take a peek at my 2022 diary
As 2022 comes to an end I want to reflect and look back to see everything that has happened this year in my business and try to help YOU in the process. Learn from the mistakes and successes I’ve had over the past 12 months. Maybe this will help you feel not so alone in your entrepreneurial journey and allow you to find some comfort in the fact that no one is absolutely perfect all the time.
This is not JUST a list of all the physical things I’ve done or accomplished over the past 12 months, but an inside look at my mental health and how it pertains to my career, and how it affected my life.. I polled all of you on my Instagram page and YOU voted to hear the emotional side of my entrepreneurial journey as well. After a long thought about whether I should include my personal mental health issues in this career log, I decided I wanted to. And here’s why:
I wanted to include these personal emotions and thoughts to help break down the over-glorification our industry has put on hustle culture. We are not slaves to our careers, there is a lot more to life than trying to persuade people that you have the most successful career.
I want to help break down the thought process that you are more than your job, income, and success.
P.S. It’s clear I’m not a writer; ya girl didn’t even finish college so let’s not critique my writing abilities right now – and is it even called “p.s.” if it’s at the beginning of the blog?
Strap in because this is going to be a long read, people!
January 2022:
This was the month that my Instagram TOOK OFF! I was starting to get more consistent with making reels and was growing close to 1,000 followers per month. I was SO not prepared for the chaos that is “IG famous”. To be clear I don’t think I am but that’s how it felt at the time. I was getting so many messages asking for my advice; my phone was going off with likes, comments, and shares.
This kind of validation was insanely addictive- I thought I was the best thing since sliced bread and no one could tell me any different.
I began really emphasizing corrective eye styling on my page because no one was talking about it- and it really seemed to connect with my new followers. This sparked an idea:to create an online mini-course talking all about corrective eye styling. The process began by creating a live online zoom class! I was super pumped and excited to make some extra money from this course and obviously I was excited that people were ACTUALLY interested in what I had to teach them. I put it out into the IG world that this live online course would take place on feb 5th. I had only given myself roughly 30 days to design this course. I thought: “Hey, this will be easy” since I was already teaching this in my in-person training class. But in typical me fashion, I felt I needed to go above and beyond and take this online class thing way much more in-depth than it already was.
I commissioned Lizzy (my web designer) to create graphics for me that were just for this course and were on brand for me. They turned out fucking amazing btw because Lizzy never produces anything short of fantastic.
I was then frantically researching and doing zoom tests for this big group training because I’m just a lash tech- my inner monologue was going haywire:
I’ve never been on a zoom call before in my life.
I don’t know how to record this thing;
I don’t know how to add multiple people to a call;
What happens if my call drops?!?
I just kept thinking “Why am I so stupid?! I can’t even figure out Zoom.”
During this whole live Zoom class thing, I was also on the hunt for a SALON! I had decided that I wanted to have my own salon with EMPLOYEES. So I was calling all the banks to try to get an SBA loan; I was viewing spaces, and I was talking to my accountant and running numbers. I wanted to have my salon up and running by March! (I’m literally laughing so hard right now writing this).
Lessons Learned:
Zoom is not that complicated
It costs a shit ton of money to have employees.
Achievements:
Learned Zoom. (Its giving Girl scouts patch vibes)
February 2022:
My live eye styling course went amazing, and I had 7 people Live with me! I wrote down that my goal was to have 20 people attend the live course….can someone serve me a plate of realistic expectations? Because old me didn’t know what that was. Making $2,450 in a single day stroked my ego HARD – like boss bitch WHO?!?! I’m the QUEEN of all boss bitches and all you peasants can bow to me. At the same time, I was also thinking “I could have gotten 20 people to attend the Live, ughhh why didn’t I work just a little harder to make $7,000”. There were a lot of opposing internal thoughts I was wrestling with.
On top of that inner dialogue, I was also learning as much as I could about E-commerce from an online course. This was the start of Xalura (my lash brand). I began testing lots of products from different manufacturers to see what I wanted to sell for lash extensions, tweezers, and eye pads! Seriously I have storage bins FULL of all the samples I tried. It probably cost $2k just in testing alone!
To add in another layer to this complicated entrepreneurial cake, I was also talking to “brand designers” to help me create what is now Xalura. Turns out this service is fucking borderline robbery! (We’re talking $10-25,000)!
I hired my very first virtual assistant, Hannah. She also started managing my Instagram which made my life so much easier! It wasn’t cheap ($1,300 a month) but so worth it to not have to stress about what I’m going to post every day. I had never done Instagram in a strategic way; I would just wake up and be like “oh yeah I should post about that today”. Adding Hannah to my team added so much more structure to my life.
