I don’t know who needs to hear this, but there’s no perfect time to start building better systems into your beauty business.
By making a very conscious effort to build the right systems, processes, and boundaries in my business, you can truly be present in whatever or whoever is in front of you. The secret lies in choosing to *consciously expand* your business. Keyword: conscious expansion, aka the opposite to a bro-y, sit at your computer for 16 hours a day doing follow/unfollow, throwing 50k a month at ads approach.
Here are some of the things that are possible when you build better systems into your beauty business
More Time with Your Loved Ones
Think about all you can do to set up the right systems to be able to prioritize quality time with your loved ones. This involves removing yourself as a bottleneck so that you can actually spend that time with your family, kids, and friends.
More Time on Passion Projects
With better systems, you can create space for contributions that are important to you, like volunteering at your local soup kitchen. You’ll also make space to do things without worrying if they’re scalable or profitable. You can pursue projects you’re passionate about, like getting back into painting and making time for travel or reading.
Enough Time to Take a Sabbatical
By just making a few key shifts in your business, you can create the opportunity to take a month off work. Imagine this: you enjoy four glorious weeks of no business-related work while cash flow remains consistent even without your presence in its day-to-day operations.
Why You Need to Implement More Effective Systems, Like Yesterday
What got you here won’t get you there. If you’re a founder who’s looking to sell your company at some point in the future or even if you’re just thinking of scaling it to a place where you can slowly start to step away from the day-to-day and spend more time with your family and friends without stress thinking about the business every second of every day, then better systems are the key to getting there.
Systems aren’t sexy, except when you think about how they will allow you to expand into more doors, get in front of more customers, partner on cool collabs, create space to land that big retailer, treat your family to a three-week vacation without once checking your phone or being worried about your cash flow… that’s pretty sexy. Does that sound like the dream to you or what?
3 Steps to Build Better Systems Into Your Beauty Business
Here are some small steps you can take to help you start building better systems into your beauty brand:
STEP 1: SET BETTER BOUNDARIES
In order to create systems, you need to start with what you’re ok and not ok with anymore. And if you’ve been all things to everything, the idea of boundaries may feel really unfamiliar or even uncomfortable.
The first questions to ask yourself to make setting boundaries easier:
- What hours are you available to answer emails/calls//Slack/[fill-in-project-management-system-here] requests from your team and from customers?
- What hours do you want to be offline from the above (think about when you most feel frustrated that you “have” to answer emails/calls (this may also be a clue for your first and next hire)?
- What payment terms feel good to you and which ones are you no longer willing to compromise on? If net 60 gives you the hives and also makes you cash flow negative four months out of the year then consider implementing a new payment policy as well as a late fee.
- Are there any retailers you’re currently working with that are really late on payments that are just not worth it to work with anymore?
- Are you saying yes to too many opportunities? In the early stage of business, you want to be more open to opportunities that come your way as you test and try out what works best for your business. As your business grows, the power of “no” becomes more and more important.
These are just a few of the many questions you’ll need to start asking yourself if you’re serious about building a bigger business consciously and intentionally.
STEP 2: PLAN AHEAD
This seems so simple and yet even seasoned product-based business founders wait until the new year or worst “wing it” when it comes to planning their market and DTC promotions, new launches, projects, and goals.
You’re leaving thousands of dollars on the table when you don’t plan your promotions, projects, and growth in advance.
“Feeling into it” may have gotten you here, but it won’t get you there.
- Think about how much better your new launches would be if you had a proper pre-launch runway, promotion, and post-launch strategy to continue the momentum.
- Consider how much better trade shows would go if you built in buyer bookings in advance of the show so you had a calendar of your top fave doors already booked in and weren’t waving down every Suzy and John that walked by your booth.
- Reflect on how much better your cash flow would be if you created a financial projection for the full year and then just had to check against it each month to make sure you’re on track.
- Contemplate this: how much better would having these systems in place feel and what would that do for your sanity? For your peace of mind? For your business and personal growth?
STEP 3: PRICE FOR PROFIT
Across the board, the average price hikes are between 5-10% with six and seven-figure brands due to ingredient prices going up, labor costs, general inflation, and so forth.
Have you checked your margins lately?
Is your best-seller still as profitable as it used to be? How can you build in regular price checks into your business to avoid having to do a huge price hike and risk shocking customers?
In working with dozens of six and seven-figure beauty business founders over the last five years of our consulting firm, I’ve noticed a few issues that come up for founders when trying to build out better systems.
See if you can spot yours:
- “I don’t want to offend anyone by saying no.”
- “I’m afraid of turning down opportunities (or firing retailers that no longer suit us) that bring in cash flow in case we need it.”
- “I don’t have time to plan in advance and things change so much anyways that it feels pointless to plan.”
- “I’m afraid of losing customers if we increase pricing.”
The reality is that when you say yes to everyone else, you leave zero room to work on the projects that really matter to your business.
When you hold on to retailers that always pay late or are difficult to work with it sucks your time and energy dry leaving little room to pursue your dream retailers or give more attention to the buyers and partners that are really good to you.
When you avoid increasing your pricing out of fear of losing customers you run the risk of being cash flow negative, which leads to working harder and harder to build volume while not being able to hire support because your margins are too slim to allow for it. Ultimately, you plateau and burn out impacting your customer relations, which was the fear, to begin with.
And when your plan is to just “wing it,” plain and simple, you leave thousands of dollars on the table.
Here’s the thing, burnout is real and unfortunately something that many business owners go through as they try to scale their business. What I’ve found to be true is that a founder can muscle their way to just about 200k before their hard-work-and-more-hours approach no longer works and burnout ensues.
If you’re someone who loves their business but also loves having a life, then consider that it may be time to see how you can build better systems into your beauty business. What got you here won’t get there.
I’d love to hear from you, did any of these steps resonate with you? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts with me!
P.S. Are you a beauty brand founder making six figures or more per year and who’s looking for a group of like-minded entrepreneurs to learn, grow, and scale with? We’d like to invite you to apply to our mastermind. Check it out and apply today.
P.P.S. If you don’t yet meet the six-figure criteria then consider getting on our waitlist for Conventional to Cult Status, it is our LIVE signature group program that helps early-stage founders build the foundations, visibility, positioning and brand awareness to reach six-figures.
