What Month Two of Starting a Business Actually Looks Like

The version of month one that made it into writing was honest but not quite complete. What it captured was the big decisions, the admin friction, and the first commercial conversations. Having re-read it, what it didn't get across was the sense of building a business I was truly passionate about. 

An Unexpected Opportunity

Early in month two, an established player in the UK comparison space announced they were stepping back from the market. Someone I had worked with previously, who happened to have exactly the skills HowMuch needed, became available sooner than I had anticipated. I was standing in the reception of a partner's office on Tottenham Court Road, between a meeting that had just finished and one that was about to start. I rang to catch up. It began as an informal check-in ended with HowMuch having an offer out for its first employee.

The Practical Side of Hiring Someone

The gap between deciding to hire someone and actually having them start is where the administration lives. Employers' liability insurance, Payroll, Pensions as well as equipment to name a few. The paperwork that most startup content glosses over but that turns out to be entirely non-negotiable once there is a real person starting on a real date.

Employers' liability insurance is a legal requirement from the moment you employ anyone in the UK. I used Simply Business to compare products and find the right cover, which is worth a brief mention in context. Simply Business is the engine that powers business insurance comparison on many of the UK's largest price comparison sites. Using their platform to find my own cover as a comparison founder had a certain symmetry to it. The process was clean, and the product did what it needed to do.

Payroll is the other piece that cannot be sorted at the last minute. The ongoing admin is straightforward once the setup is complete, but the setup itself takes longer than expected and the timing matters. Disorganisation here is not a strong way to begin a new working relationship.

Both were in place before Rosie's first day. Just about along with a new laptop & login's to our platform.

Where AI Ends and Legal Support Began

One of the areas I had been deliberately relaxed about in month one was partnership agreements.. Contracts would get sorted when they needed sorting. 

The first proper partnership agreement arrived in month two. Not a standard terms of business document but the agreement that would serve as the template for how HowMuch structures all its commercial relationships going forward. I made the mistake that I suspect a lot of start up business owners make at exactly this stage. I started with AI.

Using AI to draft legal documents can feel like a real time saver at times but can also turn into the blind leading the blind. It works well as a thinking tool. You can test your understanding of a clause, produce a first draft to react to, and explore what a particular term might mean in plain English. What it cannot do is fill in the blanks you do not know exist. In a regulated environment like financial services, those blanks carry real weight. There are provisions you would not know to ask for, risks you would not know to mitigate, and questions about FCA permissions and regulated introductions that require someone who actually understands the regulatory framework rather than someone summarising it.

I used a legal expert, which came with a cost but the value was worth the expense. The agreement that came out of that process is one I am confident in & more importantly one that can be reused.. The draft I had produced independently is one I am glad did not go any further than my own inbox.

My lesson is not that AI has no place in legal work. It has a useful supporting role, particularly for a small team without a full-time legal function. The lesson is that knowing where its usefulness ends is a skill worth developing. A first partnership agreement, a template i can use moving  forward on the majority of partnerships, is not the place to discover that boundary by experiment.

One takeaway from this process was how varied costs can be for the same request & how important it is to run a proper RFI [Request for information} when selecting suppliers and partners. The principle is straightforward. I defined what I needed, I set out my criteria, and ask a shortlist of providers to respond in a structured way rather than fielding whoever lands in your inbox first. It gives me a genuine basis for comparison rather than a collection of sales presentations, and hopefully tells you a great deal about how a potential partner operates before you have agreed anything. The ones who respond thoughtfully tend to make the better partners. This simple process led to a £350 saving, for 30 minutes work.

Beyond The Commercial Terms

The commercial terms in any partnership agreement get plenty of attention by default. Revenue share, commission rates, volume thresholds. These are important, and everyone spends time on them.

What gets less scrutiny are the provisions that only reveal their significance once you are actually working together. Data transfer and passback arrangements are a significant example.  When a lead moves from our platform to a partner, what comes back, and when? In a comparison business, that return data is how you measure performance, understand lead quality, and identify where the funnel is breaking down. Vague language around passback is easy to overlook in negotiation and becomes a genuine operational problem once you are live.

Liability provisions are the other area worth more attention than most business owners give them at the start. Not what the clause says, but what it actually means if something goes wrong. Liability caps and indemnities can look balanced in the abstract and still leave meaningful exposure in scenarios that are entirely foreseeable. Understanding that gap before you sign is considerably easier than trying to unpick it afterwards. I've found AI - in particular Claude [Anthropic's AI platform] was incredibly helpful for understanding the context of these.

If there is one thing I will carry into every future partnership agreement. Know your payment terms like the back of your hand. Make sure you understand when you will get paid before you agree to anything else. Cash flow in the first six months of a business is not an abstract concern. It is the most concrete item on the list. Building that clarity into the contract at the outset costs nothing and prevents a significant amount of friction later.

The First Business Supported

The milestone I am most proud of from month two arrived quietly, towards the end of it.

Testing of the Invoice Finance journey on HowMuch started in early April, with Compare Factoring as the launch partner. Bringing a new comparison journey to a platform requires more preparation before opening to real customers than is immediately apparent. Every scenario has to be tested. Every edge case has to be accounted for. The data has to flow correctly between platform and partner at scale, not just on the first attempt. The test phase involved more submissions than I would care to add up.

Somewhere within all of those test submissions, the first real lead came through. Generated on the 19th of April, and funded shortly after. The short version: a business needed invoice finance, found HowMuch, we connected them with Compare Factoring, and the deal went through.

The platform did what it was built to do. Invoice finance exists because the gap between raising an invoice and getting paid on it is a genuine operational problem for a lot of trading businesses. Sixty or ninety day payment terms are standard in many industries. As they say cashflow is king. In April, for that one business, we helped close that gap a bit faster. That is what the whole thing is for.

With a live customer, the focus on data visibility sharpened almost immediately. Journey performance, drop-off points, lead quality from the partner's perspective. These require measurement, and measurement requires the infrastructure built quietly in month one to start earning its keep.

What Month Two Actually Built

By the end of month two, HowMuch had a team of two, a partnership in place, a live Invoice Finance journey, and its first funded deal. Not bad for eight weeks.

The platform is doing what it is supposed to do. Businesses are finding us, getting connected to the right providers, and getting funded. That is the job. Everything else flows from continuing to do that well & a pipeline of other partnerships, products on the horizon.

The small wins are worth pausing on. Not to declare success early, but because they confirm the direction is right. In my opinion month two did that.