Michael Raymond, Author at Tinking Turtle

Welcome Turtlette

February 25, 2018 by Michael Raymond

The Tinking Turtle family would like to welcome Turtelette, aka Morgan Winfield, into our family! Turtlette joined us Friday, February 16th, and both she, her big sister Little Turtle, and Jennifer are doing fine.

Turtlette

Going Forward

As previously announced, Jennifer will be taking time away from the business to focus on bringing Turtlette into our family. We anticipate returning to teaching, finishing, and designing sometime mid-summer. You can always sign up to our Newsletter on our home page to be informed when services will be resuming. If you have a finishing or repair project you would like to add to our waiting list, please use our Finishing Contact Form to be added to the waitlist.

While she is out, Jennifer will be responding to a very limited amount of emails, as she learns how to balance the business with two small children.

As such, please direct requests or email to info@tinkingturtle.com, rather than jennifer@tinkingturtle.com. This ensures that I (Mr. Turtle) will also get a copy of the email, as I will be aiding in answering emails to clients as I am able.

Thank you for your understanding!

~ Mr. Turtle

Upcoming Changes to Tinking Turtle Services

October 31, 2017 by Michael Raymond

As Jennifer mentioned last week, the past several months (has it been that long?) have been very busy for us. Both with Little Turtle becoming more and more active and energetic as well as welcoming a future new addition to the family. All of this change has meant that we have been needing to take a more in-depth look at the level we are able to provide all of Tinking Turtle’s customer services.

Prior to Little Turtle’s arrival, we spent some time exploring maternity leave and how it could impact small fiber arts businesses. Learning from our own experiences, we are going to be making a few changes to Tinking Turtle’s services going into the Holiday season and New Year:

Effective November 1st, we will no longer be accepting standard turnaround service for finishing projects. Our goal is to ensure that we have everything with the business buttoned up prior to Turtle II’s arrival, and in order to do that we will need wo work through the projects that have already been committed.

A crib with blankets waits for a new arrival

Awaiting a new arrival

We will still accept finishing projects through December 1st with Expedited turnaround time pricing for a 6 week turnaround, and then through January 1st for Rush turnaround time.

Afterthose deadlines, or if you do not desire to have your project expedited, you can use our Contact Form to sign up for our Finishing and Repair wait list.

We are going to look at providing a longer block of leave this time around, with an anticipated return to business operations mid to late summer 2018.

While we may be a bit slow to respond to inquiries after the New Year as we focus on growing our new family, our hope is to be able to continue to providing our exceptional service and balancing that quality with family obligations over the next many months.

Maternity and Parental Leave III: Informing your Customers

March 3, 2016 by Michael Raymond

As I mentioned in the last post in what has now become far more of a series than I had imagined, having a well crafted and working plan internally for your business is only half the challenge. In order to maintain the trust and loyalty of your customers, preparing them for any changes in your business operations is key to ensuring this joyous time is as stress-free as possible for both the new parents and the business owner.

Depending on your business model, this notification, and how you change your own operations, can vary significantly. For a retail shop, it could very well be that the day-to-day operations for the casual customers are unaffected. Perhaps it’s only those specialty orders or specific classes that will take a bit longer to fill or offer. Alternatively, for a single-performer organization like Tinking Turtle, there are significant changes we needed to let our client base know about. Specifically, for Classes & Instruction, Jennifer would be unavailable for either contract teaching or private lessons for a period of several months, and for our Finishing and Repair Services, we have already closed project intake and started a waiting list.

In order to ensure sufficient lead time for notification, we believed in spreading the message about our new schedule and/or services early. We’ve found that our customers- especially those who are repeat visitors and with whom we have an established relationship – are extremely willing to work with you to adapt to your “new normal”. Having a child is an exciting time in almost everyone’s life, and framing the communication to reflect this can breed a great amount of good will among everyone your business interacts with.

Because our stakeholder base is fairly varied, we utilized a multi-tiered approach to ensure everyone was informed. You can never (or almost never) reach every possible individual with whom you interact, so identifying the individuals you need to contact into “buckets” and then tailoring a communication out to each bucket would be a good first step. For us that consisted of the following:

A pair of Blog Posts and an email notification out to our mailing list to notify individuals of the exciting news and potential changes.
Updating on our website service pages as early as possible to socialize the new schedule of offerings with individuals
Direct Outreach via email or phone call to our key vendor partners including publishers, LYS’s, and Fair, Festival, and Retreat contacts informing them of the changes

Additionally, we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible both through subsequent blog posts (like this series) and in our followup conversations responding to inquiries to keep everyone appraised of our future plans.

