Yeah so the sky is falling you all, but a good entreprenuer knows you look around and figure out what to do next. So what should you be doing with all this Covid-19 Coronavirus stuff? For many your businesses are shutting down, your clients are scared (ummm you are two probably) and you’ve been told businesses are going to fail.
Yep. Mmmmm hmmm. Yeah, I’ve heard this all before and I’ve been there. Get up, dust yourself off. Make plans and move forward. The ONE industry that’s survived all things is the beauty industry. This is your time to thrive!
If you position yourself to survive this and be the voice your clients could listen to and trust during the hard times – then you’ll make it out the other side stronger.
In this episode of Skinfessional Alex and I strategize, plot, and plan all the ways to get through this. Join us in this special live-streamed episode.
Are you planning for the future and a possible recession? Coronavirus (Covid-19), elections year stress, and crashing markets – welcome to 2020! In this episode of Skinfessional we look back at other years that have had similar themes and talk about strategies and plans of actions that WORKED to keep us in business and profitable while the world was crashing around us. Alex gets Cybil to talk about how she rebuilt her client list after a worker strike cut her revenue by 50%, how she profited during the 2008 housing crash and recession, and how she’s planning for what’s going on right now.
Does your small business really need as many clients as possible or are you sitting on a goldmine with your current clients? In this episode of Skinfessional Cybil gets crazy angry over the idea of “churning and burning” instead of nurturing and building the perfect client.
Yeah I got pissed! I was so angry when I listened to this guy who seemed to have some really good info about running a business and helping esthetician’s and salon owners grow from nothing. Then he said “forget your clients they aren’t important, worry about getting new ones.” AND I LOST IT.
Your existing clients are your bread and butter. They are your most valuable asset even if they haven’t seen you in forever, they have already spent money with you and therefore are more likely to again. Which is why Alex and I spent an entire hour discussing ways to gain new clients, keep existing ones happy, and digging into reports to make money from client retention.
This episode came about because everyone kept asking us the same questions – “What do I charge for… ” which honestly spawned a lot of conversations between Alex and me about the serious failures we have had on pricing.
PRICING IS HARD
Getting your pricing right is the key to success in business, but it can be hard. The blind anxiety and hopelessness of having to pull a number out of thin air for a new service, or the crushing weight of failure and fear when you realize you’ve priced something too low and can’t cover your costs. Yeah, we’ve been there. We feel you. We have tried and true methods of NOT being there again, but we will be honest, be totally plan on pricing crap wrong again at some point.
In this episode of Skinfessional, we talk about our successes and failures with pricing and give you solid pricing strategies that will help you find the right price for anything every time. And what we mean by that is that you will eventually get there and it won’t hurt as bad. You won’t have super, duper, fails that bankrupt you for a month. You might have little tiny moments where you go, “Gee that wasn’t right. Let’s pivot and try another price for two people and see what happens.”
We touch on all this in the episode including so much more because what we did discover was that pricing strategies touch everything in business. We talk about how to raise prices, how to beta test pricing, and how pricing seems to be woven into everything we do when dealing with people and money.
In this minisode, Cybil talks about what makes a good spa wrap, how to take care of them, and why Satin Serenity have been her go to gowns for over a decade.
I love me a good spa gown, but the problem is most of them just SUCK. They are too short, too small, and made out of material that either feels icky after a few washes or takes forever to dry. I’m a series tactile snob. I’m that person who touches stuff before I buy it. I don’t care how it looks as much as I care how it feels. I thought my poor interior designer was going to go crazy when I told her, “No hard or cold surfaces!”
So when I went on a hunt for linens (spa sheets to come next…) for my space it was an ORDEAL. I had rules:
They had to be long enough to go to (not above but to) women’s knees so they would feel comfortable hopping off the bed and dashing to the bathroom or out of the office during a fire or something if they ever needed to. Some of those robes are so short you can see everyone’s business if ya know what I mean!
They had to be made of a soft and comfortable material
That material needed to dry fast, not hold wrinkles, not need to be ironed, be stain-resistant, odor-resistant, and not pill.
The material needed to hold up to CA law of boiling water washes.
The gowns needed to be sustainable so they needed to be well made so they would last.
NO VELCRO. That shit holds hair and lint and sounds horrible and scratches skin. Ugh. I hates it!!!
