We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Desarae Marhofer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Desarae below.
Desarae, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s something you believe that most people in your industry (or in general) disagree with?
Most people in the esthetics beauty industry would disagree that you should support and empower your fellow esthetician. Most esthetician’s shy away from the opportunity to support, refer or collaborate with other estheticians. For as long as I have been in this industry I have noticed there has always seemed to be this overall competition mindset in our esthetics/beauty industry. The beauty industry has generally been seen as a cut throat, dog eat dog industry where the esthetician’s has always felt they must protect their clientele, their skills, talents, and knowledge. The truth is that the beauty industry itself is truly abundant, and there are plenty of clients and business for everyone to thrive. I have been able to experience this abundance for myself by operating from a place of collaboration over competition. I believe that it is the person mindset and fear based thoughts that create the lack and scarcity feelings around not wanting to share, collaborate and/or support a fellow esthetician. If we as an industry can overcome this idea and mindset of scarcity, we will see so many more business owners, partnerships and collaborations take place. This idea and mindset will help to further expand and grow our industry faster than any other industry out there. It has become my personal mission to transform this old belief system and help to spread the mission of women empowering women and collaboration over competition in the esthetics industry.
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 a passionate entrepreneur, who found a love & passion for skincare 16 years ago. I myself had my own struggles with acne as a teen/young adult and found a desire to want to become an esthetician to help my own skin improve, as well as others who were struggling with their skin. What I have loved so much about being an esthetician was the intimate one on one connection I built with clients. After a few months into my career I soon found myself booked out several months in advance. With the growing demand of professional skincare in my community I decided to take a leap of faith and open the very first skincare studio in my hometown. Beautiful You Skincare Studio opened its doors March of 2009! Through my entrepreneurial journey I have been able to hire and train dozens of estheticians over the years to work along side of me and help spread our mission of promoting self care and self love. As my career evolved over the years I began to grow more passionate about esthetics education. And in January of 2019 I opened Pueblo, Colorado’s first esthetics school, Beautiful You Skincare Academy. Since then I have helped over 75 students earn their esthetics license, I am committed to elevating the standards of my industry and continue to empower esthetician’s to pursue their entrepreneurial goals. It’s been 3 years since we opened our school and I’m so proud and excited to announce that we are expanding our mission throughout the entire state of Colorado and have opened our second Beautiful You Skincare Academy campus in Littleton, Co. We will be known as the premier esthetics school in Colorado that provides a high quality education in an intimate boutique learning environment, where our students feel supported and encouraged every step of the way. And that is something I am so proud of!
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
I have an amazing team of 9 staff members that truly are the back bone of my businesses. Growing a team is sometimes a challenge, and if I am being honest this was the area of my business I struggled with the most early on when I first became an entrepreneur. Being able to create a positive culture where staff feel seen, heard, and valued has been an intentional effort of mine over the last several years. So if I could give any piece of advice to those who are thinking about bringing on team members, it’s this: take responsibility for your own energy, mindset, growth and healing. In order to grow your team and your business you must be in an energy and mindset of positivity, community, connection and growth. You are a direct reflection of your business, so when your energy is low the team members feel that, when your feeling scarcity in your business they feel it, when your feeling negativity or frustration they feel it. This energy transfers and it’s spreads throughout your business and ultimately effect the morale. So it has been my number one focus, is to limit the amount of negativity that comes through the business, we have a mantra in our business… it’s so simple: POSITIVE VIBES ONLY!! But here’s the difference between just saying it and actually living it, we hold eachother accountable. And what I mean by that is that we actually care about each others well-being, we do daily, or weekly checkins to make sure our team feels supported, not just in the business but in their personal life as well. I think at the end of the day maintaining high morale really comes down to authentic connections with your team members, truly caring about them and honoring when they do have an off day or are not showing up as their highest and best self, by showing compassion, care and concern. When you truly care about them they feel it and that energy is reciprocated in positive vibes and positive cash flow!! When you manage the energy of your biz you manage the morale! It’s a win win for everyone!
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
As I am entering into my very first partnership with our second academy campus I can’t help but reflect on how that all came about. My partner today Katrina Chavez was just a fellow esthetician who I met 3 years ago over the phone. She reached out to me wanting to connect to learn more about becoming an esthetics school owner. It was my 2nd month in operation of the new school so I was still learning the ropes, but I happily agreed to chat with her and share my experiences up to that point. She was so grateful for the feedback and the insights I shared with her. We agreed to stay connected and I told her be sure to reach out to me in a year and I would tell her how it really feels to run a beauty school. We maintained our friendship and I became an industry colleague & resource for her. We would chat every now and then about the dream of her opening her own esthetics school. I told her I would love to help her or consult her in anyway I could. We agreed later on that year to meet in person to discuss opportunities. Well once we finally met in person I knew I had found my esthetician soul mate! We hit it off and began dreaming about expanding and elevating the esthetics education across Colorado. We decided to explore the idea of partnership the end of 2019 and began look at locations of where we could open our skincare academy. We found the perfect location in Littleton, co. We put a bid on the suite, but the owners decided to give it to someone else. After that we hit the holidays and decided we would try to regroup after the first of the year, and then to pandemic hit. We lost touch over that year of the pandemic. Katrina decided to move on to pursuing her dream of owning an esthetics school. She found another great entrepreneur to partner with and she moved forward with her plans. But after about a year or so of no movement with that business plan she began to wonder if her school would ever come to fruition. Katrina and I are both big believers in divine timing and one day I received a call from her telling me her partnership fell through with the other lady, and she was devastated. I knew right then that the timing was delayed because we were supposed to go into partnership together. We immediately decided to re-pursue that venture and began looking for locations. Well what do you know, a full circle moment would occur!! The building we looked at in 2019 had a suite for lease in October of 2021. We had to take a look. And, you could probably imagine what happened next… we absolutely loved it, and decided to sign the lease and open up a second campus Beautiful You Skincare Academy together in Littleton, Co. Well here we are, getting ready to launch our first esthetics program together and I couldn’t be more excited! And while I can’t tell you the ins and it outs of what it is really going to be like to have a partner in business, I can tell you that I couldn’t be more grateful to be on this journey with her… together we impacting lives, empowering entrepreneurial estheticians and revolutionizing our skincare industry. I’m blessed to be have a partner I can trust and count on. And I believe that is what is most important in partnerships.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bysalittleton.com www.beautifulyouskincareacademy.com www.beautifulyouskincarestudio.com
- Instagram: @byskincareacademylittleton
- Facebook: @byskincareacademylittleton
Image Credits
Zara Ashby Photography