This brings everything full circle to where we are today; at this point plans are in place, customers are informed, and now it’s a matter of routine upkeep of the plan until the happy day arrives!

Have any questions about aspects of maternity or parental leave that I haven’t touched on? Want to see anything more in-depth? Leave me a note in the comments and maybe it can be the focus of a future installment in this series!

~ Mr. Turtle

Maternity and Parental Leave II: Crafting a Leave Policy

February 16, 2016 by Michael Raymond

Last week I took a first stab at exploring how the arrival of Little Turtle impacts our business, and some of the thoughts we have to ensure both the continued success of Tinking Turtle as well as our own personal well-being through a maternity leave policy.

As mentioned before, while a policy or leave of any kind isn’t a federal requirement for most LYS’s and other fiberarts business there are many benefits. These can be realized by taking leave herself as well as providing a leave policy for employees. Some suggested benefits as compiled by the Small Business Administration (which calls providing this type of leave a “smart option” for small businesses) include: positive morale for the for the perspective parent and increased loyalty of all employees. The International Labour Organization goes further in a broad horizontal review of leave policies, and finds that providing a comprehensive and flexible level of leave across all ranges of organizations can lead to positive outcomes including improved worker performance, productivity, and satisfaction.

Implementation of a leave policy can vary differently whether or not you are a retail shop owner, or a provider of fiber arts services with a work-from-home schedule. According to allBusiness.com, one of the ways small business benefit by being exempt from federal regulations is the ability to tailor broader policies to meet the individual needs of the company’s employees. With the rise in teleworking, there can be a “tiered” approach to a policy, both as the child’s birth date approaches as well as for employees returning to work after leave. The only caveat here is that whatever policy is established, it needs to be applied consistently and fairly across all levels of employees. This ensures there is no risk of an employee filing a discrimination lawsuit due to favoritism. Having such a policy documented and provided to all employees (in a handbook or welcome packet) for businesses with multiple employees is a good way to ensure everyone is aware of the policy and is treated fairly.

Here’s our maternity leave schedule and policy!

When you have a single employee or are self employed (as in our situation), how to develop a policy means being comfortable with the business closing, taking a break, or going on vacation for a period of time. With multiple employees, managing the business can be a bit easier, however it very well may mean reduced hours or services depending on the size of the business and the role of the employee, manager, or owner taking leave.

When we began contemplating a maternity leave policy, with Jennifer the sole revenue generating employee, we knew it would involve a period of time where Tinking Turtle would need to suspend most business operations. While there are some basic administrative tasks that I can perform, I doubt I could stand up to the quality for designing or finishing that our customers expect!

After reviewing the economics in our annual budget for how much time we wanted to provide Jennifer, we developed a policy and schedule that afforded us the balance to allow for personal time with our new arrival as well as not lose business direction and momentum. For Tinking Turtle, this came to be a gradual reduction of duties preceding the due date, and then a stair-stepped approach with both taking leave immediately after Little Turtle’s birth and then gradually returning to a “new normal” after our determined leave time.

Once we set this policy for ourselves, our next tasks were to communicate this out to our customers and our business partners. I’ll write more on this aspect in my next post, as keeping everyone who interacts with your business in the loop is key to implementing a successful maternity or paternity leave policy for a small fiberarts business.

~ Mr. Turtle

Maternity and Parental Leave and Small Businesses

February 8, 2016 by Michael Raymond

Little Turtle!

Ah, Babies. What greater topic can evoke such an array of emotions from new parents and family & friends alike. In the business world however, babies and pregnancy are often met with a quiet sense of trepidation; just how will having a child affect an employee and their family? What does maternity or parental leave even mean?

As Jennifer mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we are blessed to be expecting a daughter of our own. This is an exciting time of change and discovery for us, as we start evaluating how having a child will affect both our personal lives as well as that of this business that we run, Tinking Turtle. A wide variety of opinions and ideas exist on how Silicon Valley tech-startups consider pregnancy and childbirth, however this culture significantly differs from the fiber-arts world. I figured I’d take a stab at documenting some of the items we are considering as we go throughout this process. This will be a journey of exciting new learning for all of us, so please join me as we work our way through the process of putting all of the pieces together to ensure we can have a warm and happy welcome for Little Turtle.

Under the defining legislation currently applied towards pregnancy and birth in the workplace, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, business with less than 50 employees are exempt from any requirements to provide maternity or parental leave, either paid or unpaid. Just because it’s not required, however, doesn’t mean that there are not benefits both to the business as well as the new mother. In a small one or two person shop, this is a difficult decision to make; it would involve essentially cutting back or shutting down operations for a period of time. With a large majority of LYS’s and other related businesses being owned and staffed by women, this is a doubly difficult consideration given the potential amount of time away to be considered.

