For a long stretch I had a company and nothing written down that would help anyone if I was gone.

I did not sit around deciding that. I just kept moving. There was always a launch, a hole in the week, a reason the forms could wait. Looking at term life felt like stopping in the middle of a job that already used up the nerve I had. So I did not look.

People around me would have been the ones left holding the rent and the brand and whatever mess was in the accounts. I called that focus. It was closer to not wanting to picture the week after.

I have sat at a table at night with the site open on one side and the ordinary life of the house on the other and still told myself this was not the night. The night was never going to feel like the right one. That is the trick. The business trains you to wait for a cleaner calendar. The calendar does not get cleaner. It just fills with more of the same heat.

The quote is what I was avoiding

Not dying. The ten minutes of questions.

Height. Smoke or not. A number that makes the worst day expensive in a boring, official way. I could sell. I could not sit still for that screen. It felt like inviting a subject I did not want in the room.

I kept saying after the next good month. After the next launch. After the account looked less embarrassing. The good months came and went. None of them arrived with a feeling that now it was safe to deal with dying. They just became more months with the same gap under them.

There is a pride version of this that sounds almost moral. You are the engine. Engines do not buy policies. Engines keep running. I have heard that in my own head. It is a nice sentence until you imagine the person who would have to keep the lights on with no check and a brand they did not ask to operate.

A spouse does not need your philosophy. They need a number that hits a bank account while they are still trying to figure out the passwords.

What I was protecting

The story that I was indispensable and also fine.

Those two ideas do not travel together. If the company needs you that badly, the household needs a policy that badly. If you are fine either way, you would have filled out the form on a Tuesday and forgotten it. I was not fine with the form. That should have been the tell.

I also did not want a premium I would have to see every month. Another line item next to hosting and ads. It felt like paying for a future I refused to rehearse. The rehearsal is the point. You pay a small, ugly amount so the ugly day does not take the house.

Founders are good at spending on tools that make them look busy. We are late to spend on the thing that only matters if we are not in the chair.

The comparison I still use

When somebody already has people who would be stuck, I send them to Policygenius.

I do not need a favorite carrier. I need quotes next to each other so the decision stops being a mood. Twenty years or thirty. Enough to cover the house and a stretch where the company would have to run without me in it.

Ethos will tell you they are faster. Ladder will tell you they are built for people who hate agents. Haven Life will keep it simple. Fabric will talk like a family brand. SelectQuote will get on the phone. If one of those is the only tab you will finish, finish it. I keep sending people here because I have watched founders open five windows, get tired, and close all of them. The unpaid year costs more than a slightly worse premium.

You can spend a Saturday becoming an amateur actuary. That Saturday is how the policy stays unbought.

An LLC does not fix this. You can have a clean name on the filing and still leave a spouse with letterhead and no check. The company paperwork and the policy are different jobs. Doing one and skipping the other is how you look official and stay exposed.

How big the number needs to be

Ugly enough that the month still works.

House. A few years of the business being slower because you are not in it. Kids if you have them. That is term. It is not a legacy speech. It is “if I get hit, they are not scrambling in week one.”

Whole life, riders, and a two-hour talk about permanent coverage can wait. Those conversations are how people stall inside a product they do not need yet. Term is the adult version. You can convert or add later if the life gets more complicated. First you need something in force.

You cannot pick that number off a feeling. You pick it off what the bills would actually do. If you have never looked at the household and the company as one stack of obligations, the death benefit will be a round number you liked the sound of. Round numbers that sound good are usually short.

I wanted the application to make me look like I had always been this responsible. It did not. It sat there. The first quote was higher than I wanted. That was information, not a sign I should wait another year. If they ask for a medical exam, do the exam. If they decline a piece of it, that is still a starting point.

The week you actually do it

Pick one comparison. Run the quote. Put a real beneficiary on it, not a blank you will “fix later.” Later is how policies get issued with the wrong person attached.

Tell the person who would have to use it that it exists. A policy nobody knows about is a scavenger hunt on the worst week of their life.

Then leave it alone. Do not reopen the tabs every time a headline talks about markets. Term is boring on purpose.

If you sell this

Policygenius is already named. You know why you are here.

Say something a founder who is scared of the form could use. A rate grid in the first paragraph will not go up. Neither will a speech about peace of mind. The reader is trying to stop leaving their family on the hook while they build. Help with that or stay off the domain.

I did not become a different man. I got a policy on the life the company was already using. That was the part I had been skipping. The business was real. I had been treating myself like I was optional.

