No Better Teacher

I had a friend visit this weekend from Lynchburg VA. She loves to come to DC to visit art museums. We spent Saturday in Baltimore and this is a shameless plug for the American Visionary Art Museum. Best four hours I've spent in a museum lately. It just lit up my imagination. Even the gift shop was fun and inspiring!

ANYWAYS (back to the topic at hand), my friend runs a house cleaning service. Like me (and many of us), she's a one-woman self-employed operation. Always working on managing her client base (enough but not too many), finances, marketing, lugging equipment, transportation, working with people from all walks of life, dealing with people who have the wrong idea about her work, even dealing with unwanted advances (yes, it happens to cleaning people too!). It all sounded very familiar.

She's casually contemplating other career options (carrying vacuum cleaners is getting old) and asked me about massage therapy. I talked about the two biggest challenges I find in this profession:

*  being a business owner and taking that seriously

*  becoming the kind of person who can meet the interpersonal, psychological, and spiritual aspects of our work

She was completely unfazed by the business challenges. They are no different from what she's experienced running a cleaning service. In fact, the best training for running a small service-oriented business is....having run another small service-oriented business.

In our drive to be taken seriously, we compare ourselves to other healthcare providers:  doctors, nurses, acupuncturists, chiropractors, etc.  How do they earn respect, get paid, set up their practices, etc.?

I suggest that if you want to learn practical business skills you also need to talk to self-employed cleaning ladies, plumbers, car mechanics, dog walkers, home inspectors, and house painters. Talk to them about how they set their rates, advertise their services, maintain a client base, save for retirement, do their bookkeeping, etc. Their challenges are, in many ways, more like ours than a doctor's practice ever will be.

There are teachers everywhere. You just need to learn to recognize them and find opportunities to listen to them.