Spousal support.
Where do you get spousal support when you're starting your own house cleaning business?
We're going to talk a little bit about that today.
Hi, there, I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask A House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question,
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now, today's show is brought to us by HouseCleaning360.com
Did you know that if you're getting ready to move,
you can find helpers at HouseCleaning360.com?
These would be house cleaners that help you with the move in or the move out cleaning,
or maybe they do a little bit of side projects and they can help you pack the boxes and eliminate
some of the stuff you're not going to move with you.
There are also professional organizers that can come through and help you redesign your
life before you pack it up in a box and ship it off, because when you get to your new establishment,
you don't want to be carrying the old stuff from the old life that you no longer use,
need, or want.
Then, when you get to your new life, wherever that new place is, you can go back to HouseCleaning360.com
and find a new person to come in and help you unload all of your new belongings and
put them away, and even they have interior decorators.
Hey, there you go.
360 view of a perfect home.
All righty, on to today's show, which is about spousal support.
Now, as house cleaners, male or female, we have spouses, and sometimes they don't understand
the nature of our business.
They don't understand that we work for ourselves,
and sometimes we have money and sometimes we don't.
Sometimes we have cancellations, and every day we have headaches.
These are headaches from customers and clients and employees, and it's a challenge to run
a small business.
The person behind us that means the most to us in our lives are our spouses,
so when they don't get what we're doing, then we have a problem.
How do you get spousal support?
Well, there are a couple of techniques that I want to share with you, and they are tried
and proven techniques that I myself have used, and I'm sure there are lots of techniques,
and if you have some great techniques, please share them in the notes below.
Whether this is a podcast, whether this is a YouTube video, I don't know how you're consuming
this information.
Even if it's a blog, there's a place below for you to include your information, so share
your tips with us on how you get spousal support.
For me, my business transitioned and I reinvented myself at the beginning of 2016.
I'd been running a house cleaning business for 25 years, and throughout the course of
the 25 years, there were times that were really tough.
There were times I had to keep reinventing my business either as we moved to a new location
and I had to start all over again with new clients, or I would have employees and the
whole business crumbled, and I didn't know how to manage them very well, and I was learning
those elements myself, but I had to keep coming back to the fact that no, this is what I decided.
This is where I belong in the house cleaning business, whether it's the flexibility, whether
it's the enjoyment of cleaning, whether I like working with people or the employees
or whatever, this is where I belong, and I had to keep reselling him on my business.
You might have to keep reselling your spouse on your business, but what I found worked
for me is as I reinvented myself, if gave him a heads up and I told him what was coming
next, it gave him the latitude to jump in and participate.
In December 23rd of 2015, I retired from the house cleaning business,
and I'd been doing a lot of consulting with house cleaning business owners
on how to start their own house cleaning
businesses while I
was trying to run a live house cleaning practice.
And it became so busy that I had to make a choice.
I had to choose one or the other, and I can do one really well, and I can do the other
one really well, but I can't do them both really well.
It's like chasing two rabbits.
If you chase two rabbits, they'll both get away, right?
You can't catch them both at the same time, so I made a decision to let go of one while
I focused on the other.
I let go of the house cleaning itself, and I transitioned into an online business that
was a consulting practice.
For me, it was huge transition because I'm not internet savvy, I'm not technical savvy,
I know nothing about social media and the internet.
So what I did was take all the house cleaning
skills that I know, and I said, "I can help a few people or I can move onto the internet
where everyone seems to be and I can help a lot of people."
That made more sense for where I was right now in my life.
But it was going to mean for me I had to learn the internet and I had to learn social media,
and I had to learn all the different elements of how to create a website and how to update
the website and how to do search engine optimization and make all that stuff work.
It was a really scary place for me because, like I said, I'm not technically savvy.
I've been avoiding the internet all these years because I didn't need it.
It's spooky, but I didn't need it.
My business ran really well on referrals and training and everything that we were doing
on a localized basis.
To suddenly stop and say, "Whoa, there's a whole new world here,"
it's going to require a lot.
I came to my husband and I said, "This is going to require a lot.
I'm going to be working harder than I've ever worked in my whole life.
I'm going to be working a lot of new things that I've never learned before.
There are gobs of software that I need to learn.
I need to learn how to be able to update my own website so that I'm not reliant on a website
designer for India that is going to take two or three weeks to accomplish what I need."
Sitting him down and saying, "Okay, here's what's coming," and I broke my new business
into eight elements, and I said, "Here's what this element is going to require.
Here's what this element is going to cost.
Here's what's going to be demanded from me.
Here's what I need you to do."
