The best lesson I learned in running my own lash business was that when things go wrong, no one is going to fix it for you. There’s no “Lash Signal” where a team of lash artists heeds your call and swoops in to save you from that aggressive client demanding a refund! Until you’ve reached the point in your business where you can outsource the tasks you hate to do in your business, it’s all on YOU.

The problem with putting off the not so fun parts of running a business means you are not in control of your business…which, by default, means your clients are! So how do we avoid having a “lash hobby” where we make pennies on the dollar and are always strapped for cash and unable to pay ourselves a livable wage? We change how we view ourselves and how we approach running a business.

Here are the top 3 mindset shifts you need to make to be taken seriously as a lash business owner:

Mindset Shift #1

YOU ARE A NOT AN EMPLOYEE

Most lash artists don’t get into starting their own lash business with the intention of being an entrepreneur and all the responsibilities that come with that. They stumble into business ownership to mainly earn more income because they were barely surviving or were capped at the income level they were at work for someone else. The majority of lash artists I come across tend to learn entrepreneurship on the fly. They either hemorrhage money until they fail and shut down or they discount their prices enough to have a steady trickle of discount-seeking clients into their business. I work with lash artist’s at all levels in my coaching programs to be intentional about creating a business they love and that works for their lives and aspirations.

Isn’t that why you wanted to be in business for yourself? More freedom with your time? More freedom with your money? When you’re a service provider as someone else’s employee, somebody else handles the complaints, the phone calls, the accounting, the inventory, the scheduling, the payments, the refunds and the countless sleepless nights worrying about how to make ends meet. The employee just gets to show up, do lashes, collect a paycheck and go home. You don’t have to worry about marketing or where the next client is coming from.

Approaching a business with a service provider mindset is detrimental to the long-term stability and profitability of your business! When you run your business with a service provider mindset, you have a tendency to let clients walk all over you because you’ve been conditioned as a service provider to take the stance of  “the customer’s always right”.

Here’s where you need to shift your mindset from a service provider to business owner. The financial health of your business is your number one priority as a business owner. No profit, no take-home pay. No take-home pay, no food, and no shelter. (enter dramatic dun dun duuun sound).

No Money = No Business = No Life

Mindset Shift #2

You Make the Rules. You also Enforce Them

Setting healthy business boundaries to protect your ability to run a profitable business is how you start to be taken seriously as a business owner. Somewhere along the way in the beauty industry, clients stopped taking us seriously as business owners. Some clients will take the approach that we’re not very educated and thus can be pushovers when it comes to our price or our policies. It doesn’t surprise me, unfortunately.

Anyone of you who have ever let a client dictate your price, worth, how much time is spent on a service, whether you offered a refund or not, or whether or not they’ll pay a cancellation fee feed into this stereotype that beauty professionals can’t be taken seriously. How do you get around that? You establish policies (aka rules) to being a client in your business.

Policies are simply the communication of what happens in the event of an issue arising in a business. Do not let a client dictate what is okay for YOUR business. It’s up to you to set the boundaries that help to create a sustainable business and it’s up to you to enforce them.

Mindset Shift #3

If it’s not working, change it!

If a client doesn’t want to play by the rules, they don’t get to play. Meaning, it’s not up to you to cater to every demand of a client or the schedule of a client if it doesn’t fit with your purpose and reason for going into business for yourself. If a client can’t come in until 5:30 pm during the week, but you want to spend more time with your kids and be home for dinner every night… tough cookies for that client. She can go to a lash artist who would prefer to sleep in in the mornings and take client’s in the evenings because she doesn’t have kids.

LASHPRENEUR LIGHTBULB: You don’t have to inconvenience your work/life balance for the convenience of the client’s work/life balance. It’s your business, not theirs.

If you’re working past your scheduled work hours to accommodate clients who didn’t pre-book and were “desperate” for a fill…charge them more. By having a natural consequence to not pre-booking their appointments (like paying for a full set because they waited too long or being charged an after-hours fee for scheduling outside of your normal working hours) they are likely to not make that mistake again. But if you reward their desperation by accommodating them to the detriment of your business or personal life, then there’s no reason for them to change their behavior.

If you don’t like taking 8 clients a day, set your schedule and charge an after-hours fee for anyone who wants to book outside of your schedule. If you don’t like a client’s always showing up late to their appointment, stop adding time to the end of their appointment or cancel them if they are more than 10 minutes late to a 60-minute appointment.

Stop rewarding clients for taking advantage of your business because you’re afraid you’ll lose a client. These types of clients are wasting your time and money as it is, no need to keep allowing them to do so! Policies set healthy boundaries and expectations between you and your client and are essential to avoiding confrontation, refunds, bad reviews, and a host of other situations that are easily avoided if policies are established from the start of the relationship. This simple mindset shift on healthy business boundaries can be all your business needs to go from a hobby to a fully fledged lash business in no time.

If you’re struggling in the area of business boundaries and what are the absolute must-have policies you should have in your lash business, I have made my lash biz policies available for you to download for free at  www.thelashpreneur.com/lashbizpolicies This document is totally customizable to your eyelash extension business and includes policies about:

• Cancellation

• After Hours

• What to do if you or they are sick

• Refunds

• Other lash artist’s work

• And more!

Leave a comment below with an uncomfortable client situation you’ve had in the past that either policies would’ve totally made that confrontation disappear OR that you learned the importance of having policies and vowed to never let that situation happen again!   Have a Good One! Tara Walsh The Lashpreneur