Practical guidance for building a business that makes sense
I’m Renee Davis, the founder of Backbone America. I help aspiring and current business owners evaluate opportunities, understand the financial requirements, make informed decisions, and build businesses that remain manageable as they grow.
I believe business ownership should begin with honest questions, useful research, realistic numbers, and a plan that accounts for the life and responsibilities you already have.
That belief comes from professional experience, but it also comes from building a business, making expensive mistakes, returning to employment, changing careers, and rebuilding Backbone America with a much stronger foundation.
My work with small-business owners
My work with entrepreneurs began when I became an advisor at a Small Business Development Center. I helped people evaluate business ideas, develop financial projections, research funding, prepare business plans, assess lending programs, and work through the decisions involved in starting or expanding a business.
During that time, I worked with nearly 200 entrepreneurs. Their startup and expansion projects represented approximately $1.15 million in capital. Together, we started companies, created jobs, and helped move business plans from ideas on paper toward operating businesses.
That experience taught me that funding questions usually lead back to the same fundamentals: preparation, evidence, cash flow, owner resources, and the ability of the business to repay what it borrows.
How Backbone America began
I started Backbone America as a blog in 2016 while I was still working as a business advisor. I wanted to make practical business guidance available to people beyond those I could assist individually.
When the organization I worked for announced that it was closing, I received two weeks’ notice. I felt blindsided, but I also recognized that the knowledge and experience I had developed still belonged to me. I registered a business the following day and began turning Backbone America into something larger.
I had strong ideas and useful material, but I did not yet have a reliable way to reach the people who needed it. I built courses before I understood how I would consistently attract their buyers. I joined chambers and attended networking events because those were the accepted things to do, even though they rarely connected me with the people I intended to serve.
I kept investing time and money because I believed persistence would eventually make the business work. I spent more than $10,000 on coaching and certifications, followed by thousands more on advertising. The business still could not pay the bills. Debt increased, cash disappeared, and I eventually lost my house.
That experience permanently changed the way I approach business ownership. A good product still needs a market. Continued investment should be supported by evidence. Business decisions also need financial limits that protect the person and household behind the business.
Returning to work and building new expertise
Returning to employment became part of rebuilding. A dependable paycheck gave me room to repair my finances, strengthen my skills, and reconsider how I wanted to approach business ownership.
I spent several years teaching elementary school before returning to school for a master’s degree in software engineering. That transition eventually led me into business analysis and my current work as a Business Process Automation Engineer.
In process automation, I examine how work moves from beginning to end. I identify repeated effort, unclear decisions, unnecessary delays, weak handoffs, and opportunities to make the process more reliable. I then use documentation, technology, and automation to build a better system.
My approach brings together business advising, entrepreneurship, teaching, financial planning, psychology, software engineering, process improvement, and automation.
I bring that same perspective to small businesses. A business should have processes that can be understood, repeated, improved, delegated, and eventually automated. Strong systems protect the owner’s time while making the business easier to operate and grow.
Why I rebuilt Backbone America
I returned to Backbone America while working in a career that I value. My job provided stability, benefits, flexibility, and meaningful problems to solve. I also wanted greater control over my time, location, and the work I choose to create.
Building while employed allows the business to earn each larger commitment. I can test an offer, improve a system, and learn from the results before asking the business to support my household.
Many of the people I serve are in a similar position. They have careers, families, financial obligations, and lives they have worked hard to build. They may want more control over their income and future, but they also want to make thoughtful decisions about what they risk.
Backbone America is designed to help them investigate business ownership, evaluate opportunities, work through the numbers, build carefully, and create systems that keep the business manageable.
Why I created the Business Lab
Business guidance is often divided into disconnected pieces. One resource helps you develop an idea. Another discusses business plans. Another explains funding. Still another talks about systems and automation.
I created the Business Lab to connect those decisions. Members can begin with the work that applies to them now—evaluating business ownership, refining an idea, preparing to launch, understanding funding, or improving an existing business—and continue as their needs change.
The lessons are focused and practical. Each one helps you answer a question, make a decision, calculate something important, or build one useful piece of the business. You can work through as much or as little as your time and circumstances allow.
A business should support the life you want to live
I want the freedom to choose among meaningful work, writing, teaching, creating, traveling, and occasionally doing nothing at all. I want to spend enough time in another place to experience living there instead of fitting the entire experience into a short vacation.
Those goals influence the kind of business I am building. They also shape the questions I encourage other prospective owners to ask. The business model, financial requirements, customer-acquisition process, daily work, and operating systems should support the owner’s definition of a good life.
If you are thinking seriously about business ownership and want help identifying the decisions that come next, find your starting point.