During that period of time, we sat down and I said, "During this window, I'm going to
have to outsource some of the tasks that I've done the entire time we've been married.
I don't have time anymore to go grocery shopping.
I don't have time anymore to clean my own house.
I don't have time anymore to do the landscaping and to keep up my rose gardens," and I literally
went through my house and I replaced all of the live plants with silk plants, and I started
outsourcing all of the things in my life, because, for everything I say yes to, I have
to say no to a bunch of other things.
By getting my husband on board, I was able to let him know what's coming.
Now, every single night when he comes home from work, he calls me up on the telephone,
and he gets the rundown of what's in store for him that night.
There are nights he's like, "Hey, would you like to watch a movie with me," and if I can,
I will say, "Yes, I would love to do that."
That's what's in store tonight.
It's a movie and dinner for both of us.
Or I might say, "I don't have it to give tonight.
Tonight is there something you would like to be doing," and he'll say, "Yes, there's
a ball game I'd love to watch."
"Great, you watch the ball game, find yourself some snacks.
I have to work through this evening.
I have a deadline I'm trying to make."
By letting him know what's on the horizon for me, he can be supportive.
Now, there are times when, and this year has been a colossal year for me.
I have taken way, way, way for my marriage relationship than I have given back, and I
told him it was going to be this way, and I don't mean it to be this way and I do it
in fun and love, and I'm trying to make this work.
But this is literally like starting a brand new business from scratch.
By transitioning everything I know into a world I know nothing about, it has been an
enormous transition for me, and it has demanded more from our relationship than probably any
other year of our life, and that spousal support is incredibly important to the survival of
your business.
Over the Christmas holidays, he's like, "Hey, I've got some toxic friends.
Let's go hang out with the toxic friends for Christmas."
I was like, "I don't have it to give.
I don't want to go.
I don't even like those people.
Those people have really negative energy, and I don't want to hang out with them."
He said, "I know, but I have given so much to this relationship, and right now it would
mean something to me if you would show up as my spouse, and you would hang out with
these toxic people."
I sat there going, "Are you serious?
You're right.
Absolutely you're right.
You have given so much and it's my time to give back."
Now I don't want to go.
I did not want to go at all, and so I had to make a decision.
The decision I'm making is that my marriage in this moment is more important than what
I want to be doing.
Because I've demanded so much, you have to give something back.
It can't only be a one-way street.
It has to be a two-way street, so I was like, "Hang on.
Let me go change my clothes.
I'll go with you to the toxic people for Christmas."
I did, and I didn't have any fun.
I faked like I was having fun, and I got out of there as soon as I could, but there are
times that your spouse is going to be that way with you, and you're going to be that
way with them.
The secret is to be transparent.
Be real with them.
Tell them what's going on and communicate what you need, because if you just go begrudgingly
and you don't let them know, "Hey, I'm making a concession here," or they don't let you
know that they're making a concession, then you don't really know the sacrifices that
each of you are making in order for your business to survive.
But if you want spousal support, this is not a one person thing.
This is a two-person thing.
If you're married, the two of you are in business together, even if the other person has nothing
to do with your business.
They are your guiding light and your force, and you've got to make sure that you have
that with you in order for you to go forward.
Be upfront, go through and explain as much as you possibly can, and I've done this.
I've done this as my business has grown, and it's grown enormously over the last two years
since I started this online training business.
But what's happened is I said, "Okay, hang on.
Hold the horses.
We're in phase two.
This is what this is going to require.
Whoa, phase three just hit us.
We're now in phase three.
Here's what's going to be required of us now.
Okay, now we're in phase five.
Here's what we have to do right now in order to keep these other five phases going."
It's been literally a nonstop process, and I could not have asked for better help and
better support than my husband Pat.
I am so blessed, and I am so encouraged, but the secret to survival with your spouse and
in order to get spousal support is to keep them in the loop and to keep them in the know,
because as things happen, if you start running out of money or if you have employee challenges
or if you need to hire more people or if you have to cancel a part of your business or
you have to erase something that you started that was a bad mistake, they need to be in
on those decisions, because it's another set of eyes.
It's another set of ears, and it's a person who knows and loves you more than anyone else.
Anyway, I could go on for hours, and we don't have hours, otherwise, my editors who edit
this video and the podcast are going to kill me.
Anyway, I would like to give a shout out to Jaden and Kristen who do an amazing job for
you guys every single day, and for me on these videos in the podcast.
So thank you to my team and tank you to my husband, who is an enormous support for me.
With that, I will leave you, and I will see you again soon, and until I do,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét