Taralinda and Dale Willis, the Co-Founders of Curate Solutions, prove once again that the opportunities for creative businesses are almost unlimited. Curate Solutions is a Wisconsin-based startup that makes local government data more accessible through its AI platform.
Taralinda, the CEO, joins The Savvy Entrepreneur to share the story of how they came up with the idea, how they found their first clients, and how they basically bootstrapped their way to success. She offers tips for creating and building a business, finding helpful resources (including a stint with Madison’s famed Gener8tor accelerator program). She also provides incites on pivoting to meet customer needs, scaling a startup business, and generally staying nimble.
Her candor is refreshing, and the story of Curate Solutions is a great listen! Below is a transcript of our interview. Or click here, if you’d prefer to listen to the on-demand podcast of the show!
Doris Nagel 0:41
Hi there, everybody. Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur show! We’re broadcasting here from the Greater Chicago Milwaukee area.
If you are or want to be an entrepreneur or small business person, this show is for you.
I’m Doris Nagel, your host for the next hour. I’m a serial entrepreneur. And I’ve counseled lots of startups and small businesses over the past 30 years.
The show has two goals: to share helpful information and resources, and to inspire you, to make your journey as an entrepreneur faster and easier, and maybe just a little bit more fun.
To help with that, I have guests every week on the show who are willing to share their stories and advice. This week’s guest is Taralinda Willis. Taralinda is the co founder and CEO of Curate Solutions, based in Madison, Wisconsin.
Curate Solutions is a startup that makes local government data more accessible through its AI platform. Prior to starting Curate Solutions in 2016, Taralinda earned an MBA in operations and project management from the UW Whitewater. She began her career in project management by overseeing the construction of a $94 million multi use facility for the State of Wisconsin.
She’s a very active member of her community and in fact, was recognized as one of In Business Madison’s 40, under 40 class in 2020 for her board service, advocacy, and volunteering in both the startup and nonprofit world.
And she says in the summer, you can find her sailing on Lake Mendota with friends in her free time. That is really fun, Taralinda — I did a little of that myself when I was a student in Madison.
Taralinda, thanks so much for being on the show today. Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur!
Taralinda Willis 2:53
Thanks for having me, Doris.
Doris Nagel 2:57
Talk a little bit about your business. Briefly, what does Curate Solutions do and who’s it for?
Taralinda Willis 3:02
Curate is a software platform. We aggregate municipal meeting data, we use that data to help organizations both monitor risk, as well as find opportunities inside of the local government space.
We work with a lot of utilities as an easy one to understand they’re impacted by permit fees changing, which may seem insignificant, but if you think about the number of permits that they need to pull, even a $50, change could have some pretty significant gaps to their bottom line. And so we identify those, so if they want to get involved and share their side of the story, they’re able to do so by finding early and actionable information from these municipal meetings.
Doris Nagel 3:53
This is a niche kind of business that I would never have thought about. How did you get the idea for this business?
Taralinda Willis 4:06
My background is, as you said in the intro, in the construction space. And so that’s where we started was looking. There are things being discussed in some really small and hard to uncover places. So the business started looking at certified survey maps and rezonings and sewer line extensions, all kinds of kind of — I call them boring, behind the scenes things — that indicated huge facilities were going to be built. We’ve expanded that into lots of local legislation tracking, helping businesses see around corners when it comes to policy change.
Doris Nagel 4:40
Are there other competitors out there who do this? Or is this a totally new kind of offering?
Taralinda Willis 4:48
We’re very new on the street for local legislation monitoring. There’s a huge focus at the federal level and obviously, at the state level, but things at the state and federal levels are becoming more contentious and more difficult to get things passed.
And so, municipalities, nonprofits and things like that are taking things into their own hands. If they want change, they do it themselves at the local level. Both in terms of their revenue and fees, as well as other things – for example, we work with an organization focused on LGBT equality. And if they can’t get it passed at the state level, they go community by community and make the make the change happen there.
Doris Nagel 5:37
Talk a little bit about how you went from an idea to actually starting this business. Lots of us have ideas, right? But actually turning it into a business is a whole different thing.
Taralinda Willis 5:56
It is a different thing. I agree completely with that.
You know, I don’t think anybody’s journey into entrepreneurship is a linear one, and ours is no exception. So, we had the idea, and understood the problem. And then this all really got started while my husband was working on his PhD in computer science. And he’s always building. And we’re just kind of looking for the right applications of what he’s building and what I’d known and put these pieces together. We thought it was cool.
