Coastal Carolina Soap Blog

Image via Wikipedia

I can’t remember where it was, but sometime last week, I saw a challenge issued in a blog.  This author’s assertion is, those of us in business and with business blogs tend to blog almost exclusively about business.  He further challenged to take a day and write about yourself, opening yourself up and sharing parts of yourself that your public may never see.  This isn’t a bad challenge, and although he was proposing that Monday of this week be that day, I simply ran out of time before now.  So, I’m making this week’s blog post about the real me.

Technically speaking, the me in my blog posts is real.  I’ve blogged about vacations and vacation disappointments, soap production, recipes and day trips.  These are all me, all bits and pieces of my life and that of my family.  This week, I’ll open up a bit more to you, make it less business.

Not only do I run my own business, but I also homeschool my older daughter and am the family’s Minister of Finance.  That means I’m in charge of making sure what’s supposed to go out goes out when it’s supposed to, and holding people accountable for not spending recklessly.  Say my husband wants a brand new flat screen TV.  He can have a brand new flat screen TV – if he can show me how he’ll be able to afford it without compromising the household finances.  It’s up to me to keep things in balance, which I don’t like more often than not, because I feel like the bad guy, always saying, “No, that’s not in the budget.”  (Why don’t homeschool moms run the government?  We’d have the budget balanced and America out of this debt in under six months!)

I love to write, which presents a struggle with my math-lovin’ daughter, who can’t stand writing.  I have a few blogs besides my business one, and I enjoy writing stories with romance and passion – when the time allows for me to indulge my hobby.  It totally blows my mind that she can be my daughter and not LOVE to write.

So, I’m business owner and homeschoolin’ mama and baby wrangler and minister of finance.  My friend Donna Maria said the other evening, “You multi-task like nobody’s business!”  Another friend, Ginger, chimed in, “I want her to bottle that skill and send it to me.”  I only make it look easy.  Truth is, this level of multitasking is draining.  They might admire my multitasking skills, but they don’t see me in the wee, predawn hours of the morning, wide awake because my to-do list is running through my head.  They might see how well I finesse homeschooling and business, but not the heartbreak I feel when one of my girls wants to spend some quiet time with me as I’m scrambling to cook dinner, return emails and throw down just that one batch of soap.  The tension is how to do it all without staying up half the night.  I look at Saturdays and think, Woohoo!  A whole day with backup to get things done!  But then I think, A whole day of family time.  And, yes, there are days I work.  And then there are days – like a couple of weeks ago – when I say, “Let’s go to the beach!”

This coming Sunday, my baby turns two.  Since my older daughter doesn’t do so well with watching her sister getting all the attention, I’m toying with the idea of taking her to a movie on Saturday, just the two of us.  I don’t know.  I’ve got 175 bars of soap to make for an order and some experiments I want to try.  And a party to put together.  It’s hard sometimes.  OK, a lot of times.

As my older one gets older, we have to find new ways of getting along together.  I’ll send her outside to play just to ensure that she gets time to be outside playing with her friends.  This is the same girl who’ll ask me a hundred times a day if she can go outside to play with her friends.  This evening as we sat beside each other on the loveseat, she told me she doesn’t always want to go outside.  I told her that sometimes I want her to go outside so she’ll have a chance to play with her friends, and sometimes I just need a mommy time-out but have to get work done in the kitchen (meaning no hiding out in the bedroom for a bit).  We just have to keep the lines of communication open.

We had some good giggles today.  We decided that our language for this school year would be American sign language, something she’s interested in and something we can learn together.  We were going over hand lettering, and she was looking at her hands as she formed the letters.  I instructed her to turn her hand around; she was talking to herself.  This is fun so far, because it’s like translating English to English, and we both talk with our hands.  Besides, she could use this one day in church to minister to people, something she’s seen done in our church.

I’ve probably rambled enough.  If you could ask me anything, what would it be?  I’m fine with answering almost all questions.

