Hi all,
Today I met with a professional business coach. Pretty impressive stuff and shows how serious I am taking the whole Hale & Fun thing right? (let us not consider the fact that it was a free thing given out to everyone who attended the business seminar earlier this month and remember how much I like free stuff but merely reflect upon my admirable level of dedication).
Anyway, he asked me if I wanted the hard coaching or the soft coaching (no really he did. I have to wonder who asks for the soft coaching? of course by the end I was kind of wishing I had made that choice. On a completely, different topic-this is known as building the expectation in the mind of the reader. You know something bad is coming but what? And how will it be resolved. This level of anticipation encourages continual reading. There was a podcast on blog writing as well this week. It also suggested that grammar and spelling were important and ironically staying on topic and not allowing yourself to be sidetracked. Hey you can’t get everything!). So the upshot of the meeting was that we broke down the actual profit margin of the business and it turns out that there are two potential possibilities for me once we reach the glorious breakeven point:
Firstly, I will either be working an incredibly large amount of hours for an hourly rate that would make a sweat shop employee laugh or that I will never met the break-even point and spend the rest of my days paying to work hours that would make a sweat shop employee laugh.
Firstly, I will either be working an incredibly large amount of hours for an hourly rate that would make a sweat shop employee laugh or that I will never met the break-even point and spend the rest of my days paying to work hours that would make a sweat shop employee laugh.
Damn those uppity and smug sweat shop employees stop laughing at me.
I got the feeling that the whole point of this “tough love” was to make me think long and hard about whether the whole business thing was worthwhile if I may never make any money. Which personally, I think totally misses the point of the whole thing. Yes I understand that I will probably never reach the dizzying heights of minimum wage pay that I was earning stacking shelves during my undergraduate or working in a toy store during my PhD, but that isn't important. The important thing is that I BELIEVE IN HALE & FUN. I know that knowledge wants to be shared, that the greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of understanding. I truly believe that learning doesn’t have to stop. I believe that as I grow older, all that means is that I have more time to learn what I want to learn, when I want to learn and where I want to learn. Everybody wants, no craves wisdom- they just need the outlet. Humanity became great by pushing back the darkness of ignorance with the torch of enlightenment. And that is what Hale & Fun is all about.
It is like Pandora Box, I have imagined a better world and can how that world can be created. And once seen, it cannot be unseen and damn it, come hell or high water or even worse-prolonged middle class poverty in a first world country like Australia- I will see that dream realised.
And while I am preaching, I have attended a lot of universities and schools, I know that lecturers are entering the world of teaching unprepared and ill-equipped. This is wrong. The only way people can become the educators that they deserve to be is to be given the opportunities that Hale & Fun offer. The chance to create their own courses, to try new methods and work with other people who are also learning how to teach. Hale & Fun is dedicated to the idea that by giving our facilitators ownership of their courses, allowing them the flexibility to build on their passion. They will be driven to excellence, to be better than even they realised they ever could be.
In short, while I did appreciate the whole dollar and cents break down offered by the business coach, I don’t think it really got to the point. It doesn’t really matter whether I make enough money to finally buy the Playboy mansion or build my army of evil mutated zombie monkeys (but that is a story for another day) or whether I will be working 7 days a week till the wee hours trying to get the business running because that is not the point. The point is that THE WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE BECAUSE HALE & FUN IS IN IT. The growing community of facilitators and myself who make up Hale & Fun are creating something unique, something unseen before and it will be glorious….in terms of profit….hmmm, succeed or fail, that is not important- the world will know we were here and be a better place for it and that is all that matters….