Stage 01
The Idea & The Setup
You've been thinking about this for a while. Maybe years. The idea is real, the timing feels right, and someone in your life — a partner, a parent, a mentor — has given you the confidence to take it seriously. Now what?
She'd done it before — just once, as a favour. Ten tables of flowers for a family event, five hours in the garage, two nephews drafted for cleanup. The response caught her off guard. Not polite compliments. Genuine surprise. "You should do this professionally," her grandmother had said. And then, without being asked, offered to make it possible.
That was three weeks ago. Now she was sitting at the kitchen table at 11pm, her daughter asleep upstairs, her husband's coffee going cold beside her, trying to figure out where on earth to start.
She knew what she wanted to build. She didn't know what it would cost, what she'd need to pay herself to keep the household intact, or whether the numbers would actually work. She didn't know what she didn't know. And that, more than anything, was what scared her.
Sound familiar?
💡
The #1 mistake at this stage: starting with the business plan before understanding the household. A launch that works on paper but destabilizes your family finances in month three isn't a plan — it's a gamble. The first question we ask is never about the business. It's about you.
Before we open a single spreadsheet, we sit with you and map your story. Your household income and expenses. Your emergency fund. The minimum you'd need to pay yourself for this to be worth doing. What your partner thinks. What your timeline actually looks like.
Most founders skip this conversation entirely. We make it the foundation of everything. Because once we understand your personal financial picture, the business plan stops being a guess and starts being a decision.
From that conversation, we produce two things: a structured checklist of every decision and task that needs to happen before you open your doors, and a startup cost worksheet so you know exactly what you're committing to — and what the contingency looks like if things run over.
Deliverable 01
New Business Startup Checklist — every pre-launch decision, organized in the order it needs to happen. Legal, financial, operational, personal.
Deliverable 02
Startup Cost Worksheet — a structured budget with 25% contingency built in, so you know your committed funding, your expected spend, and your safety margin.
The questions we ask before anything else:
01
What is the minimum you'd need to pay yourself from this business for your household to stay intact?
02
If the business needed six more months to break even than you planned — what happens to your family?
03
What does success look like for your family at the end of Year 1 — not just your business?
→
What Comes Next
Two months in, the business is moving — but the picture is getting more complex. Revenue is arriving, expenses are climbing, and the moment of truth is approaching: is it time to quit the day job? Stage 02 — Early Momentum & Growing Pains — is coming soon.
