Laura Yang Renner: 11:28
1980 was the first class for all.
John Corcoran: 11:30
Oh, so it’s been a while since then. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
So. Yeah. And then there was a woman, I think it was in the 90s who was the first combat Air Force pilot, I want to say. Does that ring a bell?
Laura Yang Renner: 11:43
Yes. I can’t remember the exact year that they allowed women into fighter aircraft, but it wasn’t, I think until maybe 2016 that women were allowed into all combat roles. But yes, but I want to say it was in the 90s, maybe 94 or 95 where there was the first women fighter pilot.
John Corcoran: 12:04
Yeah, yeah. You were actually on active duty after graduating from the Air Force Academy. During nine over 11? Yes. Can you remember back to that time period where you were or what that experience was like?
Laura Yang Renner: 12:19
Yeah. So I actually stayed for a year. So that was about four months after I graduated, and I had stayed for a year at the Academy, and I was teaching English at the Academy’s prep school or preparatory school. And so we were in Colorado. So it was around 6 a.m., 7 a.m. when the attack started.
And so for us, it was more we just went into total lockdown around Security and and so that kind of shifted our world at the academy for, you know, a few months probably the better part of a year. Around that. And, but that, so that was kind of like the immediate impact was the tight, very tight security that happened within days because we didn’t know what the attack was, what all it was targeting. Right. So I think the entire military went into a pretty tight lockdown.
John Corcoran: 13:11
Yeah. I was a speechwriter for the governor at that time in California. And you remember 3 or 4 of the planes were bound for California, and there were rumors on that day of that, you know, planes were going to cause one plane to head towards the US Capitol. They were. I worked in the state Capitol.
There were rumors that some were aiming towards the state capitol. There was definitely pandemonium. So you actually, you do six years in the Air Force and you end up, you get a couple more degrees, including eventually getting an MBA, which is an international MBA from the Chicago Booth school, where you get to entrepreneurship. That seems like a bit of a shift for someone who had been at the Military Academy, then at the Naval Postgraduate School and six years active duty, and then you go study entrepreneurship was, you know, did the family be like, what’s going on, Laura? Are you going crazy? Like what? Or was this an evolution?
Laura Yang Renner: 14:09
Yeah, I think I know, I’ve never asked them. I don’t know if they were surprised by it. I think it was one of those things, you know, my brother was also on active duty. So we were very much a military family. None of us really knew much about business.
So my viewpoint was, I don’t know anything about business. I got to go to business school. I feel like my family probably thought the same thing, and none of us just knew any better kind of thing around. You know what the next steps were to launching a business. And so yeah, so I’m not sure.
I don’t remember anyone being concerned, but rather being like, okay, that’s the next step in your life.
John Corcoran: 14:42
Well, they must have been supportive then if they. Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s to an extent I guess it kind of was breaching or bridging your previous interest because there was the international element to it.
Laura Yang Renner: 14:54
Yes definitely. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 14:56
And go ahead.
Laura Yang Renner: 14:58
Well at the time there were not a lot of international focused MBAs in the US. A lot of them, the ones I found at the time were dual degrees, but I already had the first degree. So that also impacted where I applied. And yeah.
John Corcoran: 15:17
You have also spent some time over in China and studied the language. What do you do that informs your understanding of the work that you do now, given we, you know, are much more, you know, cosmopolitan, interconnected world today than we were even 10 or 15 years ago?
Laura Yang Renner: 15:40
Yeah we are, but at the same time, I think especially the US being so geographically separated from the rest of the world, you know.
John Corcoran: 15:48
Sure is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Laura Yang Renner: 15:51
We do have that ability to still be a bit insular and which, you know, has its pros and cons. Right. And so but I think for me what learning another language, especially a language as different from English as Chinese is, it really taught me the value of communication. And, you know, you know, just because you’re missing a comma doesn’t mean the other person doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say, right? So if you focus on what are you trying to actually communicate?
You can really come to a lot of understanding with whoever you’re communicating with. And so that I think that has really freed me to be honest around how I engage with people and appreciate their insights or how they see things, and recognizing that it might be different from how I view things, because I’ve been in other parts of the world where it’s natural for them to view things differently from me, and that’s okay.