Ask ten founders to explain revenue-based financing and you’ll get ten slightly different answers, usually starting with “it’s like a loan, but…” That “but” is doing a lot of work. RBF borrows the shape of debt — you get cash now, pay it back later — while borrowing the logic of equity: the amount you owe each month depends on how your business actually performs, not on a calendar.

That hybrid nature is exactly why it’s grown so fast among SaaS companies, e-commerce brands, and agencies. No dilution, no fixed payment crushing you in a slow month, and none of the collateral requirements that keep a bank loan out of reach for a two-year-old company. Here’s what’s actually happening under the hood.

The mechanics, step by step

Strip away the marketing language and revenue-based financing comes down to four moving parts.

You receive a lump sum. A provider reviews your revenue history — usually pulled directly from your bank feed, Stripe account, or Shopify dashboard — and advances a set amount of capital. This might be $50,000 for a small operator or several million for a scaling SaaS company. It sits alongside more familiar options like general small business loans, but qualifies on revenue consistency rather than credit history or collateral.

A repayment cap replaces interest. Instead of an interest rate accruing over time, RBF uses a fixed multiple, typically between 1.1x and 2.0x the amount funded. If you take $100,000 at a 1.3x cap, you owe $130,000, full stop. That number doesn’t move no matter how long repayment takes.

A percentage of monthly revenue gets collected. Providers usually take somewhere between 2% and 10% of gross revenue each month, sometimes as often as weekly. A strong month means a bigger payment and faster payoff. A slow month means a smaller one — nobody’s calling you for a missed installment, because there isn’t a fixed installment to miss.

The obligation ends at the cap, not on a date. Once the total repaid hits the agreed multiple, the relationship is over. No lingering equity stake, no board seat, no percentage of the business changing hands. Compare that to a term loan, where you owe the same $2,800 in January whether you made $10,000 or $200,000 that month — one of these models punishes bad timing far more than the other.

Where it fits among your funding options

Founders often lump RBF in with every other type of alternative funding, but it occupies a specific niche. It’s more expensive than a bank line of credit and cheaper than a merchant cash advance. It’s faster to close than an SBA loan and slower than a same-day cash advance. Understanding that middle position helps explain when it actually makes sense.

The businesses that benefit most share a few traits: predictable, recurring revenue; healthy margins that can absorb a revenue share without starving operations; and a specific, growth-oriented use for the capital rather than a general cash crunch. A subscription company funding a marketing push to accelerate customer acquisition is a textbook fit. A business trying to plug a structural loss every month is not — RBF speeds up growth, it doesn’t fix a broken model. Cash-flow timing is the real constraint. Capital that arrives faster than you can collect is only useful if the underlying machine already works.

Among revenue based business loans, providers differ mainly in how they price risk — some lean on payment processing data, others on bank statements, and the spread in cap multiples between them can be wider than founders expect.

The real cost, worked through an example

Say a company with $150,000 in average monthly revenue takes $200,000 at a 1.25x cap, with 6% of monthly revenue going toward repayment.

Total repayment: $250,000. Monthly payment at that revenue level: roughly $9,000. At that pace, full repayment takes just over 27 months — but only if revenue holds steady. If the business grows to $220,000 a month, the payment scales up to about $13,200, and the whole thing gets paid off in under 19 months. Slower growth stretches it the other way.

The effective annual cost, when you annualize that 1.25x cap over roughly two years, lands somewhere in the 12–18% range — noticeably more than a bank loan, noticeably less than a typical cash advance. That’s the price of flexibility and speed, and it’s worth calculating explicitly before signing rather than judging the deal on the multiple alone.

Where founders get surprised

A few details catch people off guard after they’ve already signed:

• Gross revenue, not net profit, is what gets shared — a business with thin margins can find the revenue share eating a bigger chunk of actual profit than expected
• No fixed end date means a slow year genuinely stretches the timeline, sometimes well past the founder’s mental estimate
• Some providers add minimum monthly payments even during a weak month, quietly reintroducing some of the fixed-payment risk RBF is supposed to avoid

None of these make revenue-based financing a bad deal — they just mean the fine print matters as much as the headline cap.

Deciding if it’s the right fit

Revenue-based financing works best as a tool for accelerating something that’s already working, not as a rescue plan for something that isn’t. Before signing, model out the repayment at both your current revenue and a pessimistic scenario, and make sure the margin left over still funds normal operations.

