One of the biggest obstacles to setting up a small business in Bermuda is the cost, according to one entrepreneur.

“It is insane,” said teacher Margot Shane, founder of WordCraft Tutorial Service. “For incorporating as a company limited by guarantee, I paid $3,000 to lawyers. Lawyers must file the forms and relevant documents with the Registrar of Companies. The lawyers who did that for me were kind and offered me a reduction in fees because I was incorporating for non-profit purposes.”

She said that in Britain the same procedure costs about £50 ($63.98) and can be done online. The Royal Gazette found one British website, Your Company Formations, that offered to do it in England for £12.48 ($15.97).

“When you are just starting out, $3,000 can be a lot of money,” Ms Shane said. “You want to get some clients; see if it works and then make an investment.”

Laura Lyons, a manager at business accelerator Ignite, agreed that the cost is often high for small and early-stage businesses.

“Incorporating provides a legal separation of the personal and business assets,” she said. “In short, it offers security.”

Ms Lyons said that as a result of the high cost many early-stage businesses in Bermuda initially begin as sole proprietors.

Wordcraft is Ms Shane’s new business founded last month under her three-year-old company, SkillCraft.

It helps 11 to 18-year-olds improve their reading and writing skills. She also tackles grammar, sentence structure, study skills and college essay writing.

WordCraft was inspired by her early days training as a teacher during the pandemic.

“I was teaching 13 and 14-year-olds in California, and at the same time running SkillCraft Youth Internship Programme,” she said. “That trains 16 to 18-year-olds in Bermuda in social media marketing.”

Many of the young people she worked with, in both countries, had reading deficits.

“The majority of my students were reading three grades below where they should have been,” she said. “A 15-year-old in Bermuda came to me reading at the level of a nine-year-old.”

She attributed some of these problems to a move away from phonics-based reading instruction in many schools. She also thought the Covid lockdowns that forced students into online learning were contributing factors.

“Children were on screens all day sitting on their beds,” she said. “They were reading to some extent, paragraphs or extracts, but they were not being asked deep questions after reading a book.”

She worried that these reading deficits would make young people less employable in the future.

“If you can’t read at a professional level, it is hard to get even a basic job,” she said. “It limits you so much.”

She is now getting her qualifications in Orton Gillingham, a reading instruction approach that explicitly teaches the connections between letters and sounds. It is often used to help children with language-based learning disorders such as dyslexia.

Eleven to 18-year-olds are WordCraft’s target demographic, but most of the inquiries she is receiving are for middle schoolers.

“That seems to be the age at which most things are showing up and perhaps there is not enough support in place,” she said.

She starts out with a free consultation.

“I don’t want to assume that I’m the right fit for every child,” she said. “The ones who have been coming in for reading, I normally just do a phonics assessment, to check if that is where their struggle is.”

WordCraft operates out of the Clarendon Wallace office at 5 Reid Street in Hamilton, but Ms Shane is also willing to work in schools.