Image via WikipediaOne of the joys of being a small business owner is being able to take a full day off to play – go shopping, go to the beach or just bum around the house in my pajamas.  Last Thursday, despite the 100-degree temps, the girls and I headed down to the beach.  We love going to the one at Ft. Fisher – ample free parking and lifeguards, as well as showers and bathrooms.  Perfect, right?  And Thursday was topped off with just a little more perfection, as the risk warning was low, the water was the perfect temp and the waves were pretty mild.

My recent blogs have dealt with how to fail and succeed in business, and next week I’ll most likely swing back to serious, but I felt the need to post something a little bit lighter.  The third Saturday in June, I vended at the NC Blueberry Festival.  It started with this soap…

You simply can’t visit the Blueberry Festival without indulging in some delicious, locally grown blueberries.  Plump, juicy and sweet, these little blue bits of bliss freeze beautifully and since that very hot day have featured in cheesecake, muffins, pancakes and even barbeque sauce.

Peter’s birthday cake – homemade blueberry swirl cheesecake

Since his birthday fell on a Thursday and I wasn’t a hundred percent prepared to make him breakfast for his birthday (we let him sleep in), the weekend immediately following, I made muffins.  These are blueberry banana with shredded wheat topping (because I hate wasting that half cup of shredded wheat crumbs in the bottom of the box).

Blueberry and Banana Whole Wheat Muffins with Shredded Wheat Topping

We made some beautiful sand dollar cookies, too, but we gave those away before I could take pictures.  I’ll share those later, because those are truly beautiful and cleverly designed.  We’re going to make another batch, because my husband has a wonderful, kick-butt customer who deserves some.

Do you have a favorite berry dish?  Please share it.

I’ve been looking at feet lately – namely, those of my girls.  (It’s crazy where I’ll find inspiration for blog posts sometimes!)  What I’ve observed has some good guiding principles for business.

Observation #1:  My baby likes to walk around in her big sister’s shoes and in my shoes – mainly her sis’s.  How can one apply this to business?  Have shoes in which those coming behind you want to walk.  In a literal sense, if you’re a shoe fashionista, you’re not going to want to put your feet into a pair of grungy, beat-up shoes from three seasons ago.  Likewise with business.  People don’t want to walk in the footsteps of business owners who are behind the times, irrelevant to the current market and treat their customers poorly.  They want to emulate businesses who change and grow with the times, who treat their customers like royalty and who are somewhat adventurous in how they approach business.

Observation #2:  When my baby and I go down the stairs, she’ll sometimes let her foot hover over the next step for a few seconds before stepping down.  She’ll let it hover, pull it back to the step, giggle, let it hover again and then finally step.  It reminds me of when I had to take my deep-water swim test in college to pass P.E.  I didn’t learn to swim until college, and as I stood on the edge of the pool down at the deep end, all I kept thinking was, “It’s over a one-story drop from here to the bottom of the pool.”  Never mind that I’m buoyant and would never have gone all the way to the bottom; all laws of physics were moot at that point.  Besides, the water never studied law or physics.  Well, my baby makes it down the stairs and I passed P.E. (and, therefore, college), but it takes a giant leap of faith.  She has to trust that I’m going to hold her hand, not let her fall down the steps.  I had to trust that the water would, in fact, hold me up.

Business often relies on these leaps of faith, too.  While there’s a lot to be said for planning and drafting ideas, creating a budget around those ideas and so forth, eventually you’ve got to stop planning and just do.  It’s scary.  What if the plan fails?  What if an unexpected expense pushes you over budget?  What if the plan succeeds?  What if you come in under budget with a perfect execution?  Sometimes, success can be just as scary as failure (but in a good way).

Observation #3:  Sometimes, my baby tries to go down the steps too fast and ends up falling.  She takes a step and almost without pausing, she takes another step with the other foot, feeling so successful that she wants to take a bunch more – more steps and faster than she’s ready for.  As it is with business, it can be easy to ride on a success and suddenly want to do more, faster than for which we’re prepared, with miserable results.  Then we need to fight the temptation and stop, proceeding through our next steps slowly and cautiously, being careful to make sure we are firmly stable on one step before going on to the next one.

What are some important steps you’d recommend for someone just starting out in business, taking those initial baby steps?

