From Business Owner to Coach: A Journey of Growth and Success in the Beauty Industry

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This is another important lesson. I think, you know, we get so caught up in our business that we forget about the needs of our community. And when we are positioned Terence

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here with a Terence here with a very special guest who has, like, decades of experience in the business space, Dorothy Andrews. Welcome, Dorothy, to the stage.

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Thank you, Terrence. Thank you for having me, and thank you to the listeners for taking the time to invest in your learning by listening today.

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Yeah. And, Dorothy, I mean, you have been in multiple businesses. You have scaled multiple businesses to seven figures, and you’re a best selling author, and you’re involved in so many businesses. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into business and why you got into the business and your journey. We’d love to hear about it.

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Thank you so much. Yes. I was working three part time jobs to put myself through college, and it was hard. I didn’t have family or financial support, and, a hair salon came up for sale in my neighborhood. I’d gone to beauty school while I was in high school, so I already had a license to cut hair and teach hairdressing. So I went and met with a woman, and she said, aren’t you really young to be buying a business? How are you going to afford this? And I said, well, I have a car. I own my car. I’ll sell my car, and that’s where I’ll get the money. So I went home that day thinking that my parents would be so incredibly proud of me. And I called them into the into the living room in our house and said, dad, you know, I need you to help me sell my car. I have to sell it right away because I’ve just signed an agreement. I’m going to buy this business in seven days. And my father put his hands in in his pockets and and looked at me and said, but you’ll never be smart enough to run a business. I I can’t watch you fail. And in that moment, Terrence, I made a decision that whatever it would take, I would prove him wrong. And it was and that was at a great expense to me personally over the years. You know, my first day in business, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I I I didn’t know how to run a business. Yeah. I knew how to do what I was good at doing, which most entrepreneurs usually start their journey that way. We do something. We love it. We’re good at it. We might not like our boss or how we’re getting paid or the people we work with or the way things are done, and we decide to strike out on our own. But being good at our skill is very different than running, you know, running a business. So, you know, this was nineteen eighty, forty four years ago. There were not programs to support women in business.

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You you look so young, I was gonna say, like, that’s, like, incredible.

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Thank you. I mean, I come from the beauty industry, so I under stand skincare and I’ve been taking very good care of my skin my entire life. And it really does make a difference. Cleanse, tone, and moisturize every day. So anyhow, you know, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I lost that first business in a fire. Unfortunately, my father died two years later, so he never got to really see what I was capable of producing. You know, when I lost the business in a fire, I lost everything. This is when I learned about the value of business insurance. You know, it’s not like I went to school and got an MBA where you would learn that you have to have a good insurance policy when you have, you know, things in your business, products and equipment. And a friend of mine was in the building where the fire was, and and she perished in the fire. And that was really very hard. And I just remember just thinking so many times in those early, days, in those early years, like sink or swim. By God, I’m not going to sink. I have to learn how to swim. And that was, I don’t know where it came from. It was this like mantra that I had in my head. I’ve got to learn how to swim, and swimming might look like I have to learn how to do inventory. I have to learn how to be a bookkeeper. I didn’t know how to keep books. You know? Where would I learn that?

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I still hate that.

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You know? You know, it’s really interesting. I work with entrepreneurs right now to scale their business, and almost every one of them is struggling behind in their taxes, behind in tax preparation, really, because so many people who are, especially in the creatives or emotional space, don’t view themselves as good at math. To be a good bookkeeper in your business, you don’t have to be good at math. You don’t have to be a bookkeeper. You just have to know your numbers and come up with a formula and get help. You know, come up with a formula that works for you. So my formula is, you know, when I had multiple locations and companies, I did every Tuesday. This was a system. And I’ll I’ll talk a little bit more about systems in business because they’re really, really crucial for anybody’s business to scale, whether you’re a solopreneur or a brick and mortar store. It it does it really doesn’t matter. But when I had a, you know, I’ve employed over a thousand people in my career. When I had multiple locations, every Tuesday was my admin day for myself where I would sit down and get those things done. And then, you know, I had a a bookkeeper who I would work with, and then I had a CPA, an accounting firm. So these days, I do it once a month. That’s just it. The first Tuesday of the month, no matter what’s going on, I sit down at my desk and do my entering. And it’s that kind of discipline that really helps every entrepreneur grow their business. Because when you’re doing those kinds of things that must be done, even though we don’t like to do them, but we’re getting them done, we learn so much about our business.

