Our aim at Clear Books is to champion the small businesses of Great Britain. Since we\u2019ve been through the process of starting and growing a small business ourselves (not to mention seeing lots of our customers do the same thing), we\u2019ve learned a lot about best practises \u2026 and of course, about common mistakes. Some are pretty obvious, like not checking to see whether there\u2019s actually a market for what you\u2019re selling, but others you not be so familiar with, like:<\/p>\n
Trading time for money<\/strong><\/p>\n You\u2019re always going to have to spend some time running your business (in case you hadn\u2019t guessed, those \u201ctotally passive income\u201d courses are lying), but so many business owners get stuck in a situation where their income is directly tied to the work that they personally are doing. The means that there\u2019s an automatic cap on the number of people they can work with and consequently, an automatic cap on their income. To grow, you need to create multiple streams of income, including several which are scalable.<\/p>\n Not getting it in writing<\/strong><\/p>\n A lot of people play fast and loose with legal things, particularly in the first few years of business, but this is a terrible idea. It\u2019s much easier to take a little bit of time to make sure that you do things legally \u2014 registering your company properly, using proper contracts for projects, getting a lawyer to review any big deals \u2014 and it will save you loads of money in the long term.<\/p>\n