Why? The reason is they look for happiness in things that are just temporary like money, power or fame. People often spend their entire lifetime in search of peace, tranquillity and happiness, but they still fail. Yes, happiness is a choice, and you can choose it every day. Choose it every day! You heard it right, happiness is a state of mind, and you can choose to be happy. And staff relationships – everything is about relationships.Happiness is your state of mind. If your back end is sorted it allows you to work on your business, not in it. Policies, procedures really, really important.

If you’re clear on that everything else falls in place. Be really, really clear on what you want to achieve, your vision, your philosophy where you want to be. But for a small business, two extra salaries as you can imagine is detrimental. I have to employ two extra admin staff to be able to make sure that our compliance is current and up-to-date and timely.

Not only do I have Ministry of Education requirements, health and safety is obviously a huge component because you’re looking after other people’s children – and staffing employment issues. There’s a lot of time in education where you are ticking boxes and making sure that compliance is absolutely adhered to. We’ve been recognised by the Ministry of Education, by Auckland University that what we’re doing is quite special and unique. That’s what I do, I get ideas and then I run with them. So I did some research business-wise saw that there was definitely a place in the market for it. So I was approached by parents going – “Why don’t you start a preschool? You’ve got the educational background”.

That preschool had actually changed ownership, they sort of weren’t delivering what people had wanted. I’d been doing some music in another preschool.

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