Fearless Beauty (eBook)

The Hair Business Blueprint

Mikey Moran (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
206 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-2006-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Mikey Moran had only a single advantage when he started his hair and beauty business: his idea was different from anything he'd seen in the industry. Seven years later, Mikey has expanded his original idea into ten different brands, five retail locations, and one partnership with global e-commerce giant Shopify. Now Mikey wants to share what he's learned so burgeoning entrepreneurs have a bigger advantage than he had. In Fearless Beauty, Mikey provides you with a roadmap to achieve success easier, faster, and more efficiently than you ever thought possible. He shows you how to think like an entrepreneur by introducing you to practical theories that should guide every decision, then presents a step-by-step plan for taking action and getting started. You'll learn core marketing techniques that yield the biggest impact, how to select the best web platform for your business, and why consistency-or a lack of it-can make or break you. No matter your industry or where you are in the process of becoming an entrepreneur, you'll gain insightful strategies for maximizing returns and enjoying every step in the journey of your business.

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Chapter 1

1. Get Prepared

In February of 2020, my girlfriend and I had spent the day in Vegas looking at spaces to open my second company’s third location. We’d found a gorgeous one, and that night, we stood together on one of Aria’s top floors, windows open, looking out on the lights. I opened my arms to the excitement and energy of the city like I could hold it all. ”We could do really well here,” I told Mary Margaret. She asked me what I wanted to do. I had no questions about that. I wanted to sign the lease. I wanted to jump straight into a future I saw shining as brightly as the skyline. It wasn’t what I did.

Fourteen years earlier, in 2006, I’d started CurrySimple, my first business. I gave it everything I had, and it grew quickly. I got written up in magazines, and people I didn’t know started coming up to me on the street to tell me how much they loved my curry. I was “the curry guy.” Then 2008 hit and completely wiped me out.

One Friday, I booked my first flight to Thailand; the next Sunday, I had to call my grandmother and ask her to loan me enough to cover my butt. In 2009, I hadn’t had enough experience with failure to feel anything but the rapid pulse of excitement on the threshold of something new and thrilling. I didn’t notice the signs of the economic downturn looming large. I saw only promise in the future. In 2020, my vision was clearer.

Starting a business is exciting. You should be full of dreams and optimism about cool ideas you want to try out. Without that passion, you couldn’t take that brave leap into something new. The start of anything is (and should be) thrilling, and running your own business is exciting. It can take you to the top of Las Vegas. But by the time I reached Aria, I’d been through enough darkness to see more than the lights. I could see the future—its promise and its dangers. The coronavirus had just started making the news that month, and I recognized signs I’d missed in 2008 of something big on the horizon. In 2020, I was excited, but I was also prepared.

You’ll have to go get your own experience, but I can help you get prepared. I can’t show you the future, but I can help you set realistic expectations and learn to read the signs that will show you what might be coming next.

If you’re thinking seriously enough about starting your own business to be reading this book, I hope you’re excited and passionate about working for yourself. Passion is the lighter fluid that gets the fire started. Preparation is the charcoal that cooks the meat. Be excited. Open your arms and hold them out to everything that’s possible. Believe in the promise of your business. Then get prepared.

I wasn’t prepared when I started CurrySimple. I wasn’t clear on why I was starting a business—I just knew I wanted to. I didn’t have clear goals, my expectations were wildly unrealistic, and I didn’t have a plan. With Private Label Extensions, I had those things in place before I started, and the company did a lot better as a result. In this chapter, I’m going to talk you through everything that CurrySimple taught me I needed before I started another company. Your why and your goals will be unique to you, but I’ll explain why you need to have them and how they can help. Having realistic expectations will keep you from getting discouraged and temper your goals. With a powerful why and goals that are ambitious but in line with reality, we’ll take the final getting-prepared step—making a plan. Then, it will be your turn!

Have a Why

Right now, you have a dream—and that’s great. Maybe you can really see yourself running your own company, working for yourself, buying that new car. Maybe you’ve seen the Instagram stories of entrepreneurs who made it big and can imagine what it’d be like to have a life like theirs. Dreams are inspiring and full of energy and hope, and energy and hope can come in useful. But when you take that top-story view of the future, there’s something even more important you need to look for. You need to see the why behind the dream.

