How to grow your beauty business by becoming your own CEO
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When we start our own business, we have this amazing dream of how perfect everything will be. We’ll be in total control, living our best life, with a fat stacks of cash and the motivation that comes from doing your own thing.
But usually what happens after a year or so in business, is that we find ourselves in a very different place. We feel owned by our clients, overworked, stressed to the max, and that grand vision we had for our business has faded away. At this point, we’re just keeping up with the daily grind and trying to keep our heads above water.
Sound familiar? If so, it could be because you haven’t found your inner CEO yet. Instead, you’re just playing the role of hairdresser, nail tech, esthetician, or technician, without stepping back and playing the other roles it takes to succeed in business.
Today’s guide and interview is with Larissa Macleman, owner of Salon Owners Collective.
Larissa helps salon owners get out of overwhelmed and stress and grow and scale their business. She started out as a hairdresser in New Zealand, and then immediately went from apprenticeship to business ownership. Larissa told me that if she knew then what she knows now, she wouldn’t have jumped into ownership so quickly. But she learned a ton along the way.
After years of owning her own hair salon, she grew it to a team of 30, and had more than $2 million in revenue a year. But she decided she wanted a change in her life. Larissa has found her passion in coaching business owners to do the same as what she did and help them overcome the challenges she had:
In particular, while owning her salon, she was overworked overstressed, overcommitted and miserable. She felt all of these things even though she loved her business. But it wasn’t until she stepped into the CEO role that she became a more successful business owner.
Here is what Larissa has to teach about becoming the CEO of your beauty business, even if you’re just in your first year of ownership, and you work by yourself.
To scale your business, you need to be separate from it
What typically happens to business owners, especially in the beauty industry, is there there is no separation between yourself and the business. You are it, and it is you. Your salon becomes a reflection and extension of who you are.
This might seem ideal, because that means that you’re truly connected to what you’re doing, and you’re passionate about it, right? Actually, when there is no separation, this is where you can get derailed. You take everything too personally, and become too emotionally involved in your business decisions. If you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t survive without your business, or if you take daily obstacles as a personal tragedy, you might be too connected.
The first step to being a CEO is to start to separate ourselves and think of our business as a separate entity. We’re the leader of the business and we drive it but it’s not us. Larissa says that this becomes especially harmful if your salon does find success quickly. You get extremely busy and involved, and you’re chasing your tail trying to catch up.
You really do need to detach as much as possible - you’re already attached enough, so it’s time to let go.
The 3 roles in your business: Technician, manager, and CEO
There are 3 main roles in any successful business, and usually we are wearing all three of these hats, whether we’re aware of it or not.
The Technician: they do the hair, nails, beauty services. The technician serves clients. Usually that’s where we start, as it’s the most fundamental, basic part of your business.
The Manager: This is an operational role. The manager ensures that your place opens and shuts, that it’s generating enough income, and ensures the day to day tasks get done. The Manager makes sure everyone is happy, especially clients.
The CEO: This is the leadership role. And yes you are the leader of your business, even if you’re alone! The CEO actually doesn’t have a lot of tactical tasks, and actually does minimal things compared to the manager. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important. In fact, the CEO role is critical to growing your business. The CEO is the one deciding which direction your business will go. She makes the high level decisions - which we’ll get to in just a minute.
Believe it or not, you’re probably playing the CEO role subconsciously these while you lie in bed at night or take your dog for a walk, without even realizing it.
Here’s how to all plays out: The CEO provides the long-term vision. The Manager puts everything in place to make it a reality, and then the technician implements it.
All three of the roles are crucial to running your business smoothly, and scaling it to build in the direction you want. But what happens is that the Technician role becomes dominant, and the Manager and CEO hats are worn infrequently.
Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly decision making
One of the main differences between these three critical but very different roles is the timelines that they think and make decisions in. You can usually tell which role you’re playing by far ahead you’re planning.
The Technician thinks daily and weekly: Her main concern is who’s in my chair today, or how many clients will I serve, how many will I rebook this week? Usually you’re not thinking beyond this week as the technician.
The Manager usually works on monthly goals. She thinks about the rent that needs to be paid, which people need to get paid, which products need to be ordered this month. She also asks herself: Are we profitable this month? Are we making enough sales?
The CEO works on a 6-month, yearly, or even a 5 year basis. She thinks long term, and here’s the most important thing she does: She determines the whole vision and direction of the company, deciding where to go based on long-term goals.
If you’re trying to be all of those people and you’re finding it difficult, start by taking steps. If you realize that you’re just thinking daily, try to wrap your head around a monthly basis. Then move to 6 months, and then 1 year.
And please be kind and patient with yourself while you’re going through this process. In the first few years of business it’s hard to think long term; you just haven’t been around long enough to know what to expect. So treat this as a process and don’t be hard on yourself. If you’re not at the manager or CEO level yet, just keep moving forward!
