Having a well thought out infrastructure in place will give your foundation a solid first layer you can continue to build on. But where do you start?
Today we talk about 4 sublayers that make up an effective infrastructure, how to get started creating it for your business, and how to ensure it will support your business now, and as you grow.
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Episode Transcript
Welcome back I’m Traci Simkins and you’re listening to Refined By Divorce, the podcast for women like you who want to rebuild a thriving life following divorce.
I teach you how to start a service-based business that will support you and your family financially, give you the flexibility you need to set your own schedule, and the independence to live the life you choose. Being a small business owner is hard work, but I truly believe every wife and mother already has the skills and experience needed for success, I just give you the tools to make it happen.
Every episode we start with a short story of hope and inspiration of the Refined Rebels who came before us and paved the way.
Refined Rebel - Yosano Akiko
Today’s rebel was born into a successful merchant family on December 7, 1878, near Osaka, Japan. She was bright and spent her childhood reading works from her father’s expansive library. She was responsible for running the family business at 11 years old, which produced and sold yokan, a red bean paste confection.
Growing up in the late Meiji era in Japan, Yosano Akiko was not allowed to interact with the opposite sex, which she believes attributed to her latent sexuality. She was not allowed to leave her home unaccompanied by an adult and claims she can count on one hand the number of times she was in anyone else’s home. Her childhood was extremely sheltered and restricted, which paved the way for her creativity to bloom.
In 1900 she joined the Shin Shisha (New Poetry Society) and began to contribute to the magazine Myōjō, or Bright Star, which she had been subscribed to for years.
At 24, she married writer and editor Yosano Tekkan after moving to Tokyo in 1901. Tekkan was a central figure in the Japanese Romantic movement and the founder of the New Poetry Society.
Yosano published her first volume of poetry, Midaregami, which was a kind of diary of her life during her courtship with Tekkan. Each poem presented a vivid image of a lively, free woman in an effort to depict her own sexual awakening.
Despite its critics, it was widely read and became a beacon for the free-thinkers of her time. Yosano created a name for herself and set the tone for modern feminist voices in Japan. Societal roles for Japanese women focused on them being gentle and modest, but she challenged this concept and revolutionized the way women were perceived.
Yosano was also a prominent pacifist, an advocate for women, and she started an all girl’s school. Her anti-war protests started to gain traction when she wrote Thou Shalt Not Die (Kimi Shini tamou koto nakare) during the Russo-Japanese War. The poem was addressed to her brother and it was highly controversial. She also frequently wrote for Seito, an all-woman literary magazine where she challenges the perceived concepts of motherhood, financial independence, and social responsibility.
Yosano’s literary masterpieces still hold a cultural impact in Japan, and serve as a source of inspiration for women today.
You can read more about Yosano Akiko and the other Refined Rebels on the website refinedbydivorce.com/refinedrebels, all one word.
Infrastructure
During her life, Yosano accomplished so much. She was believed to have written somewhere between 20 and 50 thousand poems, she started an all-girl’s school and had 13 children, 11 of whom made it to adulthood.
Growing up I thought women could be only one thing, a mother. Being a Mother is by far the most important role of my life. My children are the most precious part of my life and they will always take priority over everything else. But 2 of them are already adults and living on their own. With the average life span somewhere around 80 years long, we have the opportunity to hold many roles throughout our lives, and having a purpose greater than ourselves can bring us joy and a sense of accomplishment. For me, helping women to rebuild their lives following divorce is what lights me up.
Last week I talked about the foundations of a service-based business and how I split them into 4 parts, the infrastructure, your service, resources and customers.
I see the infrastructure as the first layer of a solid foundation, and if it’s built with the end in mind, it will serve you better. This doesn’t mean it won’t change over time, but doing a bit of work upfront will save you time and money in the long run, among other things.
In the business world, infrastructure typically refers to the physical facilities and operating system, but I see it as more than that.
I like to break it down into 4 sublayers.
- Sublayer 1 – Core Values, Mission and Vision
- Layer 2 – Legal Structure
- Layer 3 – Physical Structure
- Layer 4 – Operating System
Sublayer 1 – Core Values, Mission & Vision
An infrastructure gives you a model and a formula that makes each time you do something easier than the time before and it helps provide consistency. Using repeatable routines that are well documented will save you time, money and effort. But all of these will be more effective if they’re built on your company values and with your vision and mission in mind.
