I started a company with no employees on purpose

On August 11 I formed a company in Texas. It has one owner, no employees, two lines of business, and a phone number that, by design, software will answer before a person ever does. I have spent most of my working life inside organizations with hundreds or thousands of people, and the first thing I did when I built my own was make sure it needed none of them. That was not a cost decision. It was the strategy.

Here is the conventional advice for starting an advisory firm: pick a niche, build a brand, hire an assistant, get a website up, start posting. I did some of that. But the advice has a hidden assumption, which is that the firm's job is to look like a firm. Mine is to be useful to a person who owns a plumbing company in Kyle and is tired of being the only one who can quote a job. He does not care whether I have an assistant. He cares whether I pick up the phone, whether I have actually run anything, and whether I will tell him the truth.

So I built around that.

The structure. DomRose Holdings is a Texas series LLC. If you have not run into one, a series LLC is one company that can hold separate, legally walled-off lines of business, each with its own books and its own liability. Mine has two. DomRose Advisory is the part that sits with an owner for two weeks and tells him where his money actually comes from. DomRose Applied Intelligence is the part that builds and licenses the machinery: a front desk that answers every call, a bid builder, follow-up that does not depend on anyone remembering. I did it this way because I have watched companies tangle a services business and a product business together and spend years untangling them. Cheaper to draw the line on day one.

The formation itself was not hard. The filing was a few hundred dollars. The things that took longer than they should have were the boring ones: a registered agent, a mailing address that is not my house, a business bank account that wanted documents I had to find, a veteran-owned business verification letter from the state that asked for my discharge paperwork. None of it is interesting. All of it is required, and if you skip it you will do it later at a worse time.

The rule. The one rule I set, and the one I expect to be tested, is that nothing gets hired until a client has paid for it. Not an assistant, not a bookkeeper, not a designer. If a job needs doing and I cannot do it, the software does it or it does not get done. This is uncomfortable. I am used to delegating. It is also the only honest way to find out what a one-person firm actually needs, instead of what a one-person firm thinks it is supposed to have.

So far the software does more than I expected. It drafts, it schedules, and it keeps a pipeline I would otherwise keep badly in my head. Next it answers the phone, and I will write about where that breaks. Two months in, the thing I thought I would miss most, having people, is the thing I have missed least. What I miss is someone to argue with. I have not solved that yet.

What I would do differently. I spent too long on the name and the look. Weeks. I told myself it mattered because the firm is restrained and senior and the design had to say so. That is true and it was still too long. The owner in Kyle will see my truck in his lot long before he sees my website. Get the structure right, get the phone answered, get in the truck. Fix the website in the gaps.

What is next. I have given myself until December 15 to have twenty real conversations with owners in Hays County. Not coffee with friends. Owners, at their shops, about their businesses. If I get twenty and none of them turn into work, I will know something important and I will say so here. If some do, I will say what they were. Either way I will write it down.

I am not sure a firm with no employees is a good idea. I am sure it is the right way to find out.