Myth #1: WAHMs have it all together. Wow! Look at her! She has all those kids and manages a business!

What you don’t see when you gaze at the successful WAHM, smiling big, perfectly accessorized, with all her little ducklings in a row behind her, is the mounds of unfinished laundry, the piles of dishes, the unfinished school work, the displeased customers, and possibly the fact that she hasn’t changed any bed linens in over a month. (Not that I’m claiming that one. Ahem.)

We do not have it all together. In fact, for the first three years of owning Cheeky Maiden Soap Co, it was a constant battle to try to find balance between my WAHM self and my SAHM self.

We cry, we fail, we yell at our kids because we’ve got a deadline and they are getting on our nerves. We cuss at the Paypal customer service reps. We resort to fast food more than we should because we don’t get to spend as much time in the kitchen as we like. We feel guilty if we ever have to tell our children to “wait just a minute, Mamma’s got to make a phone call/answer this email/make this product.” We question whether what we are doing is right or okay or in balance.

We are late to church, we forget to thaw the meat or turn on the crock pot, and we fall daily on our knees and plead with the Lord for patience and mercy just.like.everyone.else.

And possibly the worst truth of all: We fell judged by those around us anytime we ask for help or state that we are tired or overwhelmed. After all, we asked for it, didn’t we?

It doesn’t take a perfect mom to be a WAHM, just a crazy one.

Myth #2: Having a business to run puts the WAHM on level playing field with mammas who have 2 or 3 more kids than her.

The truth is that I can shut the door (literally) on Cheeky Maiden. Cheeky Maiden does not wake me up at 3 am vomiting. Cheeky Maiden does not require to be fed three square meals a day, does not burden me with her spiritual/emotional/physical health, and never farts on me. I can ignore emails and phone calls, and trust me when I say I have gotten really really good at that.

You cannot (should not) ignore or shut the door on your kids. They are constant eternal beings and the effort it takes to raise them up to be good citizens that glorify God goes way beyond the effort that anyone should ever put into any old business.

Cheeky Maiden is not going to heaven. (That one feels a little weird to type out. Maybe I’m a little too attached to this Cheeky Maiden lady.)

Myth #3: The WAHM neglects her children and that is how she is able to get “all that work” done.

The truth in our home is that the kids come first. The first fruits of my day are invested in schooling them. What keeps me up at night is whether or not I was a good enough mom for my kids that day. Soap is just…soap. (Granted, it’s really really really great soap.)  I would like to think that I school them just as much as I would had I not a business to run. I also would like to think that I put just as much effort into feeding them healthy food, listening to them, and playing with them. In our family, we try to have the children involved as much as possible in what we are doing out in the soap room. If we’re out there working, the kids are almost always out there too (unless they’re sleeping).

We honestly feel like we are giving them an out-of-the-box life, an adventurous life, and as our business grows we hope that it gives them opportunities that we couldn’t give them otherwise.

Myth #4: WAHMs work every day in their businesses.

People ask me all the time if I “make soap, like, everyday.” I always want to respond with, “Hi. Have you met my family?” Seriously, I have no idea how anyone could make mounds of soap everyday, homeschool two children with two preschoolers underfoot, grow an organic garden, blog, maintain contact with the outside world, and sleep. No wonder people thing the WAHM is Super Woman!

Heavens, no. I have a life.

You know when I make soap? I make soap when our part time helper comes and forces me to. (Which is about twice a month at this point.) We do make rather large batches (around 350 bars) at a time, so we get quite a bit of work knocked out all in one fell swoop. We’ve also gotten efficient in most of our processes so that it requires less time for slicing and packaging.

Mondays and Thursdays afternoons are whole-family work days out in the soap room for pretty much 2 or 3 solid hours. Everyone has a job they do in the process and the kids can play on the computer out there with us until it’s their turn to help with their particular specialty. On these two days Brent and the kids pack online and retail orders while I make new product (non-soapy stuff), package products, label products, or eat chocolate and hide in the bath tub.

A couple times a month during nap time, if we are all caught up on school stuff, the big girls help label soap. They rack up some impressive dollar amounts doing this.

Myth #5: WAHMs think that mammas who “get to” work outside of the home have it easier.

