In this new Coaching Corner episode, I talk with Tori Miller who owns a sugaring business in Las Vegas, NV. In Part 1 of this 2-part series, I take her through what I call domino belief coaching. That’s where we’re going to get clarity on why this one thing is happening in her business-and it will start to make sense how showing up in all these other areas of her business and life as well. 

Tori says: “I live in Las Vegas, Nevada.  I am now four years into my company and I do sugaring. I have found your episodes very helpful, especially the ones about what not to do and what to do with policies and clients. I just don’t put myself in place with it. I always book days off to either give myself a break or to do office work. But if a client comes in and asks to have an appointment on that off day then I open it- and I just start stacking up more work.”

Raise your hand if you’ve ever done this! 

Maybe you normally take Saturdays off but one of your clients pleads with you to “squeeze her in”, and you accept even if it means rescheduling or missing plans you had already made?  

Putting clients’ needs before our own is something that’s really common in our industry. So office work gets behind, admin work gets behind, you’re gaining weight because you don’t prioritize self care, and you’re starting to feel burnt out. 

Why do you set aside time to rest, get stuff done or catch up on your business, only to put that on the back burner as soon as a client comes a-callin? 

What thoughts go through your head when you agree to take that client at a time that’s convenient for them (but not for you)?  

For Tori (and let’s face it – the majority of beauty biz owners), it’s FEAR.  Fear of getting a negative review, fear of disappointing people, or fear of losing clients or money or BOTH! 

Tori says: “You know, I used to be so worried about Yelp reviews. I prided myself in four years of five stars, all this time. But I think it was a year and a half ago, I had a paramedic in my garage with me, telling me they wanted to take me to the hospital because they thought I was gonna have a heart attack.  I literally just push and push so much. And I care more about what other people say versus what my opinion is, or what my roles are.” 

Childhood Trauma May Be Affecting Your Business

Many times this need for approval goes much deeper than we realize.  So what I want to ask you is: Whose approval did you not get as a child? Mom or Dad? Usually what ends up happening is that there’s some sort of approval of love or attention we want as children that we’re not getting from a caregiver.  We then as children make assumptions about the world because we don’t have enough development and awareness about the world to know that it’s not our fault.  This really becomes detrimental when we get to be adults, and we still operate with that same mindset. And we work ourselves to the bone because we’re trying to get something that we needed as kids (approval/love/attention) out of your business. 

When we fill up our time with things like work, we’re getting a reward out of it. Even working yourself to the bone to where you’re not okay and your health is declining because of it. In some ways, it’s the avoidance of really painful things like ‘I don’t have worth or value if I am not doing certain actions’. If I am not building a business, if things are calm, and quiet, that means that something’s wrong. We get addicted to the chaos and the hustle, which is why I hate the hustle culture. All of a sudden, we tie our internal worth and value to an external result. 

Get Your Head Out of Your Clients’ Wallet

Once you get to a place in your business where you’re consistently fully booked, making six figures, but have no time to actually work ON your business-that’s a problem. Your goal might be to build a team, but you have no time to hire or train new employees or you’re so busy you haven’t posted on social media in months. If you don’t have the capacity to take on any more clients, you actually need to pull back on clients. One way to do this is to raise your prices.

Tori says: “I just always value my company like- ‘Okay, what am I willing to spend?’. My number one service is a Brazilian and I got to the point where I specialize in five to seven minute Brazilians and sugaring. I don’t know if I personally would spend more than $65.”

Understand that YOU are not your CLIENT-you need to get your head out of your client’s wallet. That’s not serving your business because you as the business owner, the revenue generator-is burned out risking injury. So what happens if you keep up this pace for the next six months? A year, two years, three years? What does that look like for you if you stay the same? You won’t have a business anymore.

All of a sudden, all of it goes away. All income, all impact. So there is a significant cost for the beliefs that you have. I don’t care whether you would pay your price point or not, you are not your client. Demand dictates price, so at a certain point when you have so much demand-it’s actually self sabotaging you not to raise your prices. How do you decide how much you should raise your prices? Think about what you want as the business owner. It might be something like “In order for me to have the business that I want to have and reach the goals of impact that I want to have, I need to work no more than six hours a day, four days a week, and I’m going to spend one full day doing admin, marketing and working on the business, not just in it.” So if that’s the goal we work towards, what price point do you then need to be at in order to drop the number of clients you need to drop to be at that level of having time freedom. 

