Be the change you want to see

Did you know you don't have to be a business owner to be a job creator?  It's really about being invested in the community and therefore your local economy.  As a salon business owner, I joined Dane Buy Local.  Really it is about local businesses supporting other local businesses in order to see our local economy thrive for everyone.  I'm not talking about only spending all of your money at the corner store.  But consider the fact that if $100 is spent at a non-locally owned business, $57 of that money leaves our area and therefore our local economy while only $43 of that stays here.  That same $100 spent at a locally owned business retains $68 here within our local economy and only $32 goes elsewhere.  Now imagine if everyone consciously spent $10 more a week within our community than we already do.  $10 a week isn't much but multiply that by 495,959 people in Dane county.  If 68% of the money stays here, that's $3,372,521 a week that would be made available to support the local economy that we didn't have before.

We're not too small to make a difference, even half of that would be a huge boost.  And if people could see the change our $10 could make, imagine what might happen if this caught on in every county in the state?

Go...Run With Scissors!

My recently graduated daughter is taking a tour of the Aveda Institute here in Madison.  Though I would be absolutely proud of her had she chosen a different path to start out on, I'm pretty proud she wants to try out what I do.  I have an awesome career and am fortunate to still be as happy doing it as I was when choosing it to begin with.

But my advice to her is this:

Beauty school isn't easy.  It is fun...for school and is like any other obligation in the end.  It's like high school, as people rarely grow up all that much over the course of a summer.  But it doesn't take as long, and the classes are geared towards someone who has a creative and active mind rather one who would rather sit in lectures day after day. You are taking classes with a bunch of women primarily, women who are taught to judge everyone's appearance as a sum total of how they are put together.   Yet you are taught how to take what you have and accentuate your assets.  It is the industry of helping people feel good about the way they look, including yourself.  And there are so many things you can do with the skills you learn.  You are taught to see the world for its possibilities rather than its shortcomings.  You are taught how to communicate with people in a positive way even when life around you is a complete wreck.

You will learn to take pride in the small things you accomplish along the way, and then to be able to look back at where all of that lead, even if you decide this wasn't the perfect fit for you.   

The Business of Self-Promotion

There’s no doubt from my happy and loyal clientele that I know how to be a hairdresser.  In fact, as far as not spending more than I make at the salon, I can do that too.  As I feel that I'm growing into what my business identity means to me pretty well, growing my business is my new project this year. 

Oh I have a lot of clients, and really good ones.  But when my kids are all in school next fall, I’m going to be bonkers unless I can expand my client base a little bit and work more productive hours.  Financially I’m doing better than I ever did working for someone else.  But I would like to do all of those things like have a “just in case THAT happens” fund. 

My two largest sources of new clients come from the Web and from word of mouth.  Word of mouth seems to be going okay.  Let me give a shout out to those of you who brought a friend or family member to meet me in the past year.  Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.  But Web traffic can be hard unless you want to pay lots of money to Google to put you on the top of the page with an ad.

“Likes” on Facebook, and followers and re-tweeters on Twitter are a big way to promote the flow of traffic through my space.  I have my own domain, which is neat.  And also, since I had to leave my good reviews behind with my former employer, I have to rebuild that too.  In that, come check me out in the Social Networking world, and maybe, if you’re particularly inclined to do so, pop a review on Yelp or Google.  And don’t only do this for just me, do this for other small, local businesses you patronize and together we can watch our local economy flourish.