A good web presence should handle most of it - oh, and the following:
1) Need a federal tax id # (
easy enough)
2) Someone (or a group of people) to "own" the company. I'm an employee, not an owner. I suck at ownership.
3) IATA (International Air Transportation Association) membership ID (
details here)
4) CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association) membership ID (
details here)
5) some sort of web presence with a form generating system that will dump the user's info to a database to
enable profiling of clients and to enable multiple associates (fancy, schmancy) to handle repeat clients if the original associate is unavailable.
6) As I'm already part of a web-based business (current job #3 for me), defining roles is key. We'd need someone to operate as the "heavy" some sort of head management role to handle specific client questions. We'd also need an expediter who would transfer specific quote requests as they come in to different associates. In our business we have 4 designers who take jobs in a round-robin process. Whatever comes in goes first to our manager who delegates the job to us after an initial meeting, then we handle the client contact and manage through to completion. We have a google spreadsheet that tracks all current jobs and maintains all past jobs incase something comes up and we need to support one of those clients. There would also need to be one very trusted person to handle the books (and distribution of commission) or a couple to handle this role.
You know, if people were serious about this.