Then we were accepted into the Gener8tor program, which, for those of you don’t know, is the business accelerator program. Doris, I know, you had Troy [Vosseller] on the show a while ago. He’s an advisor of mine. And that’s really what kicked us into high gear that provided a little bit of funding to get this off the ground, as well as really more importantly, the mentorship advice and connections and things like that to launch and grow. Well, I’m
Doris Nagel 7:03
I’m curious about the software side of things. So you need to have software that can go and find different documents and analyze them, but you have to have access to all these documents, too. Talk about more about how you put all the pieces together to do this.
Taralinda Willis 7:40
Sure. Curate is a very niche business. And one of the things that makes us successful as an organization is that we’re committed to staying in our swim lane and focusing on what we do really well. And that’s this local government piece.
Our biggest competitor to this is people manually keeping track of as many communities as they can. When you’re faced with some really damaging things that are going on, for example, in California — I know if you’re in Wisconsin, this sounds really strange – there are natural gas moratoriums. Where they will no longer allow new homes to connect to natural gas. If you’re a natural gas provider, that’s really damaging. And so you have to stay on top of that.
Our software aggregates data from a little more than 12,000 municipalities across the country. That includes everything from a town with one stoplight to New York City, and everything in between. So we get that data, and we put it together. We use a lot of AI or artificial intelligence in order to make sense of that data and be able to distribute it in a way that is actionable, so people can use it. Not everything that’s talked about in municipalities is necessarily relevant or even remotely interesting.
Doris Nagel 9:06
“Remotely interesting” or even “remotely intelligent” are other adjectives that you might use. In my local city, the local city commission meetings are aired on a local cable television station. I tune in occasionally, and I’m constantly thinking, “Wow. How did they think this was important? What are they doing?!”
So just weeding through a lot of that is probably a huge time saver for people who follow these meetings and decisions.
Taralinda Willis 9:45
Yes, and allows them to look at committees and other information. Maybe you focus on city council, but you’re not reading the minutes, you know, or you’re not reading the planning commission report. When we use technology, we’re able to gather all that data.
But we do have a little fun here as well. We keep track of some crazy things that are said through our Twitter account called “Citizens Unscripted,” where people say some rather ridiculous things. We try to keep names off to protect the innocent!
Doris Nagel 10:28
Alright, you’ve got me. You have to share a couple of them now that you’ve dangled that in front of me!
Taralinda Willis 10:37
Well, when I saw one we just posted yesterday, actually. Somebody came to the Planning Commission to complain about a landscaping business coming in. And the City Planning Commissioner asked, “Are you the neighbor? Do you live nearby?” Nope, has wasn’t the neighbor. But he drives past it on his way to work. Now that’s bringing NIMBY to a whole new level!
Doris Nagel 11:12
I would say that is someone with too much time on their hands. You have to share another. Because our ability as human beings to say dumb things is almost boundless.
Taralinda Willis 11:24
One of my favorites happened about six or eight months ago. I’m forgetting exactly where this happened. But somebody came to city council, in the middle of the pandemic, to report that chicken nuggets are so good that we should formally call them “Saucy Nugs.” He sincerely wanted an ordinance passed that would say this is how you refer to chicken nuggets or chicken wings? I don’t get it, but humanity is a funny, funny thing to try to understand.
Doris Nagel 12:01
One of my favorite expressions is that 50% of the people are dumber than average. And the average is probably lower than we might like to think.
Thanks for sharing those funny examples. I’m glad there’s often some humor in your work because it’s funny al the kinds of things that people get worked up about.
You mentioned that you pull information from about 12,000 municipalities. I suspect there’s more than 12,000 governmental entities out there. So how do you decide which municipalities to pull from? Is it just, you’re gradually building it to pull from more and more? Or do you add them as potential customers request them? Or some of both?
Taralinda Willis 13:01
Oh, a little strategy and a little magic.
We monitor every county across the country, and then we have a population threshold. If they have at least a four way stop in town, we’re monitoring it. There’s lots of municipalities with 50 people, and they’re not necessarily making a lot of decisions that impact a lot of businesses. So we focused on the ones that really could do some damage.
Doris Nagel 13:35
I’m sure there’s lots of county data. Do you track that as well?
