What Business Are You In?
"What business are you in?" I am often asked.
Never being sure what to say without sounding cheeky, I reply, "The beauty business."
I once knew someone who replied, “I am a Daymaker.” As fun as that sounded back in the eighties, these days it just feels too contrived. It was an unusual and creative answer when the beauty business started becoming more business minded and that was a good thing.
The Beauty Business
I am in the beauty business, but beauty is multi-faceted. Not just lotions and potions and treatments and products. The beauty business is about helping clients feel better than when they walked through the doors or hung up the phone. The beauty business is about changing people’s constitutions even if only for a few hours.
Business Is Different Now
These days it seems as so many businesses I grew up with have either disappeared or been dumbed down.
Gone are the days of perusing through record stores albeit the one or two that do it for the love of nostalgia.
Hiring a photographer for family pictures and special occasions has taken a back seat to the do it yourself iPhones that have seemed to turn the entire world into photographers.
The beauty business has changed significantly too, way more individual renters doing their own businesses using social media as a launching pad rather than relying on the business owner to do it for them. I have seen do-it-yourselfers give all kinds of beauty advice on these platforms, licensed and otherwise, stars and wannabes. It has been such an interesting past few years in business- Covid only magnified the changes that were taking place.
Business owning is a "twists and turns" experience. Never a set it and forget it, but goodness, keeping up with the changing tides of a particular industry is not for the faint hearted.
Business Ownership Is An Adventure
Business owning is a love it or leave it kind of adventure that never tires in its demands, and can wear out even the most enthusiastic of people.
Not me though. I love owning my business even in the most trying times. I love
reinventing, pivoting, changing, moving, shaking, and doing it all over again— again and again.
The business owners I know who are the successful ones are just like me.
They still jump out of bed after twenty years eager to see what the day brings.
For my business I have gained a different kind of confidence since Covid that has surprised me. I have always been a confident business owner, but the past two years experience have done something to my core that I haven’t really been able to articulate. I just know that what I do, what I have created, who I employ to perform the services and the people I have the privilege of interacting with makes a difference.
In this wacky time, my little business on this little corner of the peninsula in the littlest state in our country makes a difference. However small, what I know we do second to none is create a place for people to have more joy in their day. To feel uplifted. Ironically, looking better is almost secondary.
If we don’t feel a connection with ourselves we never look as good.
I have observed this for over thirty-five years in my industry. It is simple and miraculous watching someone who was sad or cranky or both when they walk in, leave smiling and happy when they walk out.
This is what motivates me, this notion of service. This is business owning in its truest sense of the word; It doesn’t matter what I am selling, nuts and bolts, books and paper, muffins and coffee, cleansers and moisturizers, SERVICE is what I sell. Not just any service.
Service that makes people feel lovelier, happier.
Now I am not always this person, sometimes I am cranky, sometimes I can’t satisfy a client, sometimes the customer is not right and I can’t make them happy; these are rare occasions though.
Joy Is My Directive
What’s Alayne up to now? Happiness, delight, creativity. This is what I sell. Joy.
Joy is my directive.
Creating it, giving it, passing it out like water, talking about it, being an example of it, Joy is what I do. So when someone asks me what business are you in, I am in the business of Joy.
This is what I will say now.
Joy is beauty.
Stay tuned.