They needed to be soft even when line dried.
They needed to be warm enough but not hot.
It would be nice if they were pretty (but that was not vital honestly.
It’s a big list and as I said a hard one. Enter Satin Serenity. I picked up 2 of their gowns at a Vegas show. After 3 months I knew I had a winner. I honestly didn’t know how durable they would be, but a decade later and I still have my original set and the other ones I’ve added on as I’ve grown my business.
I will pass on some tips to keep the gowns in good shape:
Line dry and try not to dry in the dryer. That thing is the killer of good linen.
They are not prone to stains, but if you get oil or something on it deal with it RIGHT AWAY. Don’t let it sit.
If someone funky uses the, let it air out. Don’t just stick it in a hamper, put it on a hook somewhere and let it air out then get it washed ASAP.
Use an enzyme-based laundry detergent to really break down the oils and such that don’t belong on the material.
I say this about many of my pieces of equipment, if you take good care of these gowns, they will take good care of you and your clients!
Alex and Cybil are huge Hamilton fans, which is why when Cybil said that she learned so many business lessons from the musical Hamilton Alex needed to bring the conversation to the Skinfessional fandom.
In this episode we talk about how being a solo business owner is just like being a revolutionary. It takes people with vision and guts to go out on their own and believe they can outlast their competition even in the harshest times.
We discuss how thinking like a general and sometimes needing to eat your horses is a thing. And we all agree that fighting for what you stand for isn’t always comfortable.
There are seven major fears holding you back from making the income you want. In this episode of Skinfessional we talk about how to recognize the seven fears in yourself and conquer them.
We all have stuff that keeps us from making the money we deserve and it isn’t the easy things we think like not enough clients or time. No, that would be easy! It’s the deeply rooted fears that whisper we aren’t good enough, that we don’t know how to do the thing, and that no one is going to care what we have to say.
There are ways to find these fears in yourself and overcome them. Alex experiences not being good enough all the time and Cybil battles perfectionism to a debilitation degree. Luckily we’re here to share all our secret tips and we’ve found that leaning on each other helps to stop living in fear and make all the money!
Prepare yourself for this week’s gut-wrenchingly raw episode of Skinfessional where we share our most intimate stories of the ways failure has filled us with anxiety, fear, shame, and insidiously held us back from success. Cybil talks about why failure is like Voldemort, Alex confesses to failures masked by toxic optimism, and we both discuss how isolating failure is for solo business owners.
During my darkest moments, as I’m watching a well-laid plan fall apart and go up in a firey pile of dog poo, I try and imagine what other people have thought about at times like these. What did Elon Musk think as he watched his rockets explode over and over and over again at the same time he heard Tesla batteries were slagging themselves? I mean, that guy’s a genius so what kind of dedication to purpose does it take to get up every day and know you’re doing the right thing even when shit is FUBAR? What did Ludwig Dürr think when he watched the newsreels of the Hindenburg go down in a blaze of firey death? At any time did he doubt his design or mission? Did he think afterward that he learned a lot from that, gave a Ted Talk on aligning his purpose, then designed a hot air balloon?
This is the crazy shit that goes through my head as sobs wrack my body in the post office parking lot at 10pm. Post office parking lots are excellent places to cry in your car undisturbed late at night I’ve discovered. Nobody wants a piece of that. It’s ten years ago, and I’m watching my business fail. There’s a writers strike I didn’t see the full ramifications of coming down the pipeline and I’ve gone from making $16K a month to – not enough. Just NOT ENOUGH to cover all the bills. I had grown arrogant and comfortable in my business and now, like Hindenburg, I was watching it come down in a flaming ball of death and destruction around me.
Sometimes failure is just that – failure. When I listen to people talk about failure it’s nearly always as part of a journey, a learning experience, a tool, blah blah blah. Hell, I’ve spoken about it this way. And yes, failure CAN be those things. But this is Skinfessional where we talk about the real shit. So here it is. It’s true, you need to fail to get back up and try again and you need to make mistakes to learn what doesn’t work like Elon and his rockets, but unplanned, massive, a failure like the Hindenburg isn’t pretty and quite often the biggest lesson you learn is how to deal with the feeling you have surrounding a massive failure. The lessons to be learned don’t come now. They come in your future When you can look back on the event with more experience and distance. When you hurt less and it isn’t so devastating.
