GoHuman Blog

Well, dare I say, there may just be a little bit of extra light on that horizon (please trust me and lay aside your well-earned cynic’s cap for the moment.  Don’t worry, I’ll let you put it back on in a moment).

In a few weeks, the White House will be releasing access to their new website : BusinessUSA.gov.

You can of course go and read what’s there for yourself, but I’ll just give you a few little tastes here.

“Looking to make our government leaner, smarter and more consumer-friendly, the President will call on Congress to reinstate the authority that past Presidents had, over decades, to reorganize the government.”

“…the President’s proposal … [is] … mandating that any plan must consolidate government – reducing the number of agencies or saving taxpayer dollars…”

“For too long, overlapping responsibilities among agencies have made it harder, rather than easier, for our small businesses to interact with their government.  Those redundancies have also led to unnecessary waste and duplication…”

“The President’s first focus under the Consolidation Authority Act would be to make it easier for America’s small businesses – which are America’s job creators – to compete, export and grow.”

“Small businesses often face a maze of agencies when looking for even the most basic answers to the most basic questions.”

“We will also be unveiling a new website: BusinessUSA.gov. This site will be a virtual one-stop shop with information for small businesses and businesses of all size that want to begin or increase exporting.”

Now, doesn’t that sound great?  Yes, yes, I know, most new initiatives sound great.  Don’t put that hat back on yet!

Although I live in England now, I was born in the USA and lived there almost half my life.  I started my long and overly-varied career-path delivering newspapers, and then did my obligatory spell flipping burgers before moving on to Safeway and a variety of other jobs working my way through college.  One consistency: taxes, and greatly resented they were, too.

Since then I’ve come to appreciate the role of government in our lives – and despite the negative factors, my conclusion is that overall, we’re better off (especially in the West) for having them.

However (ok, you can put that cap back on again), I’ve also seen multiple administrations come up with promises and guarantees and plans and political potions – especially with elections approaching.

But … I can’t help but hope.

At GoHuman one of our goals is to help small businesses cut through all the complexity of modern technology and provide a straightforward way for you to communicate with your customers.  We worry about the bits and bytes, so you can just post your services and recommendations from  your customers, and then get on with your business.  I see BusinessUSA.gov doing a similar thing.

What strikes a chord here is that the US government has decided to take advantage of modern technology to improve communications between agencies, and also with small businesses.  These efficiencies should translate through to all parties being able to do more with less. And although I don’t expect to see our taxes decreasing any time soon, I at least have some hope that they won’t be going up as much as they might have – or that we’ll see some real social improvements coming out of the spare funds created.

On the other hand, we might just see more corruption – but at least some of the difficulties of running a small business should be slightly alleviated as the information becomes easier to find.

Fingers crossed, this could be a good thing!

Barry the Plumber?

“It’s habit probably. People like to stick to the places they know,” I said, not wanting to put pressure on him.

“It’s a shame really,” he continued. “We all go to that overpriced deli down the road, instead of trying nice wee places like this – and then the wee places just disappear!”

Ah – some insight into what new business owners are up against, I thought. I launched The Flavour Co almost exactly two years ago, and it’s only in the last few months that groups of kids in from the local secondary school have started coming in for their lunch – the younger ones, who have just come up from the primary school nearby.

It’s a reflection of adult behaviour – we’ve had regular customers since day one, yet I feel we’re only just beginning to become an established fixture in the area. And I’m still not sure if the shop will survive!

Although my shop is regularly full of customers, it’s hard to make the books balance. We need a more consistent flow of customers. Passing trade often just passes us by because the shop is so small.

In addition, people are spending less due to the recession – we’ve had to delist some of our more premium lines. Our margins are good, but you need to make a lot each day to cover the overheads.

I often wonder whether things would be easier if I’d managed to lease a bigger shop. But that can bring its problems too. This is obvious from the number of larger cafes that are closing down. One day they’re full of customers; the next day their windows are pasted up.

Here’s an example that might explain why so many apparently successful retail businesses are having difficulties.

I recently read an interview with the owner of a coffee bar that had been launched around the same time I launched The Flavour Co, but in a different town. It’s much bigger than mine and according to the owner it has an annual sales turnover of £320,000 a year, which seems like a dream to me.

It’s situated quite close to the city centre, unlike my café/juice bar which is in the west end of Glasgow, close to the university but not right in the centre of town.

The owner of this café has 12 staff working various shifts, and they will be needed as the café serves food as well as several hundred coffees each day.

500 coffees over 10 hours would mean you have to make coffees at a rate of roughly one a minute.

According to the owner, the money doesn’t go far enough to pay his key staff what he thinks they are worth, or to give him a decent salary. I found this surprising, so I decided to do a rough breakdown of estimated costs.

Coffee sold in coffee bars is known to have a very high margin, but this particular coffee bar specialises in high quality coffee and also offers food. There will be some wastage. I would estimate the cost of the stock at 25%, or £80,000 for the year.

