- Original Poster
- #1
Hi all,
Bit of background info first - 5 years self employed exec airport transfer driver / chauffeur. making a good living from it, have a few corporate clients and lots of repeat business. At the moment the business is just me with help from trustworthy drivers when i have a large workload on - i don't make any money from these jobs i give away - always been of the opinion that a good driver who doesn't steal clients and acts as i would is more beneficial than an extra 10% in my pocket.
Anyway, i got thinking the other day that if i retire next week or next year ( not that i plan to) i have nothing to sell on for my retirement other than the car and maybe website. So that got me thinking that i should be looking at turning my self employed status into "director" / business owner status. By this i essentially mean starting to make the business work independent of me.
So as far as i can see that means becoming a limited company ? It means moving from my current personal account / haphazard accounting onto a dedicated business account and accountant ?
Although my turnover is a bout 15k shy of the vat threshold it wouldn't take much to jump above it so should i be looking at becoming VAT registered now ? Im aware that i will have to charge 20% more ( or take a 20% hit) but the upshot is a possibly more professional looking outfit.
Whilst at this point i can operate quite nicely having other drivers help out when needed it would be good to eventually build up to a fleet of my own cars and drivers so at what point would i move to that ? ie before the customer base is there in order to build or after the customer base is at that point in order to service those customers ( hope that makes sense?)
Anything else you can think of that i may need to consider ? Anything to add for me to think about and mull over.
I know its not much of a question - more of a statement of intent lol but i needed to write it down in somewhere to get other peoples opinions and in order to process whats whizzing around in my head
Bit of background info first - 5 years self employed exec airport transfer driver / chauffeur. making a good living from it, have a few corporate clients and lots of repeat business. At the moment the business is just me with help from trustworthy drivers when i have a large workload on - i don't make any money from these jobs i give away - always been of the opinion that a good driver who doesn't steal clients and acts as i would is more beneficial than an extra 10% in my pocket.
Anyway, i got thinking the other day that if i retire next week or next year ( not that i plan to) i have nothing to sell on for my retirement other than the car and maybe website. So that got me thinking that i should be looking at turning my self employed status into "director" / business owner status. By this i essentially mean starting to make the business work independent of me.
So as far as i can see that means becoming a limited company ? It means moving from my current personal account / haphazard accounting onto a dedicated business account and accountant ?
Although my turnover is a bout 15k shy of the vat threshold it wouldn't take much to jump above it so should i be looking at becoming VAT registered now ? Im aware that i will have to charge 20% more ( or take a 20% hit) but the upshot is a possibly more professional looking outfit.
Whilst at this point i can operate quite nicely having other drivers help out when needed it would be good to eventually build up to a fleet of my own cars and drivers so at what point would i move to that ? ie before the customer base is there in order to build or after the customer base is at that point in order to service those customers ( hope that makes sense?)
Anything else you can think of that i may need to consider ? Anything to add for me to think about and mull over.
I know its not much of a question - more of a statement of intent lol but i needed to write it down in somewhere to get other peoples opinions and in order to process whats whizzing around in my head
