By 
Starting a Dutch business can be challenging. Most often your savings are limited or you do not wish to put all your savings at stake. Banks are not very keen on lending to small sized companies. Borrowing from friends and family brings the risk of social awkwardness and pressure on personal relationships as a result of failing to set up clear and defined terms for repayment or, in the worst case, a bankruptcy of your business.
Most starters are forced to use any opportunity to lower their expenses. Fortunately, there are many opportunities to start your business at low cost. Here below is described how the Dutch do it.
Use a shared office
In the Netherlands the term virtual office is more or less interchangeable for coworking space or shared office. This because the trade register and tax authorities have minimal requirements for allowing an address to be used as a registered address. A shared office offers a coworking office space with shared facilities such as internet, printers and coffee machines, in combination with a physical address for registration with the local authorities and option to part-time rent meeting rooms. Mostly the lease period of a shared office is short-term, three to twelve months.
The use of a shared office at a prime location is cheaper than the rent of an independent office. In particular if you also take into account costs of furniture, internet connection and hiring staff to man your reception.
For starting companies the future can be very unpredictable. You wish to be able to move to a smaller office or even terminate your rent at any moment. The reason for this need for flexibility can be diverse: your company could not make the expected turnover or you are not as much at the office as you initially expected.
In case your business is a large success, you want to be able to expand your office space step by step without complex and expensive relocations. At shared offices, there are typically no long-term leases. For conventional offices leases in the Netherlands can be running up to five years and a rent deposit of up to three months is common. Next thereto you wish an expansion of your team count by four people in a month to be supported. Just as well as the option to move over to an independent office.
Another befenit of a shared office is that it will give you the opportunity to get into contact with other starters with valuable knowledge of finding affordable advisors, tips to sell your product and advice on finding staff.
Do it yourself and do it smart
Simple things can bring down your business expenses drastically. An extended first financial year for your business will save you the costs of preparing one financial report and corporate income tax filing.
It is not necessary to start with an extensive support contract from an IT company. Internet companies such as Strato or GoDaddy offer alternatives which allow you to launch your website yourself and send emails from corporate email address within several hours. A website is important as you need to be present on the web to enable clients to find your new business. Absence from the internet will raise questions with your potential clients and will lower your business’ reputation.
Bookkeeping is for most companies a straightforward and easy exercise. If you do the bookings and filing of the underlying invoices yourself using free software application available online, your bookkeeper in the Netherlands can prepare for a limited amount the VAT filings and annual report of your business.
Think twice before you sign any services agreements that brings unnecessary costs. Most often it will take only a small amount of time before your business will start to create turnover and you will be able to allow yourself some luxury again.
