Almost nobody decides their IT when they start a business. It gets decided for them, by whatever was quickest in the first fortnight — and then it stays that way for a decade.
This article is the short list of things that are trivial on day one and genuinely expensive to undo in year three. All of it is worth doing whether or not you ever become a client, and none of it needs an IT provider. It is a decent afternoon's work for a reasonably confident person.
Plenty of people will hand a new business a twenty-item technology checklist. Most of those items can wait, and a few of them are somebody's product in disguise.
These six share one property: each takes minutes now and days or months later. That is the whole test. Everything that fails it — the CRM, the phone system, the website, the automation — can safely wait until you know what your business actually does day to day, which you do not yet, no matter how good the plan is.
Your domain is the one asset here you genuinely cannot replace. Buy it on an account in your business's name, with your own credit card and your own login. Not your web designer's account, not your cousin's, not the marketing agency's.
Why it matters: getting a domain back off someone who has stopped replying to emails takes months, and sometimes does not work at all. Everything else on this list can be rebuilt in a weekend.
you@yourbusiness.com.au, on a proper business mail platform — not a free personal account with the business name in the display line. Set it up before you print anything, hand out a card, or sign up for a single supplier account.
Why it matters: changing your email address later means redoing every supplier login, every bank record, every customer's address book and every invoice you have ever sent. It is the single most expensive small job we get asked to do.
One place, in the cloud, that syncs to your machine. Not the desktop, not a USB drive, not a folder called "new folder (2)". Decide it once, on day one, and put everything there from then on.
Why it matters: nobody ever reorganises their files later. Whatever pattern you set in the first month is the pattern you will still have when there are twelve of you and you cannot find the contract.
Email first, then the bank, then the accounting software, then everything else. Use an authenticator app rather than SMS where you are given the choice, and save the recovery codes somewhere that is not the same phone.
Why it matters: it takes about ninety seconds per account when the account is new and empty. Retrofitting it across a business with staff, shared logins and half-remembered passwords is a project. If you ever change phones, read this first — those recovery codes are what saves you.
A separate email account, a separate password manager vault, a separate login for anything financial. Do not run the business out of the same Google or Apple account that has your family photos in it.
Why it matters: the day you hire someone, sell the business, or have a falling-out with a partner, the line between "yours" and "the business's" has to already exist. Drawing it afterwards is legal work, not IT work.
Not a hypothetical — actually answer it. If the machine went missing on the way home, what would you have lost, what could someone read, and how long until you are working again?
Why it matters: for most new businesses the honest answer in month one is "everything, all of it, and about a fortnight". It should be "nothing, they cannot get in, and I would be working by lunchtime". If you do not like your answer, that is the thing to fix this week.
These are the five we are called in to unpick most often, years after the fact. None of them looked like a mistake at the time — that is rather the point.
Being told what not to buy is more useful at this stage than being told what to buy, and you will get plenty of the second from everyone else.
The two things worth spending real money on early are the machine you work on every day, and the software your trade actually runs on. Almost everything else can be added the month you need it.
Setting a new business up properly is normally a couple of hours of remote work at our published hourly rate — see How pay-as-you-go works for the current rates and how it is billed. That covers the domain, the mail platform, file storage, multi-factor authentication on every account, and the machine set up so a theft is an inconvenience rather than a disaster.
Software licences are passed through at what they cost. We do not mark them up and we do not take commissions on anything we recommend, which is also why you will sometimes hear us say a cheaper option is fine.
We will tell you before we start if we think you can do it yourself. That happens reasonably often at this stage — a business that sets its own accounts up understands them, and understanding them is worth more than the two hours saved.
No. The first four — your own domain, a real business email address, one place for files, and multi-factor authentication — are the same job whether there is one of you or twenty. It is the rest that scales with headcount.
Find out what your industry software runs on, then buy machines that run it. That one question settles it far more often than any general argument about the two platforms, and getting it backwards is an expensive way to find out.
A hosted platform is fine, and it is what nearly every business this size should use. Running your own mail server today is a specialist decision with real consequences — if nobody has explained to you why you would want one, you do not.
Be careful with anything described as free or legacy. Google has been ending old free tiers and moving those businesses onto paid plans, sometimes at short notice. A current paid plan you chose deliberately is a perfectly good answer; an old free one you inherited is a countdown.
Yes, and it is cheaper today than it will be next year. Everything on this list is fixable; the cost scales with how many accounts, staff and years have piled on top of it. That is an argument for asking sooner, not for feeling bad about it.
Setting a new business up is nearly all remote work, so we can do it anywhere in Australia. Anyone driving out to you is metro Melbourne only.
There is a fuller version of this article on our website, written for someone still deciding rather than someone already set up: Starting a business? Get these six things right first. It covers the same six decisions with more detail on what each one costs, and what you do not need to buy yet.
If you want a second opinion on any of the six before you commit to something, ask — it is a short conversation and it does not turn into a proposal. Email admin@yougrowit.com.au or call 03 9028 4358. We are available Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.