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But it didn’t happen for you overnight. Right? I mean, obviously, this came from lots of years of experience. So tell us what happened after that fire. How did you turn things around?

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Well, really, here’s how I started to learn. So up until the fire, right? Like I didn’t, you know, I dropped out of college. I had one semester and one day in college. So I didn’t learn anything about business there. And then I bought this business and I was tethered to the chair. This was in nineteen eighty when I was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I’m from. The steel industry collapsed. So things got very financially dire, very economically Yeah. Uncomfortable in Pittsburgh. And I started losing my clientele because they couldn’t afford to come in as much, and I still had bills to pay. So I would lie in bed at night calculating how many haircuts do I have to do this week to pay the electric bill. I mean, it was that scary, and I really didn’t know what to do. So the only asset that I had other than books from the local library, which there weren’t a whole lot of books on business growth back then. The asset that I had were the clients who were sitting in my chair every day, and this is a really important thing, I think, for anybody who’s trying to grow a business is there is support all around us. We just need to not be afraid, ashamed, or embarrassed to ask for help. You know, the clients would sit in my chair for thirty minutes while I was cutting their hair. And I’m a young kid, you know, I’m nineteen. They all kinda wanted to see me succeed, but I would ask them, you know, I need to hire somebody and I don’t know how to do an interview. Have you ever interviewed anybody? What do I do? What are the questions? And then I would write this information down. Whenever I had anything that I needed to know about how to grow a business, I would start asking the people who sat in my chair, who worked in banks or other businesses. So they all had some kind of experience. And they were certainly all older than I was. That is how I learned the foundation and fundamentals of how to do things in a business, was by using the asset that was right in front of me, and that was the clients that were coming in. And the other good thing is it kept us away from gossipy conversations, which in the beauty industry we’re known for. So that was that. After the fire, the fire was devastating. You know, my father had recently passed and I was living at home with my mother in my early twenties at this point, twenty one, twenty two years old. Fortunately, I had my appointment book with me when I left the salon that day, so I had all of the contact information. This is before computers when we used paper books. Right? So I had everybody’s names and phone numbers. So I started calling people and letting them know, if you still want to get your haircut, you can come to my mother’s house. You will be sitting on a chair in the garage, but I’ll do it for half price. I just wanna make sure that you’re taken care of. And that’s how I did it for the next couple of months. And then Wow. There was a business that had gone out of business in our community, and the woman who managed that building was my hair client. She called me and said, you can have that space that’s already set up for a very high end salon. You can move in. And I was able to do that and started growing and expanding services. And, you know, the funny thing, Terrence, in nineteen eighty six, I opened a business in Pittsburgh. I was rapidly growing, hiring people, still always not exactly sure what I was doing and terrified people might know that. You

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must have been doing something right.

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You know, I just kept thinking, how can I treat people the way that I wanna be treated? Whether it’s a staff person or a client, the community, and that that was our mantra for many years. Be a good employer, be a good business, be a good person in the community. And, you know, it was just those were scary days. Those were very scary days.

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Yeah. I can just imagine that. Yeah. That that sounds scary to me. And and I’ve been an entrepreneur for, like, twenty years. Right? And but that sounds pretty hairy.

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It was it was a lot. You know, also during this time, I got married. I I had two children. My marriage started getting bumpy. In nineteen eighty six, I opened a business called Clips Salon and Day Spa, and the day spa concept wasn’t really in the United States yet. I had just been reading about it in in publications. People used to walk in the front door and say to my receptionist, what’s a day spa? People didn’t even know what the term day spa meant. That’s how early it was. So I I really had to create a market for that. And it truly it was like desperation that led to so many things. Like, oh my goodness, I’ve gotta teach people what coming to a day spa means. So all of our early marketing was it was me on TV because I really couldn’t afford to pay talent to do this. Yeah. And I didn’t I didn’t have any experience doing this. It was it really was out of sheer necessity. It was me saying, people often ask what happens when you come to a day spa. Well, let me show you. And then I had a cameraman following me around filming what what a facial looks like, what a massage looks like, like. And it really it identified us as the leader in the marketplace. And then, of course, everybody was opening something called a day spa. And it was a very exciting time. It was very exciting.

