In my last article, I talked about the importance of establishing your business foundations — and why skipping steps can cost you. I also gave you a high-level list of business foundation fundamentals to think about, so you won’t miss a beat when you’re setting up your startup.Now let’s get even more practical.  No matter how innovative your startup is, you shouldn’t have to customize the underlying foundation of your business much (or at all) early on. When it comes to business foundations, my mantra is keep things simple. And that’s exactly what I’m going to guide you to do in this article: Keep your setup simple until you can make a business case for complexity. Let’s go through this, step by step.Set deadlines for getting the work doneThe early days of establishing a startup are exciting. Business fundamentals are easy to back-burner when you’re focused on solving interesting new problems. But as we established, missing steps in your business setup can have devastating long-term effects — so you need to get these tasks done. My advice to push forward on business setup tasks is to set a deadline for each task. This will make it easier to add the tasks to your calendar and prioritize them around other, more interesting things you might want to do instead. In the early days of Pixee, setting deadlines also impacted how we chose our vendors. There were times when we chose not to go with a vendor because they couldn’t move fast enough. And vice versa, if a vendor checked all the boxes and they could move more quickly on a task, it was easy to make the decision to hire them. Of course, sometimes a deadline isn’t enough on its own. I’m certainly guilty of letting things fall off my priority list when other things come up. That’s when some external accountability can really be useful. When my co-founders and I were building Pixee, we would try to keep each other honest in that way. Tried and true methods of daily standups and shared to-do lists worked well for us. So if a deadline isn’t enough to motivate you to get business tasks done, think about telling one of your co-founders that you’ll get it done by the deadline. Sometimes just knowing that you’ve committed to someone else that you’re going to get that task done is all it takes to get yourself moving on it. Keep things simple with software and servicesAs I mentioned in the intro, I don’t believe you should customize a lot of your underlying business foundation. If you feel compelled to customize, it might be the time to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “What’s so different about me that I have to do it differently than everyone else before me?” You’ll probably find that in most cases, you and your startup are not the exception to the rule. And when you’re not asking for a bunch of specialty exceptions, you’ll see that your business setup can be pretty simple — and much more affordable. To put it simply (pun intended), keep your business foundation as simple as possible until you truly need more complex solutions. To that end, automation and multipurpose solutions will go a long way, here. AutomationWe’ve always had a very technology-heavy bent at Pixee, because we trust in automation and efficiency. We’ve used a lot of different tools and stacks, especially when we started our outbound engine. Based on that experience, my advice is to go with more mature, technology-forward solutions that can automate repetitive tasks.  Multipurpose software tools and services Whenever possible, look for solutions that can do several things, like stack collapsers. For example, our payroll system also does some tax jobs, registrations, even some IT tasks. It helps to make business functions scalable when they’re integrated in an easy way. The same goes for vendors. As much as I could, I used the same vendor for multiple services. It made things much easier. Remember, though, keep it simple until complexity is warranted. As we say internally, “you have to earn the right to be complex,” which we also apply to our product design principles. For example, HubSpot works for multiple sales and marketing tasks, and it’s totally sufficient for a long period of time. You don’t need Salesforce right out of the gate just because you’re a startup in B2B. When it comes to choosing software tools, as with all things in the startup world, speed is the name of the game. Try to choose quickly so you can move faster. At Pixee, we would spend a little time upfront asking people we knew about the solutions they liked, looking at reviews or talking to four or five companies. Then, once we made a decision, we would negotiate the price with the company (upfront is the only time you have leverage to negotiate price — don’t miss that opportunity!), and then go all in on that platform. We would use it as much as possible, and after a few months, we’d have a quick review. If at that point we weren’t using it for everything we bought it for, we may throw it out.  Use templatesThere are templates — both free and paid — for so many business setup tasks, you rarely have to work from scratch. Just make a little effort to find them. Then you just select a template, execute it and mail it.  For example, there are legal templates for incorporation. There are also free services from top-notch legal firms that help you with setup paperwork, and some firms have entire libraries of documents ready to go for founders. Stripe Atlas comes to mind. They will do the incorporation for you, and a lot of other business foundation steps, for a ridiculously low cost. It saves you a lot of money and time.  And if you are willing to spend a little more money, there are plenty of services across the business spectrum that are essentially technology platforms with assistance, where you can ask questions as you go through the process. No different from how you can file taxes using tax platforms with advisors available by chat. Prepare for a cascading to-do listOne thing you should be prepared for is that every business foundation task has the potential to spawn more tasks. Sometimes that’s just because a single task ends up having multiple steps — but often, more tasks are created as you realize there are additional requirements for startups in your space. For example, because our founding team had all been part of large startups in the past, we knew we wanted to work with a lawyer who was knowledgeable in our product security space. And when we picked one, they immediately gave us another 10 things to think about — like specific business insurance, board agreements and registering in multiple states. In these cases, the professional you hire may be able to help you take care of some of those tasks, but sometimes they’re just telling you what else you have to do. Another example is when we brought on Rippling for our payroll software. They gave us a list of a bunch of other things we needed to do — including connecting it to QuickBooks and registering our business in the states where we were going to have employees. To sum up, there is no single checklist that you can download to establish your startup. You start with what you know you need to do, and then you find out about more things you have to do as you go. Use your judgment when outsourcingGiven everything a founder is dealing with in the early days of building a startup, should you even be doing all this stuff yourself? Outsourcing can help, but resources can be difficult to find — so keep your eye out for companies and contractors that specialize in business foundation setup. Typically we would avoid the contractors that were focused on the “strategy” as we mostly needed those focused on execution and foundations. And keep in mind that outsourcing can take time, too. At Pixee, we’ve outsourced several things along the way, including accounting and payroll. But I had to talk to multiple firms before I found ones that were a good fit for us.  You have to use your judgment. If it’s taking a lot of time to find help, it may be faster to do it yourself. But if you can find outsourced help, it may save you hours of work for a relatively low cost.  Here’s a pro tip for young startups: Sometimes bigger software platforms that you’re using have online communities where you can ask for help. For example, I know HubSpot has a really active community, and you can look at their forum for outsourced service providers to help you with your HubSpot setup.