Owning a business is hard, owning a business with one or more family members is even harder. Not being able to separate business from pleasure, taking arguments and disagreements home, putting strain on your relationships whilst you make tough decisions for the business, which you may not all agree on. Not looking forward to seeing each other on occasions, and not having much to talk about. This is the reality of running a business with family.
I do not work with my sister, I do not work with my mum, I work with my best friends.
Every day I go to work, I get to know that I’m working with the best people I can imagine. Since I was born (being the youngest) the three of us have been inseparable. Heather and I used to be dressed in matching outfits, play with the same toys all of the time, write little poems telling mum how much we love her and perform them to her (with the intentions of making her cry).
We also used to get up to mischief together. The amount of times I ended up in hospital; a cracked head, a broken arm; it’s safe to say we were naughty.But even as children we barely argued, apart from that time where Heather ended at the bottom of the stairs with broken fingers and a clump of hair missing, with me standing at the top of those stairs with that clump of hair in my hand… a story so many of our clients have heard.
When we were older and in different years at school, with different friends and different interests, we still looked at each other as each others favourite people. Even when Heather abandoned me for her new boyfriend Nick, she was still my best friend. We even ended up in Las Vegas together eight weeks after she had major surgery! I even carried two rucksacks around the Grand Canyon to ease any pain she was going through… and if anyones been to or seen pictures of the Grand Canyon, it wasn’t the easiest task I have ever completed. But i completed it, for my sister. (I would accept some type of award however, because I’m pretty sure I almost overheated and collapsed many times that day).
We went to Magaluf together, just Heather and I. No clubbing happened… If you know us, thats not our scene. We spent the week eating cheeto’s, eating ice-cream and drinking cocktails. We also did watersports, which we later found out we weren’t insured to do… Thankfully nothing went wrong! Mum’s reaction to our paragliding pictures was interesting, but we thought we were funny! It wasn’t funny, however, when my forehead filled with fluid the day we were due to fly home, making us question whether we’d get stranded in Magaluf or not…
(we did not). I’d relive that week again and again and again.
Mum bought us up on her own. A single mum with two girls, 19 months between them in age. She’s a superwoman. Growing up as the three musketeers, we did everything together. The activities and games we used to play, painting our whole bodies in paint and making big pictures (actual images of this would be slightly inappropriate). We have spent our whole lives together laughing, sometimes crying, but also being the best of friends! Sometimes mum had to be hard on us, like any other family, but we always laugh it off and crack on with whatever we do.
I even went to Malta with mum on our own. No girlfriends holidays, no holidays where you go out with friends and get drunk and don’t know what happened when you wake up. A holiday with my mum, my best friend. Honestly, most of it was spent with us being drunk and being silly, but it was one of the best weeks ever.
We have always done everything together, so buying a business together was an absolute dream come true.
The message behind this blog post is that no matter what happens in our salon, or what happens in our lives, we will always stick together.
We love our jobs and we will always have smile on our faces when anyone comes in the salon. As a team, we work together to make our salon the best space possible, to make every single person who walks through our front door feel comfortable and make them feel welcome. We work together to come up with new ideas for the salon (keep your eyes peeled)! We will never stop trying to improve our salon and ensure that our clients get the best experience possible.
A salon with staff who genuinely love each other and love their job, without any competitiveness is surely better than a salon with strangers as staff who compete to be the best?
Whats your opinion?
Talk Soon,
Isla
xoxo
Recent Comments