Laura Yang Renner is the Founder of Freedom Makers, a company dedicated to providing small business owners and entrepreneurs with reliable, skilled virtual assistants. She launched Freedom Makers in 2015, recognizing the potential in military spouses seeking meaningful work and small businesses needing adaptable assistants as they scale their operations. Laura is passionate about empowering small-size entrepreneurs to thrive by delegating tasks, streamlining workflows, and enhancing customer outreach, allowing owners to focus on growth. With a background in the United States Air Force and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School, she brings a unique perspective to entrepreneurship. Before founding Freedom Makers, Laura launched BuBuBooks, an online bookstore offering bilingual storybooks for multicultural, multilingual children in America.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:35] Laura Yang Renner reflects on her upbringing as an Army brat and its impact on her life
- [5:53] How embracing uncertainty prepared Laura for the unpredictable world of entrepreneurship
- [6:54] Laura’s mother’s unrealized dream of starting a business and its influence on her journey
- [8:34] The unique challenges and rewards of attending the United States Air Force Academy
- [12:19] Insights on 9/11’s impact on military operations and security
- [14:09] Why Laura decided to pursue an international MBA from the Chicago Booth School of Business
- [17:09] Challenges of starting an e-commerce business before Shopify and PayPal
- [19:22] Lessons learned from building workflows and systems for companies
- [21:17] What inspired Laura to launch Freedom Makers
- [29:05] How the pandemic affected Freedom Makers
- [33:08] Reasons military spouses make excellent virtual assistants
In this episode…
Finding the right talent to help grow a small business can be challenging, especially when owners aren’t ready to commit to hiring full-time or even part-time employees. For solopreneurs, the struggle often involves balancing business growth while handling day-to-day tasks without the necessary support. This creates a gap in the market for skilled, reliable assistance that’s flexible, trustworthy, and culturally aligned with the needs of US-based small businesses.
Laura Yang Renner created a solution by tapping into the underutilized resources of military spouses. Drawing on her military background, Laura built Freedom Makers to connect talented military spouses with small businesses in need of flexible support. She emphasizes the unique skills military spouses bring — such as adaptability, organization, and trustworthiness — qualities developed through frequent relocations and challenging environments. Her approach is to make virtual assistance accessible, with no minimum hour requirements or contracts, allowing business owners to delegate tasks like administrative support, marketing, and customer service, freeing them to focus on strategic growth.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Laura Yang Renner, Founder of Freedom Makers, about her journey from military service to entrepreneurship. Laura shares how her experience growing up as an Army brat shaped her adaptability and resilience, the advantages of hiring military spouses as virtual assistants, the benefits of flexible work arrangements for solopreneurs, and the impact of the pandemic on the virtual assistant industry.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “Every military spouse I’ve met knows how to do three things for sure: research, be organized, and be adaptable.”
- “Military trains the service members on how to do their job. There’s no training for spouses on how to manage multiple moves.”
- “The resilience of small business owners is incredible. That’s their bread and butter. They’re going to find a way to make it work.”
- “There’s a higher starting line of trust with military spouses than a complete stranger.”
- “Covid helped us understand what we need when we need diversification. For us, our diverse client base is our strength.”
Action Steps:
- Embrace flexibility in staffing: Virtual and remote staff offer the flexibility to scale your workforce up or down based on your business needs. This flexibility allows you to manage your budget effectively and ensures you have the right resources when demand fluctuates.
- Develop clear communication strategies: Effective communication is crucial when working with remote teams to ensure everyone is aligned with business goals. Implementing regular check-ins and utilizing collaborative tools can help overcome the challenge of not being physically present.
- Leverage diverse skill sets: Hiring virtual staff, especially military spouses, brings a diverse range of skills and adaptability to your business. These individuals often have unique experiences and are ready to tackle new challenges, addressing the need for innovation and different perspectives in problem solving.
- Invest in technology and tools: Utilizing technology like Google Workspace and Zapier can streamline processes and improve productivity in remote teams. This helps tackle the challenge of managing teams from a distance and ensures that your business operations remain efficient and effective.
- Prioritize trust and cultural fit: Building trust and ensuring a good cultural fit with your virtual staff can lead to more successful collaborations. By focusing on these aspects you can enhance team dynamics and ensure that remote employees are as committed and engaged as in-office staff, turning potential challenges into opportunities for growth.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
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Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to grow your business with virtual and remote staff. My guest today is Laura Renner. She’s from Freedom Makers. And I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:13
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:30
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of the show. You know, every week I get to have this great privilege. I get to talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of different companies.
