Danielle Garner: F*%ked up… but fixed it!
As part of our ‘F*%ked up… but fixed it!’ series here on the HUB, we’re asking salon and barber shop owners to get real with us about a notable mistake they’ve made in their business and what they did to resolve it. This month we spoke to multi-award-winning salon owner, Danielle Garner, founder of Wildflower Dublin, and asked her to reveal a business secret she hadn’t told before. Here’s what she had to say…
THE F*%K-UP
It was December 2019 and my second Christmas in business – I had eight team members at this point. The 22nd of December was our last working day in the salon, and the 23rd was our ‘Give Back Day’, where we volunteer an entire day working with a local charity. Then, everyone was off until the 27th, and we all took holidays to cover the rest of the festive period, meaning that the salon was closed until the 3rd of January.
Naturally, I wanted everyone to have a ball over the holidays and I was so focused on them having time off that I forgot to factor in paying the wages. It wasn’t until the 2nd of January (the date the wages were due to be paid) as I was sitting in Seville with my family for my 27th birthday when it suddenly dawned on me that the salon had been closed for 12 days – and this meant there had been no injection of cash into the business account for almost two weeks. There wasn’t enough to pay the team or myself!
THE FIX
So, I spoke to my accountant and for this occasion we managed to find funds to pay everyone apart from myself. On that day, I learnt the importance of financial planning and thinking ahead, always. It was a very quiet birthday but one I won’t forget, and thankfully it’s never happened again.