Much like everything else that needs doing when starting up, it is the most important thing to do. Books about building a new business are full of suggestions about the most important thing to do. I suppose listing something and just saying it’s a helpful tool for getting the business on track is just not strong enough for the self-help book market.

I first read about assigning roles in The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. It seemed to make sense. It’s a really good way to get a quick understanding of all aspects of the business.

We sat down and tried to list all the departments that a business has: HR, Accounts; Sales; Legal; Project management; etcetera. Then we started thinking about all the other tasks that don’t have a “department” as such: copy editing; version control; domain name renewals; social networking; anything else we could think of.

There are only two of us and it can feel silly to assign roles when there are only two people in a brand new business. The thing is, there won’t always be only two of us. We plan to grow quickly and well. The only way to do that is make sure we have all the roles in the business outlined so that a new employee can take over some of those roles.

The thing is, we’re both going to be working on every part of the business. So what we did, instead of saying “I’ll do this and you do that”, is to just split roles into who’s taking the lead on each.

That way there’s no demarkation issue on roles. We don’t step on each other’s toes or cut each other’s lunch. A partnership is still a partnership. We are both involved in every part of the business but now, when a process falls over, we can see whose responsibility it was. We can look at why it wasn’t taken care of.

And that is a really important part of running a business.

Deciding to start Soupgiant was a little more drawn out but resulted from a similarly simple conversation — actually two simple conversations.

The first conversation was a few years ago when we both found ourselves out of work at the same time — the company we were both working at was going into a hiatus for a short period due to circumstances it’s not my place to go into here.

The second conversation was a couple of months ago in Josh’s lounge room. It was, in part, a wistful ‘how ’bout/what if’ conversation. We spoke about the types of clients we’d like to go after, the type of work we’d like to do, and, the type of standards (high) we’d like to keep.

In the cold light of dawn, it stuck in both our minds, followed by the realisation that this was exactly what we should do. Within the week we were going over plans in a less wistful, much more serious manner. Talking about potential types of clients, we were struck that these sites were big, complicated sites.

Something very important had changed since the first conversation a number of years ago: at that time we’d worked on large sites for a single company, since then we’d both worked on exactly the kind of big sites we were talking about.

A short time later, we combined the word ‘soup’ with ‘giant’ and an agency was born.

Once we decided to go into business together, there was one definite first thing we needed to: Come up with a name.

We riffed back and forth with words and word combinations we liked. As soon as we had one we agreed on, we did the following:

This whole process took about 20 minutes. We got it done and out of the way so we could concentrate on other things.

There are lots of different needs vying for your attention in the first few weeks of starting a business. Find a business name that doesn’t make you wince when you first hear it. Find something you can have fun or sound important with, but don’t stress about it.

The first time someone hears the name of your business, it’s not going to mean anything to them anyway. What matters is that you build a reputation on that name.

Once you have a name you can start with business cards, websites, twitter accounts, t-shirts, and letterhead. You can get a bank account, ABN, TFN, registration, insurance, and all those boring things you have to do before you can conquer the world.