The internet is full of people who incorporated on a Saturday because a template said limited companies look serious. Some of them now pay an accountant to file dormant accounts for a company that never traded. Others are still sole traders with six-figure turnover and a kitchen drawer of receipts, which is its own kind of trouble.

This journal is the sequence we wish more readers had before the expensive version of the mistake. Separate the money. Learn the threshold that actually applies to you. Read your employment contract before you rent a unit. Put a scope and a deposit on the work. Then, and only then, decide whether the job goes.

If you make things, fix things, teach, design, cook, or sell, the legal shape changes more slowly than the Instagram caption. The customers do not care about your Companies House number until they ask for a VAT invoice. HMRC cares earlier than that.