Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business services but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Alison Taylor, Founder and Managing Director of Augur LLC., located in Los Angeles, CA, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Augur is a business design and strategy studio which focuses on for-profit social enterprises. Our customers are creative freelancers, early stage startups and scale-ups, and small-medium-sized businesses.
Tell us about yourself
After experiencing burnout and a toxic corporate work environment in Hospitality Design, I knew that things had to change. Workplaces and spaces had to be better for all of the people involved and the planet too. I have a degree in art and design, with a minor in arts management, and I knew that if you could provide creatives with business and legal acumen, they would be unstoppable in their pursuits. I call it the closing the knowledge-skill chasm, and that's what I get to do with my clients every day. I help them to strategically design the business of their dreams into a tangible, sustainable, and, most importantly, profitable reality.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
My biggest accomplishment as a business owner is the moment when I see it click for my clients, where they understand each piece of the puzzle and are confident to further build and iterate on it themselves.
I'd also say it aligns with becoming an Executive-In-Residence at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator and mentor with Techstars - it allows me to share my time, knowledge, and resources with those who historically wouldn't have had access or had systematic barriers to accessing it.
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
Knowing how to set and maintain your healthiest boundaries and having a healthy life/work balance. It can be easy to overwork and go above and beyond without asking for additional compensation while undervaluing yourself and your work, your personal life can seem to evaporate, and your professional life takes over everything. Coming back to and finding equilibrium in your life with joy, growth, and security in your work takes time.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Make sure you are aligned with what you want to do and how you want to do it. It's your business, so make sure it vibes with how you want to live your life. When I audit my client's business models, I make them go through a series of reflective exercises to make sure they're still aligned with their business, showing up how they want to show up, offering the products/services they want to offer (not just customer nice to haves), and that their personal goals are aligned with their professional goals. It's like self-care for your business.
- Don't skip over the research, strategy, and structure development parts of your business in order to do the "fun" stuff first. Operations is all the unsexy stuff that keeps the lights on. It allows you to know internally and externally what you're doing, why you're doing it, who you're doing it for, how you're going to do it, when you're going to do it, and where you will be doing it.
- Talk to the people you want to be in service of, your customers, your customer's customers, and so on. Do your research, but first, get in front of your assumptions about your customers - list them out and determine how confident you are in them (high confidence, neutral, low confidence) to be true. Then pick some of those assumptions and turn them into a hypothesis and generate questions to ask your desired customers. Rather than thinking you know, go straight to the source and get your answers from them.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.augur.design/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/augurdotdesign
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonptaylor/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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