John Corcoran: 16:46
Right, right. You also, it’s such a diverse array of different backgrounds. I feel like I’m jumping around here, but it’s, you know, it’s your it’s your life. Boo Boo Books was an online bookstore that you started in the midst of all this selling bilingual storybooks. Talk a little bit about that.
Laura Yang Renner: 17:09
Yeah. So I think I want to say that idea actually came about during my first when I was learning Mandarin, because sometimes you want to be able to read your new language, but it’s so complicated, you can’t really just read it by itself. So I was like, oh, it’d be nice if the English were next to it. And then you kind of think, well, a children’s book would be easier to understand, so it’d be nice pictures. Exactly.
And it’s two lines of a page. Right. And it was so hard to find. Meanwhile, recognizing that we are a nation of immigrants, we do have a lot of children who are multilingual. What?
You know that it would serve two purposes. So that would lead me to start that company. I started it in oh eight as an e-commerce business, which e-commerce didn’t really exist back then. Like, I remember people, PayPal, I think it just had just come out, but it was back when people said, oh, I don’t trust any company that wants me to pay via PayPal, right? And now it’s sort of standard.
So it was a little before its time in that regard.
John Corcoran: 18:11
And you’re pre Shopify like probably putting together the website was challenging.
Laura Yang Renner: 18:16
Yeah exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then I also just didn’t understand basic business fundamentals. Like I built the website.
And then my joke is I built the website and then I took a nap. Like I wasn’t really doing a lot of outreach or hustling, if you will, to get traction with it. And so and that was leading into the recession. And so I think it just never got off the ground. But it was still an interesting experience that informed me about how I would approach things at my follow-on businesses.
John Corcoran: 18:46
Yeah, well, let’s talk about Freedom Makers and how you got into that. I think it was a former commander of yours, had retired from the Air Force and wanted you to work for him. So that led you into helping him at his company, doing recruiting there. And you found that they didn’t have a very good recruiting system in place. And so that kind of led you into the recruiting world.
So talk a little bit about that.
Laura Yang Renner: 19:09
Yeah. So it was about a 1000 person company. And they didn’t have in the parlance they didn’t have an ATS an applicant tracking system or really anything around.
John Corcoran: 19:19
It’s crazy to me that a company of that size didn’t have anything like that.
Laura Yang Renner: 19:22
Right. And it was a government contractor. So there was a lot of EEO compliance you had to follow. And it was all being done through Excel and manually tracking everything. And so, that helped me to really kind of honey how I view and how I build systems and processes more like processes rather than systems and, and workflows.
And so that really kind of informed me that, oh, I like this part. I’m good at this around building workflows and processes. And so that when I left that company, I tried to start a business doing that for other similar sized companies. But my first client was like, that’s great, can you just hire someone for me? And so we became a recruiting company, and it turned out that I didn’t actually enjoy that piece of it.
I liked building the workflows. I didn’t enjoy the actual recruiting. So that’s a tough job.
John Corcoran: 20:16
Like you really needed like a personality for that because you’re, like, constantly chasing down people, trying to convince them to either, you know, let you place someone or you’re trying to chase down other people saying, oh, you might be happy with your job here, but I got a better job for you. It’s a tough job.
Laura Yang Renner: 20:33
Yeah. And I think too, for me, recognizing that my strength is in strategy, doing the actual fulfillment was not my strength or it wasn’t. I didn’t have the confidence for it. Right. Like, I’d rather build and run the business than deliver the fulfillment of the service.
Right? And so I realized too, that was my own personal weakness, that being the primary deliverer of a service was not something that I. Yeah. Am strong at.
John Corcoran: 21:04
So where did the where did the come between you know, helping companies with fundamentally labor shortage staffing and then also military spouses. Where did that come from?
