A business should be built on a solid foundation, and there are several parts of a business that make up the building blocks. Today I talk high-level and give you an overview of the 4 basic parts of a service-based business.
Next week we’ll start breaking them down into more detail, so you can start to build your solid foundation!
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Episode Transcript
Welcome back my friends, this is Traci Simkins and you’re listening to Refined By Divorce. We’re going to continue talking about service based businesses, but before we get there, I want to tell you about Constance Kopp.
Refined Rebel - Constance Kopp
She was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1875. She was taller than most men, spoke two languages and was always craving adventure.
She and her two sisters Norma and Fleurette, were known as the Kopp Sisters, and they lived in a secluded farmhouse, which was quite unusual for the time. In July of 1914, their family buggy was struck by a vehicle driven by Henry Kaufman. He was a local industrialist who owned a silk dyeing plant in Paterson, NJ.
Constance requested payment for the damages, but Kaufman never answered. After many attempts went unheard, Constance sued and was rewarded a $50 judgment.
Soon after filing the suit, Constance and her sisters started receiving threatening letters signed by “the friends of HK.” I can’t even imagine how scary that would be. This happened so frequently and got so out of hand that at one point, their family farm was fired upon at the presumed request of Henry Kaufman.
Constance was upset and and because she was so head strong and independent, she just got tired of her family being terrorized, so she went to the sheriff’s department for help, where she met Sheriff Robert Heath. Robert helped the sisters arm themselves and taught them how to use guns for protection. Ultimately, Henry Kaufman’s men come back around and it was then that Constance scared them off.
She was later asked to lure Henry and his accomplices into open spaces for a sting operation. Although Henry never showed, the coward, Sheriff Heath was so impressed by her tenacity that he decided he would help the Kopp sisters petition for a court date against Henry.
The court date came around and Henry wass fined $1000 for the trouble he has caused, not enough in my opinion, but at least she got something. Constance is famed for her determination to balance the scales of justice, and the Kopp sisters become known as women to respect.
Constance continued to work with Sheriff Robert Heath. He was so impressed by her work ethic that he made her his undersheriff, making her the first female undersheriff in the United States. She proved herself worthy of the title but lost her job two years later when Sheriff Heath was not re-elected.
The Kopp Sisters would have been lost to history except that Amy Stewart dug up their story and wrote a New York Times bestselling book about Constance’s life called Girl Waiting with Gun. Get that book and read it. You can read much more about her and the other Refined Rebels on the website.
The Parts of A Business
Constance once said:
“Some women prefer to stay at home and take care of the house. Let them. Others want something to do that will take them out among people and affairs. A woman should have the right to perform any sort of work she wants to do.”
I couldn’t agree more. Everyone should have the option to whatever work they want to do, whether it’s in the home, out of the home or both. And I think that’s especially true with starting a business, and that’s why I do what I do.
Last week I talked about choosing the right type of service business. So this week I want to talk about the building blocks of a successful business. These are the key elements that work together to create a strong foundation for growth and sustainability.
There are many different theories and strategies put out by various experts, some of them are quite detailed and complex. But for our purposes, I see a lot of wisdom and beauty in simplicity.
When you are starting a business and when you are doing the service or are the only employee, it can be a little more simple.
So what I like to do is envision the business as having 4 main parts to it.
- Infrastructure
- Your Service
- Resources
- Customers
All 4 of the parts are equally important and each part has a specific role to play and will require different levels of time and effort to develop. Within each part there are many different sections, and they all work in harmony together.
If each part is fully developed, you will have a solid foundation set for your business to run on, and you’ll have all the information you need, should you want to, to put together a solid business plan, especially if you want to solicit funding or apply for a loan, or just have more clarity for yourself. But I don’t think you need, for this type of business, I don’t think you need a 30 page business plan, or even a 10 page business plan. I think a one pager is enough, just because of the simplicity of what I teach. But I would never discourage anyone from creating a detailed business plan, if that is what works best for them. For what I teach, it’s usually more simplified and a 1-3 page business plan is sufficient.
So let’s go through each of these four parts of the business and start to figure out what the building blocks of successful business are.
