Freelance audio engineer: Running a freelance business

When I decided to start my own company, I did it because I realized that in Denver, I'm more than likely was not gonna get hired by someone as an employee. And even when I did, I knew I had to be freelance to market myself correctly. Becoming an LLC is really easy to actually do it. You pick a name, you make sure no one else has it, and then you pay your $50. Then the hard parts start coming in, and these are the parts that you don't realize when you say oh yay I'm gonna start my own company. You turn into your own accountant. You turn into your own schedule maker. You have to literally do everything yourself, and those are things that you don't get paid for. I can't tell you how many times I was inputting everything into the software that I use, and I did it wrong. And then I have to start from zero and redo every single thing. And the only way I know how to do this is by YouTubing a tutorial that I have to sit there and watch, looking up different feeds on the internet to figure out how to do this stuff. So it's time-consuming, and you don't get paid to do all of that accounting work. And then you more than likely have to pay someone, an accountant, to do your taxes at the end of the year because it gets to the point where even if you're super organized, you don't really wanna do it yourself because you wanna make sure that you get all of the money that you're supposed to. Another part of being your own company is that you don't get taxes taken out for you. So every time I make any money, I take 30% out of that and I just leave it for tax purposes. It's probably on the higher end. I'm not gonna have to pay 30%, but just in case when tax season hits, I don't wanna be in the negatives for that. And since I just started my company, I'm kind of in a 1/2 year that I started my company, so I'm excited to have all of this done and then realize how much I will have to pay for 1/2 a year going into the next year. Because I'll probably be making more money. I don't put anything on my company card unless it's a write-off. I just because I think it will be confusing later on, and I take pictures of everything. But that's stuff that like, it's funny that I dropped out of business school and then started my own business because some of that stuff probably would've helped me now. But I'm figuring it out slowly but surely. But that's a part of being a freelancer that people don't really understand at first. Another part of freelancing is insurance for my company. I don't have any employees, so I don't have to worry about putting people at risk basically. But for production, I'm bringing my own equipment out, and I really need to get insurance for that in case anything happens so I would be covered. Being a freelancer at a studio, the studio obviously has insurance for all of the equipment, and for live I'm a contracted employee. Sometimes in either way they have the equipment. I don't own live equipment, and so they are in charge of all of that stuff. But if I were to get that, and if I ever decided to start renting out my equipment, it's a whole different ball game, whole different way of doing your taxes. You have to charge sales tax if you rent out your equipment, and that's another thing I will just throw to an accountant instead of dealing with it. Because there's only so much that I wanna really learn about that because it's just so time-consuming.