Lord have mercy on us all if I had to get up every morning at 5:30, feed everyone breakfast and make myself plus everyone else presentable to the outside world, get them to school, get myself to work, all on time. Forget being presentable, just the “on time” part would be challenging enough for me! Forget being on time, just getting up at 5:30 could possibly guarantee that I’m going to be a fire breathing dragon. I can’t even imagine running a home while being gone from it all day long and the stress that would come with that! A big hat tip to those Mammas that work and find time to spend with their children and actually cook a few meals too. Shoot, if you just get them to school on time every day, I’d say that’s a major accomplishment!

Myth #6: It’s easier to be a WAHM than to have a “regular” job. I mean, you get to work in your pj’s if you want to!

That’s not exactly how it goes. I very rarely stay in my pj’s all day because it makes me feel sloppy and depressed. In fact, I try to dress and be fully accessorized and have the living room picked up because I almost never know when a customer is going to swing by last minute and give me approximately four minutes to put a bra on, clear a path through the room, and get their order together. So, I try to at least get the bra part out of the way first thing in the morning.

There is a lot of “putting on your big girl panties and dealing with it”.Take today for example. Not my proudest moment but I had a complete come apart just before Brent got home. After I finished crying into my pillow I blew my nose, cleared my throat and proceeded to make some business calls. Also, while I have some really great and thoughtful customers, the general population does not care that you are in the middle of dealing with 72 hours of vomit, that it’s your kid’s birthday, or that you just had a baby. They want their soap and they want it now. (Especially the shampoo bars and the bamboo charcoal soap. Sheesh. People get really upset about those two when we run out.) In other words, sometimes it feels like the work never stops.

Some mornings I do run back and forth between getting the girls started on some school work, answering emails, oh shoot I need to go potty and there is no toilet paper would someone please run upstairs and bring me some toilet paper, who left the front door unlocked the baby is on the porch, oh crap the mailman is going to be here in ten minutes and those packages are not ready, did anyone get me some toilet paper, who clogged up the toilet, never mind I’ll just go upstairs and go, does anyone know what happened to that package that was waiting on a shipping label, wheres my phone so I can call Brent, the baby just fell off the table, never mind there goes the mail man without our packages, kids get your shoes on we have to go to the post office, we’ll finish school when we get back.…

In other words, it’s not a “when you’re at work, you’re at work” sort of deal. Know what I mean? When you’re at work, your also at home, and when you’re at home you’re also at work. So you have to get good at ignoring the work that didn’t get done the day before because right now it’s time for Bible time, not work time. And you gotta get good at ignoring the dishes piled up when it’s time to work.

Yes, it’s overwhelming sometimes. And it never feels anything like “working in your pj’s.”, FYI.

Did I miss any?

Brent is making me watch and I are riveted by these entrepreneurial videos that we’re watching. (There is a long history of Brent trying to show me educational/doctrinal DVDs… and me falling asleep almost immediately. I have tried caffeine, chocolate, folding laundry, etc. It seems I have narcolepsy.)

Anyway, what I watched before I fell asleep was very informative. (Does this already sound like a boring school book report?) Dude was talking about starting businesses and the qualities that make a good entrepreneur. Aside from the fact that he seems to think only men can be entrepreneurs, he listed Assets as a good leveraging tool for a successful business.

I may or may not have mentioned, but when I started making soap, Cheeky Maiden Soap Co was not anywhere near even a twinkle in my eye. Everything has happened somewhat by accident. I’m living proof that success is 90% Diligence. I have not read books on starting, owning, or operating businesses. I occassionally check out websites for mompreneurs, WAHMS, or whatever else you want to call them. But I quickly get bored. My husband on the other hand… he loves reading about that stuff. But always insisted that making soap was for girls.

Before Evie (our fourth child) was born, I was praying for a business partner. I knew we were headed in a big direction. Bigger than I could imagine, since I’ve never actually penned a “business plan” or had any goal other than keeping up with Cheeky Maiden’s growth.