Fear of Negative Reviews

Another reason why lash artists, whose lives are already stressed and chaotic, often put their clients’ needs above their own-is this extreme fear of getting negative reviews.

Tori says: “I honestly just think it’s Yelp. I hate Yelp with a passion because people nowadays will just say the rudest things when they don’t get their way. They call, you don’t answer, and it’s just a one star. And I don’t want that.”

Okay, so a one star review comes in  because you couldn’t answer the phone. What does that matter to you?

Tori-“I just don’t want people pushing my company to the side because my stars are lower.  I know it sounds so silly, but I think I’m one of the only businesses with five stars that offers the services that I do in Vegas. So I’d like to keep that reputation.  I have a lot of people that come from my competitors. And then they come meet me and they’re just like, ‘Wow, this was such a better experience than the last place.’ “

I’m going to give you a bit of tough love: your EGO is driving those decisions. Your ego is being fed by,  “I’m the only one with this many five star reviews”. You think that having a bad Yelp review means people wouldn’t choose your business. Yelp is one aspect of marketing, it is not the only marketing channel.  Something that you can do to offset any potential negative reviews is to create the structure and processes in your business to build out a booking system where somebody can book on their own and not have to call or you can train and hire a receptionist to be able to take the calls.  But if you have so much demand that you’re constantly overworking yourself, when are you going to find time to do all that? You see how important having that extra time is? 

With extra time to work on your business you can also build up processes that protect the business that are communicated to the client. And if a client’s crazy and leaves a bad review, you just list the facts of what happened-”Shelley, you showed up to your appointment 15 minutes late, it’s only a 15 minute appointment. You agreed that you would show up five minutes before. We tried to offer you a discount for you being late, but you didn’t want to take us up on that because you were already upset about it.”

Don’t let the fear of negative reviews dictate how you run your business, instead look at it as a way to grow and improve. Look at the negative review and then look at your processes. This client is giving you feedback that she felt she had no other avenue to share her grievances with. And you can look at your process and see if there’s anything you want to change about how you handled that situation, how you want to optimize your process, maybe a gap that you missed in communicating something to the client. If you look at the bad review, and all the data is telling you that your process works just fine for 99% of clients-then you don’t need to do anything to change your process. 

The feedback was not valuable to us and it certainly doesn’t mean anything about you as a person. Somebody else’s perception of you is not your responsibility. It is not your responsibility to make everybody like you. In fact, I would say you’re more successful in life when you don’t care about everybody’s opinions. Because how could you possibly please, everyone?

When you’re happy with yourself and see value in yourself (that has nothing to do with the success of your business or how hard you work), it doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say. But if you don’t see that value in yourself, it doesn’t matter how many accolades, awards, fans, you have-you will constantly seek external validation from a lot of different areas. You think if you just did more, if you just worked more, if you just hired more team members, you will start to feel internally more worthy and deserving. Here’s the thing: if you keep running yourself the way that you are, you’re going to burn out. You’re going to have to close your business, and then all of a sudden, there goes your drug. The drug that makes you feel worthy and deserving that’s giving that external validation-now you’re just left with you. And that’s going to be a dark place to be in. 

My recommendation (and I am doing this work myself) is to seek therapy and look into what’s called inner child work. Work to heal some of those wounds and the unfairness that you experienced as a child. Getting that worked through first and healed before making any forward progress in your business is going to get you more where you want to be than any level of hiring, teaching growth, money, or clients.

When I mentioned this to Tori, her response was: “Okay, you’re gonna hate me, but when am I going to find time to fit this in?” 

Episode Highlights:

•  How to identify childhood trauma that may be affecting how you run your business.
• Why you should ‘get your head out of your clients’ wallet’ and stop basing your prices on what you THINK they will pay.
• Why getting a one star review is not going to derail your business.
• What to do and how to respond if you DO get a bad review. 

Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of this Coaching Corner episode to hear my answer for how Tori can find time to work on herself and her business.