If the numbers hold up under both scenarios, RBF offers something genuinely rare: growth capital that doesn’t dilute ownership, doesn’t demand collateral, and doesn’t ask you to guess what revenue will look like six months from now. It just asks you to share a slice of whatever actually shows up. Some companies should just keep swimming. Outside money is optional if the revenue is already real.

Founders spend their planning energy on the things that feel existential. Rent, payroll, the build-out, whether anyone shows up. Premises liability sits far down the list, filed mentally under insurance, which is to say unsolved.

It is not solved. A single fall claim against a business with thin reserves and a first-year policy can consume more management attention than any competitor ever will, and the exposure is largely determined by decisions made before opening.

The encouraging part is that almost everything that matters here is cheap, physical and done once.

The Claim That Does Damage Is Rarely Dramatic

The costly incidents are mundane. A wet entryway on a rainy morning. A mat with a curled edge. A single step between a dining area and a back corridor that regulars know about and a first-time visitor does not.

What turns a mundane incident into an expensive one is the absence of a record. When a business cannot say who inspected the floor, how often, or what was found, the argument that it did not know about the hazard becomes very hard to make.

The asymmetry founders miss

The injured person has to prove the business knew or should have known. A business with no inspection system has effectively removed its own best rebuttal.

Documentation is not bureaucracy here. It is the mechanism by which a business proves it was paying attention, and it costs almost nothing to create.

The log that helps is the boring one. Entries every hour showing nothing found are what establish a routine existed, and a record that contains only the days something went wrong proves the opposite of what its author intended.

Walking Surfaces Are a Written Standard, Not a Judgment Call

There is a tendency to treat floor safety as common sense. In fact much of it is specified.

Federal workplace rules on walking-working surfaces require that surfaces be kept clean and orderly and in a sanitary condition, that they be maintained free of hazards, and that employers ensure surfaces are inspected regularly and as necessary, with hazards corrected or guarded.

Those rules govern employee safety rather than customer claims directly, but they establish the standard a business is measured against, and an operation that meets them for staff is generally meeting them for everyone.

Accessibility overlaps with fall prevention

The same features that make a space usable by people with disabilities also reduce falls for everyone. Accessible routes, consistent thresholds, handrails and adequate maneuvering space are specified in the federal accessibility regulations for places of public accommodation.

Retrofitting a level change or a threshold after a build-out costs many multiples of designing it correctly. This is the clearest case for spending money in month one rather than year two.

The Sidewalk Belongs to the City and the Liability Does Not

New York City reassigned responsibility for sidewalk maintenance to abutting property owners, with a narrow exception for owner-occupied one to three family homes used exclusively as residences.

For a commercial tenant, the practical question is what the lease says. Many leases push sidewalk obligations onto the tenant regardless of the underlying allocation, which means a business can be responsible for a surface it never chose and cannot rebuild. The city’s sidewalk information sets out the standards that apply to repair.

Read that clause before signing. It is one of the few lease terms with a direct and quantifiable liability consequence. The company paperwork and the lease belong to the same adult. Waiting until the room feels real is how you inherit a clause you never read.

Snow and rain are scheduling problems

Weather exposure is predictable, which means it is manageable by staffing rather than by luck.

The entryway on a rainy day needs someone assigned to it, not someone noticing it. Most businesses put down matting and consider the matter handled, when the actual requirement is periodic attention across the whole day as water is tracked progressively further inside.

Assign it to a shift, write it on the checklist, and it stops being a judgment call made by whoever happens to be busy.

The Insurance Question Founders Get Wrong

General liability coverage is usually purchased at the minimum that satisfies the landlord, and the certificate is filed away without anyone reading the policy.

Two provisions deserve attention. The first is whether the landlord is named as an additional insured and whether the lease requires you to indemnify them, which can make your policy the one responding to a claim about a condition you did not create. The second is the deductible, because a business that has to fund the first several thousand dollars of every claim will feel small incidents that a fully covered business would not.

What to Put in Place in Month One

Start an inspection log on day one. A simple timed checklist, initialed, kept for years. It is the single highest-value document a small business can generate.

Write an incident procedure before you need it: photograph the area immediately, record the names of anyone present, obtain medical help without arguing about fault, and never clean the area before documenting it.

Fix the level change, light the corridor, and buy mats that lie flat and get replaced when they stop doing so. Mark any step that cannot be removed, in a way a first-time visitor will actually notice.

