What doesn't constitute as a company costs when driving?

You're definitely going the wrong direction. That's my opinion. But I'm right, and here's why: Your domain strategy is hyper-extended. You've got 4 domains in .CO.UK – hopefully 8 counting .UK rights. That's all well and good for a British audience. But you deliver work online; so why not appeal to a global audience? Here in the USA, ccTLDs (a.k.a. country codes) are not recognized. Your business will look strange and be misremembered as .COM. That means your marketing will be inefficient; you'll leak traffic to Google, parked PPC pages, or even competitors who develop sites with the same brand name(s) in the same niche! Meanwhile you'll pay extra in ongoing advertising costs to compensate. And you don't own the 4 corresponding .COM domains. I checked. They're owned by a pair of people / companies – both known to me already. To acquire these 4 matching domains, you'd need to spend about $10,000. That's based on the typical list prices these guys set, which you can verify, I'm sure. On top of this, you'd face brand protection issues for at least 4 distinct names. That obligates you to further domain purchases or risks ... in proportion to the number of brand names you're attempting to operate. After all, WantApp is confusingly similar to WantApps; and WantWebsite resembles WantAWebsite. And let's not forget .DESIGN and .WEBSITE, which means your WantDesign.co.uk is competing against both WantDesign.com and Want.Design, while your WantWebsite.co.uk has to shout extra-loud to be heard above WantWebsite.com and Want.Website. Things get complicated fast! You'd eventually face competitors with these names unless you bought them all. You might even get embroiled in trademark disputes, which are no fun. For that amount of money ($10k upwards), you can buy a really great domain name and consolidate all your efforts on a single brand name with worldwide appeal and a single website. In the long run, going the way you're going, you will pay thousands of pounds one way or another. Maybe you won't buy those other domains, but you will put extra cash, sweat, and time into marketing. You'd probably lose a few customers over the years as well, since they'd go somewhere other than your site and find other people to hire. I also have concerns about branding with multiple domains, managing multiple websites, or asking customers to bounce around between several sites. But there's no space to go into that. The domain issues already sank your battleship, I'm afraid. If you'd like help selecting a single unified brand name for all your services – which is what I recommend – let's talk. Naming and domain procurement are both areas I specialize in.

Great question, this is something that can be handled with a proper deal structure involving some vendor financing. I recently did a video about this very topic for one of my YouTube followers. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/hWm4ZQxWlEw You basically make the vendor's outstanding gift certificates a 'currency' which can be used by the buyer to repay the vendor loan. It's a net-sum game for the seller since he's already received the cash without having to provide the goods or services. Hope this helps. Feel free to schedule a call anytime you have a question about business transactions. David

yes. As long as your main place of work is your home/office.

NIcole is right. When I first started my business I thought I was saving money by doing my own bookkeeping. It took me much longer than it would take a bookkeeper - all time that I was not spending on marketing or billable activities. And in the end I made errors which made the initial work of the bookkeeper longer. I now have a consistent routine. My bookkeeper picks up all my material monthly and does my books in less than 2 hours. Very worthwhile.

I think differently about this, because of two reasons: 1) I've always (and only) been involved in bootstrapped startups; and 2) I've been lucky that those startups grew organically and fast (enough) which minimized our need on marketing spend. Instead of deciding on a specific budget for this, I would instead look at your current priorities (in terms of budgeting and re-investment into your team): 1. Build a great team. 2. Build a great product. 3. Craft incredible customer experiences. 4. Spend money on marketing. If you've already hit all 3 top priorities and you can't reinvest any further into those, then you should start spending money on marketing. If you don't have revenues today and you are hoping to generate revenues through marketing spend, you're on slippery slope (says the bootstrapper). Whilst not wrong, this is tricky and you'd need to take a realistic look at your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and how much you can invest into acquiring new customers.