I've been reminded that I was blogging about the process of setting up a nursery, but that I haven't written for a while.
So, let's see where we were up to...
We've already looked at choosing a suitable place, and choosing a building. We've talked about software for time management, and about paying specialists for specialist tasks.
If you want to run a nursery then you'll need to set up a company. That's more than just deciding on a good name and logo!
Companies House is the UK's registrar of companies. If you want to run a company you need to "sign up" with them.
Things to think about:
- Every company has to have a different name.
- You need to decide on your company structure - you might want to be a Community Interest Company, or a Limited Company. To be honest this is kinda complicated but there's some good guides out there to help you think things through to be best for you situation or you could ask the advice of an accountant.
- Whether you want your company to be wider than the nursery. More on this later.
- Who the Company Directors will be, just you? Business partner? Spouse?
- What shares you will start with and who will own them?
You can go direct to Companies House and set up your company, or you can buy one "off the shelf" from an intermediary company like https://www.yourcompanyformations.co.uk/
The advantage of doing the latter is that it will save you time and paperwork. We've done it this way and they let you use generic Memorandum and Articles of Incorporation, sort out your shares, and set up their offices as your registered address. This is great as you really do not want your home address as the registered address - if you do then your address will be freely available online for all to see. I'm not so keen on that!
If you want to you can set up your company as just your nursery, using your nursery name as the company name. But it might be that would restrict what you do in the future. If you have any thoughts that you might want to expand, to have more than one site, to run courses, sell products, do training... anything other than just the nursery then I'd advise coming up with another more generic name.
To leave our options open we've set up our company as DVN Education Ltd, and we're trading as Deerness Valley Nursery. This means that if we ever ever want to do anything in the future that isn't solely run the nursery then we have the freedom to.
If you're coming along on this journey yourself I'd advise leaving plenty of time for this step. It's taken me quite a while to get it all sorted out! Lots of decisions need to made along the way so make sure you do it when you have time to think clearly too.