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

Melissa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

As a small business owner, having drive and passion are very important. Growth is inevitable when you are open to constructive criticism and you are open to learning new things. Without a plan your growth can be unpredictable though, so sitting down and writing my goals down in chronological order helped to keep me focused.

When I first started my focus was on perfecting my skills with continued education and practice. I committed to taking 2 industry related classes per year to ensure I am staying up to date on the latest trends and using the best products. I also offered free services to the first 5 clients to book a service with me any time I added a new type of service which allowed me to get some practice in before charging for a service. Offering free services also allowed me to record content for social media to advertise the new services I was offering. Social media was a great way to find clients without having to pay for advertisement.

Building a good reputation with my clients was also top on my priority list. A good reputation is very powerful because it will motivate clients to send you referrals which means more clients! To build a good reputation I would have to ensure I provided good customer service to all of my clients. I owe a lot of my knowledge on customer service to my time as an employee at at&t. I have always treated all of my clients with respect and followed healthy client to service provider boundaries.

Melissa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Melissa Esquivel. I come from a very humble immigrant family. My mom worked very hard as a single mother of 5 for many years and watching her struggles as a young adult taught me the importance of good work ethic. I owe it to her and her sacrifices for the opportunities I have now had as an adult.

When I was 19 year I became a legal resident of the United States and I began working with AT&T. I bring up AT&T a lot when I talk about my story to success because they taught me so much about business, professionalism and sales. I am grateful to them for the knowledge I have because I don’t think I would be where I am today without it. When I was an employee of AT&T I used to do crazy hair colors on myself and makeup. Every halloween other employees would ask me to do their special effects makeup for their costumes and this is when I realized how much I loved the beauty industry. One day after about 7 years with AT&T I finally decided it was time for me to leave and go to cosmetology school.

I was very convinced that I would become a professional hairdresser and makeup artists. I spent so much money on a makeup kit and hair supplies that I ended up only using a handful of times. Sometimes you have to try something first only to realize it’s not really what you want to do. I don’t call this failure, I call this experience. Experience is sometimes expensive but absolutely worth it. Instead of becoming a hairdresser or makeup artist I fell completely in love with eyelash extensions after taking one class through a third party. I had natural talent for it and I got completely booked out with clients while still in school. By the time I graduated from cosmetology school I had a full list of clientele and I went straight to work for myself. Being self employed is very hard at times, stressful and exhausting but also very rewarding. it takes a lot of discipline and self motivations to run your own business.

I am specifically proud of the fact that I am known as a lash artists that cares about my clients and their lash health. I never compromise clients lash health for looks and my clients respect that. Clients respect me as a business owner and I respect them as a client. I think that its important to stand out from the crowd and I feel that I’ve achieved that with my attention to detail, my care for lash health and professionalism.

I want all current or potential clients to know they they will always be welcomed and well taken care of in my spa.

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

I think many businesses can relate when it comes to the struggle that was the year 2020. Covid completely shut down all services in the beauty industry for about 5 weeks. Unfortunately for me, I was traveling in early march to the Dominican Republic and I am certain I got sick with COVID-19 coming back from vacation. When I returned home I quarantined myself at home for another week and a half before returning to work so at this point I had already been away from work for 2 1/2 weeks. I came back to work, worked 2 days and then we were completely shut down for 5 weeks after that. In total I was out of work for almost 8 weeks. 8 weeks of no income was extremely stressful especially while also going through a divorce, going through an ectopic pregnancy that almost killed me, falling into a deep depression and loosing 20 lbs in 2 weeks. These are big issues that I rarely talk about but thankfully I had good friends around me that made sure to visit me and bring me food, I also enrolled in online therapy with a counselor.

When I was finally able to work, it was almost therapeutic for me. I was able to hyper focus on my business more than ever to escape the reality of my personal life. I pushed for my business to become successful and while I was busy with my business my personal life also slowly began to get better.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Currently I have 1 employee and the rest of the girls in my spa are independent booth renters. I strive to be a leader and not a boss to my employee. Its important to listen to your employees and understand what their goals are. As a leader I’m here to guide her and develop her so that she can meet her goals. Her success will one day also be my success. I respect her and she respects me for it too.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @beautymarkesthetics

Image Credits
Morganic Photography on instagram