graphic designer who has started a Personal Training business called Delzo Active. She specialises in offering small group classes, so her business model and marketing focuses on connecting with people more personally than bigger gyms might do.

She’s able to save herself a lot of money because she can do all of her own graphic design work.

During Covid she moved her business to be predominantly online which was a steep learning curve, but she had the time to learn the new skills she needed to be able to offer her classes virtually.

This has enabled her to reach people all over the world, who previously would not have been able to work with her in person.

Service business

Karina has a very busy full time job and has a business called Don Sox.

Don Sox sells premium quality men’s socks with a portion of sales going to support men’s mental health charities.
Because she has a physical product she has different ‘start up costs’ to consider including the design, manufacture, shipping and storage of her beautiful sox.

Because Karina only has a small amount of time to work on her business she has had to outsource a lot of tasks to others, which means things get done faster than if she tried to do it all herself, but there are additional costs for her to cover.

Next Steps

Although there is no ‘one size fits all’ costs for every start up business you can use this Start Up Costs Checklist as a way to work out how much you’ll need to cover to get your new solo business up and running.

Whilst the financial side of starting your own business can be a little daunting, the process of considering the costs will help you feel clearer on what’s needed so you can put things in place and set yourself up to make your business profitable as soon as possible.