Fast forward a little, and I decided I wanted my live zoom course to be available for anyone to buy at any time. This created a whole other project which included researching what online course platform fit my needs best– I decided to go with Teachable.com since it was the cheapest option. My Virtual Assistant and I started building the website and online course which took about a month to perfect.
What I realized during this process is this: Trying to sell lash extensions as a service is completely different from selling online training. And this meant even more research on how to sell the shit outta my online class. Queue research rabbit hole. Next things I know I’m going down sales funnels and evergreen funnels and click funnels… oh dear god the fuckin funnels were endless. Please make it stop!
So, I made a freebie: “How to attract the RIGHT clientele for your lash business”. This is Step One in any funnel, the purpose of which is to collect emails from interested people, then send them lots of emails telling them how much they need my online eye styling course- but in, like, a sales psychology type of way. (This is the world’s shortest description of how funnels work).
I really felt like I was on top of the world! I could do ANYTHING I put my mind to, and I was a money-making machine! I was so productive and crushed all my goals, and I was going out drinking with all my friends because I deserved it. I even bought a car because I deserved it- maybe it was a little spontaneous but hey, I can justify it… right?
It was also in February that I completely stopped all searches for a salon. It was proving not to be worth the return on investment, financially or mentally.
Lessons Learned:
DIYing part of my business saves me lots of money.
Funnels are extremely complicated and overwhelming, and no one will help you build them unless you have an insanely high email list.
Lower your expectations when it comes to sales.
Multiple streams of income are WHERE IT’S AT (chaaa chingg babay!!)
Achievements:
Made my first freebie.
Made $2,450 extra in one month from my online eye styling class.
Found my manufacturers for lashes!
Is there a prize for doing the most research in one month?!? Because I think I deserve it!
March 2022:
March was a fucking shit show.
I had a Costochondritis flare-up. I didn’t know what that was at the time, but it felt like someone was stabbing me in the heart and I literally couldn’t breathe, walk, or lay down flat without severe pain in my chest. That lasted 3 days and it completely shut me down for an entire week of lashing. The pain never fully went away even to this day; it just got a little bit less…stabby feeling. This threw me into a major depressive episode.
It was then that I was diagnosed with Bipolar 2, major depression, and major anxiety. Yay-fuckin-me! Well, at least the god-complex, impulse buying, and new outgoing personality made sense now.
Well, back to business. I ordered all my initial inventory for Xalura (about $10k) and commissioned Lizzy to build out my Shopify website ($2,500 – this was cheap because I was her first e-commerce website).
I then began working on creating another freebie called “8 day challenge” in hopes of increasing sales and making my funnel better for my online course. Sales were not doing as great as I hoped so I was trying everything that I knew - which, admittedly, was not much.
I also had this grand idea in my head to create a part 2 to my online eye styling course- “Trending Styles”. I started taking a ton of models to prepare for this course and get lots of pictures for marketing, but I actually HATED how all my model sets turned out. Enter inner monologue:
UGHHH why does my work look so terrible;
how do I even have clients right now???
Like, these lashes look like absolute shit!
The depression told me I wasn’t good enough to charge for that sort of training because I wasn’t qualified, and anxiety confirmed it for me when I compared myself to other trainers and artists on Instagram. I crumpled up “Trending Styles” and threw it right in the trash where it belonged.
Then I started reading the book “Profits First”. I learned so much about how to manage/build my money as a small business owner; HIGHLY recommend this book to any small business owner.
Oh look, something new: made an extremely spontaneous decision to move out of the salon I had been renting from for 5 years and start lashing from home. I was only lashing 3 days a week due to my chest pain, depression, and all the other projects I was working on, so paying $900 a month in rent was getting to be too expensive. I was overwhelmed with guilt about whether that was the right decision or not.
All the girls at the salon hated me and were so buddy-buddy with each other and then there’s just me, who never gets invited to anything and not to mention the owner got everyone a Christmas gift at the annual salon party, besides me- yeah, leaving was a good idea! Nobody even really liked me, and I cried in my car every day before I got to work just from the anxiety of stepping into the salon.
Lessons learned:
Lower your expectations
Business profits are different from your salary as a CEO
Achievements:
Ordered my first batch of lashes for Xalura
Organized my business finances
April 2022:
I started working with my business coach, Helena again. I was getting way too stressed trying to figure things out on my own for Xalura. There were just so many things that I didn’t know how to do, and I needed help.
Launched the “8-day challenge” and started advertising for it on FB. It was really successful, and I had about 5 downloads per day! But I still hadn’t seen an increase in sales… so that was super disappointing. Something was obviously broken in my funnel. Geez, That’s a problem for another day.
I set up a photoshoot for Xalura which was t