Turning Your Drupal Hobby Into a Drupal Business (A Business Checklist)

Congrats! You’ve considered going for it and starting your own Drupal-based business!
Or, maybe you already have a humble beginning or been at it for a while. Can it be done? More importantly, can you do it? We know the answer is YES and we want to share our experiences and knowledge to help you avoid some of our hard-learned lessons.

We want to better equip you for success by covering things like:

Business Entity Structure
Advantages & disadvantages in selecting your business type
S-Corporations vs Sole Proprietorship vs Limited Liability Corporation (LLC)
Banking Tips
Never pay a fee just for banking
Important Client Agreements
SOW: Understand the three different types of Statements Of Work
What to do if requirements change? [like that ever happens!]
Tax Considerations
Obvious write-offs & the ones that many people miss
Pay now or pay later - but you must pay!
Basic Tools {Free, Freemium, or Low Cost}
Email, Project Management, Invoicing, Accounting, DevOps, & more
Solutions from GoogleApps, Asana or Redmine, Pantheon, Freshbooks or QuickBooks, & more
Retirement Vehicles
Options specifically designed for entrepreneurs
Pre-tax vs post-tax contributions & when one is better than the other
Marketing Basics
Cost effective marketing tips to generate leads
and more.
We will leave time for Q&A AND be sure to join us for a Birds Of a Feather [BoF] conversation where we can dig deeper into the areas that interest you!
If you run a business or have experiences to share, we would love to have you join the BoF and join the conversation!

Doug Vann
Drupal Dragon Slayer @ SynapticBlue Inc.
President of Synaptic Blue Inc.

I absolutely LOVE sharing what I know and giving back to the Drupal community. It was hard for me back in Drupal 5. I like to reduce that pain for others! I do that through public and private trainings and mentoring.

What really excites me these days is not only Drupal development, but business development as well. In 2011 I moved from a sole-proprietor to an S-Corp when it became clear that business was going very well. As with Drupal skills, I enjoy sharing my business knowledge as well.

None of this would be possible without my firm belief that Drupal based solutions represent tremendous value in the marketplace. Like so many in our community, I get that Drupal-High from seeing a solution come together that reduces friction in content publishing or provides better integrations across disparate systems, or simply equips an organization to truly OWN their content and story and connect with people.

My unwavering commitment to see Drupal meet the needs of any industry has allowed me to work with some high visibility clients like NASA, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The US Treasury, The US Federal Court, Indiana University, Butler University, Ohio State Gov, Iowa State Gov, and many others.

I'm very thankful that Drupal has provided such an excellent career for me and my family of 6!

Doug Vann
Drupal Dragon Slayer @ SynapticBlue Inc.
President of Synaptic Blue Inc.

I absolutely LOVE sharing what I know and giving back to the Drupal community. It was hard for me back in Drupal 5. I like to reduce that pain for others! I do that through public and private trainings and mentoring.

What really excites me these days is not only Drupal development, but business development as well. In 2011 I moved from a sole-proprietor to an S-Corp when it became clear that business was going very well. As with Drupal skills, I enjoy sharing my business knowledge as well.

None of this would be possible without my firm belief that Drupal based solutions represent tremendous value in the marketplace. Like so many in our community, I get that Drupal-High from seeing a solution come together that reduces friction in content publishing or provides better integrations across disparate systems, or simply equips an organization to truly OWN their content and story and connect with people.

My unwavering commitment to see Drupal meet the needs of any industry has allowed me to work with some high visibility clients like NASA, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The US Treasury, The US Federal Court, Indiana University, Butler University, Ohio State Gov, Iowa State Gov, and many others.

I'm very thankful that Drupal has provided such an excellent career for me and my family of 6!

https://www.midcamp.org/2020/topic-proposal/turning-your-drupal-hobby-drupal-business-business-checklist

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