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Five Greatest Ideas for Financing Your Business • 45

Setting up a limited company

Get a starter pack from Companies House. The easiest way to set up a limited
company is to buy one off the shelf from a company formation specialist. To set up
a private limited company you need one director and a company secretary who
cannot be the sole director. You can start such a company with very little capital
indeed. The starter pack tells you what forms and fees to send.

You may want to set up a public limited company. PLC can look more substan-
tial and impressive than Ltd although there is little difference. A PLC must have an
authorised share capital of £50,000 and a quarter of that must be issued. In other
words you must put in at least £12,500 to get started.

When you are setting up a company, the important issue is to get started pro-
ducing and selling your products and services. For this reason it is likely that you
will benefit from using an accountant who will take you through the processes and
tell you, for example, what meetings to convene and what resolutions to pass.

Idea 30 - Don't assume that fraud cannot happen to you

In the experience of the people I have talked to, and in my own experience, fraud is
rare. Most people live reasonably honest lives. This means that if fraud does impact
you it is all the more surprising and dispiriting.

(A good friend of mine some years ago had a brother who committed fraud,
and who was destined for prison unless his friends and family paid off the people he
had defrauded. We all chipped in against his promise to repay us in five years. Since
neither he nor I had any idea where we would be in five years, we arranged to meet
at Piccadilly Circus on the 1January 1980. To his credit he pitched up that day and
paid me back.)

An accountant I know got into bad trouble as the result of a partner fiddling the
books in his partnership. The son of one of the key people of a cleaning firm was put