Get Your People (the real ones)

Get Your People

If you know me well, you might know that I can be tight-fisted with a dollar. I do my own toenails, most of my closet is from Marshall’s, and yes—I still balance my checking account. I’m not saying I sleep with a calculator under my pillow, but now that I think of it …

Naturally, the way we manage our personal finances has a funny way of echoing into how we handle the financial side of our businesses, especially in the early days. And in this oh-so-digital world, it’s incredibly tempting to DIY everything with a few taps and clicks to save a few dollars.

Need an operating agreement? LegalZoom. Payroll? QuickBooks. A logo? Canva. Content for your blog? ChatGPT (but not this blog, obviously). You get where I’m going with this. When every dollar matters and every day feels like it’s 3 hours too short, it’s so easy to think, “Why not just Google it, click around, type in the credit card, and voila! Done.”

Well. I’m here with some unfortunate news, my friends: you still need real humans.

And not just any humans—you need experts. Experts who charge real money, and not just the promise of a future favor. Experts who know things you don’t. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel personally attacked by 2025 pricing on basically everything. But here’s the truth I’ve come to learn after 3+ years of business ownership: sometimes you just must buck up, find the right person, and pay them. Yes, it’ll sting. But not as much as learning the hard way. Trust me.

Let me walk you through a few lessons I’ve learned (but lived to tell).

Legal Services

True Confessions - I used LegalZoom to file documents to make my business official. It was fast, easy, and relatively cheap. Win! Until it wasn’t. Why? Because when it came time to file for a federal women-owned business certification, I submitted all my paperwork with confidence—only to have the whole thing delayed because my formation documents were flagged as... not correct. Given the pressures on federal government staff right now, this was not the time for delay. Enter: panic. Then enter: a local attorney who actually understood what the government wanted and helped me resubmit properly … I guess that would be called the reformation. What could have been a smooth process turned into weeks of delay at best and could have left me rejected all together. All because I tried to save a buck up front on something that I had no knowledge on.

Graphic Design

Let me first say—I love Canva. It’s like design training wheels for new business owners. I made logos, brochures, flyers—you name it. I even got kind of good at it. Until one day I needed a high-resolution version of my logo. And apparently, “high-res” means something ... that I didn’t understand. Canva probably had the file I needed somewhere in the depths of its download options, but I didn’t know what I was looking for and an event coordinator was emailing me every hour asking for it.

So what did I do? I panicked. And then I finally called a delightful local graphic designer who could not meet this deadline, but could make sure every future deadline was met.

Insurance

When I launched my business, I proudly clicked clicked with an insurer and got a general liability policy. For a while, it worked. Every time we won a new cleint, I’d send over the insurance docs and boom—smooth sailing. Until one client requested something my policy didn’t cover. Cue another panic spiral. I had to rework my insurance coverage on the fly, delaying the start of a project kick-off while my client waited patiently... and then not-so-patiently... Lesson? I needed someone who actually understood my business, not just someone who sold me a boilerplate policy because I entered in a credit card number.

Final Thoughts

I could go on (and on), but you get the point: trying to save money on the front end often ends up costing more—in time, in money, and in forehead wrinkles. So if you’re a new business owner like me, please—get your people. The real ones. The ones with actual expertise, actual rates, and actual solutions. Google can’t read your business plan. Chatbots can’t handle nuance and Canva can’t fix your logo at 3am when your printer needs a vector file now.

Hire the humans. Pay for the help. Trust me, it’s worth it.