Figuring It Out - Lesson 3: what we actually needed (and what we didn't)

When we started Rowntree², there were things we felt were essential. Decisions we had to get right, and others we assumed mattered a lot more than they turned out to.

A name
We were lucky here. My wife had already proposed a name by way of encouraging us to take the plunge and start the business. We've had no reason to change it, and no plans to. We know other start-ups who rushed this decision and are now, little more than a year in, looking at a rebrand: new name, new website, new everything that comes with it. That's not a bad thing to go through. It's just a costly one, and it's costly precisely because it wasn't figured out at the start.

Brand: look, feel, tone of voice
We do this for clients, so we had to do it for ourselves. Was it perfect? No. We've already evolved parts of it once, and we'll likely do it again. But it's done a good job for us and will continue to for a good few years yet, because we invested the time to get it sorted at the beginning rather than defaulting to "we'll fix it later."

A website
A non-negotiable. It's our shop window. The thing we point people to for information and contact details, and the first impression most prospects get of us before they get us.

We're a marketing and communications agency. If we're telling clients their website needs to work properly, we don't get to have one that doesn't. And we see it constantly. Not just in our own target audience, but across start-ups and scale-ups generally – businesses with websites that are barely more than placeholders. Building one yourself is easier than it's ever been (we did it ourselves – you can probably tell), and yet plenty of people settle for something that does their business no justice at all. Not everyone has the time or the skill-set, granted. But is a placeholder really working for you?

Picking (and skipping) social channels
LinkedIn was never a decision. As a marketing and comms business, we both needed somewhere to link to, and it's where people go to find out more about us. Everything after that took more thought. We asked the same question of every other platform: not just "could this help the business," but "do we actually have time to keep it fed." A channel that goes quiet after a month does more harm than not having it at all. X was an easy no – not a place we wanted our brand associated. TikTok didn't feel relevant for a B2B audience, at least not yet. Instagram sat on the back burner for six months before we signed up, and even then it wasn't really about Instagram itself – it was about the access it gave us to Meta's advertising platform. In practice, LinkedIn is still the one that matters: we've dabbled in paid social without needing to invest heavily in it, and mostly we just post regularly and treat it as our brand channel.

Having the answer already written
The other thing we underestimated was how much of our own back-office material we'd need before a client ever asked for it. Not glossy, client-facing collateral necessarily. More the internal stuff: brief templates, contract wording we could adapt rather than rewrite, a pricing model we could apply consistently rather than work out fresh each time, a social media training deck we could pull off the shelf when it came up. None of it was hard to create. But creating it in the moment, mid-conversation with a prospect, is a very different thing to having it ready and simply reaching for it.

Choosing a platform
Once we knew we needed a website, we had to pick what to build it on. Between us we'd used a handful of CRM platforms and website builders; some free, some on staggered pricing for start-ups through to enterprise.

We wanted something that could grow with us and integrate with the rest of the business: social, event hosting, email, new business tracking, rather than something cheap and easy now that we'd be painfully migrating off in a year or two. That trade-off, cheap-and-easy versus built-to-last, is one of the more useful lessons from the whole set-up process.

Contracts
Essential from the moment we started signing clients and issuing scopes of work. We needed something secure, templated, editable, and professional, and it wasn't as hard to sort as we expected. There are plenty of options online, and AI is a genuinely useful starting point for getting a first draft in shape.

An accountant
Necessary early on, for the basics: how to structure the business, whether that's a partnership, a limited company, or something else. We went with a partnership, set up through our accountant, largely on the back of expected turnover in the early stages.

We're set up to convert to a limited company when the time's right. We did register for VAT early, though – partly practical, but mostly because we felt it gave the business a more credible profile from day one.

Beyond that initial advice, though, I'd question whether you need an accountant on retainer immediately. We do now, but it took about a year before that became necessary; partly because of the ongoing value: they handle our annual personal tax submissions and give us access to accounting software that makes invoicing and managing finances considerably easier.

Accounting software
More cost-efficient than an accountant in the early stages, especially with the introductory offers that make it close to a no-brainer. It also means invoices and financial information look properly professional from the first client onward. Ours (Xero) has turned out to do more than we expected; it integrates payment processing directly, which we haven't switched on yet but which is neither complicated nor costly to do when we do.

A business bank account
Essential, no real debate here. Sending an invoice from a business account looks professional. Putting it through a personal account, unless you're a sole trader, just feels casual in a way that undersells what you're asking a client to pay for.

Office space
This was a genuinely difficult one. We liked the idea of somewhere that wasn't home to work from. We liked the idea of a proper business address.

Then we found out what office space costs. A hot desk in a shared space in London runs £100+ a month, plus VAT and that's before you've got anywhere private to take a call. A secure, lockable serviced office for two people is closer to £15,000+ a year, at London and London-suburb prices. As a start-up, that's not a cost we could justify. Certainly not against the established home set-ups we already had.

Club membership: the alternative we didn't expect to consider
What we hadn't planned for was looking at something like a member’s club as a genuine alternative. It doesn't solve the same problem office space does: it's not a registered business address, and there's no guaranteed desk waiting for you. What it does solve is client-facing space: somewhere with a bit of polish to take a meeting or run a pitch that isn't a coffee shop or the kitchen table.

It’s also really useful for our own business and strategy planning – somewhere neutral, different, maybe even inspiring. Sometimes a change of location for a day is just what the business needs.

The cost sits in roughly the same range as a hot desk, but it's a different kind of spend – less infrastructure, more relationship-building. But obviously it only earns its keep if you actually use it. It's easy to justify on paper and easy to under-use in practice. As a result, we haven’t got there yet but we’ve taken advantage of offers to try it out.

Put simply: office space would have solved a problem we didn't have. A club membership solves one we didn't know we'd have.

Business cards (or not)
This is the one place we haven't fully agreed. Jess wants them for events – a physical card in someone's pocket at the end of a conference is a low-friction way to be remembered, when they're sorting through a handful of contacts the next morning. I've leaned toward the LinkedIn QR code instead – faster, doesn't get lost, and updates itself the moment your details change, rather than going stale the way a printed card does.

We haven't landed on one answer, and we're increasingly comfortable with that. A card probably earns its place in a room full of strangers; a QR code probably wins in a scheduled, one-to-one meeting. The honest version of this section isn't "here's what we decided", it's that we still disagree, and we're each right in a different context.

Tech The one area where we already had what we needed. Laptops, monitors, printers all in place before we started. We've each picked up small bits of kit since (laptop stands, better chairs), but this was never a real decision point. Worth noting precisely because everything else on this list was one.

So, what did we actually need?
Looking back, the pattern is fairly consistent: the things that felt obviously essential: name, brand, website, contracts, a business account, were essential and worth the early investment.

The things that felt essential but weren't: a full-time accountant, dedicated office space, turned out to be decisions we could / can make later, once the business had earned the right to make them. And the things we hadn't even thought to weigh up at the start: club memberships, whether a business card still means anything, turned out to need just as much figuring out as anything on the original list.

That's probably the real lesson. It's not that you can plan your way to the right set-up on day one. It's that the list keeps changing, and you keep figuring it out as you go.