That would leave £240,000.

VAT (value-added tax) is chargeable on restaurant and takeaway hot food at a current rate of 20%. This would take £48,000 away from the turnover, leaving £192,000.

Given the central location and size of the café, and the advertised rent of a retail unit on the same street, I would be very surprised if the rent and rates combined came to less than £50,000 a year.

That would bring the annual takings down to £142,000.

The minimum wage in Britain is currently £6.08 per hour for an adult over the age of 21.

The establishment in question has 12 staff. Assuming that some of them are part-time, while there will probably be a couple of full-time managers, let’s estimate that on average they are all on minimum wage and working four days a week, eight hours a day, and that they get holiday pay.

That’s £6.08 x 8 hours x 4 days x 52 weeks, which gives them an average salary of £10,117 each – not including National Insurance, holiday cover and other benefits such as maternity or paternity cover.

£10,117 x 12 = £121,405. Subtract that from the total and you’re left with just £20,595 per year to pay the fuel bills, water bills, licensing, maintenance, bank interest charges – and the owner’s salary.

These figures are based on my own estimates based on the owner’s claimed turnover, but my guess is that his actual costs will be higher than I’ve estimated, not lower.

The owner has never run a café before; he is clearly full of passion and enthusiasm, and he may well make a success of it in the end. But it shows what café owners are up against these days. Coffee bar prices really need to rise if these businesses are to be sustained – but that’s not going to happen in a recession.

The alternative solution when people are reining in their spending, is to attract a huge number of customers. It’s easy to think you’ll be able to do this, but actually making it happen is more difficult. And if you’re planning to open a new café, it’s very difficult to establish how many customers you’re likely to get. Few café owners want to share this kind of information.

Before I launched The Flavour Co I searched for market research on this but could find nothing. Instead I sat in various cafes and counted the number of customers coming in at various times. This gave a very inaccurate picture, because there are so many different factors involved.

A much better idea for anyone thinking of starting a café is to look at websites like Company Check in the UK, which gives data on limited (incorporated) companies. Also websites advertising businesses for sale sometimes include details of turnover.

Bear in mind that the figures in adverts might be slightly exaggerated.

Rents can be found by looking at commercial property websites, and remember that they can vary sharply in streets that might be close together, depending on foot traffic.

Business rates in Scotland are shown on the Scottish Assessors website.

Also remember that unless you’re very lucky or conditions are exceptional, it takes time, years in fact, to really establish a good customer base.

I was always taught to square the hips to the side of the room. I practiced this way for years and wondered why my hips wouldn’t open, and why I would sometimes have SI joint pain or knee pain. There seem to be two radically different schools of thought here: one is to shove the body into the ‘final’ version of the pose, despite whether your hips are open or not, and the other is to approach the pose according to where the body is at the present moment. Looks vs. integrity.

Regardless of where one stands in this argument, I believe the greater question is, “What serves each student best?” Since yoga literally means ‘to yoke’ or ‘to unite,’ I constantly ask myself, as a teacher, “How can my student feel the most connected to their body?”

I just recently saw the movie Moneyball and loved it. I dare say I shall be putting it and this year’s The Help up in my list of all time favorite movies.  I am impassioned about cheering for the underdog, stepping out of the status quo, slaying the impossible. (Hence my involvement in GoHuman.)

Moneyball is the true story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s attempt to put together a successful and winning baseball team on a low budget. He and the rest of his management team had been taking the same approach for years – looking at the players’ strengths, their looks and their habits off the field. This conventional wisdom isn’t serving them, though, because the team is doing poorly. So Beane goes out on a limb and hires a recent college graduate, Peter Brand (a composite character based largely on Paul DePodesta), for his ability to think differently. Brand convinces him to stop looking at things like a player’s unsightly throwing style or ugly girlfriend — things that baseball managers had been using for years in making their player decisions. Instead, he only looks at one thing – who gets on base. Getting on base equals runs, and runs equal wins. Though ridiculed by their management team and the press, the A’s go on to win twenty consecutive games – an all-time record in baseball.

What does this have to do with yoga? I have seen a very similar thing happen in the yoga community—teachers fixated on a principle before looking at an individual student’s needs. It seems as though the longer one spends immersed in the yoga scene, the more emphatic and rigid their ideas become, especially about alignment. After a while, it seems like some teachers prioritize their ideas and philosophies over actually looking at their students and reading what’s going on in the moment.

I love how simply Brand looks at winning baseball: GET ON BASE. To draw an analogy with yoga, the ultimate “win” for a yoga student is to experience that undeniable feeling of connection in their body, mind and spirit.  Their ‘bases’ might be things such as: acquiring more flexibility, balancing in handstand, floating in arm balances, or building core strength. We might have to modify a pose or two to ultimately get our students on base, but if it gets them closer to their “win,” does it matter how they got there?  If teachers stay rigid about formulaic alignment, students might never get on base. Worse, they will get discouraged and give up.