Taralinda Willis 13:45
We do and some of those really itty bitty municipalities. Their information is rolled up into the county. In those cases, the county would probably make the decisions on behalf of a lot of those communities.
Doris Nagel 14:05
In urban areas, like where I live, there are often special purpose districts, and they are the ones that actually make some pretty significant decisions. Do you monitor those as well?
Taralinda Willis 14:14
Yes, we do for a lot of those. And we’re continuing to grow that database. But we already monitor a lot of special districts, like special sewer districts and fire districts, and water districts, and all kinds of things like that.
As we go across the country, they change name and authority and things like that. We use census data to make sure we’re capturing entities that are making decisions with taxpayer money – that’s the line in the sand of how we decide what we’re going to do. So, we don’t track things like a homeowner’s associations.
Doris Nagel 15:00
How did you find your first customers? You had an interesting idea. But how do you know whether there were customers for it?
Taralinda Willis 15:30
It certainly has been an interesting journey. So, you know, we had this idea, we had a lot of the backbone built, and we were just trying to find exactly the right application of some of that technology.
So we presented the idea and had a few people that were on board. Then we really pushed into high gear and began building it out. We built the business along with our first customers, not necessarily in advance of our first customers. That isn’t something that everybody can do, but [we able to because] we had a lot of the foundation down, but not necessarily the final piece.
And while we certainly made a lot of wrong turns — and right turns – we’re very customer focused, and that hyper focus on exactly what our customers need has allowed us to be successful.
Doris Nagel
Who are most of your customers? And how do you find your customers?
Taralinda Willis 17:02
Most of our customers are either businesses or associations who are impacted by changes mad by municipalities. For example, we work with like the Wisconsin Realtors Association, and have a great relationship with them. We also work with the Home Builders Association, even the Farm Bureau, so things like that are like associations.
And then we also work with larger organizations in retail, utilities, telecommunications. Anyone you can think of who might be affected by all of the decisions that municipalities are making. For example, with the COVID pandemic, there’s been a huge focus on mask mandates and capacity limits, and it’s important for groups and businesses to make sure that they’re following the rules or having some input on that. As well there are everyday things like tax law changes that can have a huge impact.
Doris Nagel 17:17
Do customers find you or do you go find them?
Taralinda Willis 17:28
Every business owner, I think, starts with their network, and we did something similar. We’re certainly thrilled to have a partner like Gener8tor, who helped accelerate that growth through their network.
And then from there, we worked on understanding the things that are happening, and then we shared that information with potential customers. We’d ask them, “Hey, did you know about this? Have you thought about this?” And because we have a lot of data, we’re able to do that. We still do some of that today.
But now that we know exactly the issues with our potential customers, so we don’t have to necessarily dig in deep to get a conversation and bring people to the table.
I have stepped a little bit out of the day to day of sales. That’s now handled by a few people on our team. But I really enjoy showing the platform and the power of what it can do. I love hearing people say, “Oh my gosh, how do you get this information?” It’s what we do. We read these minutes. We read these agendas. And we’re trying to stay on top of it, but this is amazing. You’re finding things I can’t find!”
Doris Nagel 18:50
That’s what you love to hear from customers!
Talk about your basic business model. Is this a subscription service? Is this a project based? How did you decide on your fee model?
Taralinda Willis 19:05
You know, pricing is such an interesting journey. It’s like playing darts. It’s trial and error. Hopefully we’re hitting the dartboard!
We price it as a subscription model. Customers pay a yearly fee, and the yearly fee is based on a few factors. The primary factor is the geography that they’re searching for. So each county in the US has a different price to us, and that price is based on population as well as number of municipalities there. So that can range pretty wildly depending on whether you’re looking at the middle of nowhere, North Dakota, compared to Cook County in Chicago, which is has 140 municipalities and a huge population.
Doris Nagel 20:47
How has your business grown and changed since 2016?
Taralinda Willis 20:55
This year, we’re going to celebrate five years, which is mind blowing to me, but I’m having a lot of fun.
The business has grown tremendously. Obviously, we’ve grown in terms of our customer base. But something that we don’t talk about a lot is how it’s grown in terms of like, exactly what we’re focused on. You know, we started in the construction space, but we have — pivoted is the wrong word – we have a newfound focus on local policy change. And that’s really where we’re spending a lot of time and energy.