How a beauty business CEO makes decisions
One of the most fundamental parts of business is having a really clear outcome of where you’re going. What’s the purpose of being in this business? Why am I here?
If you don’t have this direction, how can you make decisions on a daily basis? When you don’t play the CEO role, you’ll find that you get the shiny object syndrome of “Oooh that looks like fun, let’s do that!”
Sometimes in the early days of business, trying out new things and going where the wind takes you can be a good thing, of course. But at a certain point if you want to grow beyond just slogging away 40 hours a week, you need to have a destination and you need to have clarity. When you have that clarity you can decide if a certain opportunity aligns with you or not.
Here’s a real world example: Imagine that a sales rep comes to you saying that you should start selling hair extensions with a great sales pitch. And you think “wow that sounds pretty cool! I should totally do hair extensions!” If you don’t have a clear compass about who you are and what you’re doing and want to achieve, you could drop everything, invest a bunch of time and money into it and before you know it, in two years you’re just doing hair extensions and you realize that’s not what you wanted to do, it’s not what you love.
Playing the CEO role means that' you’re crystal clear about “Who are we? Where are we going? Is this decision viable?”
What about time? I don’t have enough hours in the day to plan things out!
Here’s the great news: The CEO part is not highly time-consuming, actually. In truth it’s a lot of thinking, and analyzing numbers. The most important thing is to create white space throughout the year just to think.
Here’s a good way to tell if you’re creating enough white space: If your best ideas come to you in the shower, or if you wake up at 4 in the morning with ideas buzzing through you’re brain, you definitely don’t have enough space. You need be intentional about making space to think, process, decide, and plan. Take your time with these things.
White space helps with stress and overwhelm levels too. When we don’t have enough space, and we’re just going and going, jumping from one client and task to the next, we don’t have the mental space to be the CEO.
So when and how to do create this white space? Larissa recommend quarterly going away for the weekend for several days: Mandatory holidays will help the CEO to think bigger.
Or at a minimum, have a weekly coffee with yourself. Put it in the calendar and stick to your commitment with yourself. Use this space to dream, think and decide about long-term plans.
Taking the time to be a manager - working “on” your business instead of just “in” it
The Manager role certainly does take some time, and you need to honor that time. We shouldn’t be running our business in the gaps between clients. Start with 3 hours per week for manager-type activities. Block these three hours off in your calendar, and actually write down in your calendar what you’ll be doing: “Write social media posts” for example.
So many business owners try to do these kind of things during cancellations or 15 minutes gaps. But you can’t do important things like design your website in just 30 minutes. And it’s also important that when you’re with your clients, you’re really with them, not distracted.
And here’s the great news: 3 hours doesn’t impact sales and doesn’t mean fewer clients booked. In fact, when you save “manager type tasks” to your 3-hour time period, it helps you schedule your clients better: you don’t need to add extra time between clients now, and you can actually book your clients closer together.
Make sure that during those three hours of “manager time”, you’re doing what Larissa calls IGA: Income generating activities that help to grow your business - business building and marketing activities particularly. Don’t use the time for admin or paying wages. Always ask yourself: is this going to impact my business and move the needle?
How to know when it’s time to get help, and who you should hire first
You’ll probably need your first person before you think you need them. By the time you recognize that, your business is likely already suffering the consequences of not having help. But it’s not too late: The minute you recognize it, the time is now. Don’t wait. You’re probably already overstretched with clients and holding your business back.
There are three different types of roles that can help you to scale:
The first role is someone to support you in income generating activities. This could mean helping create a better client experience, someone to prepare things, answer the phone, make coffee, see clients in and out so you have a smooth client experience. Anything that increases productivity is crucial because it helps pays for your new assistant. And you don’t need to have someone full-time right away, which is perfect if you’re on a budget. Larissa especially loves working with university students: they’re smart, motivated, and they stick around for 3-4 years.
The second type of role you can hire is to employ someone to run the business side of things while you just do services. If you hate doing numbers, marketing, wages, accounts - outsource it. Getting admin help can be the secret growth formula you’ve book looking for.
The third role is to hire another technician. There’s only so much you can do alone. At some point you have to build a team of other income-generating people. If you’re ready to do that, you might choose another stylist or therapist.
To figure out which of these three roles to hire, decide who you want to be in the business. Do you love serving clients? Or do you want to grow a business with other people serving clients?
Larissa’s main tip is to do this before you feel ready. We tend to look at another stylist or therapist as just as an expense, but they’re actually a new income stream. You can afford to hire them the minute that they can cover their wage.
What changes when you step into the CEO role
My final question for Larissa is about CEO mindset. What happens to the way you think and operate when you step into the CEO role?
Larissa’s response was: Clarity. You get clarity, certainty, and confidence about making the right decisions. There’s more time available to do that and think about things and process about what and how things should be done.
To me, that sounds like the type of business and life I always dreamed about building. What about you?