You’ve been coaching for a few years, and have decided that you want to set up a business as an independent Agile Coach. A small business of one person - you. You start looking around to see what it takes to get a small business started and find that you will probably spend more time trying to understand accounting, legal and government regulations than you would do consulting. There is a lot of advice out there, often conflicting. You want to get started - “Just tell me what to do!”
This article is for you. Make no mistake, I am not an accountant. I am not a lawyer. You will want to get help from these experts and should defer to their opinion in the event that what you read on this page differs from their opinion. This page is aimed at heading you in the right direction. The advice I received when I started was “choose a name, get a domain and label it with ‘under construction’, get some business cards… you’re a consultant now.” Since then I’ve set up my business and helped others through the basics and have learned that there is a little more it than this.
One note: I offer this article from a particular context:
You are interested in setting up in the United States.
You are interested in setting up a business where the main offering is the (Agile) consulting services of one person.
If you have a different context, this article may not be useful to you.
In the following section we will look into the basic process to set up an Agile Consulting covering: