I had my daughter when I was 24 and exactly a year later my son was born. Young and in love, I hadn’t given parenthood a single thought beyond knowing I wanted kids. Then, suddenly, I was caring for two babies with no extended family nearby. My husband was right there in it with me, but he didn’t know any more about being a parent than I did. Had someone forgotten to give us the operating instructions? All my mother had told me about kids was to get Dr. Spock’s book. What? Overnight we went from complete freedom to constant caretaking and total exhaustion. The babies took all our time and money and as overjoyed as we were with them, things were chaotic. My brother had told me all you had to do was love kids. And, yes, yes: We loved them! But love them to sleep when they were up all night? Love them to stop crying?
As the days passed, we realized we had to find better ways to structure our lives with the babies. Slowly, we started to learn that routine and consistency make everything work better. Gabi and Will are now 28 and 27 and are the greatest people I know! But, raising them was a real learning experience.
When I opened my business, Maxime, in 2001, I found myself in the same situation. I thought I’d open the doors and it would just work, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I did, however, Thank God, have a concept and a passion. I had been an airline stewardess and was in love with the beautiful restaurant Maxim in Paris. I wanted my salon to be gorgeous, like Maxim, and be a place where clients could have a wonderful experience — like they were visiting a café — then leave with beautiful hair. I wanted to create a high end, luxury salon with ambiance. My entire business plan was that I’d provide excellent service and everything good would follow from that.
And my vision came to be. The salon was beautiful! I did a great job designing it but even still you don’t know what you don’t know. Case in point: I’d made the walls a gold-orange color like Maxime’s and you know what? They cast an awful, unflattering orange-yellow-red tint on my blonds. It seems like a small thing, but it isn’t: You have to have white walls in a salon! Who knew?
So, I had no business knowledge, no infrastructure, and I was stumbling along, running like crazy, praying to God to bring me all the business in the world! And, then it happened: Some very good luck touched me. Out of nowhere, we won Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston. We were the first salon south of the city to have gotten that acclaim. And it was like the sky opened up and we got flooded with clients.
Business just started pouring in and I’m working around the clock, loving it like you do at first. And there’s money coming in, and money going out, but I had no idea what to do with it. After expenses, were we making money, or not? It didn’t seem like it because when I went to take a salary at the end of the month, there was no money left! All I knew was I was doing hair 50 hours a week, had a bunch of employees, and I needed a massage badly.
So, I took the second floor and opened a spa! My accountant and my husband said not to do it: ‘You don’t even know how to run the salon yet,’ they said. But I had it in my head, and space was available. I knew that Cleopatra was said to have bathed in milk and rose petals, so I created that treatment. Kind of tacky I think now, but I loved the idea then. And the spa brought us even more publicity and Maxime got locally famous.
This was less than a couple years after I opened. I was up to about 15 employees and each of them was doing things differently. I had no structure, no systems, no routines. I didn’t know how to run things. I had no idea what products to sell – I was ordering them on the fly, not by design. I kept losing front desk people and having to run the front desk myself while looking for new hires and figuring out how to train them. I’d run upstairs and manage things at the spa for a while, then come back to the salon and put out some fires. And every single day, I’d run out of time. Totally. Out. Of. Time.
In the space of two years, I had opened two businesses. Among the many things I didn’t know then was never to open a second business without adequate funding. I was paying for the spa from the salon: Not a sound practice. I was doing great hair, but the business was out of control. There was money coming in, but were we actually making any profit? I had no way of knowing. All I’d ever heard was the general accounting principal that Income minus Expenses equals Money in My Pocket. This vague (erroneous) concept guided me to let my expenses run my business, instead of the profits, which is upside-down. Today, we use Mike Michalowicz’s amazing Profit First accounting system, and in fact, I’m a certified Profit First coach. But, back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know on a million different fronts.
So, before I could see what was happening, my business was off and running and I was racing to catch up with it. Finally, it dawned on me: Love wasn’t going to be enough to grow Maxime. I was absolutely going to need to find some actual business help to learn how to raise this baby.
