Is starting your own hair business ethical when you are a single mother with limited funds?
Long time ago, I was asked if starting your own hair business is ethical when you are a single mother with limited funds. This question, asked for the first time in 2015, is still relevant. The question of this mother is about where to put your priorities? When you invest time and money in your own hair business as a single mother, do you take away what should be in the first place for your own kids? First, my deepest respect for combining the care for your family and the ambition to start a hair and beauty business.
There are several examples of mothers, single or not, who must share their attention and resources like money with their own business and their family. Let us see how they deal with this.
The Nurse
One of my clients is working as a nurse, and the last two years have been rather hectic. For a long time, her passion is with making people feel good. She loves hair and to give girls and women access to the best quality hair has becoming more and more important for her. As a nurse she loves to care for her patients, and she feels the reward when people recover from a bad disease. Working during the pandemic, with co workers who got sick is not easy. It requires more and more time, extra hours, and hours during the best time of her day. This leaves her very little time for her family and the dream to grow her own hair business. Often when she is ready to dedicate time to her hair store, the kids ask for attention. And we all know who gets priority. Although not direct the money, it is about where do you allocate your time to? To your family, your hair store and what about yourself?
The storemanager
There is a very ambitious lady, who works nearly full time as a store manager of a supermarket. During the pandemic supermarkets where very often considered to be essential stores. Thus, long opening hours and many, many clients. Everything comes together, stress, training new colleagues and here also, long hours. How to combine this with a young family where the kids must follow online lessons and that great dream to grow your hair and beauty business.
After a long day in the supermarket, that often starts early in the morning, little energy was left after dedicating time to the family. What choice did she had to make, family or the hair business?
The single mom who could not buy diapers
From Kenya, I can share the story of the single mother who had to take care of three kids, the youngest was still wearing diapers. To get the financial means she wanted to start a hair store. Start small and grown step by step to a hair business that will generate enough financial means to support her family. Everybody kept healthy during the pandemic, but the savings for the hair store had to be used for buying the essentials, like diapers. She was forced to use the capital she saved to start her own business and to give her kids opportunities, to use the capital for diapers. She had to give up her dream when her capital was finished. Now she did not had the money to start her business but she neither had the money to buy diapers.
Did she make the right choice?
What choice to make as a single mother?
Clear, when you have a partner the burden of taking care of the family can be split and there can be an extra source of income, when you start selling hair because the time is right!. But what if your partner is not able or willing to support/ Or indeed if you are a single mother with limited money? What choice can you make?
Women of the world unit!
One of the beautiful characteristics of the hair industry is, the store owners all want to make others look and feel good. Sometimes the focus is more on to feel good. This means you care for others. You can look for partners. Loom for other women who are interested too in starting a hair business. Or perhaps are stylist and want to add new services to their business. Join forces and see how you can work together, inspire each other, support each other, and create the best hair business of the region.
There a plenty of examples where mothers and daughters, or sisters join to start a hair business. One of my clients is a brother who started the online hair business on Shopify and his elderly sister is helping him. But next to family you can also think of friends or other professionals in the neighborhood. Visit hair salons or stylist nearby and work together to create mutual clients. You deliver the hair, and they do the install and fixing.
Perhaps you must accept to change the name of the business, perhaps you must listen to the ideas of somebody else more, but it will give you additional support.
Working together will also free up time to take care of your family, you will still be able to help your kids with the homework, or just to listen to their stories when they come home from school. Or you will have the time to follow a course.
Automate
You can also opt to set up an online hair store that is as much as automated as possible. Not only a store to display your products, but added with plugins to market, retarget clients and to optimize your pricing. It would be an initial investment in the automatization first, but you can get a hair business that is more and more doing the work itself. This saves time and money, plus your business will be more competitive
Contact us if you want to know if this solution can work for you.
