Amy Carter Of Empowering You Consulting: Five Things You Need To Know To Succeed In The Modern Beauty Industry
You need to know your true role as an owner. Look, you’re already wearing too many hats. You literally CANNOT do everything yourself. You must delegate some of the tasks off your plate so you can focus on the higher-level tasks that no one else can do. I love the quote, “I only do what only I can do.”
As a part of our series about “Five Things You Need to Know to Succeed in The Modern Beauty Industry”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amy Carter.
Amy Carter is a beauty industry expert, salon owner, entrepreneur, moneymaker, and game-changer obsessed with supporting and empowering other business owners.
As Principal & Founder of Empowering You, a beauty industry consulting company founded in 2009, Amy understands the overwhelm and pitfalls of starting your own salon or spa business. At age 22, she unknowingly bought a bankrupt salon and spa, working hard to bring it back to life & learning lessons along the way. By age 40, Amy scaled two businesses beyond seven figures.
As the owner of one of Indiana’s top salons, Amy knows what it takes to build a profitable business and train a leadership team resulting in long-term success. Her goal as a coach is simple: to help clients achieve personal satisfaction from their professional endeavors (her measure of success is the happiness of her clients) by expanding their client base, increasing profits, operating more efficiently, training a team of leaders and more.
Amy is a true believer that all entrepreneurs can be successful in both business and life, and she continues to share that formula, including through her recently released book Boldly Brilliant: How to Break Through to a 7-Figure Income.
Salon & spa business owners who are interested in working with Amy & her team can book a strategy session, during which a member of the team will make recommendations based on each business’ unique problems & desired results.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Of course! It’s quite a story. At the age of 22, I bought a salon & spa after graduating college with a degree in accounting. On paper, the salon was making over $500,000. I thought I was going to be so rich… only to find out that I was the brokest person I knew. Turns out, I had bought a bankrupt business! Fast forward a little bit, and my business partner skipped out after only a year into our partnership and left me holding the tattered remains of our company. I was devastated.
I had fallen in love with the beauty industry in college and just knew I should own a salon & spa. Unfortunately, most of these types of businesses are technician-owned, and I was a non-technician. It’s not like I could just cut more hair to make ends meet. I had to learn how to take an unprofitable business and to turn it into something beautiful. Through lots of mentoring and creating systems, I learned not only how to turn my salon around for profits but hit over 7 figures year after year, all while running it debt-free.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Same as above :-)
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
Success happened for me because of two things. Understanding the systems needed for my business and spending time in personal development. My company grew because I made sure to grow myself first. I didn’t realize it right away, but there was a lot of “ish” I had to work through that was holding me back from success. Once I invested in working on myself (and learned more about the business side of things), my salon skyrocketed.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Oh yes! My business coach Susie Carder. She is the mentor I hired about 20 years ago to teach me how to be a salon owner. Her company had all the systems and tools needed to set me up for success. Why recreate the wheel when someone else can drive you there? Fast forward to today and we are still working together by helping other beauty business owners and professionals grow their salons and spas through my company, Empowering You Consulting. Susie has helped me grow both of my companies to beyond 7 figures.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. The global beauty industry today has grown to more than a half a trillion-dollar business. Can you tell us about the innovations that you are bringing to the industry? How do you think that will help people?
What I bring is the knowledge and the actionable strategies to claim part of that market share and to make more money! I am teaching salon and spa owners how to turn a profit with their businesses and how to be a true CEO of their salon or spa instead of just another technician. I am also teaching service providers to make more than six-figures behind the chair.
One of the myths in the beauty industry is that getting better with techniques is what brings in the cash. But the truth is, only 20% of it is technical and 80% is the business/communication side. And I have taught thousands of people in the industry how to master all of it. We’ve even created templates that they can just customize and use in their own day-to-day.
Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the modern beauty industry?
1.) For starters, the industry has shifted, and it needed to. The last few years in a pandemic gave owners a chance to recreate how they wanted their business to be. Honestly, that was the kick in the butt that a lot of people needed to know that it was time to stop being a technician and to be a true business owner.
2.) The industry is getting a better understanding of why knowing your numbers is a good thing. So many owners feared the numbers, and they just floated by day to day. Things just happened to work out. But because our industry got hit so hard, people are starting to understand the importance of knowing where your business is at and diving all-in instead of sticking their heads in the sand.
3.) Modern salon and spa owners are understanding the importance of making time for “CEO time”. They are understanding the importance of stepping into the leadership role. It’s no longer about being the best technician in the business, but how to really run these companies in a savvy way. I am LOVING working with these owners!
Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to improve the industry, what would you suggest?
