By Hanna_londonlash
London Lash is one of the most well-known European lash brands. Only last year we sold 27,910 bottles of glue.
But that’s not very exciting…What’s really exciting, is the fact that I started London Lash only 5 years ago.
After starting my journey in lash industry as a therapist a lot of my clients and friends were asking me if I can teach them how to apply eyelash extensions. I thought-why not? Of course, I can teach you.
But I wasn’t government approved training academy, I couldn’t issue certificates, so my first step was to approach a few big eyelash brands in England and ask if I could become an eyelash trainer for their brand. Unfortunately all of them refused my application.
Of course I was upset..but I wanted to teach eyelash courses so much, that I one day I thought:”why don’t I set up my own training academy?”
After doing some research, I realized that it’s not that difficult to do. Yes, of course, it requires some extra qualifications and quite a lot of paperwork, but it’s certainly possible.
And this is where my proper business journey began..
My 6 secrets behind successful business:
#1 Don’t dream big.
Sounds controversial, doesn’t it? Everyone always says – dream big. I’d say I agree and at the same time I disagree with DREAM BIG statement. Because sometimes big dreams can paralyse us, they scare us. They are so big and so ambitious, so we don’t even know where to start.
For example, you are working as a beauty therapist in the salon and one day you dream to open your own big and beautiful Lash Studio. It’s brand new and absolutely stunning. All celebrities visit your salon. You have 20 lash technicians working for you.
And you only do eyelashes occasionally, for some of your regular client, for your own pleasure.
Sounds good doesn’t it? But how to achieve it? Where to start? Look for investors? Or go to the bank to borrow money? Where to look for lash technicians? How to teach them? Where to get customers?
There are thousands of questions and fears in your head, you don’t know where to start, so unfortunately, more likely, you won’t do anything at all. You’ll just keep dreaming: “One day I will do it”.
My advice – forget about your dream for now. And concentrate on the short term small goal towards your dream.
For example, if you are working for somebody, think: how can I rent a beauty room and start working for myself?
If you already work for yourself – think how I can get fully booked? Which marketing channels should I use to advertise myself?
Once you are getting fully booked – How can you raise your prices and improve your profitability?
You won’t even notice how with these little steps your business will naturally grow to the point when you’ll finally open your beautiful Lash Studio. Sometimes we don’t need to think big to go far. My advice – one step at a time.
#2 Do things your own way.
When I started to work as a beauty therapist – I was getting no support at all from my family.
Most of my family are mathematicians and physicists and unfortunately, they were a bit embarrassed to have me working in the beauty salon. You can’t even imagine how many times I’ve heard: “ Hanna, go and find yourself a normal job”. But I had a job. I was a beauty therapist.
I loved what I was doing and I didn’t want to change. So I told them all – look, this is my life. Not your life. You live your life the way you want. And I’m going to live my life the way I want.
My advice to you. Please, don’t listen to anyone. On your way to success you’ll always have people laughing at you, criticizing you and saying that it’s impossible to achieve your goals.
Just ignore them. If you can – stop communicating with them at all. Instead of talking to these poisonous people, try to surround yourself with people who will support you and help you in your journey.
If you are struggling to find support from people – just surround yourself with motivational and educational books.
#3 Love your mistakes.
When you are growing your business, everything is new for new. Nobody teaches you how to do things, so everything you do – you do the first time. So naturally you will make lots of mistakes! Whether that is recruiting the wrong people, overpaying for salon rent, counting taxes incorrectly and so on.
But how do the majority of people react on a mistake? Normally they get upset and sometimes even give up on the project thinking that they are useless.
Do you know that burglars broke into our lash salon in London two months ago? All my staff got really upset, but I was actually really happy. First reason for my happiness – they didn’t break the windows and they didn’t break the windows and they didn’t steal much. Second reason – it was such a wonderful lesson! At that time we were moving our lash products into a new big warehouse and, to be honest with you, we didn’t even think much about security.
After somebody broke into salon, we realized that if this would happen with our warehouse – it would be a massive problem. We could potentially lose all our stock. And we don’t want this problem to happen. So as a result, our new warehouse is as protected as government treasure fund. Nobody can break into it.
My advice to you – always to positive and just accept the fact that you’ll always be making mistakes on your business journey. You can’t stop yourself from making mistakes. But what you can do – is to change your mind about them. Change your relationships with mistake. Think about them, analyze them, and they will give you lots of new knowledge.
#4 Priorities the right things.
Once I’ve heard this sentence-“You can’t run a successful bakery and be a baker at the same time”。
This simple sentence triggered lots of thoughts in my head and changed the way I’m doing the business completely. Think about it. You can’t imagine an owner of multi-million pound pancake factory who spends five days a week baking these pancakes. No. He won’t do it. He needs to run the business.
So, two years ago I stopped doing lashes, I stopped doing teaching. I stop replying to messages on Facebook and Instagram, I stopped doing everything. That’s not my job. That’s the job for my employees. My role in the company – to move it forward, to develop it. My job is to think.
I’d like to give the same advice for you. It might be financially difficult at first, but trust me – the sooner you start employing staff and step away from actual salon work, the faster your business will grow. By delegating day today tasks, you’ll release an enormous amount of time to spend on your business growth and development.
#5 Never stop learning.
Over the past few years I’ve read thousands of articles, hundreds of books and watched lots of You Tube videos. All business related. First, I learnt about lash application, then I learnt about salon customer service, then I learnt about social media marketing and so on. Every single day of my life I learn something new. Something which is important for my business and something I can implement straight away. When I was living in London, on my own, I even threw my TV away as I always thought that watching TV is a useless thing and a total waste of my life. Education was the only thing I wanted to spend my free time on.
I won’t recommend you to throw your TV away, but I’ll advise you start scheduling learning time into your calendar. Spend just 20-30 min a day learning something new. Concentrate on practical knowledge that you can implement straight away. And soon you’ll see massive improvement in your business.
#6 Be unique.
I noticed that a lot of business owners are mentioning competitors when I ask them about their business. They watch their competitors, they think about their competitors, they try to be better than competitors. I always found it a bit strange. Yes, it’s good to have an idea of what your competitors are doing, but thinking about them and competing with them-it’s a total waste of time.
When you are doing the business – it’s all about the quality of your product and services, it’s all about satisfaction of your customers and employees. All you need to do-is to concentrate on your business and think of how to do it better. Forget about competitors. It really doesn’t matter what they are doing. What’s really important – it’s what YOU are doing.
One of the reasons why London Lash is so successful, because we really try to be unique. We don’t copy anyone – we come up with new fresh ideas. For example, I was the first one who came up with the idea of paper boxes for lash trays. I really wanted to reduce the amount of non-recyclable plastic boxes. It was a massive success – we gained lots of new loyal customers.
Because we were unique, we came up with new good ideas. Now every second lash brand is coming up with the same paper packaging as us. We are being copied now. But it’s fine. We were the first and we’ve gained a lot out of this.
So, my advice to you. Don’t let competitors steal your time and energy. Better spend your time and energy on your products, services and clients. I can guarantee that if you do your business will always be incredibly successful!
