The makeup of any entrepreneurial business needs to be well designed and offer a firm yet flexible framework that can with stand the stress of the small business market but also be portable. 

The main pillar is yourself. The Entrepreneur. You need to know yourself well. Understand your strengths, your skills, your abilities to do the job. Also, almost as important is to know what you are unable to do and what you are poor at doing. This gives rise to the second pillar. 

Your team. This is a group of people, services and companies that offer you the support to give you the freedom to do what you do best. Search these people out and build a solid relationship with them. 

To start your framework by connecting the pillars like a ladder we begin by using the first rule of Entrepreneurship. Niche thyself. Create a niche in the market for you and what you want to do. Begin to speak about this area, write about it. Start a blog, offer to speak at functions. Get people to know what you do and who you are. 

The second rung on the ladder is our finances. A solid financial plan with cash flow forecasts and management reporting to keep us in the loop on information about current and future financial situations. 

We move to our customers for the next rung and begin to understand who, why, what and when our customers are. The more we learn from them the better we can serve them. 

Also begin to understand your suppliers. Seek out and build solid relationships with them. Create those important payment terms and build a sense of team and trust with them. 

Now we can begin to market. We know what we do, who we do it with and we now have a way to offer authentic marketing. Build a series of campaigns that follow the sales cycle of Inform, Educate and Sell. 

The final rung on our ladder is the internal processes and procedures. Every business needs a set of rules to operate with. From the smallest function through to the yearend processes, they should all be defined and written down. You now have a solid flexible framework for your business, just add product.