We were lucky to catch up with Kelsie Bentley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Kelsie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?

I became self-employed as a hairstylist when I was 20 years old. I LOVED helping my clients and seeing their faces light up when I would turn them around and they got to see their vision for their hair having come to life. But more importantly, I gained relationships with so many of them. When you work in a personal industry like that, people share their lives with you. They share their problems, their joys, and so much more.

Because of this, I developed some really unhealthy habits. Things like being always available, letting people contact me any way they wanted to, responding to messages whether I was in the grocery store, out to dinner with my family, or sitting in my car after a long day of work. Not only that, because I had these too-friendly relationships with my clients, I also had a hard time with other boundaries such as my pricing and working hours. I mean, how was I supposed to raise someone’s price “after everything they’ve been through lately?!”

Ultimately, and not surprisingly, I started to burn out about 5 years in. I had a great clientele, was earning a comfortable living, although not nearly what I should have been, I enjoyed the majority of my clients, and I didn’t mind the work.

It wasn’t until I started working on myself and searching for the source of my burnout that I really began to discover where I’d gone wrong. I remember starting with a Pinterest search for “how to feel better.” And from there, it was DEEP into the world of self-care and mindset, meditation, and boundaries.

Through all of that, I realized some of the things I’d done wrong, but ultimately, ended up making the changes that needed to happen to successfully run my salon business for another 8 years before intentionally changing career paths.

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.

Because of my background in hair, and my history with boundaries, I ended up realizing that I have a LOVE of business systems. Ultimately, they allow us to more seamlessly work with our clients and customers, provide a better experience for them, and save ourselves so much time and energy in the process.

As I learned more and more about the online space, I realized how many small, local business owners open their businesses without realizing or understanding everything that goes on behind the scenes. Maybe a person just wanted to make the best gluten-free cinnamon rolls money could buy, but they end up having to do things like inventory management, bookkeeping, social media, and so many other things that they either don’t think about or don’t know about doing business. After working with just a few small businesses, I realized how much the knowledge I’d gained online could make a huge difference in not only the day-to-day operations of businesses, but the lives of small business owners.

When we feel empowered to do business in a particular way, when we feel as though we have the agency to run our businesses in a way that still allows us to have a life outside of the businesses, and when we have the self-worth and systems to support it, our businesses can thrive.

What I provide to small businesses are simple, minimal-tech ways to set up systems to serve their clients and customers without always having to be hands-on about doing it. Take, for instance, a yoga studio owner I worked with. Some of the key things we did in her business were to:

– Implement online booking for classes and sales of online passes (she was previously losing a LOT of money by using paper punch cards that people would “forget” to have punched, either intentionally or not)
– Set up business communication methods and the template responses she could send to people to direct them that direction;
– Creating a FAQ page so people could find answers to commonly asked questions without her needing to type a response every time
– Implement forms for scholarship applications for her kid’s summer program (she was previously having people email or message her, which led to a lot of back and forth, as well as a lot of time wasted trying to find messages)

Small, simple solutions like this don’t always come to the front of a business owner’s mind because they’re so deep in the daily operations of delivering their products and services. It’s my job to take a zoomed-out look at what they’re doing and then a zoomed-in approach to making things run more smoothly.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I always joke that I became what I am by accident. When I was learning about self-care, I really wanted to start talking about it online, which led me to creating content, blogging, and a number of other avenues. But what happened was that I was slowly learning the back-end of the systems and components of being online as a business owner.

Simultaneously, I was still running my salon business and implementing some of these systems in that business in everything from automated responses to FAQ pages for my regulars, and creating assets for that business that most hairstylists in such small towns didn’t have.

I decided to take on some work as a virtual assistant for one of my coaches, and at the same time, another one reached out to me to ask about coming on to their team. More learning, more systems, more skills. I was lucky enough that the first coach I worked with has an AMAZING online business manager who was more than generous about teaching me her skills, and really felt that in how I was operating behind the scenes of every business I was a part of.

Fast-forward four months and the coach who reached out to me asked if I wanted to come on to her team full-time. This would have been a position making more than double what I made in my salon business (of which I was getting pretty burned out of working in, by this point.) I accepted and we agreed that a 3-month phase out of my salon business and into theirs would be a good fit.

Except it wasn’t.

I went through all of the steps of liquidating my salon business only to be met with “we’ve decided to go a different direction” which did not include me having a living wage.

The blow was sickening. I couldn’t go back to my salon business and I was now earning approximately 1/4 of what I had previously. Not only that, but a major home repair happened at the same time, ultimately draining my savings to next to nothing.

Thankfully, because of the amazing human that first coach I worked with is, I was able to get more clients. She helped me find other people to work with and keep my head above water. And the more clients I worked with, the more I began to realize the skill set that I possess and where to best put it to use. While I do still work with online business clients, and love helping them create the systems and processes for their businesses, bringing these things to small businesses is at the core of what my heart loves, and I’m SO happy to get to help business owners in this way.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I have worked on a number of teams, and managed projects with a number of contributors, and the biggest advice I can give in regards to managing a team and creating and maintaining high morale is to be involved and support people in their positions.

Too many people think that having a team means “here’s your job, do it, whether I have provided the necessary tools or instructions. Just figure it out and do it right.” In reality, people flourish where they are both supported in their roles but also given just enough agency and freedom to bring ideas forward to serve the ultimate goal of the team.

More simply, my advice is:
– Give your people what they need to succeed. Whether that’s physical resources, moral support, instructions, etc. As the leader/business owner, it is your job to support your team as much as they support you.
– Be involved but don’t micromanage. Trust that you have chosen a capable team, and if you don’t, see the previous point.
– Give direct, but kind feedback. If someone is messing up, they deserve for you to address it in a professional manner and have the opportunity to learn. Every position we take teaches us something.
– Deliver on your promises. And if there’s a reason you can’t, be honest about it and don’t try to shift blame.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.simplybentley.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simplybentley