Last updated on January 15th, 2018 at 10:55 am

Following on from our last post about starting up a new business I thought I’d give you a concrete example of some of the other things that you need to think about when you are thinking about working for yourself.

I have a friend that has been doing mobile hairdressing on a part-time basis for a while now and decided to “bite the bullet” and open a salon so that people could visit her.  This step up in the business has meant that she has had to think of several things.  These  included:-

• What she was going to call her business, after all it’s fine to be a mobile hairdresser and use your own name but it appears that that’s not the way that salons work.  In the town here we have ladies hairdressers with business names such as “Diva”, “Scissors” and “Tsunami”.
• Where the business was going to be based, this wasn’t so much of a problem as she was going to convert one of the rooms in her house to a salon.
• What insurance was needed, this is made a little more difficult as people will be visiting her at home so she needed to make sure that her house insurance wasn’t invalidated by the change of use.

Looking at the list above, choosing a name took a few days to sort out, mainly because she wanted a name that didn’t say “Ladies hairdressers” as she wanted to be a unisex salon.

Interestingly, although the fact that the business was going to be based at home meant that she didn’t have the worry of finding something like a shop and converting it to a salon there were problems that needed to be sorted out because it was a home based business.  The whole room had to be gutted so that work could start on the fitting out (hairdressers have to have sinks, wall mirrors, chairs and plenty of power points for example).  Before the work started she looked at the layout of the room and was horrified to realise that there would be no wall space for radiators, bearing in mind that this was a room with a big bay window and another outside wall it would mean that the temperature in the room in the middle of winter would have been much too cold to work in.  She was almost at the point of giving up when she came across an article about underfloor heating and decided to investigate this a little more.

Looking at one of the manufacturers websites she realised that the benefits of underfloor heating included the fact that it didn’t need radiators (obviously as the heating elements are under the floor), that it reduces running costs, something that is helpful to any small business and that it can be used with almost any floor finish.  Since she was going to have the floor worked on anyway she decided to go the whole way and not just have the carpet lifted and the floor tiled but to have the underfloor heating installed at the same time.

The final item on the list was sorted out fairly quickly by using a local insurance broker who not only was able to find a home policy that covered the use of a room in the home but was also able to find a business policy that covered public liability, theft and all the other kinds of insurance cover that any small business needs.

Hopefully this article will give you a few hints about starting up a business.  If you need more help then a quick search on any of the search engines should bring up sites for businesses that will be able to help you, indeed, checking Google for example shows that there are business advisers in almost every location that I checked.