Then, she made her grand entrance, and life as I knew it fell to pieces. Recovery took longer than ever, and Brent somehow found himself managing the website and packing all the orders. I’m fuzzy on the details, but I think it had something to do with me being confined to our upstairs bedroom for 7 days. I recall waving a flag out the window when I got hungry, begging passersby to stop and feed me.

And quite accidentally, we discovered that he was the best business partner for me and I couldn’t be happier.

My greatest asset? My husband. Hands down. I’m not quite sure how Cheeky Maiden got as far as it did without him. Up until October 2009, I did all the web design, the label design, any other marketing, order shipping, labeling, making, selling… whatever. It turns out that what he’s not good at, I am, and what I’m not good at, he is.

We still have the balance of working together and being husband/wife. The struggle that comes with this being “my” business and the idea that he works “for” me. (In reality I view it as “ours” and we work “together”, but I understand how he feels. I did it for four years on my own, and it is called “Cheeky Maiden”. Not exactly the manliest sounding joint to work for, huh.) He discovered that making soap is hard work, too. You get sweaty and dirty, have to lift lots of heavy stuff, and sometimes you get lye burns.

My man is currently in the process of redesigning all of our packaging.

Ahem. Anyone that has ever been over to “help” in the soap room will bemoan the tedious task of labeling the soap. Each bar had a front and a back label, which were printed on full sheet avery label paper. (Usually around 15 labels per sheet). Then, we had to cut the labels out. By hand. Brent’s first purchase was a paper cutter. It revolutionized the process. I could cut labels three times as fast. But it still took a lot of time. And afterwards we still had to peel the backing off of each little label (front and back for each soap, remember) and then stick it on the soap.

It’s also good to remember that I work in 15 minute increments, usually with a baby either on my back or at my heels, and children asking me a dozen questions a minute. In other words, I’m distracted and in a hurry. Labels get cut short or crooked, and then slapped on the soap by a 5 or 6 year old. And… it looks like it usually.

Enter Brent. He redesigned the labels so that all the information fit on just one label per soap. Then we found a nifty company that made label paper with the labels already cut out,like a sheet of stickers. So, all he had to do was line our newly designed labels up on their template and print. Then it’s just peel and stick. JUST PEEL AND STICK!

Not only do we not have to peel that stupid backing off with our fingernails, but we don’t have to cut anything out. And the paper is half the price of the full sheets we were buying before. HALF THE PRICE!

Half the stickers, half the price, half the work.

Tada! New packaging:

(This is officially the worst product photo you will ever see. Camera is long overdue for a trip to the shop. My apologies)

Here’s a side by side. My old label is on the left and his is on the right. (Remember the old version also required a label on the back of the soap, not pictured for obvious reasons.)

This is just one of the areas that Brent has made more efficient in our work.

Not only is he handy, but…

he’s cute…

…and he’s good with kids…

So, Mammas. Who do you have sitting in your very own home with untapped abilities?

If you are thinking of starting your own family business, have you considered the skills that your husband and children have that could be assets?

I told you the happy version of the story. Now it’s time for reality. We learned a LOT of lessons the hard way with this project and have definitely counted the wisdom gained as the most valuable profit to come out of the whole thing.

Our very biggest problem was that we totally ignored our own boundaries because we were so excited about the largeness and high profile- ness of this request for dog soap.

Tip #1: Know your boundaries and state them plainly. Soap takes 4 weeks to cure. Period. There is no getting around that. When a customer calls and requests thousands of bars of soap in less than three weeks, my response should be nothing short of “NO”. It’s impossible. I knew that was a boundary with handmade soap, but I also didn’t want to lose the order. I figured that if I made it all in the first week, it could sit for two weeks with a dehumidifier and be fine. I also knew that it would have plenty of time to cure before it actually made it to anyone who was going to wash with it.

One other small boundary we ignored: my current handicap, aka pregnancy. Small detail, I know. But we forgot to calculate that a very very pregnant lady cannot lift heavy jugs of oils or heavy pots of soap or heavy molds filled with soap. And even if I could, doing all that myself would take way more than 3 weeks because I’m big and slow at this point.

