There has been so much going on throughout the fall and winter. And now that all the different moves, schedules, births, etc. have basically been completed, the air has gone out of me a bit. I am very happy and I feel great! But at the same time I feel a little insecure (or reached, feels like I can not find the right word choice) now that everything is so calm suddenly :)
This week I have almost only worked from home and told Annika "it's almost a pity that my sunday posts about my work week are so appreciated, Sundays have become the day of the week when the statistics pick up, but I have no fun writing now! I can not take a picture of myself in front of the computer every week either”.
Cut to -> here comes my longest Sunday post in a long time, haha!
A little lost?
Being an entrepreneur does not mean that you are always in full swing with high energy and many balls in the air, when you completely control your own future, you sometimes end up in periods where you feel a little lost. What is the next step? What do I want now? What do I want in the future?
You know when you get so drastic, I'm sure I'm on the right track and just need to find the next step, but at the same time I get thoughts like "maybe I should volunteer with sick monkeys in the jungle for a year instead?" Lol.
Why - Right now I have such a period and the first thing I do is try to get out why I have such a period. Because it is also an important part of it all!
Is it because I want to change direction for real?
Is it because I'm just tired after a long and intense period of stress? That my feelings now are not really "mine" but are based on the fact that I need to rest.
Or am I just unsure now that the salon is so self-sufficient even if I were to work a little harder? That now that we have come this far, I get a little "past success feelings".
I actually think it's a mix of all the points! I finally feel free but it has required a lot of me, which means that the spark inside is not as strong as it usually is. While this is really a bit of a crossroads and I need to think about what I want next, I do not let go of the salon completely just because it is self-propelled but suddenly there is plenty of time left over for other things if I want!
What do I want to do next? - That is the question. The makeup brand I talked about was more complicated to start than I thought, I now know after a lot of research and discussions with producers. I know it's possible if I fight, of course! But before I spend another year trying, I have to be sure that this is what I want.
The reason I hesitate is because I have started to get a more romanticized image of a business idea that does not require constant development to exactly the same high degree. Do not get me wrong, of course all companies must be developed all the time! But e.g. I was inspired by the Grace & Frankie series where two women develop a dildo for older women - they put all their focus on one single product! Then they have a travel size and a bit of that too, but you can develop in so many other ways than constantly coming up with news, new colors, new products, etc. so that the interest in the brand does not die. It's a bit like the make-up industry feels, I think, you have to produce new, new, new all the time otherwise you are forgotten. It was the whole thing that I thought sounded most fun before! But now in my what-should-I-do-in-the-future-slump, I get more hungry for a different type of company building. Do you understand what I mean?
Entrepreneur or makeup artist? - You can think ”if I did not work with makeup, what would I have done then? I can do nothing else!"But when I think one step further, it is not true. My colleague Annika is a makeup artist "for real", she was born an artist and loves to create. I myself am only good at makeup because I have been practicing it every day for 10 years. That which I is good at is really that I work hard and am stubborn when I know what I want, if I decide on one thing I make sure to fix it!
And when you start thinking bigger and not just about makeup, there are suddenly lots of opportunities! I would like to try writing a book! Annika and I have an idea for a squeezing exercise machine for better snippet health :) Miska has started with a sunglasses company that will also have some accessories in a certain style that is in progress, I would like to work with that. I would also like to do another make-up brand with base makeup that is developed specifically for oily skin, I had actually intended to do that after this first make-up brand that I am already starting to research. Such a make-up brand is based more on high quality and a solid basic range and does not require news and limited edition stuff and the like in the same way. I would also like to work more socially on the left, where you get to talk a lot!
Yes, you hear, it is not ideas and commitment that are missing. Without more that I have many loose strings right now and have to catch at least one of them :)
What should I do now? - Last Friday, Annika and I went for a cozy stroller walk on the snowy forest roads where we live and it is always so rewarding to talk about this with her because she is so wise, best coach!
She knows that I'm a little mentally dull right now and thinks I should rest my mind. So not that I should be free and lying in bed and watching movies all day, but that everything I do does not have to be work from morning to night. Right now it's calm at the salon, Annika is in a baby bubble and it's really perfect timing to keep me busy with other things and let the inspiration come to me. The power of doing nothing.
Both me and Annika have the good-girl syndrome and sometimes you only work to feel good who has worked, that's the case with companies, there is always something you can do! But the fact is that if you only work for the sake of the job, then maybe in the end it does not give much value to the company anyway. If you had instead done something else and let your brain rest from work for a period, then the spark comes back and then you become three times as efficient!