Laura Yang Renner: 21:17
Yeah. So during that time I was meeting a lot of what I call them solopreneurs, the solo practitioners who just weren’t ready to hire. Whether it’s because they didn’t have enough work for even a part time person, or they didn’t have the consistent revenue to feel like they could commit to hiring, even part time help. And so I saw that they had this need. They just weren’t there, there wasn’t really anyone to support them in that need.
Meanwhile, my brother is still a full time Air Force. He was getting ready to move again. I was having that conversation with my sister in law about what she was going to do for work, and I’m just like, man, this is not the first time I’ve had this conversation with her. And it just reminded me, like, even my mom, you know, she had to start over every even though she worked at Avis, she would have to pretty much start over every time we moved. And, you know, colleagues, when they would come into the office, be like, oh, what does your spouse do?
Because, you know, they’re always having to start over. So that made me realize there’s this untapped source of talent on the military spouse side and this unmet need on the solopreneur side, and that that’s what kind of was that for me. We could give this flexible work that they can take with them wherever they go and still meet the needs of a solopreneur who doesn’t need it. You know, our average client uses us five hours a week, like, it’s super part time work, you know, and there wasn’t really a lot out there for them to get that type of support. So that’s what led me to put the two together.
John Corcoran: 22:45
Now, you talk about something similar to the Boo-Boo book situation where you didn’t have Shopify, PayPal was barely in operation. You started this company 11 years ago now, and around then there weren’t as many solutions. There weren’t as many, you know, staffing, you know, related software and things like that. So how did you put the systems in place or did you kind of cobble it together to start?
Laura Yang Renner: 23:14
Yeah, definitely cobbled together with I like to call it I like to call Zapier, the duct tape for small Business, where you just kind of piece things together. But yeah, you know, there were some things out, you know, Google Drive, Google Workspace was pretty big back then. And in fact, that’s how we did our time tracking on a shared Google Sheet between the Freedom Maker and the client. And then we relied a lot on forms. And so we would send a form to a client, you know, to purchase hours.
And we would ask freedom makers to fill out forms to let us know that they were interested in a certain opportunity. But it was all through a lot through email and forms and Google Sheets, a lot of manual work, behind the scenes to make it look as automated as possible or and and supportive as possible to both the clients and the freedom makers.
John Corcoran: 24:06
Yeah.
Laura Yang Renner: 24:07
You know, I think of my grandmother who was my dad’s mom who passed away when I was pretty young and she never really had a career. She was an artist. She actually was a model for a while. But she followed my grandfather around from assignment to assignment and even my grandfather wasn’t there for my father’s birth because my father was born in Brooklyn. He was in it right before World War two, and he was in Texas at training pilot school.
And I think about the impact that this could have had, could have had for someone like her who didn’t, didn’t have that opportunity to have a career, put money on, you know, put food on the table for the family. What has this impact been like for you? Call them your freedom makers, for the military spouses that you’ve been able to place into positions?
Laura Yang Renner: 25:00
Yeah. So I think nowadays some of the modern challenges, well, I guess they existed back then as well. Oftentimes the service member is deploying for short deployments for an undisclosed amount of time and kind of no notice. So you end up having to run your house and your family without a reliable partner. And it’s no fault of theirs.
Right? They have to serve their mission. And so but to do that while also maintaining a full time job that may or may not move with you, I think that’s a hard part to balance. And so for us at least, where we have really focused is on the flexibility side of things. So they don’t we don’t have minimum hours that they have to work so they can balance, like if they have young kids or if whatever is going on in their life, they can balance how much work they’re able to contribute versus also not versus, but also running their house and their families.
So and also, as you probably saw with your grandmother and your mom, they have so many diverse skills and talents because they’ve moved so much and they’ve, you know, have to adapt. And that’s one of the things I always say to like the military trains a service member on how to do their job right. There’s no training for spouses on how to manage multiple moves to new communities where you don’t know anyone you know, to run your family or support your family without a local. Your other nearby family to help you, that kind of thing. Like you have to figure all that out on your own.
There’s no training for that. So they always develop these great skills. I always say that regardless of work experience, education or skills, every military spouse I’ve met knows how to do three things for sure. One is research, the other is to be organized and the other is to be adaptable. And that’s what business owners need.