It’s been my experience that as business owners, to admit you are failing makes the failure – REAL. By speaking its name it comes to life. I know that when I am on the brink of watching a massive failure, one that has me scared, up at nights, stressed, sitting in my car crying, feeling so, so alone, paralyzed by the fear of it all, this knot in my throat, my hands shaking, with absolutely no idea what to do or how to fix the situation. I don’t want to talk about it with anyone. I don’t want to ask for help. I KNOW it’s stupid. I totally understand that I should reach out and ask for help, but when I’m in this dark place, getting the feeling that my plan is about to fail, it’s like saying He Who Shall Not Be Named. The failure will go from a whisper of an idea to a reality. It will become a truth. I will have said Voldermort and admitted I am failing in a massive way. and weeks, months, years even of planning are collapsing and burning around me. So instead I keep all my anxieties, fears, and insecurities to myself. I isolate, push through the days with “toxic optimism” and hope it’s going to be okay instead of maybe finding a solution from a different source. Why? WHY?
So no one will know the shame I feel in my failure.
There I said it.
I said What No One Wants To Name.
Amidst all the motivational talk around failing up, learning from your mistakes, and even my talk of failure just being failure there’s a dark demon that rides along with any meaningful failure.
Shame.
Let’s talk about the BS that is shame. Fuck shame. Shame has zero place in failure and yet that bitch is hanging out and stopping you from making good decisions. Now that we’ve called her out and brought her into the light you can recognize her, label her, and stop giving her power.
Instead of feeling shame and crying in your damn car, what if you talked about the possible failure BEFORE it got out of control? Reframe a failure as a moment. A space in time.
“Hi there I’m having a moment right now where I’m afraid…”
“Hi I had a moment where I screwed up and I need some advice…”
“Hey,I have a problem and I need a moment of your time…“
When you look at failures as moments suddenly the shame goes away. If you come away with anything from this piece please let it be that shame has zero place in failure. I know for me it’s something I’m still working on. The control freak in you, that seems to gravitate to isolation and feel you are alone when wounded and in trouble – stop it. Remember other perspectives are good. They help you see more clearly. They think in different ways and come at problems with different solution sets. Remember that failures hurt. Sit in them with intent and know that you’re not going to have an instant epiphany. Like a time capsule, failures give you their best insights far into the future if you aknowledge them, respect them, feel them, and look them dead on in the face.
Nothing is more frustrating than clients messing with your schedule. Whether it’s not showing up, spending hours juggling reschedules or heck, even the cancellations a few days ahead of time that are supposed to be okay – it’s still messing your life up! We’ve been there. We know. In this episode of Skinfessional we talk about all the ways we’ve learned over the years to handle this mess.
A lot of your scheduling has to do with actually training clients in advance. Setting expectations is half the battle with clients. Making them understand that your time is valuable and training them that getting on your book is hard is important. This about that appointment you have that you would NEVER change because you’ll never get another chance at it. You know the one. Well that needs to be you!
Holding to a cancellation policy that works for you is vital. We talk about the ways that work and ones that haven’t for, but find one that does and stick to it.
We also talk a lot about how to handle all the feelings that arise with no shows and cancellations. Remember, it isn’t personal. People make decisions for all kinds of reasons and most times you weren’t in the equations at all.
Are you the same as your brand? When Cybil started her business 20 years ago she was working at five different locations but she knew she would one day be working at her own place. She also knew that no matter where she worked she would need to have her own brand. People would need to be able to search for HER, Cybil Solyn esthetician. So she created a website to brand herself. That way no matter where she worked her name could be searched and discovered.
Alex, being a yoga instructor and body nerd had the same epiphany when she started out. She would go from yoga studio and yoga class all over the valley teaching and getting a following for her unique way of teaching yoga. Yeah she used social media, but AE Wellness and her own brand and website was born out of a need for people to be able to find HER in the mess and chaos of the LA yoga scene.
This is one way of thinking about your branding as a newbie starting out. But we dig even deeper in this episode of Skinfessional. Cybil poses the idea that we even need to create a brand to protect ourselves. A persona, hats, to keep ourselves safe and separate from our business on a day to day basis.