As a parent, you’ve likely set up systems and methods to successfully raise your children and manage your house. Schedules, rules, expectations and consequences that are based on your values are more solid, as opposed to an arbitrary set of rules and systems.
So the first sublayer is made up of your Core values. The set of principles and fundamental beliefs that will guide you.
What do you want your company to stand for? What is important to you? And when working with someone on their Core Values I recommend starting with 10-15 values and slowly narrowing it down to around 5. Writing them out in a short sentence is effective and helps clarify what you stand for, how you operate, make decisions and handle challenges. If you decide to expand and grow your company, these will be the foundation of your culture, so put in some time thinking on it.
There’s a company called ZocDoc and they match up patients with providers, and their Core Values are as follows:
- Patients first
- Speak up
- Own it
- Us before me
- Work hard
- Make work fun
Those are so simple. There are 6 of them, I usually recommend no more than 5, but 6 is fine. But once you have these established, they really kind of help shape how you operate your vision as a whole. Once you have your values established, you want to look towards writing your mission and vision statements.
You know I used to always get those mixed up, or used to, until I finally had it solidified in my head this way, the mission is what you are doing today, you’re on a mission, and your vision is what you want to achieve in the future, so it’s what you see up ahead of you.
After years of feeding local Atlantans in need from her own kitchen, and out of the goodness of her own heart, and with their own money, Jasmine Crowe-Houston founded Goodr in 2017. The idea was born from the notion that if on demand drivers can be used to deliver food orders from restaurants we can use similar technology and logistics to repurpose edible surplus food today.
Today Goodr has grown into a full-scale waste management and hunger relief company that has provided food to millions of people across the United States and redirected millions of pounds of waste away from landfills. It’s just, I mean it’s just amazing what she’s done.
Her Mission Statement is To cultivate resources for a community of dedicated partners committed to eliminating food waste for the greater good
And her Vision Statement is to Build a strong community of companies and non-profit organizations working together to end world hunger.
I love that vision, I mean, she’s not envisioning the end of world hunger, she’s envisioning the building of a strong community of companies and nonprofit organizations who are working together to end world hunger. It’s realistic and at the same time a stretch goal for sure.
If you can take your core values and what it is that you are going to sell or do, and it doesn’t have to have, you know, it doesn’t have to have a huge mission like Goodr has, but whatever you decide you’re going to do, if you can really focus on and lay that initial what I call the sublayer, that very first layer of the foundation of your business. When you base things on values and structure, you’re in a better place and you’re going to be more successful.
Sublayer 2 – Legal Structure
As a small business owner, the options I typically recommend the most are sole proprietor and LLC, a one member LLC. We’ll be going into detail on these on a future podcast, but I will link to some resources that will provide you with some information to help you decide which one might be right for you. Either way you’ll need to ensure you have the correct licenses and registrations for your specific state. And they all vary, every state is different.
If you’ve set up an LLC, you will need to get a federal tax ID. If you’re a sole proprietor, you can just use your social security number and you will be able to file your federal taxes on your personal income tax return, with a schedule. However, I always recommend getting one to make opening a business bank account easier.
The other thing about it is, you know it’s always best to get a professional attorney, accountant, or tax specialist to help you when you’re setting up a new business, but it’s not necessary if you put in the time and effort you can find all of the answers yourself.
I try to give you as much information as I have and that I can find, but for each state it’s different and they’re always changing, so that’s why I suggest, if you can, get the advice of a professional attorney. Or you can do something like LegalZoom, they will help get it set up correctly, but for our purposes, this type of a business set up is usually pretty simple.
If you’re a sole proprietor, you will register the name, you will get a federal tax ID, you don’t have to but I recommend you do, and you will get whatever licenses that you need, depending on the type of business and what your state requires. But once you get all of that set up, it’s pretty simple.
For an LLC, I usually recommend choosing a name, and the name of the LLC doesn’t have to be the name of the business, it can but it doesn’t have to be. So for example, my company is called Refine Her, LLC, but I do business as, so it’s called a DBA, doing business as Refined By Divorce and then I also have another business on another side.
Starting a business is something I help women do in a one on one DONE WITH YOU program, but I can’t possibly help as many of you as I want to, and it’s not something that is in everyone’s price range. So, I’m currently working on developing an online course that I will be launching on April 3rd. It’s a “Done By You” Program, available at a fraction of the cost. It will be a combination of videos and a workbook, that will be a step by step guide and will walk you through this process. It’ll be a lot more in depth than what I can offer in this podcast, because it will be a 6-week program.
