What should I do in my first ninety days?

The order matters because each stage depends on the one before it. Marketing before you can take payment produces enquiries you cannot convert. A website before you know what you sell produces a page you will rewrite. Chasing customers before you are insured is a risk nobody should take knowingly.

Weeks one to three are administrative and unglamorous. Register the business. Get the licences and permits your activity requires. Arrange insurance, and arrange it before any work is done rather than before it is convenient. Open a separate business bank account, because mixing personal and business money creates a bookkeeping problem that compounds for years.

Weeks four to six make the business able to trade. A way to take payment that works on the day, invoicing that does not require an evening, and somewhere consistent for records to live. Decide your prices and write them down, including what is not included, because the boundary is what prevents a profitable job becoming an unprofitable one.

Weeks seven to nine make you findable. A business profile on the platforms that matter locally, claimed and complete. A site that says who you serve, what you do, what it costs, and how to reach you. Analytics installed before traffic arrives rather than after, since you cannot measure a period retrospectively.

Weeks ten to thirteen are for customers, and this is the part everybody wants to start with. Tell everybody you already know, specifically rather than generally. Approach the businesses that serve the same customers you want. Do the first jobs properly and ask each of those customers for a review at completion. The first ten reviews take longer to get than the next forty.

Resist the things that feel productive and produce nothing. A logo before you have customers. A brand refresh before you have a brand. Software chosen for a volume you do not have. Each consumes days that belong to the stages above and each is easier to do than the work that actually matters.

Expect the administrative stage to take longer than planned, because permits and account approvals run on other people's schedules. Start the slowest items first even if their stage comes later, since waiting for a licence to arrive is not a reason to leave weeks four to six untouched.

Write down what you decide as you go, particularly prices, terms, and what you will not do. Ninety days from now you will not remember why a decision was made, and the businesses that hold their pricing are the ones that wrote down the reasoning.

Then review at day ninety against what you set out to do, honestly. A stage unfinished is information about where the time actually went, and it is considerably more useful than a plan that was never checked.

Keep a running list of everything you deferred rather than deleting it, because a decision to postpone is different from a decision not to do something. That list becomes the plan for the second ninety days.

Get one paying customer as early as the sequence allows, even a small one. Everything about the business becomes more concrete once real money has moved, and decisions that felt theoretical resolve themselves quickly.

Tell people what you are doing well before you are ready, since word travels slowly and the first enquiries frequently arrive from conversations held weeks earlier.