How much money do I actually need to start a one-person business?

Separate two things that always get mashed together: your gear and your business. Gear is a mower, a trailer, a machine, a freezer — it varies enormously and it's yours already or it isn't. The business — the registration, the name, the .com, a website that books jobs, a phone line that answers, cards, card payments switched on — is surprisingly consistent from trade to trade.

We price that side at a flat $2,000, itemized in public, the same for every trade: the build, plus Indiana's LLC filing at about a hundred dollars paid straight to the state, plus the card company's cut shown in the open instead of skimmed in the dark. It's on the ledger, town by town, trade by trade — go read it.

And the honest part: that money usually isn't yours. A barn raising is forty people at $50. The first $99 breaks ground — your own .com, registered in your name — and at the halfway mark you're a registered Indiana business. Your tools stay your own; the barn never buys gear, so nobody else ever owns a piece of your shop.

No income promises live here. What we can tell you is what it costs, and we do.