What are your boundaries? Timelines, pricing, minimums, payment schedules, details, details, details. Think about it and write it down! What is a reasonable time line for your business? What is the best competitive pricing you can offer (remember to pay yourself!)? What is the smallest amount of work/product that will make the project worth your time? When and how do you expect to be paid? What are you going to do if you are paid late? To establish boundaries, go through a project for your business, in your mind, start to finish. If you know any super anal retentive people, you should enlist their help in this. Try to imagine every little detail that may need to be covered and cover it. This will establish good communication between you and your client. You can never assume that any small detail is common knowledge for anyone. People are crazy.

For instance: a photographer should have already written out and stated their sitting fee and how many photos/poses that includes. That’s the very bottom line. But what if you have a client that wants all ten poses to be in different outfits for their one year old? Have you already established a limit on the number of wardrobe changes permitted for a photo session? If not, you may be looking at a very long afternoon that will end up not being worth your time. What if they want you to meet them an hour away? It can be awkward when you’ve already stated your fees, and then the client mentions they would like the location to be far away. Now you have to figure out how much you are going to charge and change the quote on them. If you know your boundaries, you would have already stated, “My sitting fee is x for on location, x hours, x number of wardrobe changes, and an additional x for distance locations, an additional x for every x minutes, an additional x for x or more wardrobe changes…”

Tip #2: Be Firm

I’m not trying to toot my own horn or anything, but I have a really high quality product that I’m offering. I have chosen the top rung and don’t do any part of it cheaply. This is a big deal, and I should be confident in it. Without me, these people have no wonderful awesome dog soap on a rope. They are paying me, so they call the shots, but I respond equally as aggressive with my limitations and requirements as well.

Now, I’ve done business before with folks who had a list of policies a mile long and rather sassy quips all throughout their FAQ section. It was a real turn off and I wondered what made them so grumpy and difficult to work with. Now I know. My soap studio became a sweat shop over the last two weeks, and it was rather unpleasant. Don’t get me wrong, I think that we should bend over backwards for our clients and customers and duh, work is hard sometimes. But even that can go too far, and it sure did with this project.

I should have responded and said, “NO, but I CAN do this in 6-8 weeks for you.” What other option do they have? They’d have to find another soap maker equally as skilled enough to even figure out how to get rope into that many bars of soap, and formulate a recipe specifically for dogs. I guarantee you there are not many others out there. That makes ME the commodity, not just my product.

Going back to the photography example: If the person cannot afford to pay the extra for the distance location, you will have avoided their embarrassment of having to state that to you if you told them up front of your extra charge, before they even asked for it. You give them your policy statement, and they can gauge their request to what they can afford. You don’t go to a restaurant and order from the menu and then find out how much the food costs, do you? No. You know exactly how much it costs to get cheese on that burger or extra guacamole with your burrito because it’s written for you right on the menu. And if you can’t afford it, you don’t order it.

Mammas, take pride in your work and be confident. Yes, we are little mammas churning out wonderfulness from the comfort of our own homes. But if you let someone walk all over you, it will very quickly become un-comfortable.

Now, for the story….

The very first thing that went wrong was that it took forever to get some of the pertinent ingredients to me. I did not have enough essential oils on hand to do 2500 bars of soap. And most essential oils cannot be overnighted due to their flammability and combustibility (can you believe that’s a real word?) So, I had to wait for them to make their way here, all the way from Ohio, via UPS truck.

Then, since I had to go with a different rope company in my hurry, the rope I got was all wrong! When I cut it, it frayed like cotton balls and was so fat and hairy I couldn’t force it into the soap. I had paid a LOT of money to have this rope practically overnighted from Chicago. I had my mother and grandmother come to town to watch the kids for a very limited two days. I spent most of that time troubleshooting the rope issue. By the time I found the local rope company that solved all my problems, it was time for my helpers to leave!! I had solved one problem, and now had a new problem on my hands…

Which I solved by enlisting Aunt Ellen, who lives 10 miles away, as honorary soap maker… for four days. Her muscles were strained, her skin was burned, and I don’t think she totally comprehended how much work it was to make soap up until that point! (I hadn’t either!) She and I worked side by side for about 30 hours in those four days. My fingers were literally bleeding from inserting so many pieces of rope into raw soap. It was hard to get the rope in right with gloves on, and my fingertips kept grazing the surface of the soap. I finally did find some gloves that were tight enough on my skinny fingers to not be bulky.

