Women have been making waves in beauty and wellness for decades. Take Elizabeth Arden’s story. She went from opening her first salon in 1910 to owning 150 salons within 20 years. That’s serious growth – in pre-internet times – and the brand is still going strong. Today, more than a century after that first shop opened, you can upload a selfie to the Elizabeth Arden website and receive a customized skincare regimen, with AI doing the analysis.
In recent years, women entrepreneurs have been driving the industry forward with innovative business ideas. Chances are, you know one, whether it’s a woman who opened a chain of waterless nail salons or a mobile hair stylist whose only marketing tool is Instagram.
While scope of business and career arcs might vary, women have instinctive strengths that can help their entrepreneurial bent. Here, we cover three such strengths and offer solutions to common roadblocks that female entrepreneurs face.
This post also includes expert advice from successful women entrepreneurs who spoke at Innergize 2023, the premier industry summit from Zenoti.
The experts:
Marilyne Gagné, founder and president of Dermapure, opened the brand’s first three clinics 15 years ago. Fast forward to 70 clinics across Canada today and the addition of skincare cosmetics, with L’Oréal Paris investing as a minority shareholder three years ago.
Susan Haise, CEO of Edgeless Beauty Group, began her career in the early 1990s founding salons, spas, and beauty schools. Five hundred students graduate from her businesses each year and her salon / spa sectors report 130,000 to 140,000 transactions annually. Susan opened two SKN Bar RX (medical spa) locations in 2020.
Moderator Brittany Slater, CFO of OrangeTwist, joined the management services organization in 2020. The company has grown from a handful of staff to more than 100 employees across 12 medical spa locations. Two private equity sponsors started helping the brand with expansion plans in 2023.
Although the following is geared toward women, anyone working in beauty and wellness can take inspiration from the advice and tips.
Embrace your natural strengths
Women have traits that serve them well in their personal relationships and family situations. Some of those traits are just as valuable in business and entrepreneurial settings.
1) Working well with others
Women naturally foster positive relationships with team members and colleagues, which can lead to a more productive and harmonious work environment. Starting and running a successful beauty and wellness business requires a great deal of collaboration and teamwork, making this trait a significant advantage.
However, beware of a top-down hierarchy. Although quite common in the business world and corporate setups, the structure tends to limit the sharing and exploration of great ideas to implement.
Dermapure founder Marilyne Gagné offers an alternative: “Make sure you don’t get too serious, and stay accessible, authentic with the team. People who succeed the most recognize others and are accessible. You don’t need to be extra strict and say, ‘I’m the president or the CEO.’ People don’t work for you for that. See what’s in it for them. Be encouraging and ignite their fire.”
2) Knowing what makes people tick
Understanding the customer is a crucial first step to creating and selling products and services that resonate with the public. Women tend to be empaths, so they excel at tapping into the needs of their customers – and also their employees.
As an example, if a salon operations manager notices front desk staff hesitate around selling memberships, she’ll likely key into ways to help the team, such as a script based on her discreet and casual observation of their interactions with customers.
Building community by celebrating others is another hallmark of empathic entrepreneurs. Susan Haise, CEO of Edgeless Beauty Group, does this by starting every meeting with celebrations. She recalls “always celebrating best practices, rewarding perfect attendance at the institutes, rewarding and celebrating high sales, high service sales, things like that.”
Use positive, motivational wording for titles of policy documents like company handbooks. “’A system of success’ is really what’s written on the front of our handbooks,” says Susan. “I don’t call them policies. It’s just not my language that I would ever use.” These subtle changes to standard and typically boring touchpoints in the employee experience can increase engagement where it matters.
3) Being tech and social-media savvy
Keeping up with the latest technology is critical to entrepreneurial success today, and education is key. Susan Haise ensures her team is well supported in that area. “We go to HubSpot training, we go to Salesforce training, we’re here at Innergize, and we’re at technical trainings as well.”
As the topic’s panel moderator, OrangeTwist CFO Brittany Slater adds that education is “a great pillar to build, to not only keep evolving your practice and offerings, but also keep engaging your team members.”
With social media, an increasingly valuable point of marketing and customer interaction, women tend to be more active users. They also excel at using social channels to market their brands and connect with customers.
Take your gift of communication and connection a step further by keeping up with social media trends. Doing so helps entrepreneurs develop or vet strategies that will further their businesses and brands – both online and offline.
Also consider using social media to share your own story as an entrepreneur. You’ll deepen your brand’s authenticity by giving your audience a chance to relate to your journey. You might even inspire other women to pursue their startup dreams.
Overcome common roadblocks
To start where you are and build from there, put systemic barriers aside. Know you don’t have to go it alone in an entrepreneurial endeavor – seek out the mentorship and support of people who have already navigated similar challenges.
Here are some ways around three roadblocks women entrepreneurs often face.
1) Limited access to capital
Women continue to have a more difficult time obtaining the funding needed to start and grow their ventures. Harvard Business Review reported that “women-led startups received just 2.3% of venture capital funding in 2020.” A solution is to seek out women venture capitalists when looking for funding as they are “twice as likely to invest in female founding teams,” notes the same HBR article.
Networking and exploring alternate sources for capital, such as crowdfunding, are other ways to overcome this obstacle.
Regardless of the source, having a strong business plan is necessary to increase the chances of receiving funding. It’s the clearest way to show the viability of any venture.
Finally, partner with well-known beauty and wellness brands, like Dermapure did. Founder Marilyne Gagné describes the brand’s journey to attracting L’Oréal Paris to invest in her service business. Dermapure had already grown to 15 clinics at that time and supercharged the medspa concept with its own skincare line. With the partnership in place, SkinCeuticals products from L’Oréal are currently sold in all Dermapure clinics.
2) The fear of being a purple cow
Differentiation is key to standing out in the marketplace – known as being a purple cow – but it comes at a cost: leaving your comfort zone.
Marilyne Gagné says “not thinking the same as everybody else” can feel uncomfortable for some, but being okay with discomfort is essential to business success.
“If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to think differently,” says Marilyne. “You’re going to create something unique that may bother people at first, but they need to see that it is what it is. You need to be convinced.”
Practice and repetition can help staff overcome their fear of being a purple cow. At SKN Bar RX medspas, for instance, the team practices addressing guests with time-of-day greetings like “Good afternoon! Welcome to SKN Bar” and phrases like “Can I offer you a moment of wellness?” as guests arrive. “That’s super uncomfortable to say if you wouldn’t normally,” notes Susan, “and it’s not expected if you’re working in some other cosmetics environments.”
3) A tendency to overstretch
It’s ironic when the very salons, spas, and medspas that serve as relaxing havens for guests become a source of stress and burnout for the entrepreneurs who create and run them. Women entrepreneurs should establish schedules and support structures to help balance their personal and professional lives.
Setting boundaries, however, isn’t always easy when you’re passionate about your business, but it counts as self-care. Susan Haise offers this advice: “Talk to your families to understand what everyone is comfortable with as you grow companies, because the phone starts ringing all the time. As much as we’re open-minded, we must have boundaries to what we can do and be clear about that with our leadership team – and encourage them to be so, as well.”
Finally, consult advisors to get unbiased assessments of situations you’ll face as an entrepreneur. They can help you avoid making rash decisions from an emotional place. To that end, Marilyne Gagné strongly recommends enlisting the services of a lawyer, an accountant, and a financial advisor right from the start. “You cannot know everything,” she explains. “It’s better to be surrounded by people who have your back.”
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