Regenerative Notes
Slow, honest notes on building a business that sustains you.
Kindred: Small Businesses Worth Knowing
Kindred: Meet Rachel Flood, Alignment Ops
Sometimes what gets you started is not a plan. It is one person who hands you a small first piece of work.
For me, that person was Rachel Flood of Alignment Ops. I had been very resistant to starting my own business, and then Rachel gave me my first small contract. It felt like a sign from the universe that I needed to stop second-guessing myself and take the leap.
Rachel is an operations consultant and enterprise architect with over 20 years of experience in for-profit and non-profit settings, and she describes herself as an adept systems thinker and digital strategist.
Tending My Own System
Every morning, I open at least two apps just to figure out how to start my day. One for Notion, where all my knowledge and reference info lives. One for ByDesign, where my tasks live. It doesn't take long before I'm getting distracted moving from one to the other, trying to remember what I was actually doing in the first place.
A few weeks ago, in the middle of that same back and forth, I made a decision. Nothing dramatic. Just a choice to adjust my tools so I could stop the context switching and avoid the distraction that came with it.
I want to walk through the whole thing, not because switching tools is interesting on its own, but because the process I used on myself is the same one I use with clients. It's just easier to see the friction in someone else's systems than in your own. When you're standing inside something, it's harder to spot what's not working.
Sometimes what gets you started is not a plan. It is one person who hands you a small first piece of work.
For me, that person was Rachel Flood of Alignment Ops. I had been very resistant to starting my own business, and then Rachel gave me my first small contract. It felt like a sign from the universe that I needed to stop second-guessing myself and take the leap.
Rachel is an operations consultant and enterprise architect with over 20 years of experience in for-profit and non-profit settings, and she describes herself as an adept systems thinker and digital strategist.