Intro

Here's some of the "juice" that has helped 7MS have a successful start:

Support system

Ok so I think if you're going to have a successful business, you need an awesome support system. Mine consists of some of these things:

• Faith - I'm a Christian and pray about this business constantly. In fact I learned really quickly how easy it is to brag about your rock-solid faith when everything is going fine. And then when suddenly the rug is pulled out from under you, you find what your faith is really made of!

• My wife - she's my biggest supporter and cheerleader.

• Financial advisor - we have a great "money guy" who helped us plan for moments like these, where income might be slower as I drum up business.

• Trusted advisors - I'm blessed to have a partner called InteProIQ that has been a sounding board for a zillion and one questions. Everything from helping me quote projects and set hourly rates to marketing plans and connecting me with other business owners and contacts.

General "get your business started" stuff

• Form your LLC - I just Googled how to do it, and found a bunch of articles with good info. Basically I found my state's Web site hierarchy and within that was a place to register the LLC and grab an EIN for tax purposes.

• Bank accounts - I visited my local banker and setup work checking/savings/etc.

Tech tools to help you get the job done

• Quickbooks - I use this to keep track of expenses, send out quotes, reconcile invoices, etc.

• Expensify - I use it to track receipts and mileage. They even give you an email address where you can forward receipts to and it'll work it's awesome OCR magic to automatically extract the vendor, charge and date. Awesome!

• Toggl - a free Web interface (and app) to track time for projects (if the client doesn't already have something they want me to use)

....more on 7MS.us!