And that’s interesting to me. When you think about growth, it’s not just revenue, number of customers, number of employees. It’s also like the business itself is a living thing. Your customers tell you what they need and what they want. So when I think about the growth of Curate, I think about how our customers interact with the software, what they how they’re able to click how they’re able to disseminate and find trends in the data. And that is really cool. To me, it’s probably a different answer to the question, but that’s what I’m where my head’s at.
Doris Nagel 22:22
Talk about how you found funding for this business. That’s a challenge for a lot of small businesses. You mentioned Gener8tor provided a little funding. Was that the main source of funding for you to get started?
Taralinda Willis 22:50
That was one of the key initial pieces of funding. It was not a lot, but it was enough to launch. And that’s their focus: launching businesses and helping them accelerate their growth.
Beyond that, Genera8tor opened up their personal network of investors. And so we met with lots and lots and lots of potential investors. And we made a lot of pitches. But as part of that process, you find people that believe in what you’re doing. Maybe they have a personal interest because of their legislation experience, or because of their construction experience. Or they’re a developer in town and they know the pain. Or maybe they understand the space and really want to be part of the journey. There isn’t a magic formula, other than it’s not dissimilar to sales in that it “shots on goal,” right? You can’t win if you’re not shooting.
Doris Nagel 22:30
You pitched to a lot of potential investors. What did you learn through the pitch process? Any advice that you would share with other people who might be starting out looking for funding?
Taralinda Willis 22:50
It’s one of the more humbling experiences, asking people to believe in you and invest their own either personal money or their fund’s money into your business. I think that a no is just as good as yes, although it may not necessarily feel like it. But then you’re not wasting your time with someone who’s not going to invest. People ask a lot of questions if they’re evaluating an opportunity. And they should ask a lot of questions, right? But that’s really time consuming. And knowing that they’re not going to be the right fit is incredibly important as well.
Doris Nagel 23:38
That makes sense. What did you learn about the pitch process as you went through more and more of them in terms of how to pitch, how to organize your story? Is that something Gener8tor really helped you polish as well?
Taralinda Willis 23:48
Gener8tor certainly helped with some initial polish. But I think it’s key that, you don’t get “feedback whiplash.” What I mean by that is: everybody gives advice. But only after you hear it consistently — several times– should you think about making a change. Or make a change if you agree with the advice. But otherwise, all you do is change your pitch deck based on the last pitch you’ve had. Remember, nobody knows the business like you do. You’re running the business, right? So keep your eye on the ball, incorporate what you think is most important, and certainly if you have multiple times where people suggest something you should really think about including in the pitch deck. If you hear something three or four times, you believe it, do it, but if just one person says it, you could lose your life, continuously modifying your deck.
Doris Nagel 24:48
It reminds me of being a new mom. Everywhere I went, people would offer their opinions on what to do with your child and how to handle certain situations. And I started to lose my mind, until I realized these people are just trying to be helpful. You just have to step back and ask, does that make sense? If no, ignore it. Or if it might, mull it over. But you really have to sift through all of that advice, right?
Taralinda Willis 25:20
That’s exactly right. It’s a great analogy.
Doris Nagel 25:30
What would you say has been the hardest part about having your own business?
Taralinda Willis 25:39
That’s a tough question. It’s a humbling experience, to build your own business. I also think it’s very lonely. You’re always trying to keep the team on track, and you can’t always share all of the information that you’re getting. You’re the one source at the top. And I think that’s probably the most challenging piece.
How I’ve dealt with that is I’ve built myself a network of other founders running businesses, who you can rely on after a particularly bad pitch, or you have to let an employee go and it was challenging, or you’re struggling with the customer, or whatever. Where you can honestly and transparently share that information and get feedback when you need feedback, or just have an ear to listen when you need that that as well.
Doris Nagel 26:50
What are some of the roadblocks you’ve faced, as you started and have grown the company? And have you dealt with some of those?
Taralinda Willis 26:58
Oh, boy, we have plenty of roadblocks! A common theme is: where do we put our time and resources as an organization? We try to be really conscious of the money that we’ve raised, and to be really fiscally responsible. So, making the right decisions and keeping things lean, for example, presents challenges. You know, when do we make the next hire? You don’t want to hire too early and be less financially conscientious with those funds. But you also don’t want to hire too late, because your team is going to be real unhappy with you. So, trying to figure out the balance of hiring is challenging.