If there is a demand, I’m also looking at doing a “Done in a Group” Program, which would be a hybrid of the “Done With You” and “Done By You” options. So I want to hear from you and let me know if you’re interested in either one of those. Like I said, I’m still developing these and they’re in the works, and my hope is to be able to help more women at a price point that works for you, but also helps me run my business the way that I need to and support my family, so back to it.
Sublayer 3 – Physical Setup
This can be everything from a laptop you work on while sitting in a closet to a fully furnished office in a building. Whatever you need to physically run your business is considered part of the physical setup. Since I teach service-based businesses, the setup is much less complicated and you don’t need to worry about storage for product or a storefront. You know all of those extra things you would have if you had a physical product.
Speaking of storage, you’ll also need to figure out how you’ll store your paperwork and digital files. Once again, as a mom, you likely have a filing system in place for your own home, your bills, medical, school and so much more. I cannot believe the amount of paperwork that we have to dig through! I mean these poor trees, just make sure you’re recycling! I mean I’m all for getting rid of as much paper as possible by scanning and recycling, but per the IRS, you do need to keep certain documents when you’re running a business. You want to keep all of your original licensing documents, you definitely want to keep your receipts, anything that you are going to use for your taxes. So for those things, I would just get a small filing cabinet, you definitely want one that locks, where you can save the originals. But I also recommend scanning and keeping a digital copy as well, so they’re easily accessible and you can search them, it’s just a much easier way to have access to your information and your documents,
When you sign up for a gmail account for your business, you can do a free option and you’ll have a gmail.com address. You can also do, for pretty cheap per month, you can have your own domain. So it would be you know, like for me, I do traci@refine-her.com. It’s a small amount that you’ll pay, but either way, whether you do the free or the low cost option, it’ll give you access to Google Sheets and Google Drive where you can store files and you can set up a filing system. You know a filing structure could be its own entire podcast! Maybe down the road, but for now try to set it up to the best system that has worked for you to keep yourself organized. As you grow you may need to adjust, but having a solid filing system in place up front is going to save you time and effort on the back end.
Sublayer 4 – Operating System
These are the policies, methods and processes you follow. You’ve already created structure in your home – you have a set of family rules, you have chore charts, you’ve made babysitter checklists, you’ve done homework plans and set up daily schedules. Setting up your business is no different. Don’t let the fancy business terminology throw you, lean into your instincts as a mom and into how you run your household, and you will be successful.
Just imagine the simple chore chart. You know the kind you first made when your kids were small? I’ve made several variations over the years, but they all have a few key pieces of information in common. They list out the chores, who does what, when it’s due, and what the reward or consequences are. Or imagine the checklist you create for your kids when you’re teaching them how to clean, where you detail each step and add a checkmark next to it. This is the same process you’ll go through as you create what we call Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs.
For repeatable tasks, the things you’ll be doing on a day to day business like checking email, writing a blog post, posting on social media, taking and making calls and the entire process of delivering your service, you want to document as you go, in what we call Process Documentation. It will help you create a Step by Step guide that can be used in the future to train, outsource, and work on the speed of your process, and eliminate unnecessary steps.
What questions do you need to ask and answer in order to come up with all of these things? So you want to know, just like you would with a chore chart:
What needs to be done?
How is it done?
Who’s supposed to do it?
What is the Due Date?
What happens if it’s not done on time?
What’s the contingency plan?
All of those things.
For the service that you will be offering, and like I said we’ll be going deeper into into this in the next few episodes, but you’ll want to create a Statement of Work which outlines what your customers can expect from you, what you expect from them, the objectives that will be met, the cost, etc.
Next Steps
Getting all of these things in place before you open your business will help you build that solid first layer to the foundation.
Next week we’re going to be talking about your offering, your service, what you choose to do, and how you can fully develop that so that your business will be successful.
The following week we will be talking about Customers, and then the next one will be Resources.
Like I said, just one little tiny piece of this can be an entire podcast on its own. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of it and you want to look into a more Step by Step program, I will be launching a new one April 3rd, so you’ll want to go to the website refinedbydivorce.com/services and I will have listed the upcoming information on those programs, and the price points, and all of that.
Please reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns, I am so happy you’re here.
Have a wonderful week,
Love In, Peace Out.