We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO. Check out the archives. Lots of great episodes in there. And of course, this episode was brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done for you podcast and content marketing, and of course, our new podcast Co-Pilot platform. You can learn all about it by going to Rise25.com or emailing us at support at rise25.com.
All right. And I want to give a quick shout out to Roman Pollner who introduced us to today’s guest. Roman is from the Pillar6 Podcast. He’s a wealth manager based in the San Francisco Bay area. He specializes in helping young families to plan for their future.
Check out Pillar6.com. We’re also proud to count him as a client and he has been a great client we love working with. And my guest who she he introduced us to is Laura Renner. She’s the founder of Freedom Makers Virtual Assistant Services.
She’s got a really interesting story. She’s got a background in the United States Air Force, which is a bit of my background, too, because my father and my grandfather are both in the United States Air Force. So we salute her for her service. And she got into helping place military spouses into staffing opportunities in kind of a roundabout way. She’s got a couple of different degrees and spent a number of years in active duty in the military and eventually got into that.
But Laura, I’m excited to have you here and I’m excited to dive into your story. And of course, I always like to ask people who’ve been in the military what it’s like to be, especially when you grew up in that world. What was it like to be an army or an Air Force brat? You were an Army brat, so your father was in the army. And usually what comes with that is you move around a lot.
I had a little bit of experience with that growing up. My father was out of the Air Force by then, but we moved around a bit and that really, I feel like I have shaped who I am today. So what was that experience like for you? How did it shape who you are today?
Laura Yang Renner: 02:35
Yeah. Thank you and thanks for having me. And it was pretty monumental for us. You know, we my dad was enlisted, which. So growing up we went to places like in Europe that we wouldn’t have been able to go to.
We wouldn’t have been able to afford to travel there on vacation. But when you’re stationed there and my mom took advantage, we went all over. At the time we were only in Western Europe, but to be able to travel as much as you can as a kid, it does impact your sort of outlook on life and your view, and understanding how it is possible for people from different cultures to view the same situation differently based on their culture. And so to understand that as a kid was, I think, pretty monumental in informing who I would become as an adult.
John Corcoran: 03:21
Yeah, I never moved internationally. My family always moved domestically, but one of the hard parts is like moving in the middle of a school year or leaving your friends behind. But my understanding, because my dad would always, when we moved, he would talk about what it was like for him when he had to move. And for him, you’re usually with a group of other Army or Air Force brats who experience the same thing. So that kind of shaped it a little bit.
And oftentimes you’re in a base school or a school that’s right off of the base. So there’s kind of a little bit more of an understanding of what you’re going through and a little bit more normal for someone to move in in the middle of the school year.
Laura Yang Renner: 03:58
Exactly, yes. And I got lucky. I only had to move Mid-school year once and but yeah, it was one of those things where, you know, there are friends from elementary school that I have no idea where they are today. And there’s, you know, now, I think it’s easier with social media to stay connected. Definitely.
So, you know, there is that piece of it. But it was especially, like you said, a base school. It was kind of exciting to see, oh, who’s new this year. And, I remember learning about things like New Kids on the Block because the new kids brought that band to us in Germany because we hadn’t heard of them prior to that. Right.
And so that was always exciting. And that whole, you know, oh, I was the new kid in school who got bullied. We didn’t really have that experience because to your point, it was always a large influx of new students. And they all were from the military. So we did have that in common, especially overseas, when every kid is military and not necessarily integrated with the local community.
John Corcoran: 04:54
Kids, right? And Americans. Probably all American. Yeah. Yeah, for the most.
Laura Yang Renner: 04:58
Part, yeah.
John Corcoran: 04:59
I moved in the middle of fifth grade, and I can still remember. It was like a scene out of a movie where, like, the principal walked me down from the principal’s office to my new classroom, and the door opened. And it was like, you know, the record player screeches to a stop, you know, kind of thing. Every head, face turns and looks at me. And I was moving from Southern California.
I was a Southern California kid moving to suburban Massachusetts, which is very insular. Yeah, very insular, very different culturally. And, you know, no one wanted to be friends with the new kids. They’d all been in school together for a long time, you know, and and I think now I think that something one of the things that I like about entrepreneurship is that you’re constantly craving new or you have to be okay and comfortable with newness, and that’s something you have to be okay with when you move around as a kid. Do you think there’s anything that prepared you for entrepreneurship from that experience? If you can unpack it?