I managed the last few batches on my own last weekend when Brent was off all weekend. Then I had to start slicing. It was too much. I was exhausting myself and almost literally went into labor at one point. Midwife demanded I slow down…way down. That wasn’t so much of an option, because if they didn’t get the soap on a certain day, I wasn’t getting paid. And we were in it for good now. So, we bought more slicing supplies and Brent and I sliced together while our kids got educated and doted on by Dora and Steve (from Blue’s Clues). I think their brains actually shrunk and fell out of their heads, but we’re working on fixing that now.

Oh, and did I mention that we hadn’t been paid one pretty penny for any of our work clear up to the day the soap got shipped out?!? I kept asking for a check and they just kept either totally ignoring my requests, and eventually saying they had mailed it. We did finally get the check, and it wasn’t even for the original amount I had quoted them. What moron makes and ships out $9,000 worth of soap without getting paid first?!?! Me. We haven’t been cheated, don’t worry. They understand that they have to pay the rest within a certain amount of time. And if they don’t, I’ll be tacking on late fees. I don’t mind working with people, but I went way over the “favor limit” with this one.

Even boxing it all up went wrong. We stayed up late the last night, wrapping stacks of soap in bubble wrap and brown paper bags when we ran out of the bubble wrap. We had totally gotten shafted on boxes, and paid like $50 for 9 or so of the strongest ones around. They started falling apart when we went to move them to the driveway for pick up (each box had about 150 pounds of soap in it). We had to buy more boxes and repack them in the driveway. And by “we”, I mean “Brent”. He spent about five hours in the heat repacking all the soap, when the 18-wheeler was set to be there at any moment that day. Fortunately, he finished in time, with a couple of hours to spare, and the trucker got there right before the rain began!

The entire thing was miserable and we never should have attempted it. It literally ruined my life for three weeks straight. I started to feel like I was stuck in a nightmare or something.

Yeah, the profit is still really great, but was it worth it? Yes and No. Yes, in that we really learned our boundaries and can plainly state them now, as requests continue to roll in for other projects. Yes, in that we are thoroughly equipped with molds and such to handle any size order.  No, in that it really disturbed our peaceful little life here and ate up the last few days of energy that I had left to get my life in order before having a baby. I may never recover by the time I go into labor!

Now what?

I have typed up a very detailed policy statement for whole sale, bulk, and custom orders and will be contacting all of our whole sale accounts this weekend with the updates. Life is changing for us. Baby #4 is very quickly on the way, and I’ve always said that if anything becomes a burden, it will be the soap, not my family. They are first. Very first. And this project put them second and it made me mad. Totally my fault, and now we will fix that so that it doesn’t happen again. I’m sure that most of them will be very happy to comply with some of our new minimum requirements and such.

I am probably as sick of the words “dog” and “soap” as everyone around me is of hearing them, but I’ve just got to record this venture in our lives.

There are two versions to this story. I will start with the happy one.

Somewhere around a year ago I had a doggie company ask me about making a dog soap on a rope for them. It sounded really fun and I created two bars of dog soap that they really liked. They took the samples to some trade shows and mentioned that a national retailer was interested. My mind couldn’t comprehend at the time what that meant… 500 bars of soap? 1,000?? When the economy looked perilous, evidently this retailer’s interest waned and the entire project was put on the back burner.

Meanwhile, we renovated the soap room and I got pregnant. Really, really pregnant.

About three weeks ago I got an email that this national retailer (anthropologie) was ready to go and needed 2,500 bars of soap in three weeks. At the time, I was working on building up my own stock of soaps so that I wouldn’t need to worry with making much at the very end of my pregnancy and shortly after baby came. It’s important to know that soap takes at least 4 weeks to cure after it’s been made. If you are really tricky you can make it 3 weeks, but a minimum of four is best. They drove a hard line and said three weeks or not at all. My mind quickly calculated the profit, the time, the supplies I would need to order. Then I wrote it all down and talked it over with Brent. We knew we’d be crazy to miss this opportunity. We estimated that with enough soap molds I could manufacture 2500 bars of soap in about 4 days.

