Hitting 6 Figures in 2024: 7 Steps Every Business Needs To Break 6 Figures

Are you ready to make more money in 2024 and keep it? Let's make sure that you're asking the right questions so that you are turning your side hustle, passion project, or your quiet and quitting gig into your real business. And with 12 million lawsuits filed every year against small businesses, you can't afford to ignore this stuff. Hi, I'm lawyer for creators Brittany Ratelle, and I'm going to walk you through the biggest legal mistakes that I see my clients making in their small businesses online every single day. Remember that while I'm an attorney, I'm not your attorney, and this is not official legal advice. However, I hope this is helpful for you start thinking and showing up instead of playing small on your business exactly like you mean to for next year. Step number 1, you want to start out with a really strong legal foundation. I know, shocker. The lawyer in the room thinks you actually need to get your legal ducks in a row, but it's true, and I've seen it way too often when I help businesses start and set up their LLCs. It's more than just adding initials to your contracts or to the bottom of your website. It means that you're really drawing a line in the sand and you're showing up and officially declaring this is a business. It's not a hobby, it's not a hustle. You want to show up with an energy that says, I know what I'm doing. I'm being intentional with my time and my talents and my process. And because of that, I'm going to look and feel like a real business. So set up your LLC, set up your business bank accounts. Also make sure you're saving for taxes. Make sure you're setting aside at least 25% of everything that you're making in your business so that you can start doing those quarterly tax payments and settle up with the government at the end of the year if you need to. I highly recommend the book Profit First for setting up this system. If you need more help setting up all this stuff, I highly recommend my course on this called Lawfully Ever After. After. You can see more about this in the comments. Step number 2: make sure you're getting paid and securing that bag with ironclad contracts. You need to be making more money and making sure that you're charging the right way and that, that pricing is intentional and it's signaling to people that you've thought out about what your costs are, the way to price, and then to anchor that pricing to make sure that you don't have to give refunds, bonus chargebacks, late payments, or that your pricing is cut away by scope creep. If you're a service provider, you want to make sure that you have ironclad contracts with your clients and your vendors and your manufacturing partners, your collaborators, influencers who might be helping you, or affiliates. You want to make sure that the people that you're doing business with have really clear expectations. Boundaries are super sexy right now, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that you want to make sure that you're setting up expectations to understand what's going to happen and who's going to do what, and then what are we going to do when the unexpected happens. Step number 3, you're going to grow your brand. That means that we're going to put boundaries around our brand and our content. You're going to feel secure about posting and sharing content online and engaging in the creator economy and making sure that you can do it in a way that's not stepping on someone else's toes. You're gonna do this by using the right intellectual property tools. Use copyright to protect your content and your curriculum and any other things that you're making in your business, and use trademark to protect any of your assets like your branding, your logo, your online course names, your membership names, or products. Last but not least, you're gonna use NDAs or confidentiality clauses to make sure that you're protecting all of that business secret sauce. If there's anyone who gets to see behind the curtain in your business, you're going to make sure that they've entered into a contract and that they're not going to share the secrets. Step number 4, we're going to make sure we have a compliant website and that we're able to have a privacy policy that allows us to use marketing and the modern features of social media without getting into trouble. This means that we need to have a privacy policy on our website so that we can run ads. You also need to comply with state and federal privacy laws. This is especially important if you want to do things like email marketing, which everyone should be doing, or even add in SMS marketing. Make sure that you have affirmative to opt in for your email newsletter and that it's very clear that there's a privacy policy link to people giving you their private information like their email address if they're going to opt into your list. Also, make sure your website is ADA compliant and follow the WCAG guidelines for best practices on developing and upgrading the functionality of your website. Last but not least, make sure you're using affiliate disclosures, truthful advertising, and make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions. Above all, make sure you're setting up a very transparent and trustworthy relationship with your customers and clients. If you don't have anything anything to hide, don't look like you have anything to hide. Step number 5, make sure that you are compliant with all things employment law. As you grow your team, you're probably going to use independent contractors at first, 1099ers, right? This is really normal, but you need to make sure that those people are properly classified as 1099 and they're not really should be W-2 employees. It means you can be slapped with state and federal penalties and back taxes because you should have been treating that person like an employee and withholding, and you haven't been. Make sure that you're using the right contracts and complying with any extra things like you have to do as an employer, especially watch out for people who might be remote. You need to comply with the laws in your state, along with the state of the residence of the person that you're helping, even if they're an independent contractor. Step number 6: make sure you're compliant with social media. You're probably using the benefits of social media in your business to drive traffic, engage customers, increase your brand awareness, and you want to make sure that those tools keep on being available at your disposal. That means you're in someone else's sandbox and you need to play by their rules. Make sure that you're following the rules of the platform. Make sure that you're being compliant and disclosing when you're using affiliate links, when you're using sponsored or advertising content. Make sure you don't use words that can be against the guidelines and terms and conditions. Make sure you're not using commercial music when you're doing commercial activity that you don't have a license to. Make sure that if you're holding a giveaway, you have the fine print that you need. And if you need help with that, buy my promotional legal kit and get everything you need to have a legal giveaway that will be compliant across different platforms. It's always okay to use in-app features like sharing things to stories or using a remix. What's not okay is to repost or to take content and move it in between platforms. Step number 7, make sure you have a plan and know the rules of the game so that you can bend or break them if you want to. It's really important that you put the right emphasis on legal. It's important for you to start getting feedback about your offers, about your company, to make sure you have good market fit. Start talking about your company and doing so confidently. However, it's also important that you realize there are hoops that you have to jump through. Just because you might not have to sit in someone's office and explain your official business plan doesn't mean that these things aren't the important things that every successful business owner has to do do at some point. You could decide to do it on your own terms because you are owning your business and all of your boundaries, or you can be humbled and forced into doing some of these things because you're reacting to negative impact or to a lawsuit or to a chargeback or to refunds or to client or customer drama. Make sure you're putting the scaffolding into place because you have every intention of making six figures next year. And while none of these steps will guarantee that you'll make six figures, I can guarantee that the people who are making six figures and beyond have all taken care of this stuff. Ultimately, it's your responsibility ability to teach other people how to treat your business. And you can't expect for people to treat your business seriously if you're not going to be the one to do it first. These are all 100% real questions that come up when I serve my clients each and every day in my law firm. However, I know that not everyone needs to have a one-on-one legal solution for every problem. If you want the full printable list of all these things so you can go through a step-by-step checklist, make sure you look in the comments and get the link to this resource. Again, I'm Brittany Ratelle. Thank you so much for your time today. I'm so excited to hear what your business is going to be doing next year.