Why do you want that dream you have to come true?

Even more than knowing what you want, knowing why will get you through the tough times. Sure, you want to be successful, you want to make big money. Why? What would that money do for you?

Want to work for yourself? Why? My bet is when you really think about it, your why isn’t about you. It’s about creating something special or changing something for somebody else. Why do you get up in the morning now? Yeah, you have to go to work to pay rent. Why? Is it to prove something to yourself or to someone else? To make a nice place for your kids? To never need to ask Grandma for a loan?

I’ve helped a lot of people start their own hair businesses, and I’ve seen many of them obtain the success they sought, and when they’ve been heart-to-heart honest with themselves, their why has always been about another person. Maybe you want to give your kids more financial stability. Maybe you want to give your sister a job. Maybe you want to help other women feel beautiful. It’s not that you don’t want nice things for yourself, but you want them for other people, too, right? Starting a business is hard. It requires time and money and sacrifice, and if you’re only working for a yacht-sailing version of Future You, on the tough days, Current You is going to seem just as deserving of a day off, and you’re going to let her off the hook. Some days, it’s not going to feel worth it to keep going just for you. On those days, knowing who else you’re doing it for is the only thing that keeps you going.

Have Great Goals

If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know when you get there. You’ve got to set goals so you know what success looks like. Big goals are inspiring and energizing, and energy can be hard to come by sometimes. I had the goal of making Mom feel safe. Maybe you have a goal that comes out of your why. Maybe you want to make a million dollars. (That was one of mine, too.)

Making a million dollars is a fine goal. Making a million dollars in four years is a better one because four years from now, you’ll know if you hit your target or not. Goals are better when they have numbers—dollars, years, locations—anything you can count. Things other people could measure. This is why happiness (although great) isn’t a great goal. Making a million dollars in four years is a goal that might not guarantee your happiness, but it probably wouldn’t damage it much.

Making a million dollars in four years is a goal a lot of people have, but most of them don’t make it in part because it isn’t actionable. In a minute, we’ll talk about how to gauge whether a goal is realistic, but first, you need to set a goal you can act on. Do this by asking yourself a series of, “What’s the first step?” questions. If I want to make a million dollars selling hair, what’s the first step? Selling hair, right? But that’s a goal without numbers, so you need to drill deeper. If I want to sell hair, what’s my first step? Making your first sale. “Make my first sale,” is a good start. (And making your first sale may actually feel better than making your first million, so it still works if you’re aiming for “happy” instead of “rich.”) Now your goal is actionable. Make it measurable. “Make my first sale four months from today.” Now that’s a great goal!

Making your first sale is a huge accomplishment. Most people will never start a business, never have a website, never get a single person to go to their website, put something in their shopping cart, and click “buy.” For most people, that first sale (like that million) is just a dream, but for you, it’s a goal. It’s actionable and measurable. But is it realistic?

Have Realistic Expectations

The difference between a dream and a vision is whether your eyes are open or shut. A dream is something you make up out of your imagination. A vision is something you see clearly. In dreams, you go from one location to another without traveling—you’re just suddenly there. A vision sees the goal and the steps between. ”And they lived happily ever after” is a dream. Recommitting every day is a vision.

Expect It to Take Two Years

Overnight success is a dream. Instagram is full of stories about businesses that blew up overnight, but if that’s your plan, you might as well play the lottery. The odds are about the same. Realistically, while everyone’s timeline is different, you should expect it to take about two years of hard and consistent effort before you can start taking money out of the business to pay yourself or take a vacation. If you make it sooner than that, good for you! But expect and plan for success to take two years.

Expect for it to take many of the hours and most of your brain in those two years, and tell the people in your life to expect the same. Expect them to struggle with this. Talk to your friends and family now and let them know you’re not going to be as available to them. If you have a serious romantic partner, talk to them a couple of times. They’ll want to support you, and they’ll say that they do, but it can be hard for them to imagine what that means on the day-to-day, need-to-miss-dinner,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.5.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-2006-9 / 1544520069
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-2006-3 / 9781544520063