One Successful Business, One Failed
On May 19th Dave and I went to Duffy’s, Roseburg’s finest restaurant to celebrate our anniversary and we’d just purchased a hair salon. Financing was available for small businesses; we refinanced our home and Dave’s parents loaned us $30,000 to complete our purchase. The former owners agreed to stay and work as employees while four stylists followed Dave from “Lynn and Dave’s Hair Salon.” We named our salon, “Dave’s Headquarters. The previous owners didn’t last very long, they were used to being in charge and they ran the salon differently. It was okay because we didn’t feel the business was ours until they left.
Written in the terms of our small business loan agreement was that we were required to have licensed, certified accountants prepare financial documents. The firm had a patient woman I could call with my questions; however, they were expensive and so this drove me to take a bookkeeping class at Umpqua Community College so I could understand the reports. The instructor told the class that her mother-in-law, a small business owner, had the habit of picking up receipts in parking lots or sidewalks to use as proof of a business expense. It was interesting that our instructor would tell our class how to defraud the government. It has been said that knowledge is power, this was true for me. I learned what the quarterly reports meant and the bookkeeping process to generate them. I could evaluate how our business was doing financially. I learned how to prepare payroll, and accounts payable, balance the till at the end of the day, and balance the monthly bank statements to the very dollar like my boss, Madeline, at Lockwood Ford taught me.
Dave and I worked well together, he was a stylist and the salon manager and he supplied quality beauty products for the salon use. This helped make our business profitable. We had seven stylists all of whom were women. Dave had the rare gift of keeping the salon gossip-free. When a client complained he listened carefully but didn’t assume the problem was the stylists fault. It was a delicate balance to listen to both sides. I was glad he was good at it because I was way too emotional. At the end of each business day, we cleaned to salon to get it ready for the next day. We were proud of our new business and wanted it to shine.
I hated when we had to raise the price of services: haircuts, shampoo sets, hair color and permanents. Some customers were habitual complainers, especially when it came to money. We gave the clients a two-week notice for the price increase, but two weeks dragged out my misery. I memorized a verse from Proverbs, “The fear of man will prove to be a snare but those who trust in the Lord will be kept safe.” This helped keep my anxiety in check with the three difficult complainers.
We were tight-knit with our co-workers; we celebrated each stylist’s birthday with a potluck and birthday cake in the salon lunchroom. At our house on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, we played a dice game with nice prizes for the winners and gag gifts for the losers, it was all in fun. But the tradition I loved most was floating the rapids of the Umpqua River, in inflatable canoes Tahiti’s. We usually had six of the canoes; water guns were kept hidden in each and when another canoe came close it was all-out war. The guns were powerful and probably held a quart of water the back-and-forth battle left all of us drenched. It’s odd how I loved those trips because I have a fear of water and I can’t swim, but the fun overrode my fear.
We took a class at the community college on business management taught by one of our customers. It was designed to help our stylists, Dave, and I understand different temperaments and how they work with each other and their clients. The temperament I remember most is the, “emotive personality” the one who acts as though things are good but who has the power to change the entire atmosphere of the salon into a negative state. Shelena was also bipolar and much later I found out I was emotive too but only when I was manic. We eventually had to let her go. She offended a client whose husband was a doctor by saying “You’re rich you can afford a good tip.” I apologized to the lady for the stylist’s rude behavior but the salon lost a good client that day.
Tanning centers where a person could get a tan in the comfort of a warm bed any time of year were just getting popular. A close friend of ours drove by a tanning center on his way to work and the parking lot was nearly full so it had to be very profitable. Since it was new to Roseburg, Dave and I assumed when we opened ours since it was in a different part of our town that it would be just as busy.
We bought three high-quality, very expensive tanning beds. We built divider walls between each booth and remodeled the bathroom. We chose crisp colors, navy blue, white, and touches of black we thought it was very classy. We had the usual business expenses: telephone, air-conditioning and heat, appointment book, and office supplies. We thought startup expenses would quickly be recovered and it would be a highly lucrative business. It turned out we were very wrong.
We hired a receptionist to work from 7:00 in the morning until 4:00 then another one from 4:00 to 8:00 in the evening. We thought the long hours would bring customers flocking to our tanning center. Our price point was competitive but our location wasn’t in a high-traffic area. We thought our salon clients would rush in to get their tan but that didn’t happen since many of them were older women.
Three months into the business it became clear that hiring a receptionist ate up any of the profit so I became the receptionist. We changed the hours so that we’d open at 8:00 am and close at 6:00 pm. My good friend Jennifer, volunteered to work the early morning shift so I could drive the kids to school then I’d work until 4:00 in the afternoon. Jennifer would come in at 4:00 and be there until 7:00 but even with her generous help we still weren’t turning a profit. The only option was for me to work all the shifts just to reduce our losses. I was already the bookkeeper, part-time receptionist, payroll clerk and lots of other roles in the background to help make our beauty salon run smoothly. I was exhausted and Dave and I were beyond discouraged. After six very long months, we sold it.
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