How to organise multiple businesses administratively?
Hi guys,
First post! I run two businesses with a business partner, and am ideally looking to set up my own side business (or several, in time). My question is: how would/do you run several businesses from an organisational standpoint? Do you have one business email that you use as an administration touchpoint for all emails, or do you run an admin email for each separate business? Do you reply to all your businesses from one email account (for non-customer emails)? Do you have one storage place for all businesses, eg Google Drive with separate folders, or separate gDrives?
Perhaps this sounds ridiculous, but I have a personal email account, and several work accounts, and it's starting to feel unwieldy, especially as I test new side ventures. Less decisions, less stress, more time to focus on the MVP.
Note that this q isn't related to tax, legal separation of businesses, or customer-facing enquiries etc.
Thank you,
Juzzo
This is great, thanks guys. Guess I'm regretting the unwieldy setup I have so far.
I think what I'll do is:
When it comes to hosting etc I'll just set it up separately. Been looking at AWS Organizations though, looks interesting. I guess, if you run everything through AWS, it could work.
I use ProtonMail and set up all my email address there under one Omnibox. Google is horrible. I even pay for ProtonMail because its that good and super private.
If they are organizationally separate, as in, new business partner or new investor, I would have a single service for it: their own email address, their own aws, mailchimp, heroku, everything.
For launching experimental stuff, I just add domain aliases to my own main domain that matches the legal entity I'm working under. I'm using GSuite and they can have their own signature, they own domain, etc. You can even have some sub-organizations. I've used them a little bit but not too much. Google Drive goes with that.
One of the big problems with Google Drive is that you can only have one mounted on your local hard drive. For that, I'd recommend sharing some folders from the work one to the personal one so you can access everything locally.
Dropbox does it a bit better. It allows you to have a personal account and a business account connected. But only one business account, which probably is enough for the vast majority of people, but not for me.
I host the websites using a multi-domain wordpress hosted on wpengine. They are great.
When it comes to deal with other people, customers, etc I keep separate identities and make sure to not be confusing. When I send an email to john@something.com and the reply comes from john@somethingelse.com, it looks super unprofessional.
Great advice re. multiwebsite hosting. Been thinking about wpengine, but I'm wondering if it's better to use AWS for this? Mostly WP setups.
I'm of the opinion that everything that's not core to your business should be outsourced to companies that make it the core of their business (unless you are big enough, but that's another story).
With that in mind I don't think you want to be maintaining and backing up WordPress installations. You want to outsource it and if it's a personal site I recommend WordPress.com. They are cheap, good and feature rich. If it's for business I have yet to find anything even close to wpengine with their staging instances, daily and on-demand backup, automatic upgrades, monitoring and great support. No, I don't own wpengine shares, I'm just a happy customer.
Google apps or fastmail with domain aliases will handle this for you. Set up one admin user and when you add a new domain admin@newdomain.com will start working.
I tend to use different email addresses for different businesses though they all come under whatever the parent company is. My email client(polymail) allows me to add aliases so when I respond it comes from the right email and when sending I can select the right domain from a list.