1. The Infrastructure
So in the beginning, this is where you will probably spend a good deal of time, because you are developing your mission and vision statements, you’ll be developing your core values along with action statements. And although they take time, they will save you so much time on the back end. If you go into a new business with the clarity that doing all of that back end work provides, it’s going to guide you in the right direction, it’s going to save you time when it comes to making decisions. You know it’s like with your children, when you have set rules and consequences, and everything that has been set up beforehand, it runs a lot smoother. These are the types of things that I think make women and mothers especially, so well set up to start a business. It’s because we’ve had to construct these processes and the structure that is needed to run home and be a caretaker. And I’m not saying that if you’re a father that you don’t do these things, what I’m talking about is a primary caregiver.
So anyways, the infrastructure, the set up of it, you’re going to want to figure out the day-to-day operations, and what the finances are going to look like. And then there’s the difference between, a lot of this is the internal focus. This is how you run the business internally, not outward facing towards the client. This is “how do you as a business owner operate your business” and if you are going to be a solopreneur or a sole proprietor or even eventually make an LLC, where you are a one person LLC, and that’s when you incorporate, and we’ll talk about all of those in the future. Even if it’s just you, it does make sense to sit down and figure out what your values are, and especially getting it out beforehand, before you start to grow, because if you do have plans to hire any employees or get bigger than you currently are, there a lot of things that you’re going to have to work out, and it makes so much more sense to do it on the front.
There is a book that I would highly recommend, and it’s called Built to Sell, and I’m blanking on his name, but I will put it in the show notes. But the concept is if you’re going to build a business you want to build it in a way that you can sell it at any time. And it just depends on what your goals are, but if that’s something that you’re considering, I would recommend reading that book, because it really talks about how to set it up so that you are in a good position to sell. And the reason why I bring that up, you know when you’re figuring out all the internal processes that you’re going to set up, how you interact with other employees, what your day to day looks like, your operations, and all of that, it’s a good idea to have that in mind as you’re setting it up.
The other thing is when you’re going to hire someone on, if you have all of your strategies and all of your day-to-day operations in place, it becomes so much simpler, and if you have it written, it’s even more simple, because it’s right there. And you can day one, hand them all of the information and it’s right there for them to access and you can do a lot less hands-on training, which as a business owner, when you get to the point where you are going to hire somebody, it’s because you’re busy, and so then if you add on having to train someone, and I’m not saying you’re not going to do any training cause you will, you will definitely do a lot of training, but if you can hand a new employee a booklet or a PDF of what your policies are, what your values are, all of those things, if you have that set up in advance, you’re going to be so much better off, it will free up your time for later, so you really want to spend the time going through and figuring out what the infrastructure of your business looks like, so that’s number one. Okay so,
2. Your Service
This is what you sell or what you’re offering.
For our purposes, this is the Service that you are selling. Now you might be selling a service like, for example, if you are going to do a laundry service where you are going to pick up people’s laundry and you deliver it, you are not selling laundry services. You’re not selling laundry services, you are selling convenience, you are selling time, you are making their life easier. So you really want to figure out what it is you are selling, what sets you apart from the competition, it’s called a strong value proposition. What makes you unique, why are you the best choice? And going through the exercise of coming up with what problem are you solving, it’s what’s going to uncover your special sauce, that little bit of extra oomph, that little bit of extra uniqueness that you offer, that the competition doesn’t. What makes your laundry pick up and delivery service the best? And it could be, it could be anything. It could be that you offer a higher level of service, it could be that you do pickups earlier or later than the competition. There’s just so many things that you could do to set yourself apart, but the service that you’re offering, always try to think of it as “What problem am I solving?”
3. Resources
You want to spend some time in the beginning as you’re preparing, you need to know what are the things, what are the outside things, that you need, to be able to sell your service.
So is it a computer, is it some type of software, is it money? If you’re doing piano lessons, it’s a piano, it’s sheet music. Anything and everything you would need to run your service. Is it a car, is it gas, is it insurance?
All of those outside resources that you need to have set up in a way that you can access them as they’re needed. I mean there’s so many different things.
4. The Customer
This is where your marketing, your branding, anything that has to do with the customer and how you acquire them as a client, this is what you’re going to set up in this part of the business. And like I said, each one of these sections could be an entire podcast series, so we will be going over a lot of this.
So I think that’s a good place to stop for today, it’s a lot of information, and we’re going to go into each section in depth, but if you can focus on these 4 different areas as you build your business, you’re going to build a business that is solid, that is successful, that is profitable, and that you can keep for the long term.
Thank you so much for joining me this week! Follow me on LinkedIn I’m @tracisimkins, and check the show notes for other resources and places to go, and check out the website, refinedbydivorce.com.
I hope you have a wonderful week.
Love in, Peace Out.
Bye.
