Pernilla Frazier, second from right and Line Daems, far left, meet with Web-site designer Josh Silverman, far right, and photographer Karen Philippi, second from left. Silverman is founder of Schwadesign Inc., which is designing the Web site for Kreatelier. Philippi is taking photographs for the site. The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PAWTUCKET — “No man is an island,” wrote the 17th-century poet John Donne. Neither, it would seem, is a business.

Even the smallest of businesses — say, sole operators such as carpenters or graphic designers — rely on networks of service professionals, suppliers and contractors who make it possible for those entrepreneurs to pursue a particular financial endeavor. In turn, those entrepreneurs provide income that helps those other businesses, often small businesses themselves, survive and grow.

Typically, these business networks grow out of personal relationships and recommendations from trusted advisers.

Some of those advisers end up providing much-needed services that get a new business up and running, some that customers see — such as paint or a retailing Web site — and some they don’t — such as help with permit applications or tax filings.

Nationally, about a third of sole-proprietor businesses –– those in which a person works alone –– get a third of their sales from other businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

“I think it’s all about building the network,” said Adriana Dawson, a regional director with the Rhode Island Small Business Development Center. “There needs to be a balance between building a business and developing a network.”

That’s the case for Kreatelier, a two-person consumer goods and home-decorating firm that began operating last year out of a studio in a mill on Mineral Spring Avenue.

Business partners Line Daems, of Providence, and Pernilla Frazier, of Cranston, are relying on advice they’ve drawn from business-planning classes at the Center for Women & Enterprise in Providence, and a small set of service professionals, to grow their new business. At the same time, they provide income to some of those same professionals and pay subcontractors to perform work for which they either don’t have the time or the expertise to do themselves.

Within Kreatelier’s evolving network of advisers and subcontractors are a lawyer, an accountant, a Web development team, a seamstress, an upholsterer, a coterie of retail shops and even the mill building’s landlord.

Elizabeth M. Tanner is a Bristol lawyer who works on her own, often advising business clients referred to her by the Center for Women & Enterprise, a nonprofit business development agency located in Providence’s Fox Point section. That’s how she came to help Frazier and Daems set up Kreatelier. The two women took a business-planning workshop at the center last year.

“I start a lot of businesses,” Tanner said during an interview at the center. In March alone, she filed incorporation papers for six new clients.

Many of those prospective clients have little idea about the legal work involved in started a business, she said.

Daems and Frazier seemed to stand out from the pack in that regard, an oft-repeated description offered up by the service professionals who work with the Kreatelier partners.

“They have the potential to have tremendous success,” Tanner said of Kreatelier’s partners. “They’re smart, they’re organized and they have a plan.”

In December 2006, Daems and Frazier produced some brightly colored fabric organizers for makeup, cutlery and writing or drawing implements to sell at a school craft fair. The items sold well and led to orders that kept them busy sewing for weeks.

They began talking about a more-permanent working arrangement.

“They knew they needed to surround themselves with a team of professionals during this start-up process,” Tanner said. “They listened to what [those professionals] had to say and they followed their advice.”

“They took their time and they didn’t rush” into starting their business, she said. “When people are in a rush, that’s when the problems happen.”

There were about 6 million nonfarm businesses in this country in 2006, with the median small business employing four people, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s latest annual report to the president. Small businesses, defined by the SBA as a company with fewer than 500 employees, create 60 percent to 80 percent of the net new jobs in this country, according to federal statistics.

In 2004, large businesses with 500 or more employees actually lost more jobs than they created, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, seeing a net drop of 181,122 jobs.

In any given year, about 7 percent of the nation’s working-age population is laying the groundwork for a new business, but not all of them will succeed in even starting a company. Rhode Island was home to an estimated 101,800 small businesses in 2006, according to the SBA. That includes 3,700 that were added that year.

One of the first decisions that entrepreneurs face is where to locate a new venture. Is it better to work out of the home to save money, or rent office space?

DAEMS AND FRAZIER envisioned a business selling home goods and apparel accessories. Renting a storefront seemed to make sense, they said, until they started looking at rental rates and considered how two working mothers would manage a store’s long operating hours.

They held off renting a storefront and, after months of planning, launched Kreatelier last fall, out of the mill studio.

