New businesses tend to buy technology in the order the problems show up. A website from whoever a friend recommended, email from the internet provider, a domain from wherever the website person suggested, social profiles on the founder’s personal login, and a booking tool signed up to on a phone between clients. Twelve months later it all works, mostly, and nobody can say where the logins are or who owns what.
We set this up for new businesses as a single engagement, from the logo to the booking software, and then look after it. The Ishita Physio case study is a typical example. This is what the foundation looks like when it is done in the right order.
The order that avoids rework
- Business identity first. Name, ABN and a logo you own the files for. The domain choice depends on the name, and the logo drives the website, the social profiles and the email signature, so settle it before anything is registered.
- The domain, registered to the business. Not to the agency, not to a personal account. Long renewals, auto-renew on a business card, MFA on the registrar. We covered who owns your domain separately because it goes wrong so often.
- DNS somewhere you control. We use Cloudflare, which also puts a firewall and a fast edge in front of the site. Every later step adds records here, so it needs to be documented from day one.
- Microsoft 365 before the website. Email on your own domain from the first day of trading, MFA switched on for every account, a shared mailbox such as hello@ so enquiries do not live in one person’s inbox, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC published so nobody can forge you. The tenant is the identity every other tool should hang off. This is our Microsoft 365 and identity work.
- The website. Fast, accessible, mobile first, with a contact form that reaches the shared mailbox and the plain facts an AI assistant can quote: who you are, where you operate, what you do and for whom. Structured data and a sitemap from launch, not as a later SEO project. This is our web development and SEO work.
- Social profiles owned by the business. Create the Facebook page and Instagram profile with a business mailbox as the login and recovery address, and add the founder as an admin rather than making the founder’s personal account the owner.
- Line-of-business tools last. Booking, practice management, invoicing and payments, signed up with the business email and connected to the calendar and mailbox that already exist. For allied health that is often Zanda, formerly Power Diary, configured so online bookings land in the right diary.
- Write the ownership register. One page listing every account, who owns it, who has admin access, the recovery method, the renewal date and what it costs. Keep it in the Microsoft 365 tenant, not on a laptop.
The ownership rules
- The business owns every account. Providers, including us, get delegated access that can be revoked without changing anything else.
- One identity, everywhere. Every tool signs in with the Microsoft 365 account where it can, so departing staff lose access in one place.
- MFA from day one. It is far easier to start with it than to add it after a scare.
- A password manager for the rest. Anything that cannot use single sign-on goes in a shared vault, not a spreadsheet.
- Renewals on a business card, with the expiry dates in the register.
Retrofitting an existing business
If you are two years in and recognise the opening paragraph, work backwards through the same list. Find the registrar and get the account in the business’s name, move DNS somewhere you control, put MFA on the mailbox and the registrar, re-home the social profiles to a business login, and write the register. Most of this is an afternoon of careful work and none of it needs the site to go offline.
What to do this month
- List every account the business depends on and who can sign in to each.
- Fix the three that matter most first: the registrar, the email tenant and the DNS host.
- Turn on MFA everywhere it is missing, then write the ownership register and put a renewal reminder in a calendar someone reads.
A foundation set up once, properly, is the cheapest technology decision a new business will ever make, because everything after it becomes an addition rather than a rescue. If you are starting out, or cleaning up, book a consultation and we will map it with you.