Hair & beauty business coach, Maddi Cook of Boss Your Salon, shares top tips to elevate your offerings and enhance your profits.

Boss Your Salon helps empower hair and beauty pros to price perfectly, set boundaries and grow without burnout, believing that business growth is for everyone. Maddi has worked with over 15,000 hair and beauty pros, on her mission to change how the industry values itself. She believes that money is an amplifier; meaning that more money allows workers to do great things: for themself, their family and their community.

Howdy, nail bosses! Have you ever felt that you don’t deserve your success? That you’ll be ‘found out’ at any moment, and revealed to be a fraud? You might want to grab your fake moustache, badly-fitting wig and trench coat for this one…

Enter: ‘Impostor Syndrome’. Maybe you felt like a fraud for entering a competition when you’ve only been doing nails for a year, being in training rooms with other nail techs, or even showing your lovely face on social media.

But what is an impostor? The Cambridge Dictionary describes it as ‘​a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others’. Are you pretending to be a nail tech? That’s a bit of a weird flex – and a Netflix special waiting to happen. It’s also a hell of a commitment to be reading Scratch, when you’re really three racoons in a trenchcoat, you impostor, you!

Are you trying to deceive others? Hmm… how does one deceive people as a nail tech – besides the odd fib to clients about how much you love doing heart nails in February, even though you’re painting the thirtieth set that week?

No, I don’t think you are an impostor, after all. But what causes the feeling in the first place? For me, there are two main culprits.

1. Social media

We tend to follow other people who do what we do, as this helps inspire us creatively. But the downside to this is that it’s easy to get a huge dollop of ‘comparison-itis’: constantly holding your work up against theirs, comparing your follower counts and engagement, and feeling deflated when they seem to be living the dream life, while yours feels lacking.

But remember, your business is built on your clients. YOUR clients. Usually ones who live within 10 miles or so. So that Insta-famous nail tech who lives five hours away, isn’t your competition at all. Your clients aren’t comparing you and them; they’re comparing you and the other nail techs in your town or city. Do those other techs do hand-painted nail art? Do they offer vegan-friendly options? Do they offer free parking? Do they have an online booking system so clients can book at their convenience?

Those are just a handful of the many things that may be important and valuable to YOUR client. Learn what these are, offer them, and talk about them! This will set you apart from your competition, elevate your value in the minds of your clients, and get bums on seats. And guess what all of that does? Banishes the inner impostor.

2. Society

Many of us have grown up in a society that has praised us for being placid and agreeable people-pleasers. Maybe you were praised for an achievement, or had parents who were perfectionists or highly critical. No wonder you’re giving yourself a hard time and feeling out of place!

A method that I use (and yes, this is something I feel from time to time) is to collate a folder of evidence. Every time you receive a nice review, a lovely text from a client, an award nomination or similar, grab a screenshot and add it to a folder on your phone. When you’re hit by impostor syndrome, look through this folder and remind yourself of how great you are, and how much you deserve every bit of success you get, because you really do.

It’s time to bin the fake moustache!

Maddi x

www.bossyoursalon.com

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