In Moneyball, Peter Brand gets ridiculed for using a methodology that is different and new. And a good yoga teacher runs the same risk by refusing to buy in to the old belief that perfect alignment is the only important thing and should be achievable right off the bat. Certain popular teacher training courses use language like ‘the most difficult certification process’ in order to convince both students and teachers that their style is the best and safest. But these kind of grandiose statements have the unfortunate side effect of producing some strong-minded, ego-based teachers who put the copyrighted style before the student. It’s this sort of mindless rigidity that leads to injuries.

I think it’s wonderful (and imperative!) for yoga teachers to study human anatomy and physiology.  In my humble opinion, I feel we can never learn enough about the human body. But for a lot of us teachers, this means taking the initiative to seek education outside of our yoga training, or even outside of the world of yoga altogether. Since so many teacher trainings put the emphasis on alignment and tradition over individual bodies, it’s up to us to do the legwork to become better teachers.

As teachers, we are in the position of being of service to the student, and ever expanding our knowledge and awareness is one of the best ways of being in utmost service to our students. We have to think like Brand: for ourselves.

Last year, I received a call from Adidas, who approached me to be their Global Yoga Ambassador.  A global yoga ambassador gets to travel around the world to different gyms, teaching and evangelizing the word of yoga. Basically, my second perfect job. (My first is starring in an action film. I’m a natural.) I was elated to hear I’d made the final cut. Adidas flew me to NYC to meet with their representative – let’s call her “Maria” – and to teach her yoga so that she could get a feel for my style. Maria said she loved the class and told me about the relief she felt with a sciatic issue that had been bothering her for years. We went to lunch after class to discuss possibilities.

At lunch, Maria talked about my strengths, Adidas-style: good teacher, knowledgeable, inspiring, with a global “look,” young without being too young. Toward the end of our conversation, she posed a fateful question: How can we market you?

Huh? I asked her what she meant. Maria explained that they needed to prove I was a good teacher with a bona fide paper trail. Which yoga-related websites or magazines had I been published in? Did I have certificates resembling diplomas that would make me more credible? You see, I would be following in the shelltoes of Elena Brower, a highly regarded Anusara teacher (with a dancer’s physique).

I returned to Los Angeles and crafted an impassioned letter, detailing my pedigree and beliefs about yoga. My Anusara Level 1 and Level 2 Teacher Trainings were with (among several talented others) Noah Maze, Tara Judelle, and Naime Jezzeny. I had taken over 200 hours of workshops with John Friend, Desiree Rumbaugh, Carlos Pomeda, Ross Rayburn, and Darren Rhodes – all household names in the Anusara community. My daily practice is with Annie Carpenter. My ongoing education is with Chloe Chung Misner of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering®. I taught at City Yoga, #1 on Huffington Post’s “Best Yoga Classes in Los Angeles.”

Then I worked the philosophical angle.

I explained that the yoga scene is filled with people preaching that to be a “real” yogi, you must be vegetarian, wear organic cotton, don mala beads and patchouli. You must have studied in India, resigned your material possessions, lived in an ashram, meditated in the Himalayas, and been hugged by Amma. I called bullshit on the idea that if you’re a size zero with a sick practice, you must be a great teacher. Or that having a celebrity following says something about you as a person.

“Screw it,” I wrote. That’s not the kind of yoga I know. It’s because of all of those preconceived notions that yoga remains inaccessible and inapproachable to many people. Yoga is a way of being that transcends schools of thought, and to borrow from Rumi, it lies “beyond the fields of right and wrong.”

And this is where I brought it all home: I reminded Adidas of their own ad campaign. I wrote, “Adidas asks, ‘Who are you as an individual?’” (Nice touch, right?) In my classes, I see a yogi population that wants to be recognized for its abilities and imperfections, a population who won’t be categorized into a stylized box and who may live an entire lifetime without living in an ashram, much less the desire to visit one, and yet they have the same chance of becoming enlightened as anyone.

Adidas, I said, It’s with this new wave of yoga that I identify. I eat meat, I adore animals. I love clothes and material possessions, and I don’t believe that living without anything will make me a better person. Evolving is a choice I make daily. I don’t believe in gurus. I think we all have the potential to be the best version of ourselves, and our greatest teacher is within. I believe that the most influential people of our time are cut from the same cloth. The Dalai Lama didn’t study to become inspirational; he simply speaks from his own experience.

I clicked SEND on my email and reflected. How’s that for a marketing campaign, Adidas?

A week later I received a response: “You’re too short.” Ouch.

In acting, it’s common to be turned away for not looking the part. Casting directors have a particular image in mind, and make no bones about it. You can say what you want about the entertainment industry’s superficiality, at least they’re up front about it. But because this was about yoga, I suppose I assumed that Adidas would consider passion, drive, knowledge, and originality more important than say, being 5’6” or taller. My bad.