Anna: Day-zero sounds dramatic, but it's literally the first five business days.
Greg: Exactly—incorporation, domains, devices and security all race to go live together.
Anna: Miss a step and you're chasing paperwork while customers wait.
Greg: So we map the whole week before the first hire even signs their contract.
Anna: Read day zero from left to right. Legal registration and shared control of the domain come first because identity and email depend on them.
Greg: Next, establish the identity provider and roster. That gives you controlled access to email, chat, documents and shared workspaces instead of a collection of founders’ personal accounts.
Anna: Enrol devices and configure backups before customer work begins, then name the people who own support and escalation.
Greg: Every stage needs proof: registrations, access reports, shared templates, an asset list, a restore test and a decision trail. In the first five business days, that evidence is what makes the plan usable by an MSP, investor or auditor.
Anna: We start with the boring stuff: entity registration and bank accounts.
Greg: Boring until a contractor asks for payment and you realise payroll IDs aren't ready.
Greg: Or until a contractor sends an invoice and you discover "Awesome Startup LLC" was never actually registered.
Anna: Nothing kills the entrepreneur vibe faster than admitting you're technically a sole proprietorship.
Anna: Or a founder leaves and there was never a signed agreement.
Greg: That's why day-zero includes a data room folder for all those artefacts.
Anna: Domains feel simple—just buy the .com and you're done, right?
Greg: Until someone forgets the .co or country code and a squatter grabs it.
Anna: Or when the CEO's ex-partner controls the domain and decides to get creative during the breakup.
Greg: That's why we register defensives—and use business email, not the founder's hotmail-from-college account.
Anna: Or the registrar is tied to a personal Gmail account you can't access during travel.
Greg: Shared ops email, templated DNS records and uptime monitoring keep launches from face-planting.
Anna: Choosing Google Workspace versus Microsoft 365 still sparks debates.
Greg: The real question is which ecosystem your customers expect and what integrates with your stack.
Anna: Either way, MFA on admin roles and shared mailboxes can't wait a month.
Greg: And even if HR is a spreadsheet, sync it so joiners and leavers stay in lockstep.
Anna: Where do we keep the policies and meeting notes so they don't vanish in chat history?
Greg: Spin up a knowledge base on day one, even if it's a single-page Notion workspace.
Anna: And pre-build channels for incidents, board updates and customer escalations.
Greg: Templates save teams from reinventing emails at 2 a.m. when something breaks.
Anna: Hardware always turns up late unless you plan buffers.
Greg: Exactly—keep a few imaged laptops ready with asset tags and shipping labels.
Anna: And there's always one founder who insists on a $4,000 gaming laptop "for better performance."
Greg: Which promptly gets coffee spilled on it during the first investor meeting.
Anna: And don't forget travel kits for sales or fundraising trips.
Greg: Record serials and warranties so replacements aren't a scavenger hunt.
Anna: Security feels like overkill before the first customer signs.
Greg: Yet that's when attackers love to strike—defaults are still wide open.
Anna: So we turn on password managers, logging and break-glass accounts immediately.
Greg: And make sure founders know who to call—lawyers, insurers, incident responders—if something goes sideways.
Anna: Rough day-zero budget. Two to five hundred dollars a month covers the productivity suite licences, domain registration and DNS hosting.
Greg: Then allow two to three weeks for hardware, because procurement, imaging and shipping delays are not optional extras. They always happen.
Anna: Set aside one to three thousand for incorporation legal fees and trademark searches.
Greg: And a small thing that saves a surprising amount of time: pre-approve the founder credit cards, so vendor sign-ups don't stall at a payment screen at nine at night.
Anna: Most day-zero delays are administrative, not technical.
Anna: Check whether your early contracts already commit you to specific data locations or certifications. Founders sign those clauses more often than they remember signing them.
Greg: Then write down which service stores data in which region. Slack in the US, email in the EU, whatever the mix is.
Anna: That document takes twenty minutes now and answers a question that would otherwise take a week during diligence.
Greg: Draft a lightweight privacy policy before you collect any customer information, not after.
Anna: And flag which rules genuinely apply, GDPR, CCPA, or something sector-specific, because those constrain your vendor shortlist and your architecture.
Anna: Checklists are easy to nod along to and easy to skip. Stories tend to stick better.
Greg: So before we get to the first-week runbook, here's a failure that will feel uncomfortably plausible if you have ever set up a company yourself.
Anna: It starts with a domain registered under a personal email address, and a CEO teaching herself DNS at one in the morning.
Greg: Nothing malicious, nothing exotic. Just one person with production access and no second pair of eyes.
Anna: Remind me about Sarah's DNS incident—you keep telling teams that story.
Greg: She registered the domain with her personal email, deleted a wildcard record at 1 a.m. and the demo site vanished for six hours.
Anna: Investors called before breakfast and the sales team had to reschedule every meeting.
Greg: Now she keeps registrar access in a shared vault with change windows, even with ten employees.
Anna: How do we keep momentum once the checklist starts?
Greg: Daily stand-ups, a Kanban board and a link to evidence for every completed task.
Anna: Plus async walkthrough videos so the next hire isn't blocked waiting for a founder.
Greg: And note which lawyers, accountants or MSPs you escalate to if things stall.
Anna: So the goal is confidence that core services survive founder vacations and audits.
Greg: Exactly—treat day-zero as a living runbook, not a one-off launch party.
Anna: When everything's documented, due diligence calls become show-and-tell.
Greg: And the team can focus on customers instead of chasing missing DNS logins.