We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Morgan Chavis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Morgan below.

Alright, Morgan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

WOW! This is an amazing question. If there is a business owner out there saying they never thought about having a “regular job” during the inception of their business, the infancy phases or even in a period of scaling I can confidently say I’d call it a stretch from the truth. I get on indeed maybe once a month with the mindset that it would be easier to work for someone else. Before I can even complete an application I begin thinking of all the things that will be wrong with the job I found. There is nothing more rewarding than working for myself. My business has the values I value. It has the culture with which I identify. It has the team I selected and the products I want to sell. Everything about my business is how I want it to be and that feeling is one that makes all the difficult days worth the struggle. I am definitely happier as a business owner than when I was climbing the corporate ladder. In my book, Leap Off The Ladder, I discuss how lost I was feeling before taking the leap of faith to pursue my passion. I do not regret my decision to be an entrepreneur.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am the CEO of The Lusso Brand and my job is to inspire other entrepreneurs to pursue their passion while also giving them the resources they need to attain success through business coaching, motivational speaking and my book, Leap Off The Ladder. As a proud native of Detroit and an HBCU graduate from Hampton University I like to say that my background has molded me in to the tenacious leader that I am today. Detroit made me fearless. Hampton made me strategic and resourceful. In addition to managing the growth and success of my two brick and mortar businesses Lusso Salon and Lusso Suites, I offer individual business coaching to existing and aspiring business owners in the service industry. My experience is in senior management where I left my corporate career from Amazon to focus on The Lusso Brand full time. The skillsets I exercised in my corporate career make people leadership and organizational strategy my specialties as a business coach.

The word “Lusso” means luxury. I affectionately named my business an Italian name in homage of my mother who loved Italy. I also chose the word luxury to set the standard for my brand. My goal is that every interaction with The Lusso Brand is a luxurious one where the customer should be treated with the utmost value. I thrive to make a luxury experience accessible to all whether it be your engagement at Lusso Salon receiving a service from my skilled team or an interaction as a tenant at Lusso Suites. My passion is helping others grow their businesses and show them that they too can achieve their business dreams.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Part of The Lusso Brand was once Lusso Extensions, an eCommerce business selling luxury hair extensions and custom wigs. The lesson I learned it eCommerce is that it takes tons of capital to market. There are so many online store, especially offering hair extensions, that the investment needed to set Lusso Extensions a part from others became astronomical. Managing Lusso Extensions was like a case study I didn’t know I was volunteering to write. I learned a valuable lesson in profit margins, supply and demand, inflation, cost of goods sold, and market share. I knew I needed to pivot with Lusso Extensions when I assed it was costing me 40% of my profit in customer acquisition. WHEW! The Shark Tank would not approve. The numbers were telling me that it was time to pull the plug on Lusso Extensions. I felt like I was giving up or quitting on part of my business. I thought people would judge me. I thought there was no way I could be a successful business coach with part of my own business hemorrhaging money. This entire experience caused me to fall in a never-ending spiral of self doubt.

I was able to overcome by changing my perspective. How silly would it be to continue investing money in only one part of the business that was not yielding a return. Instead of viewing my pivot as a failure I began to view it as a lesson. Now when I have clients with waste baked in to their business model or a product that is not yelling an ROI I am easily able identify and recommend ways to trim their excess expenses.

Any advice for managing a team?

Welcome to your free business coaching!… There is an activity I love to have my clients do who contact me about team management. I write a simple bell curve and designate the high ten percent and low ten percent on the curve. I tell them to write the names of everyone on their team within the bell curve in respects to where they feel individual performance warrants they fall. The people in the top ten and bottom ten should receive most your focus as a leader. For those in the top ten percent your goal should be keeping them engaged. Find ways to incentivize them. Learn their interests. Does on of these people love the local coffee shop in your neighborhood? Perhaps a gift card for a cup of coffee would go very far! As for the bottom ten percent, they should be having a next step plan and sometimes that plan is not always disinviting them from your brand. Maybe they struggle at the core competencies of their current role but that may not mean they cannot excel at a different role within your business. Usually at this point my clients ask, “Do we just ignore the people in the middle?” My answer is no! We should be identifying the top ten percent of that middle bucket and creating a separate next step plan for them to move them in to the top. Managing a team this way will divert your attention to assessing talent in a way that drives retention among your team and engages everyone within your business with a cyclical rotation of driving performance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thelussobrand.com
• Instagram: LussoCEO
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MorganElizabethW/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lussoceo/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lussoceo
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thelussobrand

Image Credits
Jennifer of Exposed Moxie Photography