In last week’s blog post, I outlined four ways to ruin a good small business.  This week, I want to look at the positive – ways to grow a good small business.  Part of this post is inspired by an email interview my daughter, the head of Girly Arts Made by ME, completed yesterday.  (When the interview is due to air online, I’ll post it here.  And on Twitter.  And Facebook.  And maybe on that electronic sign over the interstate.  OK, I don’t think NCDOT will let me get by with that last one.)

1.  To grow a successful business, take care of your customers.  This is the most important lesson I can give you.  I once saw a sign in a small business that said, “If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will.”  Small business or large, this is an absolute truth.  Prices and products are not going to usurp customer loyalty if a business takes them for granted or treats them with less than the most awesome, personal customer service possible.

2.  To grow a successful business, strike a balance between work and play.  When you can get ahead, do that; it could free you up for some play time later.  Make time to play.  A relaxed company owner is herself a happier, more productive worker and that, in turn, inspires the employees to be happier, more productive and more efficient.

3.  To grow a successful business, create a positive experience for everyone.  You absolutely won’t make everyone happy – that’s not your job, anyway – but do your best to create positive experiences for contractors, employees, customers, even the delivery folks.  Have an employee who just botched an order?  You as the boss have to work with the employee to fix it, but how can you turn that into a positive?  A customer is unhappy with their order.  Take care of the customer; making this into a positive has the best chance for keeping this customer loyal.

4.  To grow a successful business, approach it with a childlike attitude.  In my faith, there’s an emphasis on coming to Jesus as a little child – total faith, complete trust, not over-thinking it.  My daughter approaches her business like this.  She says, “I approach every product I make with the same question:  What will make this product sell?  The answer is, ‘Because I made it, and it’s a great product!'”  The possibility of failing in any way is not even a blip on her radar.  She moves forward with the full knowledge that she will be nothing but successful.  She embodies the thought, What would you do if you knew you could not fail?


What other steps would you consider necessary in growing a successful small business?  How might you implement these steps?

Sad but true, the inspiration for this week’s blog post came from observing the business practices of an area business.


Being a small business owner has made me extra-sensitive to the business practices of other small businesses.  I feel that observing what they do well and what they do poorly can provide some powerful vicarious learning opportunities to me.  If a business is doing something great to meet its customers‘ needs, then I want to emulate that in my own business.  If a business is doing something that could cost it customers or lead it to get shut down, then I want to avoid doing those things.

1.  You ruin a good business by hiring family.  While some family involvement is often normal for young businesses, hiring family members to “help them out” can lead to a tense work environment and lead to feelings of resentment among employees.  This goes double when the family members just aren’t the best employees.

2.  You ruin a good business by showing favoritism.  This is somewhat related to the first one.  Some employees are going to be better than others; that’s just natural.  However, be sure to play up those things that all employees do well.  In the case of this particular business, the best that can be said of one employee is, he does a very good job of not over-exerting himself.  Unfortunately, he’s a relative of the boss (see #1) and therefore will be around a while.

3.  You ruin a good business by putting employees above customer service.  If you had an employee who cost you several high-paying customers, what would you do?  Shrug those customers off because, after all, there will always be more?  In this economy, there’s no guarantee of that.  There’s a fine tension to this.  I’ve had customers ticked off at me before and complained about me to my boss, and each time, I was grateful that my boss heard the customer out and stuck up for me while satisfying the customer.  There has to be a cut-off point, though.  If one or two customers register complaints about an employee, then maybe that’s on the customers.  However, if several customers complain about an employee and immediately seek another business to meet their needs, then, regardless of how much you may ADORE that employee, they’ve got to go.

4.  You ruin a good business by turning a blind eye to illegal or unethical practices.  Bottom line, in the eyes of the law, the boss is responsible for ensuring that the employees conduct business and represent the business in ways that are lawful and ethical.  In this case, the boss is much like the parent of a minor; while the employee may get in trouble by being terminated or even, in some cases, incarcerated, the boss could lose the business altogether.  Allowing one employee to engage in illegal or unethical business practices can be doubly detrimental to the business:  (1)  As previously stated, it can cause the business to be shut down, and (2) it ensures a bad reputation for that business.

