We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jalynn Craig a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jalynn thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

Most of my business profits are generated from direct sales so the process of hiring has to be focused on personality types who are business oriented. I also knew that with proper team-building it would be imperative to have the correct people in place so that our team will be the most successful. The process of recruiting a team would be to search for people who were already in the beauty industry.
This sales position requires an outgoing personality, complete product knowledge, and the ability to handle rejection.
The hiring, training, and recruiting were unconventional in the beginning. Over time I was able to compile a way to improve this process so that the business can be professional in fact most times business systems are constantly changing and there are always ways to improve the business with the professional industry standard.

If team members see the professionalism in how standards work they become convinced and trust leadership. I definitely would’ve changed a lot of things now I go through the interview process, the first being a 30-minute phone call with me asking general questions about their schedule availability, past work experiences, and commute reliability.
Next, I take them through another hiring process that requires a face-to-face interview process only if they make it past the phone conversation with either myself or one of my managers /team leads.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I went to college to obtain my bachelors degree in business administration, I definitely thought I was going to get a job in Corporate America however during that time I was already working at a job at the mall kiosk and making a lot of money. The comission for my sales were comparable to corpoarte salary because of the ability to maximize sales. Ive always loved jobs in sales to be able to interact with customers and solve their problems.

Most of my customers need help with their hair because of heat damage, color damage, and breakage. We provide anti-damage products and hair extensions that help decrease the need of color correction and excessive use of heat plus the hair extensions adds volume and length.

I’m most proud of the fact that we have amazing clients who love our service and respect our time the ones who invest in our luxury products love hearing about whats new within the business and referring customers.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

The advice that I have for managing a team and maintaining a high morale would be to have complete transparancy. In my experiences being very straight forward can be the best thing for keeping low stress levels and weeding through team members who are not serious or responsible. Maintaining morale is more of an inner self-check but if your team sees that honesty and keeping your word is important they will follow by example.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

A lot of people do not know this but in 2020 I was in my breaking point of sales. I was very close to submitting applications to jobs with high salary. Although this was something that was “easy”, I could not begin to complete this process with out giving myself a fair chance as a business owner. Looking back I’m happy I tried because six months to a year, I had the opportunity to open my first location.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: therealmsamerica
• Facebook: Jalynn Craig
• Twitter: therealmsamerica
• Youtube: therealmsamerica