Brent began making the molds.

Each mold was comprised of three log cavities. Each log cavity held a 5 pound recipe and would produce 15 bars. So, each box would produce 45 bars of soap. We already had 2 boxes, and Brent made 16 more for a total of 18.

My mom came to help tame the kids… more like they tamed her!

In case you didn’t realize, it takes about 1000 pounds of vegetable oils to make 2500 bars of dog soap, and slightly under 100 pounds of essential oils. Throw in about four pounds of ground oats, 2 pounds of spirulina, almost 150 pounds of lye, and about 4,000 feet of rope and you’re all set!

Orders started rolling in. I swallowed hard when one person on the phone asked if my neighborhood could accommodate an 18-wheeler.

Folks, THAT is what 1300 pounds of vegetable oil looks like. There’s a 55 gallon drum of coconut oil hidden behind those boxes. It’s still on the front porch until we figure out what to do with it! My mom and grandmother had to help the trucker tote the pallet up the driveway, which sits on a slight incline. Now you know where I get my super human abilities. My mom hoisted each bucket and box of oils (each weighing between 35 and 50 pounds) onto a little red wagon and together we toted them back to the soap room. I really can’t think of anyone else who would be willing to do that for a crazy pregnant lady! Thanks, Mom!

Surprisingly, it all fit into my work space. We had to purchase shelves for the soap to cure on and began putting those together.

We  immediately ran into our first problem. My supplier for rope was not able to accommodate my urgent need for (what I thought at the time was) 2500 feet of rope. I went with a new company and paid big  bucks to have the rope shipped in from Chicago. Big mistake, but we’ll go more into detail in my follow up posting on this adventure. The rope they sent me was horrible quality and frayed everywhere, like giant cotton balls. In other words, it was not going into the soap. After an entire morning of talking to rope guys who clearly thought I was insane, I found a local rope company that had enough rope and a rope cutter on hand for what I needed. A short 45 minute drive brought me to rope paradise. Ya’ll. I know a LOT about rope now. If you’ve got rope questions, I’m your girl. So, we bought this handy dandy rope cutting machine that sears the edges all nice and stuff. We had to make a couple more trips for rope after that, and I think the grand total was 4,000 feet that got cut up into around 18 inch strips to be inserted. This was a group effort. I cut a little, Brent cut a LOT, my mom cut a little, and Brent’s aunt Ellen cut some too.

Next it was time to start making the soap!

Once all the oils, lye water, and other additives made it into the pot, it weighed somewhere around 25-30 pounds. After making around 500 bars of soap (filling 11 boxes) it was becoming clear that I could not make all this soap on my own. Aunt Ellen came to save the day…actually about four days, hefting those big jugs and boxes of oils and measuring them all out for me. All I had to do was stand up, mix, pour into the molds, and sit back down to insert the ropes…one by one. Thanks, Aunt Ellen!!!

Each filled box got stacked on the floor and pretty soon we had some pretty tall towers going. It’s best to insulate the soap in the molds for at least 24 hours to make sure that it has thoroughly and evenly begun to saponify.

Once the soap cooled, usually around 36 hours later, it was unmolded and ready to slice.

Eventually, we had to buy some more slicing supplies and Brent and I sat and enjoyed many hours of each others company while slicing soap.

We ended up fitting almost all of the green soap (1250 bars) onto one rack, but the lavender oatmeal soap got spread out pretty much everywhere…

Some of it got to sit and cure for a while, and some of it just had to be shipped raw. It will have plenty of time to cure as it goes through the packaging phase and the shipping phase and the warehouse phase, I’m sure. We really weren’t that comfortable with such a short deadline, and for sure won’t do it again!

We rolled stacks of soap in bubble wrap and brown paper and packed it securely in boxes. Brent spent several hours getting it all onto the pallet and ready for the 18 wheeler to come back to pick it up.

This project literally took over our lives for 3 weeks and we are so. relieved. it’s. done.

We made a lot of mistakes, did a lot of troubleshooting, and learned a lot of lessons (which will be maybe tomorrow’s post). There should be an awful lot of clean and pampered pooches out there though.