Making business magic with the Skin Fairy

Your business is extremely well known in Australia. Has that growth been steady and continuous from the get-go?

In the beginning, no one really knows who you are until you establish a name for yourself, but it’s definitely been a whirlwind and pretty continual growth since we opened in 2014. It hasn’t really slowed down and it’s really humbling and overwhelming at the same time because I’ve got a lot of expectations on myself. The Skin Fairy name is very well known, but now we’re known for other things like our results and our culture, which I’m proud of.

What was the inspiration for the name Skin Fairy?

My client Kylie actually called me her skin fairy, so I thought I’d just change my Instagram to that, and then it became my business name!

How do you find work-life balance, being a business owner, mum, wife, and friend? 

I have a lot of support and help, so I can delegate now that the business is bigger, and I prioritise my time. I just do the best that I can within that day, and I’m very thankful that I have a lot of help with my son, and my team’s really amazing so I’m able to do different things now.

It’s often hard to be present with someone or a situation fully because humans are always thinking about the next thing, but I’ve done a lot of work on myself over the past year. With my team, I make sure I’m engaged and present when I’m with them, because if you’re a leader or owner of a business, that’s really, really important. 

“If you don’t have goals as business or as a team, find some or make some up and try to focus on those positive things.”

Is there anything skin therapists who want to start their own business should know?

I definitely had to learn everything from scratch; I didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning. But if you’re passionate enough, you learn and get better at owning a business every day!

If you want to be in business, you need to be ready to work seven days a week. How good do you want something to be will be the time that you put into it really. But it’s hard work, really hard work.

How do you make your days run smoothly?

We have daily catch-ups and one on one meetings, but every Tuesday we have a weekly ‘power meeting’, where we talk about everything going on and what’s coming up. If there’s anything happening or changing, we talk about it, and all the girls read their notes prior to the clients coming in so they’re on top of their appointments. If there are any client reactions or any issues with someone’s skin, that’s also discussed with the whole team so we can best help the person get a great result. 

How do you help your staff members to be their best?

Other than the one on one meetings and constant education, we have a Mentoring Program that we do in the clinic, where the senior therapist spends time with the newer therapists. There’s also always constant communication, so even though I don’t see seven columns worth of people and bookings, I pretty much know everything that’s going on, and I can just pull someone’s client notes and have a read to keep up to date and make sure everyone is accountable.

What’s your favourite Timely feature to use right now?

Most recently we’ve been using SMS campaigns to communicate with our clients, which I love! Everyone’s usually on their phones, so we get a lot more engagement than with email. We’ve been using SMS to keep clients up to date on what’s happening with the clinic, but we also like to let people know when it’s our birthday or when we’re celebrating something else, like Mother’s Day, to encourage people to book in the special women in their lives, or treat themselves!

The great thing about Timely’s SMS is that it’s so personalised; you can select and target specific clients based on lots of different filters, like people that have come in the last 6 months or VIP clients.

Do you have any advice to help business owners create content?

If you have a team of more than one person, there are systems you can put into place to gather good content. We have Dropbox folders of all our before and afters, so it’s a great idea to keep those all together. You could talk about the benefits of your products, create videos, or basically anything that will help your clients or be interesting to them.

Just get on there and create as much content as possible and if you mess up, just post it! People need to see the real you. Don’t hide who you are, engage and show people what you’re doing.

What inspired you to start your Look and Learn Shadowing Program and will we see more education from Skin Fairy in the future?

Yes, eventually! I took my inspiration from the hair industry because there are so many people I look up to in the hair industry; they share their knowledge so well and I just want our business to be open and welcome to other therapists. Collaboration is the key to success and we get to share our passion for what we do and how we do things. The clinic has been successful with results and things like that, but there’s so much more to it. 

The girls are superstars; they get to do their thing and share their knowledge. A lot of people that have come into the clinic and taken part in the Shadowing Program are just lacking confidence and they don’t have a lot of support, so they get a lot of inspiration from the Program.