That’s exactly what they need. So they get to bring a lot of versatility and skills, like a renaissance of skills to their clients. And they don’t have to sort of pigeonhole themselves into doing one type of career or one type of job. So I think that’s where we have had that impact on the spouse community is they get that flexibility in not just commitment, but also in the skills they get to use for that, that side of their brain.
John Corcoran: 27:23
And you mentioned that some of the early clients at least, were like solopreneurs who hadn’t hired before. Was that a challenge for you then, to place, like, you know, staff into these companies that hadn’t had staff before or didn’t know how to supervise them or train them or things like that? Did you have to get involved in those sorts of things?
Laura Yang Renner: 27:42
A little bit, I think what we’ve shifted toward over the years is more like clarifying the expectations around, especially someone who’s virtual and the kind of support they can give. And also going back to that, you know, freedom is our guiding principle. So if a solopreneur is too busy to engage with their freedom maker, then that usually leads to sort of fizzling out of the we call it an assignment. So we it’s more like we kind of screen for that and, and really sort of I don’t want to say educate, but encourage clients to be ready to consistently engage their freedom maker and to have things in place and, and to delegate. And so it’s more like I don’t we haven’t really stepped in, but more like sort of screening for and then educating and encouraging clients to be ready for that when they, when they choose their food maker.
John Corcoran: 28:35
Yeah. Of course now in 2020. A big thing happened. We all remember there was this Covid thing that happened. I’ve interviewed so many people since then, and many kind of followed this path of absolute shock and terror and like, oh my God, what’s going to happen?
Everything I built is going to come crashing down. And then in many cases, then it went the opposite direction, which was what was it like for you with a virtual staffing business? Did you experience that as well?
Laura Yang Renner: 29:05
Yes. So I remember I would tell my team, we’re going to come out of this stronger than ever. And then I shut down zoom and I’d crawl into bed and cover my head up.
John Corcoran: 29:15
Oh, God.
Laura Yang Renner: 29:16
But but yeah, you know, for us, I remember I would go to networking events and if and I was living in Oakland at the time, and if I went out to like suburbs and I would say, oh yeah, I have a virtual assistant agency, they would even, you know, the Bay Area, a pretty large area. You know, the suburbs people would be like, what’s a virtual assistant? Like, they didn’t, they had never heard of it before. So Covid sort of helped us as far as people understanding what a virtual assistant is and that they could get that support and also that they could run their business remotely. So be more open to hiring someone like us.
Meanwhile, it also helped me to realize, because, you know, they always say, like, you have to diversify your revenue, you have to diversify your revenue. And so I always thought I needed to get corporate clients or government clients because we were focused on solopreneurs. But what Covid helped me realize is that while we focus on solopreneurs, small teams of up to ten employees, we have such a diverse industry across that, that that was a part of our diversification. So while some of our clients, because the fear for me when that happened was if our clients shut down, we’re going to shut down, right? And so because the military had to keep working, I knew the spouses were going to be there.
It was more what was going to happen to our clients. And they found a way to be resilient. And yes, some of our clients were required to shut down. But even then, they found a way to make something work out during that time.
John Corcoran: 30:52
Most did. Right. I mean, except for exactly, you know, there were very few businesses that completely shut down. If they did, it was maybe a very short period of time.
Laura Yang Renner: 30:59
Right, exactly. So, that one built my confidence that even, you know, for the past few years now, we keep waiting for this recession to happen. Right? And even if it does, I’m like, our clients are resilient small business owners. They have to be right that it’s their bread and butter.
It’s how they make a living. So they’re going to find a way to make it work. And we’re going to help them with that. And as a result, we’re going to work. And so that was really eye opening for me to realize, one, just how resilient small business owners are in the US, as well as personally understanding how diversified our client base was.
And so that was good for us as a company as well.
John Corcoran: 31:39
Yeah, and it’s funny how diversification happens sometimes. You don’t even realize the diversification. I interviewed one guy who had a line of sandwich shops in the New York City area, and before Covid, he’d opened two shops in the suburbs, and all the rest were in the financial district. And before Covid, the financial district ones were doing gangbusters, making all his money right. And the suburbs were like hardly anything.
