How to Separate the Personal from Professional in a Startup

When you are starting a new business venture, the project can easily become your life. And it makes sense that you would put so much time and energy into your new endeavour because, of course, you want it to succeed. Yet, the lines between your personal and professional worlds can quickly become blurred. Read on for some action items you can easily implement.

Maintain Separate Financial Accounts

You might want to fund your new startup business with your personal accounts, but if you can avoid doing so, you should. Regardless of whether that has happened or not, going forward, it will benefit you personally and professionally to keep your finances separate. 

Taking the simple step to open a business account is a critical one for the purpose of protecting your personal finances. This is especially important if you begin to lose money in your business or if it, unfortunately, fails altogether. That way, you do not lose both your financial well-being and your job. Keeping these financial worlds separate also makes tax reporting and accountability much easier since you do not need to sort through receipts and reconcile why expenditures were made or which account they originated from. Or worse, you do not need to transfer money back and forth to fix any errors in accounting. Additionally, managing bank account balances and cash flow is much easier and more accurate with separate and distinct accounts since you can quickly see what is in each account.

Separate Your Social Media Accounts

Your personal social media accounts likely include a lot of content about your startup efforts. You have probably shared your hard work, goals, accomplishments, and even advertised on your personal profile. However, it is time to move on and create business accounts on the relevant social media platforms. 

While this will create more busy work for you and require you to factor in more time to manage the accounts or delegate that to an employee, it is a necessary step. Separating your personal and professional social media accounts gives a new voice to the company profile that you can curate from scratch. Of course, the accounts will be related to you, so to speak, since you are the boss, but they should not include your personal life or any details about it beyond a personal bio and professional photos.

As for your personal social media accounts, consider this the perfect time to clean them up. Despite your best efforts to separate your personal and professional lives, there will always be a connection. With that in mind, you need to remember that you are a brand ambassador and a representative of your company, regardless of what you are doing or where you are posting. Set everything to private on your personal accounts. Take the time to scour each post and delete the ones that no longer align with your views or that you would not be proud to show your grandmother. Going forward, only post about something after following the “think twice, post once” mantra.

With these realistic suggestions, you can work to create a distinct separation between your personal and professional worlds. Starting a business is hard work, and you want to do everything you can to make it a success.