Entrepreneur Olivia Lockey is the owner of Northumberland’s award-winning luxury wedding venue and glamping site, Northside Farm, in Horsley, Northumberland.
Perception is a funny thing – how we think and form opinions about people and ourselves. From the outside people think I have it all together. A businesswoman who set up and runs her own business and a mother of three young daughters, people seem to think I must know what I am doing to get the balance right.
But we are all only human and I am just like any other person juggling home and work life with some mornings leaving the house looking as if I’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards handing out travel cups of tea and breakfast biscuits on the way to school before getting to the office to sit there not knowing where I am going to start.
Like so many of us, we are often just juggling life from attending school plays when I can feel my phone vibrating in my handbag 12 times throughout a performance to catching up with emails until midnight. However, what I always do is my best and make sure the service we provide is 100% whether I have started the day breezing out the door like Mary Poppins or have had an argument with a 6-year-old over the wrong coloured cup!
People are generally quick to judge and often they forget that the people they are dealing with in a professional capacity are human as well, so when people are demanding to speak to you or are outraged because they emailed you at 1am and you didn’t respond by 7am, I believe that its ok to say, ‘Yes we are professionals and we are providing a service and we do our very best to provide that service, we appreciate you as clients and will do our best for you, but we are also human and we have to sleep and sometimes our children our ill and sometimes we have parents meetings or plays and are not always available 24/7’.
Perhaps we are a victim of our own success and making ourselves so available means that our clients have high expectations (I once answered the phone to a client on Christmas day as I thought there was an emergency and again after my youngest daughter was just born).
We all have families and lives, and our family-run business which our kids are very much involved in means it’s important to ensure that we get the balance right.
Instead of thinking in a B2B or a B2C way, let’s think in a H2H way (human to human) – people buy from and invest in people. So I guess what I am saying is give yourself a break, remember you are human and you are interacting with other humans so let us be more understanding about having a life and not just being seen as a working machine.