What are some business practices that you’ve seen or experienced that can ruin a good business?  How could the business have turned that into a positive?

For those customers who don’t mind if their body care products are vegan-friendly or not, I like what beeswax does for certain formulations, such as lip balms and lotion bars.  It gives it a silky glide that’s incomparable.  There are many places online to purchase beeswax, but since the North Carolina state insect is the honey bee, then I personally prefer buying my beeswax from local beekeepers.  My favorite source for this is my friend Rick Coor, a beekeeper out of Goldsboro and a member of the Eastern North Carolina Beekeepers‘ Association.

When I get my beeswax from Rick, it’s golden yellow and in a hefty 2-pound block of refined goodness, bearing that lovely warm scent that only beeswax can have.  However, it’s not completely refined, so I have to give it a little extra refinement.  I thought I’d share that with you.  This is what it takes before I can even begin to put this luscious wax in my lip balms, lotion bars and bug repellents.

One pound block of beeswax as Rick gave it to me.

I wrap the block in a double layer of cheesecloth

Into the boiling water it goes.

The beeswax will melt in the hot water, but all the debris on the wax will stay in the cheesecloth.

Beeswax beginning to mix with the water

Checking to see how much of the wax has melted.  There’s still a good chunk left.

All the wax is melted now, and all the residual debris (flecks of dirt, bits of wings, etc.) clings to the wax on the cheesecloth.  It’ll go into the trash.

Melted wax and water.

Now this will sit for several hours while the whole mixture cools down.  The wax will harden and float to the top.

Wax hardening and cracking – a good sign.

Back to that beautiful golden yellow of the block initially.

After the beeswax and water mixture cools completely, the beeswax is now completely hard but will need to dry out for several hours before I can use it in anhydrous formulations.

The solid block of pure beeswax, nice, clean and ready to use.

When the beeswax gets dried out, it gets brittle, making it very easy to chip apart.  From here I’ll chip it into smaller bits for body products.

Last week at this time, my husband, older daughter and I were in Orlando, hanging out with a Mouse, many Princesses and a whole bunch of other characters.  We had a wonderful time, and while we were in Orlando, we had to get in a visit to Clean The World, a nonprofit organization that provides soap, lotion, shampoo and conditioner to people in places all over the world where diarrheal, skin and autoimmune diseases are a very real, daily problem.  Soaps, shampoo and conditioner provide needed hygiene measures that help prevent the spread of diseases.  The lotions help soothe the skin, offering relief to open sores among people suffering with HIV/AIDS-related conditions.

This graces one wall of the Clean the World warehouse.

I first became acquainted with Clean The World through the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild after the earthquake that ravaged Haiti in January 2010.  Since then, I’ve been connected with them through Twitter and Facebook, and Jeremy Chambers, their social media specialist, and I have gotten to know each other through tweets and phone conversations, and he’s helped me discover new ways to help support this great organization.  When I knew we were going to be in Orlando, Jeremy arranged for us to meet and to tour their offices and warehouse.

This table of soaps greets visitors.  There’s a painted turtle soap on the right-hand side that’s adorable!

Jeremy took my husband, daughter and me on a tour, and we were able to meet some of the people behind the scenes at Clean The World.  I’m sorry I don’t remember all their names; I’m horrible with names, though I remember all their faces.  One of those we met was Paul Till, co-founder of Clean the World.  (Check out his smile.  You just get the sense that he always exudes this calm joy.)

Left to right – My husband Peter, older daughter Mary, Paul Till, me

After the grand tour of the offices (physically, nothing elaborate or extravagant – “cube hell,” mostly), Jeremy took us into the warehouse, which was a marvel of organization and contains a mind-numbing amount of soap.  See for yourself!  Check out the end for opportunities to support this amazing organization, even with something as simple as a text message.

Watch this space, because there’s going to be some more opportunities for you to help support this awesome organization, and check out their website at www.CleanTheWorld.org to see everything they’re doing.