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So were you, like, the first in the US or first in your state that

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I was yes. Not definitely not first in the US. There were day spas in New York, in California, in Chicago, Atlanta, the bigger cities. But Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is not that big of a city. And, you know, it’s certainly I don’t live there anymore, but the reputation has changed. It’s now technology and medical. But at that time, it was known as a steel town, you know, where steel mills produce steel that went all over the world. It wasn’t like a haven of fashion. So it was really the first in the region, and that was that was exciting. That was very exciting.

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Okay. And then what happened after that? Did you expand it to expand it to multiple outlets, or So did you get into some other business?

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The day spa the first day spa location within six months. So I was in a five year lease. Learned about leasing. In my most recent book, I share some of these stories in-depth because if they happen they happen to everybody. These stories happen to everybody. And so many times, people don’t know what to do. You don’t wanna look like you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re the business owner. You know, you’re the go to person. So I put the information into a book so that people would really have a resource to do that. But so what happened, I instantly outgrew the space, And then I took another space, three thousand five hundred square feet, and grew up to thirteen employees. And I got involved with a local chapter of an international organization. And in that organization, I was really working, and it was fun. It was exciting. I was with other hairdressers, really the most talented people sort of in our region. And I got elected at the end of nineteen ninety four to be the chapter president. And this is another important lesson. I think, you know, we get so caught up in our business that we forget about the needs of our community. And when we are positioned as somebody who cares about the community, our business grows much more rapidly. So my first official event was I needed to produce and host an event, which I was going to learn how to do that. I mean, I I had some kind of an idea of how to do things, but, you know, not to this level. So I formed a committee of really the best and brightest names of Pittsburgh in the beauty industry, hairdressers, makeup artists, fashion photographers, fashion writers, you know, people like that. We got together and everybody was saying, oh, let’s let’s do this fabulous fashion show. And I said, you know, I’d really like to do a fundraiser for homeless children. There’s two thousand homeless children in the city of Pittsburgh who do not have a bed to call their own. I’d like to bring some awareness to that. And everybody looked at me like I had two heads, and they’re like, homeless children? And I said, I think that we could do something that shows the community how much hairdressers and people in the beauty profession care. And this is going to help lift our reputation and lift each and every one of our businesses. So who could say no to homeless children? Right? Everybody got on board. It was a it was a massive success. We got a ton of media coverage. We took a first floor and a beautiful shopping, like a boutique kind of mall, and it started getting a lot of national recognition. So the next year, fortunately, I was elected as the international president of the organization, the beauty organization that I was volunteering for. And that was exciting. I was thirty five years old, the first female, youngest and first female ever to preside over an American based beauty organization. And when you talk about not knowing what you’re doing, I was so scared. I’m like, how did this happen? I’m not from LA. I’m not from Manhattan. I’m from Pittsburgh, and I’m a female. And I think it was just this sort of let’s get it done attitude. Let’s look at the problems. Let’s deconstruct what’s not working, and let’s find a better way, and then let’s start doing that. And then let’s start having everybody do that. And this is when I really started figuring out systems are absolutely necessary in business. And when I think about it, when I speak about this, you know, there’s everything that goes on behind the scenes in a business. The bookkeeping, the marketing team, the interviewing, the training, the onboarding, the discovery well, the discovery call is actually the front stage stuff. But everything that goes on behind the scenes, every decision of what’s happening really must be made for what is going to happen when we interface, interact with the public, the potential clients, the clients. And all of those things must be really thought through and calculated in a way that trust is immediately established. And for people on both sides, we see, are we a fit or are we not? If we’re not a fit, they’re going somewhere else to do business, or we’re finding somebody else to engage in business with us. If we’re a fit, we’ve we’re setting the platform for a very valuable long term relationship just by being thoughtful about how things have happened up to that first point of interaction in a business. My very first official duty was I had to fly up to New York and there were twenty delegates from Japan. We were going to be doing a huge show in New York a few months later, and that would be my show as the international president. I would work with a team of people, but I would be emceeing the event and and I really got to put my flavor on it. So while I’m in Japan with this group of delegates really being so excited and so proud, it was in November. We have really bad winters in Pittsburgh. While I was there, unbeknownst to me, my youngest son was just turning four years old. My mother was in my house babysitting him while I was out of town. I fortunately had great support with my mother and mother-in-law for the travel. My older son was in was seven. He was in school. Our house caught on fire, and we lost everything. So the entire wardrobe that I had just, amassed to go travel for a year, our home, our clothes we were left with nothing to close on our backs. And I had to be back in New York a week later. It it was awful. I got a phone call from Peter, who was the regional director, and he said, we understand that you’ve had a crisis in your personal life. And if you can’t do the job, we’ll bring in the person who had the next highest amount of votes internationally, and Joseph will take over as the president. And, you know, there will be another election next year. And, Terrence, in that moment, as stressful as my personal life was, I mean, we lost everything.

