Going out on your own: the 30-day setup checklist
You handed in your notice, the truck is yours, and the license is real. Between today and your first month of paid work sits a pile of setup — some of it legal, some of it money, most of it phone. This checklist is the sequence that gets you from decision to first invoice in thirty days, in an order that avoids re-doing anything. It pairs with the rest of our going independent guide, which covers the whole first year; this post is month one.
Week 1: what legal and money basics come first?
The groundwork: choose a business entity with an accountant or attorney, line up liability insurance for your trade and state, confirm your license covers the work you plan to sell, and open a dedicated business bank account. None of this is legal advice — week one is for buying an hour from people whose job it is.
The order matters more than the speed. Entity first, because the insurance certificate and the bank account both want the entity's name on them. Licensing rules vary by state and by trade, and they do not transfer from your old employer — assume nothing carries over from the shop you just left, and verify before you sell a single job.
The bank account is not bureaucratic decoration. Every dollar the business earns lands in it from invoice one, and every business expense leaves from it. Untangling mixed personal and business money at tax time is precisely the kind of expensive accountant hour this week exists to avoid. And since insurance binding and license verification run on other people's timelines, start week two in parallel while the paperwork clears.
Week 2: how do you set up the phone so it does not lose jobs?
Get a dedicated business number — not your personal cell — and design for the call you cannot answer, because you will be on the tools when the best calls come in. A voicemail that names you, states your trade, and promises a call-back window loses fewer jobs than silence. The honest fix is coverage.
A dedicated number costs almost nothing and pays forever: you can forward it anywhere, print it on the truck, and it survives every phone you will ever own. Then fix the voicemail, because the default robotic greeting is where new customers go to die. Say who you are, what trade you do, and when you call back — and ask for the address and the issue so your return call is already useful: “You've reached Sam at Ridgeline Plumbing. Leave the address and what's going on, and I'll call you back within the hour.”
Before you decide whether voicemail is enough, do the arithmetic on what a missed call actually costs you — the missed-call cost calculator runs it with your own average ticket, call volume, and close rate, not anyone else's statistics. If the number convinces you that coverage is worth paying for, the realistic options — a human answering service, an AI receptionist, or betting on voicemail — differ mostly in architecture and pricing shape. Rivet vs. an answering service walks through the comparison honestly, including the cases where a human service is the better choice.
Week 3: how do you set up quoting and invoicing?
Three numbers and one habit. The numbers: a floor price under which the truck stays parked, your real hourly cost with the truck and insurance loaded in, and a diagnostic fee you state up front. The habit: the invoice goes out the same day the work is done — every single time.
Notice what is not on the week-three list: a flat-rate price book. You do not need one to open, and the pressure to build one first is mostly a big-shop assumption baked into big-shop software. The full argument — including the exact moment a price book does start paying — is in do you need a price book on day one?
The same-day invoice habit is the biggest cash-flow lever you control. An invoice sent from the driveway gets paid while the customer still remembers being rescued; an invoice sent three weeks later reads like a bill from a stranger. Whatever you invoice from, keep the books clean from the start — retyping a month of jobs into your accounting software is where evenings go to die.
Week 4: what daily habit loop keeps the shop running?
Ten minutes at the end of every day: review what came in, confirm tomorrow's schedule, send any invoice still sitting, and queue follow-ups — quotes older than two days, invoices past due. Month one's real job is making this loop automatic before you are too busy to build it.
The loop is deliberately small. A closing routine that takes an hour gets skipped the first busy week, and a skipped loop is exactly how jobs and money leak out of a one-person shop — not through bad work, but through the quote nobody chased and the invoice nobody sent.
Follow-ups deserve their own line because they feel optional and are not. A quote with no answer after two days is not dead; it is waiting for a nudge, and the shop that nudges usually wins. Same for unpaid invoices: chase them on a fixed schedule so the reminder is the system being consistent, not you being awkward with a customer you like.
Where does software fit in month one?
One tool, chosen against this checklist: it should answer the phone you cannot pick up, book jobs without double-booking you, and get invoices out the day the work is done. If a product's main screen is a dispatch board or a CRM pipeline, it was built for a bigger shop than yours.
The tool-by-tool version of that decision — what each category of contractor software assumes about your shop, and what a one-truck operation actually needs from it — is in what software a one-truck shop actually needs.
Rivet is our answer to it, so here is the plain description rather than a pitch. It is voice-first: you speak — a booking, an invoice, a reply — and Rivet turns it into a typed proposal that goes nowhere until you approve it. A second supervisor AI checks every proposal, everything lands in an audit trail, one tap undoes a mistake, and nothing ever sends without your yes. It is in early access, priced as a flat monthly rate, and QuickBooks is its one integration. If the week-four loop sounds like exactly the thing you do not want to be typing at 9pm, that is the problem it was built for — start a free trial or book a demo and hear it on your own phone line.
Common questions
Can I do this checklist faster than 30 days?
Some of it. The paperwork can compress if your state moves quickly, and the phone and invoicing setup are days, not weeks. What cannot compress are other people's timelines — insurance binding, license verification — and the week-four habit loop, which only becomes real through repetition. Run the weeks in parallel instead of skipping them.
Do I need an LLC before my first paid job?
That is a legal and tax question that depends on your state and your situation — put it to an accountant or attorney before you take money, not after. The one general principle we can state: keep business money separate from personal money starting with the very first payment, whatever entity you end up choosing.
Where do a website and marketing fit?
Month two, for most shops. A Google Business Profile and a phone number that always gets answered generate more first-year work than a website you spent month one building. Early work tends to arrive by referral, over the phone — which is why weeks two and four of this checklist are about never losing one.