Daems and Frazier rent studio space at 558 Mineral Spring Ave., a building owned by Jonathan N. Savage, a partner in Pawtucket law firm Shechtman Halperin Savage. They pay $800 a month for space on the mill’s third floor.

The building is one of several Savage either owns outright or in which he shares ownership with various partners.

“Our concept was to break it up into small spaces that were affordable to artists and small manufacturers,” Savage said in an interview at his law firm near the Providence city line. “I’m very proud of that building. It’s making a difference for a lot of people in a nice, supportive environment.”

At 300,000 square feet, the three-story brick building is large enough to require its own building supervisor and maintenance workers, as well as take up the time of a bookkeeper and a leasing agent –– Len Lavoie, owner of a real-estate management company that specializes in renting artist space in mill buildings.

More than 100 artists or small businesses operate out of the mill, and room is being made for more businesses as renovation work on the building continues in small phases.

“The demand has been such that we’re doing two phases simultaneously,” Savage said, noting work to create spaces that can be used by handicapped artists.

Yet the project hasn’t reached profitability, he said.

“The project will be years before we see break even,” Savage said.

Like many people who fall within the network of this small business, Savage is not only landlord, he’s a customer, having bought a quilt made by Frazier as a gift for a daughter.

While Savage’s business relationship with Daems and Frazier is at arm’s length, others come in contact with them more often.

After getting help setting up and learning how to use a bookkeeping software program, the partners hired Warren accountant Joe Farmer to review their books and prepare their income tax returns.

Farmer, 44, has been an accountant for 22 years and runs his firm, Farmer & First, with a business partner. They employ a full-time accountant, three part-time accountants and three other full-time workers to handle the firm’s roughly 1,000 clients.

MOST OF the clients are small-business owners.

“Your typical mom-and-pop, or in this case mom-and-mom,” he said.

The clients are the type of businesspeople who typically don’t have the time or the expertise to manage tax filings and whose businesses aren’t large enough to support an in-house accountant.

“The reason somebody sets up a business is not to set up their bookkeeping,” he said.

With their bookkeeping system in place, Daems and Frazier send him quarterly reports electronically now. They meet face-to-face sporadically, to review Kreatelier’s finances.

An accountant such as Farmer can alert his clients to issues they may face down the road. As Kreatelier grows, its financial structure may have to become more sophisticated.

“There’s a point where they’re going to reach a critical mass” in sales, said Farmer, who praised the partners. “They have a marketing sense about them; they get noticed.”

ONE REASON they get noticed is the help they’re getting from a business consultancy that operates right inside their building

Small-business owners often realize one thing quickly — it’s impossible to do everything yourself.

Daems and Frazier understood early on in their partnership that the Internet could help them reach customers.

But building a Web site to accomplish that would take time away from actually producing items to sell and require an expertise neither of them possessed.

“Some things we have to give up [doing]; it’s not viable for us to be working 10 hours a day on them,” Frazier said.

They turned to Josh Silverman, founder of Schwadesign Inc., a business-strategy and brand-development group located one floor below Kreatelier in the Mineral Spring Avenue building.

“THEY CAME to us knowing they needed a Web site,” Silverman said during a series of interviews. “They just knocked on the door and said, ‘Can we talk about a Web site?’”

Schwadesign pulls together teams of specialists for projects that may include crafting business strategies for clients as well as creating the promotional materials, packaging, Web sites and other marketing materials that support those strategies.

“They really didn’t have an idea for it . . . they had a color palette that they liked.”

Kreatelier is now one of four clients Schwadesign has in the building, all of which grew out of chance meetings and friendships struck up inside the former mill.

“The best kinds of [business] relationships are not purely transactional,” Silverman said.

Even with a team of professional Web developers working on the project, the Kreatelier Web site has taken months to unfold and required more work and more help than the partners first envisioned. Crafting product descriptions that can draw customers took Daems away from production for hours at a time.

“Line has been working night and day,” Frazier said in late March. “It’s a lot harder than you think.”

Producing catalog-quality photos capable of spurring sales proved too hard for them. By January, they turned to another tenant in the building to do the photography for them.

The decision was another example of the “constant battle” the partners wage between deciding whether to devote personal time or scant finances to a project.

The work fell to Karen Philippi, a professional photographer.

Philippi and the partners negotiated a deal that got the work done at a cost they could afford, Frazier said.

