Ironically Hawkspring Photography has the same initials as the rather larger company that I currently work for. Be that as it may, I’ll prefix my posts about Hawkspring Photography with HP. It seems sort of therapeutic somehow.
The Admin portion of the problem seem to break down initially into three areas. I’m sure more will come up as I learn more, but for now they are Legal, Accounting, and Issue Resolution.
Legal – At the moment, this is primarily about becoming some sort of independent legal entity. I had a Hawkspring Photography dba in 2013, but that’s just me with a different name. Various forms of corporations provide some legal insulation between your business and your personal life among other things. Tim Ferriss recommends an LLC. Other options are S-Corps and C-Corps. I once knew the difference but now need to learn again. In a subsequent post I’ll describe what I learned and what if any decisions I’ve made.
Accounting – It seems wise to keep track of spending and revenue from the start. My default plan is to use Quicken. I always get the personal and business version anyway, I just haven’t had much use for the business version. Categorizing transactions is an interesting question. I’ll likely begin with the Quicken defaults, but I may want to talk to my accountant to learn how to do this well. When I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Issue Resolution – aka Management. This isn’t business design so much as dealing with the things that come up that aren’t part of the business design. I want to practice creating a system where everything is as automatable and delegatable as possible. Beginning with that objective in mind will hopefully help me to make correct design decisions. This gets into some of the worked described in The E-Myth Revisited and likely extends through the entire system of Hawkspring Photography.