I’m not a huge fan of Suze Orman, but overall I usually have positive vibes for her. That’s why I was watching her show on CNBC Saturday night. I know the show is structured around the contrived drama of Ms. Orman berating people for doing stupid things with their money. But this was different. She actually said, “Now is not the time to follow your dreams.”
The first guest was a woman who left her position as an executive assistant to open a day spa. She and her husband took money from their savings, borrowed against their home, and also got an additional business loan to start the business. In over a year of service, the best the business had done was to cover its expenses with perhaps a two- or three-hundred-dollar profit in a month.
They were behind on rent and behind on their mortgage. They were two thousand dollars short of covering their bills each month. Suze did her thing and asked the woman if she had ever run a business before and if she had developed a budget and looked at anticipated income. Predictably, the woman had no experience and had not planned out the business model well. Unpredictably, Suze blamed her desire to follow her dream for her failure.
The right and proper critique, the one that would help this woman and her husband and also give useful information to other people considering starting a business, was that they jumped in with huge risk without knowing a lot about what they were doing. A day spa is a luxury service, the kind of thing many women give up first when money gets tight. Their model didn’t plan for or even anticipate that.
Also, without any business management experience or even experience with the business model of a day spa, they invested tens of thousands of dollars and borrowed more than they invested to get the business going. The way it was presented, this couple thought the lack of a day spa in their community was an opportunity and they wanted a business that would give them a better income than a job. The failure was in poor planning. They didn’t understand what they were getting into, and they assumed the best without even knowing how to predict the outcome.
But Suze went on to rant about people getting frustrated with their jobs and having a dream of being their own boss and owning their own businesses. She talked about this as if it were childish. She told the audience that having a job with a steady income was better in the struggling economy than risking everything to follow your dreams. This is the same woman who uses phrases like “lucky enough to have a job in this economy,” showing that she thinks jobs are not nearly as safe as some people think they are. This is a woman who had a nice job with a steady income but gave it up to follow her own path and be a self-employed author, speaker, and radio and then television show host. This is a self-made woman.
Suze got it wrong. The woman who started the day spa probably wasn’t following her dream. Not the kind of dream that Barbara Sher talks about, the kind that calls to your heart and is inborn in your nature, the kind you owe it to the world to pursue. This woman was following a shallow wish for greed and ease. She wanted to work less and earn more and thought she had come up with a plan to make that happen. This was no dream. It was just a fantasy.
Later in the program, a woman asked if she and her husband should buy a kiln for their pottery business. When Suze found out pottery was a side business and most of the income came from their construction business, she dismissed it as not a “real business.” The woman explained they rented equipment to do the pottery work, but Suze never asked about the difference between renting annually and buying the equipment. She never asked if having the equipment would help them grow the business or what their plans were for that business. She just told the woman not to waste her money.
I try to extend grace and assume Suze Orman is worried about the struggling economy and thinks it’s time for people to be prudent with their money. Amen! I’ve thought that for a long time, even when the economy was growing regularly. I’ve come to believe I can afford something if I have the money to pay for it right now, not if I have enough credit to get a loan and think I can cover the payments. Houses can be an exception, but they don’t have to be if you start small and keep putting money away to trade up.
It definitely is time for people to follow their dreams. The shaky economy reminds people that the façade of security they get from a job is not that secure. The greatest security comes from knowing what you can do or make on your own and how to offer that to other people who want to buy it. This is why business coaches and self-employment consultants are seeing a big increase in people seeking their guidance. The veil is lifted and people see the reality of what my colleague Henry Packer refers to as the gilded cage of servitude in the corporate world.
The woman with the day spa didn’t need to be told it was no time to follow her dream. She needed to be asked if the spa was really her dream. She needed to be asked what she was hoping for by starting the business and what it meant to her. If she was truly called to serve people with relaxation and restoration, perhaps her dream is a day spa, so perhaps she needed to pursue the dream in a more practical way.
In that case, she could have been invited to find owners of successful day spas to mentor her, or see if someone wanted to buy the one she had started but have her continue in a management training position so she could learn the business end. If someone had heard her plans before the huge investment, a wise recommendation would have been for her to leave her job and work for less money in a spa to learn about the daily operation to see if she wanted to own one.
If it had turned out that her dream were more about being able to spend more time with her children and learning how to make money without relying on a job, she could have been guided to look at her natural gifts, talents, and passions and see how she could turn them into a creative career or small business.
The right question for the woman with the side business in ceramics would be to find out if this was more of a hobby or a business she had a plan to grow. If it were a hobby that paid for itself or brought in a little extra money, the decision would be based on her love of the hobby and her husband’s love of it, as well as their ability to pay cash for the equipment. If it were a business that could grow and buying the equipment could move them towards earning more money, it would be a good investment as soon as they had the money to pay for the kiln.
Wishes born of greed and ease are not dreams. Dreams come from the heart. They are the call to utilize your gifts and talents and honor your passions. You can’t be satisfied when you ignore them. You have to heed them and be who you uniquely are in order to feel complete and enjoy life. It is always time to follow your dreams. And it is always time to do so in a way that is most likely to bring you success, a way that is practical and possible, with calculated risks and reasonable daring.
May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,
Steve Coxsey
LifeWork & Self-Employment Expert (trying out a new title…)