I’ve been quite busy these last weeks and I hadn’t got the time to write a new post for the blog. Yet, I wanted to make a small status of what I’ve been up to recently.

  • Setting-up of my company

My company is now registered at the “Banque Carrefour des Entreprises”. I also got my VAT number and my professional bank account. My company is virtually created, which is a great milestone.

I was pretty surprised to see that in fact I didn’t need any business plan to set up my company. The only thing they asked me was my dimploma. I was about to drop the writing of my business plan to relax a bit, that was maybe not my greatest idea, when I heard about a financial help of 12.500€ from Le Forem, which is the Walloon public service for employment. Le Forem wants to help people who are willing to become entrepreneurs for the first time. Guess what, a business plan is needed to get that financial help. I’ve then been busy working on it for two weeks now. It’s painful but also really helpful in order to get all my ideas straight and to validate my project.

Also, as I will be selling precious materials, I had to ask the permission at “Bureau de garantie de la Monnaie Royale”.That was also quite a big deal. So much for the 7 days start-up 🙂

  • My offer

I had the opportunity to meet new suppliers and already order from them. I will have a new trendy brand to sell at the very beginning.

I also became a member of UCM Mouvement, which is an association of self-employed workers. With my membership I have access to a legal advisor who helps me for the general terms and conditions, the obligations of the merchant, etc…

  • The webiste

When setting up my business plan, I come up with a lot of ideas to implement. I’m happy to see that Shopify has plugins that will help me do those. I will be working full-time on the website the last two weeks of June.

Moreover, when opening my bank account at the CBC, they showed me payment solutions for e-commerce. Yet, their rates are really expensive for a small company (it’s a bit paradoxical when you know that they had a campaign for small entrepeneurs a few weeks ago).They have a monthly fee of around 70€ plus transaction fees for each transaction. I compared the various offers and Mollie seemed the best one for me to start with, even if their website is full Dutch.