Entrepreneur

Yes you should.

Definitely insurance. Heaven forbid you accidentally ruin something priceless you were not supposed to touch.

I have heard that an LLC might not mean much because the difference between you harming a client or your LLC harming them are pretty minimal if you are not hiring anyone or have no contractors. I am not a lawyer, but I would be interested to know how true it is.

My advice, do it right and build off of a solid foundation. Your start up costs are minimal the way it is.

If you do the paperwork yourself, LLCs can be ~$100 to form - not sure about Florida. But that depends on whether you're willing to be your own registered agent and expose your mailing address. If you need to pay someone as your registered agent, write your operating agreement, etc, that can be $500-$900 not including the insurance. You may also have minimum required taxes each year. BTW: don't trust those review sites that say agencies will form LLCs for you for $150ish, they're totally off.

LLCs are a great way to protect your personal assets, but they can be expensive to form *unless* you handle it all yourself.

Are you fully confident this business will work out? How much do you expect to make, and what's your risk tolerance with your initial clientele while you're just starting out? These are all important considerations.

Would definitely protect yourself with an LLC. Easy and quick to setup and can avoid a lot of trouble down the road.

No one every expects accidents to happen but at least you will be prepared.

You definitely need insurance regardless, but an LLC is completely unnecessary. It's just a bunch of extra expensive paperwork and tax filing that will not protect you in court from liability. The liability of the business would just be passed on to you. The reason being is that an attorney can easily prove that the business is not truly separate from you as the owner/operator.

If you are planning to hire employees immediately, it might be a good plan. But if not, I wouldn't bother.

Always get an LLC if you’re engaging in any business that someone could find a reason (even if fabricated) to sue.

I would setup an LLC so if anything happens, the LLC is the one that gets sued. If you don't have an LLC or something & you get sued, they can come after EVERYTHING you own.

If you don't mix the business with your personal stuff, an LLC will do what it is meant to do which is keep your personal assets safe.

I'm assuming you have no employees, because if you do, the answer is obvious.

So the question here is, will you have a brand for your business or will you use your name and face? If the former, do the LLC approach, if not then you may skip the LLC.

If you don't have a brand, and you still want an LLC for other reasaons, don't even sweat it, you can just go with a combination of Name, INITIALS, LOCATION, INDUSTRY and industry,"JD Miami Pressure Washing LLC", if you end up developing another differnt or shorter brand, or you want to pivot industries, you just do a dba or another LLC, no worries.

Another question is, who will your clients be, businesses or residential customers? If you plan on cleaning businesses, do the LLC, if not, you can skip the LLC.

Another question, do you plan to expand? Or is this just an experimental thing that you plan as you go? if you plan to expand, do the LLC, if not you may skip it.

Another question is, how neat are you or do you want to be with your finances? If you want to be neat, do the LLC and open a business bank account, if not you may skip it.

Another question is how do you want to take payments? If always cash, you may skip the LLC, if you want to take credit cards, do the LLC and open a merchant account with your bank to swipe cards.

Just in general there's so many advantages to having an LLC that you might as well just do it in 1 or 2 days and move on to the next thing, never get stuck on the first steps, blaze through them.

Why do you need insurance or an LLC?

Do you have any meaningful assets?

If you break something, pay to fix it.

In the beginning you are going to need to go door to door and get paid in cash, Venmo, Zelle, etc.

It's going to suck, but door knocking is the only way to get business in the beginning. You'll be paid immediately when the job is done and the transaction is over.

But, man...it sounds like you really need to go work for someone else first.

That is the best, and maybe only reason to be an employee; to be paid to learn.

Have your completion train you and pay for your equipment.

Learn the operations, how to deal with customers, and learn how your competitors do their marketing.

Don't start a business because you hate working for other people. Start a business because you KNOW you'll make money.

Once you establish the business, then the fun begins: you need to beat out all of your competitors.

Business is war and anybody who tells you differently is naive and is surviving from the scraps the top player doesn't want.

It's winner take most, even in pressure washing.

Go kill.

You only eat what you kill.

I would just form the LLC and take everything extra serious. There's a couple of free services that will even get you a Free Tax ID and Registered agent. The catch is upsells in future.