[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee, and in this episode, Moore and I will talk about what it's like to start a small business and include interesting information governance guidance along the way.
Did that summarize kind of what we were talking about in the preface here?
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I think so. Good morning, Lee and everybody.
But it's a little different, right? We haven't talked about us as a business as much before. Kind of sneaks in every now and then, but it hasn't been a focus. And before the end of the year, last year, you brought up the idea of doing a series of episodes and I said, great, your turn to do all the talking. So take it away.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: No, no, I set it up nicely for you.
Okay.
Yeah, we'll see how far this goes until Maura has to chime in. But, well, starting a business, what's that like and what was it like for us? Let's kind of, let's talk about starting a business. Let's start with the basics. What's your business about? Right. You have to discuss that. I don't know if there's any information governance related aspects into in that just yet, but do you have an idea? Do you have a need that the, that you can fulfill in the market or is there a need in the market that you can fulfill?
You have to identify this clear purpose for your business first. That's your first step. It's crucial understanding the problem that you're trying to solve and the value that you're trying to provide your customers. How does that as a start of a business idea, can you turn that into an information governance thing?
[00:02:15] Speaker B: I can. Because you need information to run your business. Regardless of what your business is, you probably are going to need information to run it. And the thing that just popped into my head because I can't help thinking about our clients all the time is we had, we had an interaction with a client. We ended up actually not getting to do the work for them because they're priorities changed. But it was a restaurant chain and one of the, one of the things that I thought going into the conversation with them, it would be kind of their most important piece of intellectual capital. The thing that we would definitely want to protect and keep track of, moving through, you know, as you. As they distributed it to all their different locations was their recipes. And it turned out for this particular restaurant there, they didn't write them down. They didn't write down the recipes, they wrote down the ingredients. And then they actually taught all the chefs, all the cooks how to make the recipes. They brought them to their headquarters. They had a massive test kitchen. Everybody went through the same training, and then in each location, the head chef would teach the line chefs and they would pass it on. And I was fascinated by that.
So even at the very beginning, thinking about, okay, it's, it's us, it's Trailblazer. We're the information governance consulting firm.
We have a lot of information about what we do. And that's the content side, right? The, the what, the. What are we trying to sell? Who are our clients going to be? How are we going to do this? Then you get to the nitty gritty kind of basic information that you need for any business.
How much money are you bringing in? How much money are you spending?
What are your tax responsibilities? Do you have income tax responsibilities? Yes. How do you do income taxes? It's different to do an income tax as a small business owner than it is to do it as an employee of a company.
If you have employees, that adds a whole new level of tax responsibility. And there's data behind all of that, or there should be data behind all of that. So even at the very beginning, when we were talking about setting. Well, not the very, very beginning, because just since we're, you know, talking about Trailblazer as the example here, I want you all to know that the very first week after we started working together, after I hired you at the big company we worked together at. Lee, is that when you first said to me, so when are we going to start our own company? Was it like one week? In one month?
[00:05:06] Speaker A: It was around there, yes.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: It certainly went on for a long time before I was, before I said.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: Yes, yes, it did take a while, like 10 years.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: But even so, the whole time that we were. That you were saying we should go out on our own, one of my first comments back to you always was, what would it, what, what do we, what would we need to take with us? How would we do this? Because our business idea was to do the thing we were doing for the big company, but for ourselves, which I think is how a lot of people get started. They're working with somebody, they're working for somebody and they're like, I'm making all this money for that guy. I want to make the money for me, which is a totally legitimate thing. And I think we felt that and, and definitely we felt the tired of having a boss feeling. I think that's another big thing that comes with running your own business is I don't want to work for anybody else.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think you're right. The information that, that's how you started this section with and I, it's. There's so many books out there, there's so much information out there on how to start a business, right? You, you, it could be too much. It could be information overload. And so people will tell you, you need a strategy. Of course you need a strategy. You need to plan for your exit right away, right? Which it is true, you do need to know if they're, what kind of company you're trying to create. But I think the important piece is you need to have a plan or you need to have a roadmap going forward in information governance. That's something we really talk about when we go into organizations and we do an assessment and we say, hey, here are some of your weaknesses, but here's a roadmap to get you on your path and your journey, let's put it that way, into increased compliance type of thing. So both of those go hand in hand.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Could be, could be. We always do a roadmap that leads you to increase compliance too. But I actually think one of the other things you said is, is more interesting for this episode, which is a lot of business books tell you to think about your exit strategy when you set up the company. The IG side of that, the information governance side of that is how are you going to need to separate your data? So if you are in an industry where there's a lot of movement, there's a lot of mergers or divestitures or acquisitions, the data goes with it. And we see that all the time with our bigger clients in the infrastructure space, in oil and gas especially, or utilities. But what actually I was just reading this week, some things that are going on in the market today are big companies might be selling off hard to run or less profitable pieces of their business to a small company, a small company that can focus on just that one. And, but they have to be able to give them the data. And so setting up your data right at the beginning in order to facilitate how do you give it back, how do you take it apart and you know, less happy things if you get Sued. You only want to have to look in one place. You only want to have to answer questions from one location.
