3 Takeaways After 1 Year Running a Beauty Business

Yesterday marked one year since launching my beauty & grooming business Glory By Us, seeing to revolutionize hair care for Black men.

The first year was full of triumphs, losses, questions, and challenges. It has all sharpened me mentally and emotionally to deal with the nuances of entrepreneurship and life as a whole.

Here are my three major takeaways that you can apply as you continue to build your company or work on launching your idea.

You Don’t Know Who Your Customers Will Be

I spent 5 years building Glory from the idea’s inception. I talked to men in barbershops around the country, conducted surveys, studied brands, accumulating qualitative and quantitative data to build specific buyer archetypes of who the Glory Guy is.

Yet, since launching the brand I’ve been shocked at the profile of some of Glory’s biggest and repeat buyers. They seem to completely fall outside of the personas I developed. Some are not guys at all.

But it reveals the importance of building a brand identity that resonates — an identity that people can tap into.

My responsibility as a Founder is to deliver the most well-packaged and effective product possible and allow it to appeal to whoever sees the value.

Always Have a back-up — or Five

Similar to most business models, as a D2C e-commerce business in the beauty, I work with a lot of third party vendors. There’s manufacturing, fulfillment, shipping, and everything else you didn’t think about.

Nonetheless, you and your team can’t (and shouldn’t) do everything. You need specialized service-provider partners to build a scalable business.

However, sometimes those vendors will flop or be unable to meet your demands in a reasonable timeframe. In fact, right now, I’m on a vehement search for new manufacturing partners.

I’ve learned to eliminate single points of failure in business.

Even if you have a trusted partner who’s consistently executing a task for you, always invest in a couple of back-ups who you can call on in case things go awry.

Nothing is Guaranteed to Happen

Until the money is in your account and the products are delivered it hasn’t happened.

I don’t care how productive a conversation is or how promising a pending partnership seems, you cannot count that chicken before it hatches — period.

Sitting at the helm of a company exposes you to the fragility of circumstances. And it’s not always the person across the table who needs to pull out. Sometimes it’s you.

There’s constantly shifts and changes in budgets, priorities, principles, and people that could act to catalyze or cripple a situation.

As an entrepreneur, it sometimes feels like you become an expert at dealing with disappointment. In fact, maybe it’s not “disappointment.” It’s just business. And maybe it’s not “business.” It just is what it is.

Either way, keep moving because as sure as an opportunity passes another will inevitably arise and you need to leverage that mental and emotional capacity to execute when it does.

See you at the top.