What a business plan from Grant looks like.

1. Executive summary

Greenline Bookkeeping is a remote bookkeeping service for independent contractors in Florida who earn between $60,000 and $200,000 a year and still keep their books in a spreadsheet, or not at all. The founder has eight years of accounting experience and no marketing experience, so the plan leans on referrals from tax preparers rather than paid acquisition.

Grant's preliminary verdict: Go, with confidence 7/10. The problem is recurring and costly for the customer; the open question is price, which the plan tests with real customers before any money is spent on tools or branding.

2. Customer and problem

The first customer is a self-employed tradesperson or consultant who files a Schedule C, pays quarterly estimated taxes, and discovers in March that nobody tracked deductible expenses. The cost is not the bookkeeping fee; it is the missed deductions and the penalty for underpaid estimates.

What is not yet proven: whether this customer pays a monthly fee for prevention, or only pays a preparer once a year. Interview ten of them in the first three weeks (see the roadmap).

3. Market

The number of one-person businesses in the United States is published by the U.S. Census Bureau (nonemployer statistics, census.gov). The plan uses the Florida figure as the ceiling for the addressable market, not as a forecast: current count to verify on census.gov before it is quoted to anyone.

Competitors identified: national bookkeeping subscriptions, local CPA firms, and accounting software used without help. The gap the plan targets is the contractor who finds a full CPA firm too expensive and software too time-consuming.

4. Offer and pricing

Three tiers, tested at the interview stage rather than assumed:

• Catch-up: one-time clean-up of the current year, priced per month of backlog.
• Monthly: bookkeeping, categorized expenses and a quarterly tax-estimate summary, at a flat fee (hypothesis: $149 to $249 a month, to be validated).
• Annual add-on: year-end package ready for the customer's own tax preparer.

5. Legal setup (Florida)

Entity: a single-member LLC is the usual structure for a service business of this kind. It is formed with the Florida Division of Corporations (sunbiz.org); the current filing fee is shown there (to verify before budgeting).

Tax identity: an EIN is requested from the IRS at no cost (irs.gov). State tax registration depends on what is sold; confirm with the Florida Department of Revenue (floridarevenue.com) whether the service is taxable (to verify).

Professional rules: bookkeeping is not the same as public accounting or tax-return preparation. The plan keeps the service to bookkeeping and refers tax filing to licensed preparers. Confirm the boundary with a Florida-licensed attorney or CPA.

6. First 90 days

• Weeks 1–3: ten interviews with contractors, and five with tax preparers who could refer clients. Decision rule: at least four of ten say they would pay for prevention.
• Weeks 4–6: form the LLC, open a business account, publish a one-page site with a booking link.
• Weeks 7–12: take the first five paying clients through referrals; measure hours spent per client and the price they accept.

7. Main risks

• Price risk: customers value the service below the cost of the founder's time. Mitigation: validate price before building anything.
• Concentration risk: all clients come from two or three referrers. Mitigation: track the source of every client from the first one.
• Scope creep into tax preparation, which has licensing consequences. Mitigation: a written scope and a referral partner.