I want talk about letting people influence your business and personal decisions, particularly when they aren’t qualified to do so.

I hear from a lot of my audience on Instagram and from my coaching clients that most negative comments and opinions come from those close to you, like family members and well meaning friends and maybe other distant relatives, and they’re taking this advice on board and getting quite confused about what their direction is with their business or what the best thing to do is and really letting these opinions influence them.

Some of the first questions that I asked these people were:

• Has this person owned a beauty salon before?

• Have they had any kind of business before?

• Have they had an appointment based business?

If they haven’t, or if they have and they haven’t been successful in that business, I would nod, smile, thank them for their advice and move on and forget it. And this is so important! Because I feel that as women business owners, we are already unsure of ourselves. We we didn’t take business courses, we did beauty and we’ve just kind of organically grown as beauty therapists or makeup artists, lash artists, hairdressers, we’ve grown in our role to the point where we wanted to go out on our own and open our own business and it’s  a little bit scary for some and really scary for others. It’s so easy to let those voices of self doubt creep in. But when you have other people you know, or relatives and friends that are adding to that chatter in your brain and that negative mindset; It’s really, really hard to get away from it. 

This is a conversation that I had with one of my coaching clients the other day. She’s moving herself into a new space, which is super exciting. She was really unsure about the layout and the floor plan and we chatted about having an open air salon, which for anyone that doesn’t know, I have an open air salon; I have all my lash beds out in the open. There’s no rooms or curtains or cubicles, or anything separating the beds. I previously had a smaller space when I first opened in 2014 and I was in that space for two years. I had separate rooms there and then when I went into my new space, I had a big space to go into but it really only allowed for that open air setup. I didn’t really have enough space to fit as many beds in as I wanted if I had’ve done the closed cubicles or partitions between the beds.

I received A LOT of negative feedback from people at the time when I shared my vision for my new salon. This was back in 2016, so having the beds out in the open was a big thing; basically unheard of. I’d seen on Instagram and Facebook, a few salons in the USA and I think in Canada particularly that had this sort of open air setup and I really wanted to do it, I thought it was really cool, I thought that it would be really great for the team to all be working together in the same room, no one closed off and just just really good vibes for the business; for the salon staff and the clients.

Anyway, I received such negative feedback from existing clients and negative feedback from my staff at the time. I also received negative feedback from my family members who were just like, “What are you doing?!” And I’m sure those family members were the same ones that were like “don’t specialise in lashes” or “lashes are a fad, they’re gonna go out of fashion and you’re gonna end up bankrupt”. I had so many people telling me I was doing the wrong thing. And I guess I was just lucky that I’m a very determined person. I’m very headstrong, very stubborn, I guess you would say. And when I get set on an idea, when I get my heart set on something, I usually roll with it and I’m very good at blocking out the noise. I don’t let anyone else’s opinions or anything undermine from what I want to do. And I’m very lucky I have a really supportive husband, that always thinks my ideas are great. Sometimes he’ll come up with some other ideas and we’ll have a discussion, but he’s never just flat out said “No, that’s a bad idea Lauren”. So it really grinds my gears when amazing salon owners that I come into contact with every day, let these people deter them, you know? You’ve just got to have confidence and be really certain in the path that you’re taking. It’s very, very easy to stray from the path.

There are a few tools that I use and one is journaling and being able to come back to your WHY. You need to always refer back to your WHY when you feel like you’re coming off course; look at the bigger picture and see if the things that you’re doing are getting you to where you want to be. Basically, I went with my gut feeling.

I decided to do the open salon in 2016. I had clients, friends, family, my staff all saying “no, no, no, don’t do this. Nobody else has done this, it’s a bad idea, the clients won’t like it, they’re gonna leave, they’re gonna go to a different salon” And I just did it. And here we are, 6 years later since I went into that salon and we’re still there. We’ve got six beds. In an open air setup. Our clients love it. The team’s great, everyone loves it. I didn’t lose ANY clients, not one client left! And I’ve seen many, many open air salon setups in my local area and all over Australia since. And if you if you’re stuck for space, it’s a really, really great way to set up your salon and the gamble really paid off for me, but it was really hard. It was scary. I really had to push past what people were telling me and ask myself those questions I mentioned earlier, as well as “Have they had their lashes done? Do they even know what it’s like to lay on a bed in a room getting their lashes done versus lying on a bed in a big room with other beds in the room as well?” No, they hadn’t experienced any of that or they hadn’t done any of that. So really, they are in no place to be offering me advice on the matter and influencing big decisions in my business.

So back to the coaching client – she was really letting the negativity get to her and she was getting very confused and flustered. She’s running on a timeline, she’s got just under a month to fit out her new space and she hasn’t settled on a floor plan because she’s so confused about what to do. This girl runs an amazing business and it really, like I said, grinds my gears when I see these strong business women who are absolutely fantastic at what they do, letting others influence their decisions and mindset on big business decisions that should only really be theirs and theirs alone. And while it’s easy to say “don’t listen to them” the point is that it’s very very easy to listen to the noise, because business is lonely! A lot of the time we don’t really have anyone to talk to that knows exactly what you’re doing or going through, so that’s really why it’s great to network within your industry, have that business bestie that you can reach out to, get a coach, join a coaching program, do some online training on mindset and things that are for your personal development and to help you feel a little bit more certain about where you’re headed in in your life and your business. It is so lonely. I remember not having anyone I could really talk to because when I started my business, there weren’t any specialised lash salons around! There were full service beauty salons and hairdressers, and there were a couple of spas but in my local area at the time it was very competitive, and I didn’t feel that I could go and ask an established salon owner to mentor me or anything like that, so I had to really do a lot of research online and I reached out to coaches and other salon owners in other cities and even other countries and I always made an effort to attend events.

I know it’s been really really hard the last couple of years because of COVID but I love going to conferences for the beauty or the lash industry. I love networking with other business owners and talking business and getting new ideas. They’re just really fun. So I challenge you to connect with someone, even just on social media. I challenge you this week to connect with somebody in your industry that you can just bounce ideas off. They don’t have to be in your local area. You could do this on Zoom. Plan a monthly catch up, have a coffee, talk about your businesses, get excited about each other’s ideas, cheer each other on. That is a much, much better option than listening to people that don’t know what they’re talking about.

Lauren xx