Laura Yang Renner: 05:53
Absolutely. I think you’re spot on. You get comfortable with the unknown when you have when you have that experience as a kid. And so I think that has definitely impacted my approach to entrepreneurship, where even now, as we grow every year that we grow, it’s basically a new milestone for us. It’s something we’ve never experienced before.
And rather than being scared by it, I think my approach has been, well, let me figure out how to do this and let me reach out to people or apply to programs that will help me understand how to navigate this level of my business, whereas I don’t. You know, I can’t say that others don’t do that. But I think being comfortable with the unknown, because of having moved around a lot as a kid helped me, helps me to take that viewpoint or that approach.
John Corcoran: 06:43
Yeah. Your mom was a military spouse because your dad was active duty in the Army, and she always wanted to start a business, but she never did. Tell me a little bit about that.
Laura Yang Renner: 06:54
Yeah, she worked at Aphis, which is sort of like the general merchandise store on every military base. She worked there and that let her transfer it for the for the most part, there would be times where she’d have to wait for an opening or whatnot, but she would talk about that, how she would want to start a business and, you know, others in the community, you know, she was Korean. And so you’d meet, like, Korean business owners in the community. And she would talk about maybe one day buying out their business or something. But she never did.
But it was always something that was appealing to her. And I think for me, her, her support of me was always just even if she couldn’t do it, her encouragement of me made me believe I could. And so that was I think that planted the seed of her talking about it, even though she never pursued it and really kind of propelled me forward.
John Corcoran: 07:48
It’s crazy to think to like what you do now wasn’t a thing when, you know, one generation ago, like, literally like one generation later, you have a business that if your business format had been around when your mom was younger, when you were a kid, maybe that would have been something that she she could have owned a business in spite of the fact that she was a military spouse who had to move every couple of years.
Laura Yang Renner: 08:11
Absolutely, absolutely.
John Corcoran: 08:13
Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing that that kind of difference. So you kind of like me. I ended up studying English as an undergrad.
Didn’t get into entrepreneurship later. You know, I wish I’d found it at a younger age. You end up going to the United States Air Force Academy and studying there. What was that experience like?
Laura Yang Renner: 08:34
Yeah. You know, my dad, even though he was in the Army, talked me into going to the Air Force and I went there primarily to be honest, because it was free. I knew that I could do all four years without worrying about taking on any student debt or being able to continue going. And it’s a really good school. And that ended up working out well for me because it was an engineering school, but I also majored in English.
So I got to do a wide variety of things, as well as a wide variety of activities that I wouldn’t have gotten to do at a civilian school. But I think that also further added to what we were talking about a minute ago, around being comfortable with the unknown and being able to push yourself beyond what you think you’re capable of, because that very much was a theme at the Academy of kind of, I don’t want to say stressing you to your limit, but that’s kind of the environment where you’re under a lot of pressure and, and, and they, they push you to at least for me, I felt I learned that there were things where I thought I couldn’t do it, and it turned out I could. And oftentimes those were, you know, physical, like how far you could swim or climb a rope or whatnot. But for me, that really impacted my view of being in a stressful environment and knowing I could handle it, and oftentimes being able to handle more than I thought I could. I think it has also really impacted my view and my approach to life.
John Corcoran: 10:00
You were at the United States Air Force Academy from 97 to 2001. Were there a lot of women then?
Laura Yang Renner: 10:09
My class had about 13% women. It was 1 in 8.
John Corcoran: 10:14
What was that like being in that, you know, with that percentage?
Laura Yang Renner: 10:19
You know, I think you don’t really know anything else, right? Like and my experience with my one corporate job and in the military is in the military, it’s once you’re in, you’re in, you know, they will take care of you. So a lot of even even in situations where I was the only female, it felt like my brothers, I never felt, you know, concerned or left out or anything like that. And so that, I think, is one of those things where you just because it’s all, you know, you know, I showed up ten days after I turned 18 years old, like, so I didn’t really know any, any different. Yeah.
And, I always felt supported by everyone I was around.
John Corcoran: 11:04
I don’t remember the sequence, but some of the military academies were some of the last to really integrate and to have, you know, women in them. I don’t remember when, when the US Air Force Academy was all male, I imagine it was for a while, and I don’t know at what point it was allowed to. It allowed women to join.