“Karen did the math and brought the cost down for us,” she said.

Philippi displayed in 90 photographs what Daems and Frazier expected would take 200 images to show.

“I try to make myself more affordable for artists,” Philippi said. “I enjoy working for that community.”

She also used the women to help stage shots, allowing her to cut out the cost of a temporary assistant.

“They propped [the items] for me so I didn’t have to hire a stylist,” said Philippi, who has been doing product photography for about a decade.

They pay her $35 a picture.

Even with an interruption caused by a travel commitment, Philippi did the work faster than the partners could, they said.

Still, bringing all the various elements of the Web site together has taken more time and money than expected, the two women said.

“AS SOON as there is more than one person involved, it seems to get complicated,” Frazier said.

The people at Schwadesign now expect to complete the work of merging the product descriptions and the photography by June. Originally planned for the beginning of May, the launch of Kreatelier’s online store is now expected to occur late next month.

But the partners couldn’t afford to sit back and wait for money to come pouring through an online portal. Through fall and winter they took on home-decorating projects, sold their wares at craft fairs and ran a sewing workshop to bring in money.

That’s meant sales for other businesses, including a Pawtucket upholsterer, a West Warwick seamstress and Benefit Street Antiques, owned by Marian Clark. Her Providence shop is a regular stop for the partners.

Some business arrangements happen by chance, as when they found ASAP Upholstery & Window Treatments, a Pawtucket business that handles upholstery work for their interior-design projects.

“This company has been around for years,” Daems said on a recent trip to the shop. “Last year, they hung out this little sign, we were driving by and we saw it.

“We’ve brought them a lot of business.”

OVER THE winter, they spoke with a handful of seamstresses and sewing entrepreneurs about farming out some of the orders that are coming their way.

“We’ve really reached the limit we can handle,” Daems said in early March.

But subcontracting the sewing work has come in fits and starts.

They’ve run across many women who sew as a way to make money but few who can work consistently to a pattern. Some seamstresses can’t resist putting their own flair on the pieces they are hired to produce, while others have trouble finishing the work on time.

“THAT’S BEEN the scariest part; suddenly you have to let go of the quality control,” Frazier said.

An arrangement with a West Warwick seamstress is rolling along.

“So far that has worked out great,” Frazier said.

Frazier met Sue Beaudoin about three years ago at the Fabric Place store in Warwick, where Beaudoin taught sewing classes until the store closed last year.

After the Fabric Place closed, she started Material Things, a sewing business she operates out of her home.

“I’m trying to make it a full-time business,” Beaudoin said, sitting in her living room. Behind her, on the other side the front door, is her sewing machine and the work area for her business.

Most of Beaudoin’s work comes from interior decorators who hire her to make drapes, shades or other items they choose for their own clients. She now works for about 10 decorators regularly, including the Kreatelier partners.

Late last year, Frazier asked her former teacher whether she wanted to work for them on a contract basis.

Interior decorators “start out sewing themselves, then, as their work grows, they realize they don’t have time for the sewing,” Beaudoin said.

She likes working with the Kreatelier partners, Beaudoin said, because they know what they want from her, give her the time to do it right and they pay on time.

“I get paid within one week — that’s fantastic,” she said. “I’ve had other people pay me and the checks bounce.”

Beaudoin has a formal price list for the work she does, minimizing misunderstandings over payments.

While the arrangement with Beaudoin works well, others do not.

THE PARTNERS dropped contract negotiations with a Fall River sewing shop after a frustrating trial run that lasted weeks but, by mid-April, produced little that could be sold. Misplaced labels, wavy stitching and other mistakes cropped up as the shop’s seamstresses worked through batches of sample cloth. There were testy exchanges about the price to be paid for sample goods that were the basis of the trial.

By the end of the month, they find a trio of manufacturing partners who can produce their goods in numbers that can make sense for a start-up design firms. Lead by East Boston manufacturer Classic Apparel Designs of Boston Inc., the trio will produce as few as 150 pieces in an order.

“This feels more professional,” Daems said of the Boston firm.

It was another example of the trial-and-error nature of building a business.

At a networking event the women hosted at their studio in February, Frazier offered a small group of budding entrepreneurs some encouragement.

“You have to be a little gutsy and see what works,” she said.

A year in the life of a

Small Business

an occasional series

pgrimald@projo.com