1.) We need to raise the bar to enter the beauty industry. Too many come into the industry not even knowing if they want to be a service provider. It’s tough for owners to hire when the people they hire may or may not even like doing it. There is a HUGE dropout rate. Don’t quote me on this number, but it feels like only 5% are still doing services after 5 years. I would improve this by making business skills a part of beauty schools. It would take the truly serious candidates to the next level.
2.) Not enough people make enough money in the industry. The average pay is like $25,000. Yikes! I think 80% of the industry should be making at least $100K. And to get there we need to make a CEO mindset the norm and have more mentorship. It starts by teaching the owners and for the owners to then teach their teams. It’s a win-win because then the technicians make more money, and as a result the owners do too.
3.) Even though it’s starting to trend better, I’m still concerned about salon and spa owners focusing too much on how to be great technicians when they need to get serious about being an owner and CEO. Too much guilt is around thinking they need to keep doing the services, so their team doesn’t think less of them. I’m working on creating awareness for owners and team members around the importance of running a business that will be sustainable and thriving… and that requires that the owner truly take on the role of CEO.
You are an expert about beauty. Can you share a few ideas that anyone can use “to feel beautiful”?
I always stress the importance of self-care to my clients. If you’re working 12+ hours a day in your business, 6 days a week, it doesn’t matter if your makeup is lit or your hair on point — you’re going to feel like crap. I teach people to schedule out time for themselves and to make it a priority. Another thing you can do is to reward yourself when you hit your goals — they can be little goals with little rewards or big goals with big rewards.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five Things You Need to Know to Succeed in The Modern Beauty Industry”. Please share a story or an example, for each.
1.) You need to know your true role as an owner. Look, you’re already wearing too many hats. You literally CANNOT do everything yourself. You must delegate some of the tasks off your plate so you can focus on the higher-level tasks that no one else can do. I love the quote, “I only do what only I can do.”
I’ve had clients tell me they simply do NOT have the time to work on the business. So, I had them list out everything they were doing each day. I had to point out that someone else in their company could take out the trash and that they didn’t need to be the one to greet every client. Trust me, delegate your tasks, train your team, and only do CEO things!
2.) You need to know your finances. Yes, yes, yes, I know numbers can be scary. Either you’ve always felt confused about them, don’t know what to look for, or fear what they will tell you. But trust me, it’s better to know. Your decisions will be so much smarter and your profits so much greater when you know your finances. Profits in this industry can be slim, so you must know all the money coming in and all the money going out. Knowing this took my business from unprofitable to massively profitable and knowing how much cash I needed in reserve saved my business time and time again.
3.) You need to know how to grow a team and a strong culture, because you can’t do it alone. Well, you can, but I can almost guarantee that it’ll be miserable. Culture is the backbone of our success. When my team’s culture sucked, I hated going into the salon. And I’m pretty sure no one else enjoyed going there either. But when we pruned the bad seeds and worked on cultivating an amazing environment, we saw it flourish again. That’s why we teach to not hire out of desperation; instead, hire when you know your new employees will add to your team culture.
4.) You need to be a good leader. A great leader is relatable and vulnerable, not just busy. I find that a lot of owners think that being a leader means you’re the busiest one at the salon. That’s simply not true. You need to let your team know that you care and that you understand them, and that you’re invested in their growth. You need office time and an open-door policy so that your staff can come to you and be in a safe place to share their thoughts.
5.) Be a coach to your team. The truth is, most leaders are made, not born. People don’t pop out of beauty school with leadership savvy. These are skills that need to be developed, and those of us who own a salon or spa aren’t immune from it. Develop your team to be the best that they can be. And even if you’re a technician, you need to develop your own leadership skills so you can stand out from the crowd and become a six-figure service provider. I love taking the time to coach my team to their dreams and their greatness. It’s an honor to support them in living a life they love. When they are happy, owning my salon is a breeze!
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I’d love to inspire people to be willing to do whatever it takes to have a life they love AND a business of their dreams. I think too many people think that both can’t exist at the same time. And that’s why we do what we do at Empowering You. We love the beauty industry, and we know that you can be a rockstar at business without working yourself into the ground. And we also know that you can spend a lot of time doing what you love with the people you love without letting your profits suffer.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“And the Day Came When the Risk to Remain Tight in a Bud Was More Painful Than the Risk It Took to Blossom.” — Anais Nin
Honestly, it was a risk and a leap for me to finally accept that my failing business needed help and that I had to invest in myself and hire a mentor to grow. Had I not made that decision, my business would have folded, and I’d probably be stuck in a job I hated instead of doing what I love — helping those in the beauty industry to blossom.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can follow us on Instagram @EmpoweringYouConsulting or me personally @AmyCarterEYC. You can also visit our website at www.EmpoweringYouConsulting.com
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
