Dream Believe Create by Hayley Lewis

Author:Hayley Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

My location

I chose a major shopping centre as the location to build my swim school because I had only one option in mind and I was stubbornly sticking to it. I was so adamant that my actual business would replicate my dream business that nothing else had a chance to figure in the equation. Big mistake! I often wonder where we’d be now if we’d chosen somewhere else. I realise now that I should have considered other locations or options for my swim school instead of having such tunnel vision on the shopping centre location.

My other main hurdle was that we were trailblazers in having a swim school located in a shopping centre and this meant that researching the idea or even going on a reconnaissance mission to ‘suss out’ the opposition was impossible in those vital planning stages. Don’t get me wrong — the opportunity to have the amount of walk-by traffic means limited advertising is required. There’s also the added attraction and convenience of being located in one of Australia’s largest shopping centres. My clientele seem to enjoy the opportunity to combine swimming lessons for the kids with a coffee or the weekly food-shopping trip, but there are many, many overheads for me as an owner, of course. Would I do things differently if I had my time over? Probably not, because I feel like I’ve got something special happening and my clients obviously think so too.

Westfield had originally offered me a second-floor space, which had a good vibe, but not a great vibe. My female instincts must have been well and truly working overtime because something inside me was telling me that the position just wasn’t ‘it’. I was excited nevertheless that I’d even been offered the opportunity so I wasn’t about to start getting choosy. After many exciting visits to the proposed location, I talked myself into how I could make it work even though it was quite small and tucked away in the corner. The gods of small business must have been looking down on me because a couple of weeks later I was advised that the location wasn’t structurally sound to hold a swimming pool and they had another location for me to look at.

I wondered if this was a bad omen. The site they’d suggested wasn’t really familiar to me. I’d visited the centre a few times a week, every week, over the years, so should I really be considering a location that I couldn’t even visualise? Would people venture down that end of the building? If I was challenged at this stage of the proceedings, was I indeed cut out to run my own business at all?

I remember getting off the phone from the centre’s leasing manager and immediately ringing my husband at work to tell him the latest machinations.

‘Well, let’s not think anything too negative until we actually see,’ he said, with less enthusiasm than I had hoped.

‘No, I have to go right now. Can you meet me on your way home from work?’ I pleaded, with almost too much impatience in my tone.

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