And then Covid flipped that. And if he didn’t have the suburban ones, which were doing so poorly before, he would have lost the entire business because the financial ones were all closed because no one was going to work. And so it was a diversification. But he didn’t even realize it, and it was not something that he would have asked for because he went into Covid beforehand, he resented the suburban locations. He was like, I need to close these, you know.
And they ended up doing so well. So it’s funny how we don’t even realize what diversification might be, right?
Laura Yang Renner: 32:31
And also, if Covid hadn’t happened, those businesses would have supported his growth. Right. Or would they have dragged him down? So it’s like right. You don’t know when you need that diversification either.
John Corcoran: 32:42
Right? Right. So we’re getting a little short on time here. But for those who are listening to this who haven’t started diversifying their hiring strategy, why would they, you know, what’s the benefits? What are the pros?
You’ve touched on them already. But why would they consider military spouses for helping support and grow their business?
Laura Yang Renner: 33:08
Yeah, a couple things. One, I think when it comes to military spouses, there’s a higher starting line of trust than with a complete stranger. So there’s that piece. Just from the nature of the type of work, the type of life they live. There’s, you know, a higher foundation of trust.
And I think for us, specifically, our flexibility around, you know, we don’t have minimum hours. So that flexibility around commitment is attractive to people. And then going back to the Freedom Makers themselves too, they are all American citizens or becoming American citizens. Not that the citizenship part matters, but the fact that they know American culture, American business nuances. I think sometimes business owners prefer that either they have to for security, their compliance, security, depending on what they do, or they just prefer that because then there’s less lost in translation when you’re asking them to do something for you because they understand what you’re trying to ask them to do, just through the American language and business nuances that that people have.
Right. So I think those two things specifically around trust and and just the cultural awareness of working, if you need that in your company. Those are two things. Two reasons to choose a military. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 34:32
And flexibility and time zone is another big one as well. They’re working in your time zone most of the time, I imagine, unless they’re stationed somewhere abroad.
Laura Yang Renner: 34:41
Right.
John Corcoran: 34:42
So what we ask is if instead of them saying they need to be in your time zone, we ask if they’re available to work in that time zone. If that’s what the client needs. Sometimes the work is asynchronous, so it doesn’t matter. And sometimes our clients have team members overseas, so they want someone with differing availability based on who they’re supporting and how they’re supporting them.
John Corcoran: 35:05
Right, right. Well, great learning about your company, Laura. And you. I want to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude and giving my guests the opportunity to express gratitude to those, especially peers and contemporaries who have helped them in their journey.
Who would you want to shout out and thank?
Laura Yang Renner: 35:26
Yeah, so I’ll shout out to that former commander. His name is Darryl Sims. In fact, he now lives in the outskirts of Dallas, and I was just visiting him a couple of months ago and we were still close. He was probably my first mentor when I was on active duty, even though he was my boss’s boss. And but he again, going back to how we talked about being pushed or asked to do things you didn’t think you could do, he did that for me while also guiding me, you know, in a mentorship way.
And then when he retired, he, you know, called me up and said, Will you come work for me at this company? And it was one of those things where you just don’t say no. So but that worked because that’s what led me down this path that I’m at now with Freedom Makers. So very grateful for him and his family and the support they have provided me and my family over the years. It’s been over 20 years since we’ve known each other.
John Corcoran: 36:21
Wow, wow.
Laura Yang Renner: 36:22
It’s so cool how you have been able to marry these two different kinds of disparate interests and entrepreneurship and then, you know, love of military service. So appreciate you for your service and appreciate you for helping support so many military spouses. Where can people go to learn more about you and about Freedom Makers?
Laura Yang Renner: 36:40
Yeah. So our website is www.freedom-makers.com. And there’s a lot of stuff on our site there. People can schedule calls and then I’m on LinkedIn Laura Yang Renner and people can find me there too.
John Corcoran: 36:55
All right, Laura, thanks so much. Thank you.
Outro: 37:00
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.