So from the very start, and we did, we actually did a decent job at this. When I think we didn't do that just for everybody's, for everybody to know we didn't do a good job on what do we want our exit strategy to be? Because we just were focused on how do we get started. And also, I never want to retire. But just for the, for the record, Lee is making the usual face.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Yes, I want to retire soon. Soon, please.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: You're not getting rid of us that easily. What? What?
[00:09:14] Speaker A: No, we can still. This is not work. This is fun.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: This is fun. I agree.
But anybody who's listening to us with all the giggling knows, yes, so, but the. So we didn't do it. We didn't do a great job on the exit plan at the beginning, but we did think about what are the pieces of data and how do they live together and separately. So we don't just have a big pile of documents somewhere. We had our back office stuff, our governance stuff, our setup documents. Some of those have to be in paper. I have a binder that I've had since 2013. It has our original license and application and IRS information.
And then we have our electronic side where we have our letterhead and our logos and our templates. And we have the client side where we're divided up by client, by contract, by year, so that we can easily find. That's from a document perspective. We can easily find the documents that we had for each of our clients, that we produced for them or that we used to do their work.
We have the, the template side, the approaches, the sanitized stuff. We're going to have to talk about this again later.
And then we have. And I think this is going to be a good, good place to stop for today because this will lead us into our next episode, which is the accounting side of things.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Well, I don't even know if we're there yet because I still think that we're. The marketing strategy is part of this first section, right?
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Oh, you're right. So we're only on number one.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: That's all. That's all data. We're only on number one. I mean, that's all data related. You just got into information on how you, how you help yourself to organize yourself. Well, what about what data you want to collect on your competitors, what your, your, the people you're trying to sell to, whether you're B2B or B2C. I mean, you need to collect a lot of information there to get things right. So I think we have that. Decide what you want to do. We didn't even. Is it a product? Is it a service? Does it matter? Right. Do you. Can you have both?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: We didn't even get a thing that we didn't do at the beginning, so. Well, at the beginning we were services. We're coming out of the consulting space and we're services. But along the way, we have talked about products a couple of different times. We've talked about outsourcing. We've talked about a lot of things and we've tried some things. So we'll. In future episodes, I think we could dive more deeply into that.
That initial decision, though, absolutely. Makes points you in different directions. Do you have employees?
Do you have a lot of money so that you can wait to be profitable?
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Right.
So I do think there's a lot that we still have to talk about in just this first section. We do have a number of other sections. We've talked about funding. We could talk about financial planning, the legal structure, compliance, branding and marketing itself. What kind of professional support do you need? I think that'll be a good one. It could be short, too. You need this and this. For sure. We'll get to that.
Human resources you talked about a little bit. But what benefits are out there for small businesses? And we've encountered a number of different places that we've looked and we've gone through a number of trials and tribulations when it comes to benefits that we'd like to share with people.
There's more insurance.
Not only benefits as an insurance, medical and dental and so forth, but when it comes to errors and admissions and product liability and cyber insurance. What do you need? How much is that? Where do you look? Where do you go?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Office supplies, car rental insurance.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: That was necessary.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: It was required whether you were renting a car or not. Some of our clients required that and we wanted it for when we were having our employees rent cars. Like there's a lot there. Yeah.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: So. Okay.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: And then the. The, like the infrastructure stuff. We don't have an office location, but we have all the stuff. So. Yeah, we'll be talking about that.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, good. I think we found something here.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: I mean, there's so much to. There's so much. We've been doing this for more than 10 years. We are beating a lot of odds by still being here after 10 years. And that's something we'll talk about too, along the way in the upcoming episodes. So how do we sum up? Well, this was just our introduction, really.
This was just our introduction. We're going to talk about running, you know, starting and running a small business in the information governance space. But I think the one thing that you might take away from this episode is know what your business is about. Like, do you have an idea? Why are you even thinking about doing this?
And to me, that, that what the. I have an idea. I see a need.
I want to test something. I want to take control of something that I'm not getting to do in my current job.
That's a reason to go forward with this. If it's just about money and it's just about a boss, it's harder for me to see it. But that just might be me. So we'll have time to talk about that, too.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: If you have any questions, please send us an email at
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. Thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Thanks everyone. Tune in next time.