Here at Tinking Turtle, we’ve begun exploring just how to balance these two competing factors: providing the time through maternity leave to nurture and welcome a Little Turtle into the family, while still being cognizant of the business landscape and relationships to maintain.

Check out our next installment, where I’ll drill down into some of the specifics on how we hope to accomplish this, and our thought process behind some of these decisions.

~ Mr. Turtle

From the Business Desk: Small Business Privacy

October 15, 2015 by Michael Raymond

From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature looks at some of the common privacy implications that Small Business owners should have an awareness of. Join Mr. Turtle as he looks into the practicalities of privacy and small business.

License: Some rights reserved by g4ll4is

Just the other week, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that in addition to the estimated 22.1 million identity records that had been compromised in an illicit hack of their databases, approximately 5.6 million sets of fingerprint records has been stolen as well. Unlike a credit card or social security number, which can be changed or re-released, this personal biometric data is crucial to keep private, something that the OPM had failed to do.

While most small businesses do not operate at the scale of the Federal Government, they are still responsible for certain privacy requirements around how customer and employee data is collected and used. In addition to the commonly thought of privacy items like securing data from theft, there are other more subtle aspects of privacy law that govern what a business can, and more importantly cannot, do with someone’s data. While privacy has been growing in importance with the rise of the Digital Age, it has only been recently that the general public has become attuned to it’s importance in the world of commerce. As a small business owner, having a baseline understanding of some of the key elements of privacy law can pay dividends in protecting your business and yourself from liability.

In the United States, unlike our European cousins, privacy regulations follow a sectoral approach: each sector of the economy has its’ own set of laws and regulations. The general enforcement for privacy constraints in the business sphere, as opposed to more regulated sectors of industry like healthcare and finance, is the Federal Trade Comission (FTC). In its’ creation with the Federal Trade Commission Act, the body is chartered with enforcing against “unfair and deceptive trade practices and acts,” of which case law has held includes taking appropriate privacy and security measures. For the small business owner, this is important in how you portray your business’s privacy practices to your customers and the general public.

One of the first items a business owner should consider is that if you have a web presence, you should have a written Privacy Policy. This serves to inform any visitors of their rights to their personal data, and more importantly, your intentions surrounding that data. This in turn allows users to make informed decisions or know that for instance using a “contact me” form on your website may lead to their email address being added to your mailing list. Additionally, the State of California in their 2003 Online Privacy Protection Act requires such a notice to be posted on the website if you may potentially be collecting identifiable information from California Citizens. Given the interconnected web of e-commerce in today’s world, the chances are that this may be happening; ensuring that you have developed a current and accurate document unique for your business situation can cover a lot of your privacy bases in this respect.

Attribution: Some rights reserved by hyku

Another key area a small business owner should be aware of is how they conduct any email communication and marketing. As e-mail messaging has exploded in recent years, replacing more traditional postage service mailings, many small business owners have found themselves afoul of the regulations in this space. Email messaging in the United States is primarily governed by the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act) of 2003. In brief, the Act requires all email messages to possess a legitimate return email address and physical address of the sender, not have any false, misleading, or deceptive headers or subjects, and provide a clear and conspicuous way for the recipient to opt out of receiving future email messages at no cost to them.

Because of requirements such as these, I would recommend that any organization that intends to use email as a platform for outreach to consider selecting an Email Marketing service to assist in managing one’s distribution list. Many of the commonly used services, such as Mad Mimi, MailChimp, or Constant Contact provide free or extremely cost effective basic plans for small business users. These services allow the use of email formatting templates to assist in meeting all necessary privacy requirements, and additionally provide a platform by which recipients can individually manage their subscription status and opt in or out of receiving certain types of communications. Additionally, such services assist in keeping email distribution lists secure, and ensure that when messages are sent out, recipients email addresses are not exposed to other individuals. It is because of these benefits that any small fiber arts business should consider setting up an Email Marketing service as part of their initial business plan.

While the future of privacy law and requirements for U.S. based businesses may seem murky, a small fiber arts business can take heed of the above principals to best position themselves to be able to respond both to industry requirements as well as the overarching desires of their customer base. By acting and thinking in the best interest of the customer, and treating customer information as you would have another company treat yours, the savvy business owner can create and maintain indispensable customer goodwill. And that is an asset always worth having for your business.