I feel bad if I do no good at all, so there is no alternative, but I have a lot of stuff I would like to sew and so I have started exercising as well. Maybe I should just work a few hours a day for a period and get a little more free time for other activities that make me feel good. And then when the spark and the ideas come, I simply do what I feel like right now, without overthinking it all, the rest of the pieces will fall into place automatically!
What do you think about that? :)
A picture from my weekend job may illustrate this! I bought an expensive bikini from Victoria's Secret a year ago and the fabric has become dull and ugly after only two sun holidays. But since I do not like the buying and throwing culture, am sewing-savvy and also so happy with the shape of this (it is difficult to find strapless bikinis that both fit well and give a nice tan), I decided to change the fabric to a black fabric instead! There will also be recycling with the fabric as I sacrificed a pair of old training pants that will soon be a bikini instead;) Good for both the environment and the wallet!
In addition, I have to sew by hand because the bikini is so hard, so there will be some therapy and relaxation at the same time :)
Semester schedule
I asked the staff to send in holiday wishes for the summer already in December and now I have received all of them and are planning. It's always a puzzle!
We are looking for a new makeup artist and we also have to change the opening hours to summer time, because it takes four people to be open 8-20 and Monday-Saturday that we have now so when people have a holiday it does not go together.
And then the fact that summer is our big high season! So we must use the time as much as possible while we of course can not deny our staff to be free the short summer we have in Sweden :)
Here I sit and try to puzzle :)
Hard working parents
It looked so fun when we went in on Monday and worked a turn at the salon while Annika's baby was asleep in the car seat:
Here you see a hard working "folder" with a 6 day old baby who is already at work haha :) Annika did not work but we had a return visit at the birth the same day so she followed and showed the cute little baby to colleagues ♥
Crisp
We have been through worse months but now almost all of our buffer has been used up and we hope for an early spring so that customers wake up from their hibernation soon;) January is always a quiet month but now we have double rents and increased staff costs plus renovation costs in in connection with the move so it takes more than what comes in! Lucky to save from better times.
The salon move is a positive change financially, but we still have our old premises until March, so the rent reduction is not noticeable yet. On the contrary, now we have double. The reduction between the rents is SEK 50,000 a month, so you can imagine that it is a fairly large blur that is paid in total now in just rent, wow haha.
Here Miska sits and pays bills! I am so lucky that he is in charge of that part of the finances, I make invoices that we send out and fix statistics and cash reports, but then the money comes in. All the money that goes out because I panic haha. Even though I have been an entrepreneur since I graduated, I have not got nerves of steel yet;)
Oh by the way! Last week I wrote in this makeup that Miska painted a picture with tropical parrots in the morning, subconsciously I was inspired and did a make-up in the same colors and did not realize it until afterwards. You see the board in the picture above? This week he painted it while I put on my make-up upstairs, and without us seeing each other I did a make-up in the same colors !! Compare this painting with this makeup which I published yesterday. Isn't that cool? :) Super-connected haha.
This painting is for sale, write to him on instagram @miskaisoniemi if you have questions or want to shop :)
Note we are aware that the painting does not fit our wallpaper, it just stands there and dries, we have not hung it up haha.
Stock balance and drive cats
When you know a thing completely without it, it is incredibly easy to explain too quickly or vaguely when to teach. You should only know how many problems we had when we three years ago taught Malin (who works from home with webshop etc.) how Photoshop, Quip, WordPress, Dropbox etc. work. No matter how accurately I thought I described, there were always things that went crazy because I had missed an important detail somewhere or that it looked different on different computers. Poor Malin had to call me all the time haha!
Now before we started working more from home, we taught our colleagues at the salon how to change the stock balance in the webshop, we taught a person who then taught the others. This is so simple we thought :)
Then last Friday I received a message "can we not remove the products we no longer sell? You get a better overview then”. I sat and thought for a while about what the problem was, those products should not be visible in that list, which they did! It took so long for me to understand what had happened, and then realized that a small, small mistake had resulted in the person accidentally republishing deleted products that we no longer have in the range, so suddenly there were lots of old products in the webshop Lol!
Luckily, there was zero in stock on these, so we did not get any wrong orders :)
My Friday night and Saturday morning was therefore spent removing products from the webshop + writing a drift cat (we say drift cat instead of crib, the word crib sounds so negative haha) on how to super quickly have an overview of stock balances and edit products in a smooth way .
So now everyone has a simple step-by-step description with both text and images!
No corner now I'm going to make myself a cup of nettle (super useful!) And sew a bikini and baby cuddle! :) The power of doing nothing!
Hugs are !! ♥
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