This happens to solo estheticians or beauty business owners a lot – running their business wearing their “esthetician hat” instead of putting on an “owner” or “manager hat”.
We shift our mindset when we change hats.
If you have a habit of wearing your esthetician hat as you tackle other things in your business, you could run into trouble sooner or later! Why?
No doubt, you are an AMAZING esthetician with incredible skills. But you need to leave your “esthetician identity” in the treatment room. When you’re building your practice, it’s important to strengthen your skills as an entrepreneur, business owner, and manager.
Running a business and servicing clients require very different skill sets. We love being in the treatment room and frankly, it often feels comforting to “hide” there, get into the zone, and not look at other aspects of the business.
And I get it – the business side of things is the necessary evil that we just have to deal with if we want to grow our practice.
Here’s the thing – many of us own our businesses mostly because we want to live life on our own terms. We do have a life outside the treatment room.
It’s important to be in the driver’s seat so you’re actually running a business and leveraging your time and expertise instead of just creating a job for yourself.
You didn’t open your esthetician practice to own a job.
We need a business with replicable systems! Systems simplify and standardize processes so you can effectively automate or delegate various tasks.
One of my favorite books, The E-Myth, gives a great analogy of the baker who loves baking so much that she decides to leave her employer and open up her own bakery. What she soon discovers is that while she is an excellent baker, she lacks the skills to run a business.
The truth is, putting on the business owner hat often doesn’t come naturally to many of us and that’s ok!
The key is to schedule times for all your different hats, so you can dedicate attention to each important aspect required to run your business:
The Entrepreneurial/Innovation/Creative Hat: Idea Generation
Our practice will become stagnant if we don’t stay current and relevant by coming up with new ways to serve our clients and market our businesses.
For me, I like putting on my entrepreneur hat in the morning. Innovation comes alive for me in the early hours when I feel most creative after my morning rituals. But innovation covers more than creating something new. It also means taking current strategies and making them better.
For example, you can use this time to tweak systems that you already have in place. Analyze what is working in your business model and what needs adjusting to optimize efficiency and revenue.
The Manager/Spa Owner Hat: Idea Execution
Schedule time every day to wear your manager hat when you’re at your spa or practice, even just for a little while.
Wearing the manager hat puts you in the mindset and space of executing the fabulous ideas. Innovations you came up with while wearing your entrepreneur hat. The manager implements systems, workflows, and enforces policies.
The manager hat executes and makes sure tasks are completed on time.
Your standard operating procedures (SOP’s) reflect your unique flow in your business. Your SOP’s showcase your unique approach to guest handling.
Having procedures creates consistency. Consistency creates client loyalty.
In fact, the most successful beauty business owners have procedures written out in great detail.
Wearing the Right Hat At the Right Time
To make sure you’re paying equal attention to every aspect of your business, create a system so you’re wearing the right hat at the right time.
Write down all of the tasks needed to run your business. Inventory, accounting, marketing, servicing clients, selling retail, and so on.
List each task under the appropriate hat. Next, write out procedures in detail for each task. Congratulations, you just created a system for your business that you can tweak and improve!
If you need to delegate any tasks now or in the future, your operational flow is ready to train a new team member! And the results will show in your bottom line!
Ready to step up your game? In the Esthetician Inner Circle, we’ll show you how to run your beauty business efficiently so you can spend more time doing what you do best and build a profitable business that you love!