BLOG spot CAN MONEY BUY YOU HAPPINESS? By Lisa Conway
Everyone says that money doesn’t buy happiness. Lies! I tell ya … lies!! Let me explain how money does buy happiness, especially if you own a beauty business and have a couple of kidlets. The fact is money pays for everything. Your holidays, your home, your kids’ education just to name a few. These are the things that give us a platform to enjoy a happiness experience. Now you can have happiness in a tent, a one-bedroom apartment or a 60 square home too you don’t have to be high end to enjoy happiness, happiness is for the most part, a mindset. The one thing you do need for happiness is to have the freedom to choose where you spend your time and if Coaching salons has taught me anything it’s that time is a challenge for every salon owner I’ve ever met. It’s the no 1 pain point of salon owners everywhere. Lack of time is very frustrating and it’s the same for both rural and city both entry level beauty, a spa or as I say heavy duty beauty they would all welcome more time. In the early days of owning a salon we start out doing everything and that’s usually unavoidable. You are building and we don’t have the financial resources, so you become a do er that’s where you do everything. Now for most us there is never a written plan to swap over to become a who er. That’s when you change from “I need to get it done “to “who can I get to do it for me?” That’s when the magic happens, and you will begin to free up your time. The first step to finding more time is to know what your hourly earning rate is in the clinic. What can you earn per hour working on clients? Not knowing that and respecting your skill set is where most of us go wrong. I suggest you list all the tasks you do for a week at home and at work. For this exercise I’ll use home as the example but at work the process is exactly the same. Track yourself and be honest about all the chores you do from collecting kids and all the other kid activities, cooking meals and making lunches, walking the dog, changing beds, loads of washing, mowing the lawn, washing the car, the list goes on. Then I want you to see where you can outsource ten hours. You see most career women need a good old-fashioned fifties housewife. Too often I see women especially mums doing everything, they often don’t even think about outsourcing or if they do, they get the guilts about it. Here’s a fact… your kids don’t see quality time as you are doing chores and they are on the iPad. Your time with them should be other things too. Ask them what they think would be quality time, you might be surprised at the answer. When my kids where 8 – 10 I started taking them on a Sunday morning for a latte, we polished up a bit and we went to a wine bar that served coffee. We all sat and poured over the newspapers and chatted about the topics we saw, social events, the sport results, the gossip columns etc. It was a great little tradition we 62
Beauty Biz Year 14 Issue 1
developed; my hope was for them to be interested in current affairs. For less than $30 they drank hot chocolate from a fancy cup and I explained things like politics, law and religious beliefs amongst other things. Kids grow up fast and, if you are lucky, they will leave home. I didn’t want their only memories of me to be doing chores or working at the salon. I believe every salon owner deserve a part time wife, it will be the best investment you ever make, and it will buy you happiness. It might be a housekeeper that cooks a lasagne and makes a pot of soup every week while minding the kids. The aim is for you to find $300 a week somewhere and to re purpose it so you can buy yourself same happiness. Maybe you park 8 blocks away for free parking and walk to work every day? Maybe you bring your lunch from home saving $20 a day. Maybe you stop buying clothes for a bit or eating out. Maybe you sell things you no longer want, clothes, pot plants, vases, gym equipment you never use. Every one of us has hundreds of dollars’ worth of things we don’t use or don’t need that we could sell online. Imagine this … you come home after spending the day in the salon and the house smells of home cooking the kids are bathed the readers are read and everyone is in their PJs and excited to see you. That money definitely bought you happiness. That one day that you stay late and work servicing your high-end clients could return you three times what you paid the home maker and so it makes sense to re consider your choices. You may not have any kids; you might use your $300 to have your garden maintained, your ironing done and the window’s cleaned along with your dog walked. It’s up to you but I do know that your beauty girls do way too many $30 an hour jobs. You could be earning between $150 - $200 per hour in the clinic and paying someone else the $30 an hour. Food for thought… my belief is you deserve it. For more salon wisdom, email me at lisa@zingcoach.com. au, visit my website, find my video tips on YouTube or read my latest book Your Salon Retail: the no-nonsense, nohype guide to kick-arse retail in your salon business. www. thezingproject.com.au
