Protecting Yourself When You’re Self Employed
Self employment is quite a popular career choice these days. More and more people are realising the usefulness of working for yourself, and being able to build your own business on your own terms, and now there are more home businesses than ever before.
If you’ve recently made the decision to become self employed, you’re going to need to take some extra steps to protect yourself. Of course, you’ve done your research, and you feel all clued up and ready to go, but some things need to go in twice! So let’s go through a couple of those most crucial elements below.
Having the right desk setup might even be the first step to getting into the self employment mindset. (image credit)
Know What Insurance You’ll Need
Working from home is a bit of a grey area when it comes to insurance, but there’s a chance you’re going to need a policy to cover you. Your normal home or contents insurance policy might be rendered invalid by your choice to work from your living room, and it’ll work out a lot cheaper for you to take out a new policy, compared to updating the old one.
However, do you even need business insurance? Of course, it’s up to you. But thinking about it: covering your business is still important, even if its home based, and you don’t want to suffer a loss this early in your career. You’re going to be using the internet to sell, which might need covering for damages incurred during manufacture and shipping. And if you’re receiving people at home, for work related events like meetings, you might even need to invest in a public liability policy. It can be quite complicated, so make sure to double check your research!
Know How to Look After Your Website
Your website is how you make money. If you’re operating online, which is likely crucial to your business model, your website is your gold standard. It needs to be set up right, and it needs to be protected in its own way, and you need to be clued up on both of these things.
First, learn how to back up your website. If you don’t, there’s a chance you could lose all of your work, should your servers or network go down. Secondly, if you’re not quite an IT specialist yourself, you might want to turn to outsourcing here; visit some IT websites like www.cimasg.com to know your options, as you’re going to need to be able to turn to a real expert when an error or connection issue occurs. Website coding can be quite finicky, and there’s no telling how many problems you might run into whilst you get going.
We know we’re good at what we do, and we want to be able to do it for ourselves, and reap all of the rewards of our work. But being self employed takes lots of energy and dedication, and quite a bit of protection!