As is deciding where we put our resources as a development team. What features are what are we going to build and how are we going to make them? All of those decisions can be really, really challenging on an ongoing basis. So, maybe those aren’t roadblocks – they’re speed bumps that come up every few months.
Doris Nagel 28:02
It’s just a lot of speed bumps and, and, and crime scene tape and other sorts of law many obstacles to go through, right?
Taralinda Willis 28:15
Yes, exactly. In a startup, things work until they absolutely 100% stop working. And it sometimes can absolutely blindside you. I make the analogy to my team that you’re driving along on the highway. And out of nowhere, there’s a brick wall. And you see the brick wall as you’re smashing into it. It comes up so fast you can’t change lanes or anything like that. And so you’re on the highway but you’ve got to like pick up all the pieces and keep going.
Doris Nagel 28:40
Give me an example of one of those.
Taralinda Willis 28:52
Okay, this is painful. So, we’ve had a growth spurt in the last six months, and pre COVID, you know, employees were in the office. And employee onboarding just happened naturally. It sounds stupid to say out loud, but we didn’t have a concrete plan for onboarding. People would shadow employees, they met people, they got some direction, and they put the pieces together. It just worked.
Then we had four or five employees start, and they’re all remote. And our onboarding just stopped working. There was lack of direction. They didn’t understand what the other teams did. There was no ability to meet in the coffee room and chat about what they were working on today. They didn’t understand how their work fit in with other people’s, or how they got help when they needed it.
We just took all those things for granted — that new employees can just figure it out for themselves. So, we hit one of those brick walls I mentioned, and the pieces are all over the highway. And we started putting we started putting them back together. You have to do that, right?
Maybe you could see this coming if you’ve done it 100 times. But it surprised me. So, we took all those pieces apart and put it back together. And now we have this amazing onboarding plan.
Doris Nagel 30:20
Yeah, you know, I was just thinking as you were talking that that’s a great example of how sometimes an event that caused you to relook at things. Maybe you felt like the pieces were all over the highway. But it sounds more like a fender bender to me. Because from a long term perspective, that is one of the things that businesses need to have in place, in my experience, to be able to scale effectively. You have to have those kinds of processes mapped out and make them replicatable, if you will, without necessarily depending on any particular individual.
In a business, there often are people who are – frankly — the person everybody goes to with questions. You know? “Suzy will know the answer to that.” “Go ask Betty — she always knows that kind of stuff.”
What you’re talking about is really moving it from the personal or organic to something that’s systematic, with processes that are repeatable, whether Taralinda is there or not. Right?
Taralinda Willis 31:41
Exactly. But it’s a challenge figuring out when to put those processes in place. Because if you started building that like you have 100 people when you have only five, you would just build processes all day and you never have time to run your business. Sometimes, you have to wait until it’s necessitated to get those some of those things done.
Doris Nagel 32:50
Talk now about the best parts about having your own business.
Taralinda Willis 32:57
When I first started, a lot of people told me that it’s like riding a roller coaster: the highs will never be more high, and the loves will never be more low. And that’s been 100% true for me, living and breathing Curate for the past five years. I
think some of the best parts are being able to see my ideas come to life. I get to come to product meetings, and we share ideas. And then, that afternoon, or a few days later, a few weeks later, you have the opportunity to see what you conceptualized, because somebody took it and put it into action. And I think that’s one of the most amazing things — being able to see that vision come to life is so inspiring to me.
I also love seeing the growth of the team, the growth of our customers and the things that they’ve been able to do with Curate. We get so excited when people have a win with Curate. Because that’s why we do this. And so, those highs are just incredible.
Doris Nagel 34:30
Talk about one or two of those wins.
Taralinda Willis
A lot of our customers pride themselves on having exceptional relationships with city council members and other officials in their communities. So it’s inspiring to me when we’re able to find something when they say, you know, oh, I just had lunch with so and so. And he didn’t say anything, or I just met her, you know, we just were on the phone with her. And she didn’t say anything. But like, we’re able to uncover some of that information of things that are happening in the Magento the minutes.
Oftentimes, it’s not necessarily something that seems huge at the onset.
For example, we work with a company in Florida, where solar is really a huge thing – there are big utility-scale solar projects. And we do a lot to support solar. It’s a little baffling to me, but solar can be a little contentious. It doesn’t generate any jobs, right? You build the solar farm. And that’s it. It’s not the same as some other types of investments. So, the community was talking about changing the permitting structure, and process for utility scale solar. And this was a community that this group already had a utility scale solar project in, and so they thought they had great relationships there, but they were still surprised. Because they were planning on doing more there.