And report incidents to your carrier promptly even when they seem minor, since late notice is a common reason coverage gets contested. Business owners who have been through one of these generally find that New York City premises liability lawyers on either side are asking the same first question, which is what the business can document about the days before the fall.

Paperwork has a strange tendency to transform a thrilling business idea into a full-time side quest. The Netherlands is a highly promising country in terms of hosting overseas entrepreneurs because of its infrastructure, talent pool, international contacts and proximity to Europe. For many founders, beginning their own business in the Netherlands does not necessarily imply relocation there right away.

Nevertheless, creating a business from abroad is not an easy task without some serious decisions regarding company structure, incorporation, taxation, banking, addresses and even migration policy. Taking care of all this from the very beginning will help to avoid any problems in the future.

Can You Start a Business Without Living in the Netherlands?

Residing outside the Netherlands doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from starting a business in the Netherlands. The essential thing to consider is the meaning of ownership, management and labor.

Foreign Ownership

A foreigner is not required to reside in the Netherlands in order to set up a company. Yet, certain registration, tax, address and other conditions must be fulfilled by them.

Remote Management

You can handle most aspects of running your business remotely through the use of technology and local talent. This arrangement must still address issues of Dutch administration, accounting and compliance.

Work Rights

Just being the owner of the company does not mean that you have the right to stay and work in Holland. There may be additional immigration regulations for those who move.

Key Things to Know Before Starting

Being an expat involves dealing with one or two more things before going into action. Having your basic things in order can really help you get along smoothly on your Dutch business path.

Business Structure

Select the structure of business that best suits your needs for ownership, liability, taxation and growth. Your choice will have an impact on management, expenses, liabilities, and future business modifications.

The filing is what makes the work official. Waiting until it “feels real” is usually just delay.

Dutch Address

Choose an appropriate company address in the Netherlands for registration and correspondence. Having your foreign residential address will not be enough for this purpose.

Tax Duties

Get familiar with the taxes that may apply to your company, such as corporate tax and VAT. There are also taxes in your own country that may be applicable.

Registration Rules

Gather the information and documents that will be required for registering your company. Depending on your circumstances, you will also require UBO information and other relevant documentation.

Banking Setup

Consider the process by which your company is going to manage its money transactions. Bank transactions may not be very fast, especially if the owners of the business are not from the Netherlands.

Local Support

It may be wise to consult the services of accountants and lawyers who work in the Netherlands. This assistance may prove helpful in dealing with unknown requirements and regulations.

How to Register Your Dutch Business From Abroad

Going from an idea for a business to the actual registration requires some distinct steps. It would be helpful for foreign entrepreneurs to prepare each step beforehand.

Prepare Documents

Obtain identification documents, information about the company, ownership details and an appropriate Dutch address. It is useful to have them handy to minimise delays during the submission process.

Complete Registration

Register your company at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, also known as  “Kamer van Koophandel”. Supply all necessary information and undergo any required identity checks while registering.

Handle Taxes

Once you have registered for all the necessary licenses, check the tax obligations of your company and register for them. It is also important to set up bookkeeping so that you file and pay appropriately.

Managing Your Dutch Business Remotely

Operating a Dutch business from a foreign land becomes much easier if the systems take care of everything. A good system ensures that all tasks are well-organised, coordinated, and facilitated.

Digital Tools

Use online resources for handling communication, documentation, sales and daily tasks from any place. Shared technology ensures that information is available and keeps everyone in sync.

Local Experts

Engage the services of accountants, lawyers and consultants from the Netherlands whenever necessary. This would go a long way in helping to deal with legal complications.

Financial Systems

Maintain a proper system for accounting, payments, invoices and record-keeping. Process clarity will assist with handling international transactions and relationships with related enterprises as well.

When Do You Need to Be in the Netherlands?

It is not necessary that having a Dutch company automatically means taking up residence there. The need for presence will depend on your position, business practices and objectives.

Daily Work

You will have to be physically present in the Netherlands when your job involves frequent hands-on tasks. Managing physical establishments or dealing with locals can entail this need.

Local Hiring

Working closely with a developing Dutch team will become easier once you are closer. Frequent physical presence will enable better training, communication and business-related decision-making.

Immigration Rules

In case you intend to reside and work in the Netherlands, find out more about the relevant immigration rules before relocation. Having company ownership is not enough to be allowed to work.

Conclusion

A foreign entrepreneur can successfully establish a Dutch company provided he or she is properly prepared for that. It is important to know how to register a business, manage it remotely, pay taxes and meet immigration requirements.