Michael Raymond, CIPP/US

“Mr. Turtle”

From The Business Desk: Agile for Small Businesses

September 25, 2015 by Michael Raymond

From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business. This feature looks at how to leverage some new time and project management techniques from the Agile framework for small businesses.

As a small business owner, time is one of the most important assets that you have. It is also one of the most limiting. While other business areas like staffing or inventory can be expanded or invested in, there are only so many hours in a day (if you know how to change this, please let me know!). Making effective use of your time for projects and operations is crucial for a well managed business to both succeed and grow.

Is this what agile means to you?

Scrum. Kanban. Sprint. Agile. You may have heard these phrases before in industry trade shows or in the media as the newest focus for tech companies to manage their time, projects, and resources. While originally created for Software Development, the Agile Framework at it’s core can be applied to any business process or project; especially in the Fiber Arts industry where there are natural market segments and discreet work items like classes, designs, and projects.

While we here have written previously about project management, thinking about the Agile methodology more surrounds the what rather than the how. The core elements of agile that a Small Business owner should most be aware of are Team Ownership of Work, Minimum Viable Product/Shippable Units, and Timeboxing.

Before diving into these a bit further, I wanted to provide a 30 second overview about Agile from a non-technical perspective. Unlike traditional mindsets where work is done in an orderly, sequence of events, Agile revolves around breaking up the necessary work to be done into discreet work units, and then over a set period of time (commonly called a “Sprint”) delivering a piece of the work to the customer. For example, if you are running an LYS the work could be a 4 week class on garment construction; each week/session could be a unique and discreet unit of work. Now, with this background, let’s look a bit further at some of the tenants that could be applied to your business:

Team Ownership of Work: Agile frameworks work best when a team of individuals with a variety of skills are empowered to come together to tackle a project or issue as a whole. The team, rather than one individual, collectively has a say in how the work is preformed and ultimately delivered to the customer. This is especially applicable to a Fiber Arts business, due to the muti-facted nature of the industry.

If you are looking to put on a specific fiber event like a Fiber Festival, your team could consist of folks with a deep knowledge of yarns and marketing, separate instructors with significant technique knowledge, and then a handful of us less crafty types with some of the more technical business knowledge. By bringing the team into the decision-making process early on to determine what is and is not feasible (“scoping the work”), you and your business can be sure to have a better understanding up front of what you can (and more importantly what you cannot) accomplish in a given period of time.

Minimum Viable Product/Shippable Units: In the software development space, research has shown that the average user base only heavily utilizes 20% of all of the features of a software application, following the classic Pareto 80/20 rule. Think about your business. Are there certain key elements that always seem to attract the most customer base? Do you have certain patterns that always seem to hit on what the customer wants? Agile is built around focusing on identifying what those elements are, bundling them together to create the leanest possible unit for work to ship, and then working towards that.

Applying that principal to your business can dramatically help you drive your Return on Investment, as once you are able to focus on these areas, you are able to cut to the core of drawing in your customer base. Then, once you have a solid project or process up and running supporting that desire to be taught a specific skill in one of your classes, you can enhance that with additional features that may apply to a smaller set of customers. Doing this is following the tenant of breaking down your projects or work into smaller features called Shippable Units that can be developed in a shorter period of time.

Timeboxing: As mentioned at the beginning, managing your time effectively is crucial for any business owner. As an example, I have allocated myself 60 minutes to write this article. Following the Agile principal of timeboxing, a discreet amount of time is set aside for any one task, meeting, or work item. When that time is up for the day, no matter at what state the project is in, you should stop and move to your next item. Many different studies from business to medical have demonstrated that mulitasking is actually a misnomer, and the human brain loses efficiency when rapidly switching between tasks.

As such, being able to focus on one item at a time, like updating your website with your latest shipment of yarn or re-arranging your models for an upcoming trunk show, work it for a specific period of time, and then close out that piece of work before moving on can dramatically increase the efficiency in how an individual or team gets work done. So when you have those daily team meetings, or find yourself bogged down answering your inbox, break up your task into specific chunks, and timebox them. It may take you longer to accomplish that one task, but by knowingly addressing items one at a time you are able to accomplish a lot more work as a whole.

Overall, the Agile methodology is gaining traction in many large and medium sized corporations and is still being developed and tweaked as additional lessons are learned. While this overview has just scratched the surface, it’s an interesting mindset to begin thinking about when approaching your business planning for the coming year. For another approach on how to use some of these tenants, check out this great post from Agile Advice. And with that, I’m timeboxing this post for today!

~ Mr. Turtle

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