So, if that community changes the approval process, [our clients’] projects could take significantly more time and more money to get approved, which would really slow down their growth.
So those are the kinds of wins that we find. So heading off a proposed ordinance change like this one is a huge win to our customers.
Doris Nagel
So it’s not just data about decisions that are made, but it’s maybe the ability sometimes to get intelligence to head off an unfavorable or undesirable decision, right?
Taralinda Willis 36:35
Exactly.
Doris Nagel 36:40
You haven’t talked about your co-founder yet.
Taralinda Willis 37:01
Sure! He’s next door in our home office. My co founder is Dale Willis.
Dale was working on his PhD in computer science at UW Madison and had the idea for Curate. When we were accepted into the Gener8tor program, he left his PhD program to focus exclusively on Curate. We work incredibly well together. He leads the technical team, as well as product, and loves to build things. He gets super excited about that!
Doris Nagel 38:15
That is a real tribute. Because it is hard enough to find a spouse with a marriage that works. it is equally difficult to find a great business partner. A lot of people have said finding a business partner is basically like a marriage. And I can attest to that, having had a couple very ill-chosen business partners, that it’s difficult. So kudos to you and your better half for finding not only the ability to, to have a successful marriage, but to be able to work together, not just founding a business, but being in the business together. America, I’m sure it’s a source of a lot of a lot of pride between the two of you.
Taralinda Willis 38:23
We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve built. We’re also each other’s biggest cheerleaders. I’m thrilled to do this every day with Dale.
Doris Nagel 38:30
You mentioned the roller coaster ride of a startup. When there’s a down, where do you find inspiration?
Taralinda Willis 38:44
There are definitely lots of downs. I often look to the team for inspiration. You know, what we’re doing is challenging. There’s no playbook. Nobody really knows exactly what the right answer is. And so, when we’re having a down moment, I often rely on the team and get their input and feedback on what we should do and where we should go.
I also I hired a business coach. It wasn’t something that I thought was necessarily a key part of growing the business, but it’s been incredibly helpful. You know, it’s almost like having a business therapist, keeping your head on the right path. And if you’re irritated or frustrated about something, they can really give some good perspective as well as direction on how to solve problems.
Doris Nagel 39:30
It is challenging when you are a small business owner, because most of us are good at certain things, but none of us are good at everything. And so, it’s sometimes challenging to find those blind spots — to really look at yourself in the mirror and say, “You know, I’m not very good at this. I have to figure out how to, if not get better at it, find somebody who can do this better than me, because I’m this it’s just not my strength.
That’s a tough process and kudos to you for taking the unflinching look in the mirror and saying, “These are things I need help with.”
Taralinda Willis 40:26
Growing a business is a very humbling experience — that’s probably my common theme here. You have the opportunity to really take a look at yourself and assess not just what you like to do but what do you need to do, and to ask, “How can I surround myself with the right people either on the team or through a network of advisors?”
Doris Nagel 41:00
That’s a great segue to my next question. Where do you go for help? What resources have you found that are great to tap into when you’ve had challenges?
Taralinda Willis 41:09
We have no shortage of challenges here. So, I’ve intentionally as a first time founder surrounded myself with people who have specific expertise in a variety of things. It’s a little harder these days, but I do my best to stay in close contact with people who I think could answer questions I have today or tomorrow or in a few years.
And some of these informal advisors have been incredibly helpful when the going gets tough, where we get stuck on something. There’s also some consultants that we hire, as well as other entrepreneurs who are further ahead than I am, and people in the community who have been helpful and lent their ear or their advice.
Doris Nagel 42:03
It sounds almost like you have an informal board of advisors. Would you say that’s a fair characterization?
Taralinda Willis 42:20
Yeah. 100% agree. I also have a formal board that jumps in and is very helpful. But my board of advisors answers very specific questions. It’s not like they all get together or anything. But just having those one off conversations when I need them is so incredibly valuable.
Doris Nagel 42:30
Where would you like the business to be in, say, five years? What wil Curate look like?
Taralinda Willis 42:41
Do you have a crystal ball? Because I’m still waiting on mine to show up!
Doris Nagel
No, but if I find it, I’m going to buy a lottery ticket. Just kidding!
Taralinda Willis 42:52
But to answer your question, there’s a lot of directions we can go. We’ve been hyper- focused on the intersection of municipalities and the impacts to businesses. And that’s where 100% of our focus is going. We’ve built ourselves into the leading aggregator of municipal meeting data. And my focus right now is to continue to grow that. Municipalities are becoming more powerful as things become more contentious at other levels of government. And so we see every day more and more changes that could be either good or bad to businesses. And I don’t see that in any way slowing up in the next several years. So that’s where our focus is.
Doris Nagel 43:43
Do you think you’ll ever get tired of working in the business? And if so, is, what else might you do?
Taralinda Willis 43:50
Well, you know not every day is full of sunshine and puppies.
Doris Nagel 43:59
I say sunshine and rainbows and unicorns, but same thing.
Taralinda Willis 44:05
Yes, exactly. But today, I love what I do. At the end of the day, I’m thrilled I work really hard on this business. You know, I happily answer emails and slack messages, you know, late at night, early in the morning. And that’s where my focus is. This is where my passion is. And, you know, I think there’s a lot that we still can do with the business. And that’s where I’m putting my time and attention. Someday in the future, maybe I’ll spend more time sailing, but for now, I’m really happy doing what I’m doing.
Doris Nagel 44:36
Looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self about starting and growing a business?
Taralinda Willis
Oh, that’s a loaded question!
Doris Nagel
Well, I’m sure you have other entrepreneurs who are starting out who ask you for advice. What advice do you give them?
Taralinda Willis 45:04
I do a decent amount of informal mentoring to other entrepreneurs starting out. And really the advice that I give to them is to focus on customers. Stop building and do more listening. I think that really helped us be successful. I think we did a lot of that. But even we didn’t do as much as I think we could have done.
And that’s probably something we would have done differently. Going back is even more of a hyper focus on customers. That’s exactly where we started, but never taking that you know, what’s going on in some of your customers world for granted. And so always, you know, setting up more conversations and more checking meetings and being able to have that really close contact so that you’re 100% always building the right features.
Doris Nagel 46:03
Great advice.
I people are interested in Curate, or maybe they’re interested in just chatting with you about something they hear today, what’s the best way for them to reach you?
Taralinda Willis 46:26
I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. You’re welcome to connect with me there on LinkedIn, or and also to reach out through our website, which is curate solutions.com. I will make a plug that we are in a hiring push, and we have four positions posted.
We’re a team of 20, but we’re very actively growing. And trying to find the right people to help us grow is something we’re very focused on right now.
Doris Nagel
If people are interested in learning more about those, should they go to your website?
Taralinda Willis
Yes. We have a careers page on our site at curatesolutions.com.
Doris Nagel
Taralinda, thanks so much for being with me today and taking a little time to talk about your business and your journey as an entrepreneur. It was really a pleasure having you on the show.
Taralinda Willis
Yes, thanks so much. This was a lot of fun.
Doris Nagel 47:45
Well, we have just enough time left today to talk about an issue that I’ve seen crop up with a couple of clients recently. And it’s a topic where they might have saved themselves a bunch of heartache, and certainly a lot of legal fees. And that is something called an operating agreement, which you really need to have if you have two or more founders.
Both of these clients had business partners, and there was no operating agreement. And it caused a lot of a lot of issues.
So first of all, what is an operating agreement? Hopefully, most of you know, but if not, an operating agreement is basically a set of ground rules for how the business is going to operate in a whole variety of different situations.
It’s often one of those things that gets pushed to the side when you’re starting a business. You’re usually going into business with somebody, you know, maybe have known for a long time. You trust each other — obviously, you wouldn’t go into business together otherwise, right? And you really should have a lawyer help you draft a good one. Online templates, in my experience, just really don’t cut it. But lawyers are expensive. And most startup companies have a lot of things they need to spend money on, and not enough cash.
So it’s one of those things that often gets pushed to the side. One thing leads to another and often, it just never gets done. The co-owners usually believe it will never be an issue. But, you know, I did a little research. Depending on the study between 50 and 80% of business partnerships fail. And when they fail, things are usually not nearly as rosy as they were when the partners started out.
A lot of people compare a business partnership to a marriage, and that’s consistent with my experience with business partners. And we all know some marriages end pretty contentiously, even when both are good people. And the same is true for business partners when things don’t end well.
Think of an operating agreement is sort of a business prenup. It helps avoid disputes because things have already been anticipated and set out in black and white. Things like who pays the debts of the company? How are the company’s assets divided?
And it’s useful not only if the business fails. Wven if a business is successful — maybe, especially if it’s successful – it eventually will be sold, or maybe one or both, or all of the owners will want to move on and transfer ownership. And the operating agreements is where the business partners set out restrictions on transferring ownership. Should the other partner or partners be able to have a say over who becomes a new co=owner? Should they have the right to buy the other partner out? If so, at what price?
I had a client a while back with a very profitable auto body and repair and paint shop business. It was owned by two partners, and sadly, one of the two owners unexpectedly passed away. They had no operating agreement. Under the state’s inheritance laws, the deceased partner’s ownership in the business passed to his wife, because there was no operating agreement saying anything different.
The wife unfortunately felt that her deceased husband would want her to carry out in the business. The unfortunate part is she didn’t have much of a flair for the business. She drove her new business partner crazy, key employees started leaving, clients started walking. And by the time the remaining partner came to me, the once-profitable business was a shell of what it had been.
It was worth a whole lot less, and things were pretty ugly. And that’s just one sad story, and it’s one that didn’t even involve an angry split up. The business could have been saved and a lot of anger, heartaches and legal bills avoided, if only there had been a good operating agreement in place.
It’s much easier to set up a win-win exit strategy in advance, when things are going well, than afterward, when emotions are running high. And people feel burned by their former best friend, and this is partner.
State laws often provide default provisions. So if there’s no operating agreement, it defaults to state law. And you might think, “Why not just go with those — state laws should be good, right?” Well, they might work fine, but they often play out in unfortunate and unexpected ways.
For example, several states provide that if there’s no operating agreement, the partners in the business share ownership equally, and they share the assets and liabilities 50/50. Now, if you’re a 50/50 partnership, or a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 equal ownership and contributions, that may work out fine. But it doesn’t work so well if contributions haven’t been equal.
Another good reason to do an operating agreement is to limit liability partnerships and limited liability companies LLC as you might know them as are created shield the owners from corporate liability, and both forms are more likely to be ignored than a corporation. So it’s really important for both types of entities to follow corporate formalities to protect the partners from personal liability in the business.
A good operating agreement also just sets out how the company will operate and various roles and responsibilities. My best tip for writing an operating agreement or something like it is to come up with an exhaustive brainstorming session. all areas of the business that might need to be addressed even unlikely things, even the most mundane things.
The core elements of a good operating agreement should include provisions related to equity structure, contributions made by the partners, and how profits, losses and distributions will be handled. There should be provisions for management decisions and things like the accounting methods to be used, and how voting will occur, It should also address various legal issues like limitations of liability and indemnity, how the books and records will be handled, as well as governing law and dispute resolution. Importantly, it should also address any restrictions on the transfers of share or ownership in the company, such as buy outs, what will happen upon dissolution and liquidation and things like restrictive covenants, — for example, if you part ways on unhappy terms, can either of you then go work for a competitor, or start up a competing company?
Make sure to have a good lawyer help you as a commercial lawyer who works with small businesses. I do these frequently for clients, you know those cheap templates out there are tempting, and they are a decent place to start to get you thinking about the issues, but they should never be used as a file version. And I say that very sincerely whether you come to me for help or not. Templates are cookie cutters. And unless your business is a cookie cutter, too – in which case, I don’t know if you’ll make it — but if your business isn’t a cookie cutter, then that’s probably not the final product that’s right for you.
When your operating agreement is final, make sure you have all the partners sign it. And probably just as importantly, make sure to review it regularly and updated as needed. An operating agreement that was great when it was first signed, but no longer reflects what the current business partners want anymore, is not a good operating agreement anymore.
That’s our show for this week! Thanks so much for listening, everybody. And thanks especially again to our guest today. Tara Linda Willis, who’s the co founder and CEO of Curate Solutions, based in Madison, Wisconsin.
You can find more helpful information and resources on my website globalocityservices.com. There’s a library there blogs, tools, podcasts, and other free resources. And because the show is for you, I door’s always open for comments, questions. suggestions are just to shoot the breeze. You can email me at dnagel@radio.org. I promise you’ll always get an answer back from me.
Be sure to join me again next Saturday, 11am Central/noon Eastern time.
But until then, I’m Doris Nagel, wishing you happy entrepreneuring!
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