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Yeah.

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I knew that for the rest of my career, it would be she couldn’t cut it. And what would that do for females who would come after me? If I was the first female to be elected into a really high position and I would I had to back down because of family stress, regardless of what that was, it really would set women back many, many years. I felt at least that was my belief, whether that would have happened or not, I don’t know, but the words were coming out of my mouth as I was thinking, I don’t know how I’ll do this. I said, no, no, no, I got this. I’ll be in New York next week. And we’re gonna grow the organization under my watch. It was like going through the meat grinder.

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Yeah. That must have taken so much to to say yes.

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It was crazy. We had to move into a temporary apartment. We had to, like, go shopping and buy food and clothes. And my friends were donating clothes to my children, like, giving us bags of clothes. And and not only did I need, like, pajamas and toothbrushes, you know, I needed to go out and buy stage clothes because a week later, I was going to be on a stage and being filmed and Yeah. You know, having to get it together. And so a few months into this this is really, I think, the answer to your question. A few months into this, we’re in this rental apartment. It’s very stressful. This is back in the days of fax machines. So I’ve got my big boxy computer and a fax machine, and it was my day off. It was like Monday was my day off, but really I didn’t have a day off. I was working nineteen hours a day and sleeping five hours a night, and my family was getting the the short end of the stick. My little boy kept saying, you know, mommy, mommy, mommy, and I kept saying, wait, honey, wait, honey, wait, honey. He climbed up on my lap and he put his hands on my face and looked at me and he said, mommy, you’re no fun anymore. And that was a defining moment for me. I thought, I have got to take my life apart and see what’s not working and get some balance going here. So I I mean, I really for the rest of that day, I started thinking, what is important in life? And I came up with these, like, five key areas that first and foremost, it’s our physical body and our physical space. Yeah. And then it’s relationships. Right? Because we’re built on relationships. And then it’s spirituality, and not necessarily religion, but believing that there is a higher purpose that we’re put on this earth for. And then it would be career. Are we happy in our careers? Are career fulfill fulfilling? Are we doing what we were put on this earth to do? And lastly would come money because money is definitely necessary, but money, I believe, is what just flows to us when those first four components are in place. So I started really looking, what does this look like in my life, in my family’s life? And I also I had the product company at this time. And I was also, while I was traveling, I was opening accounts for this, the product company that was a really fabulous manufacturer based over in Parma, Italy. And, you know, products in general were so competitive. The products in the beauty industry at that time were going through a massive transformation. We were shifting from things like, you know, Paul Mitchell and Nexus and Aveda and Sebastian and those products that had been only professional. You had to be licensed to use and sell those at that time. Now we’re being able to be sold to the general marketplace and we had built those reputations. So I thought, okay, I’ve got to do something to get myself in the door of these businesses. So I thought, what if I create a workshop? Now I had no idea how this would serve me in the future. And again, for anybody who’s listening, these little things we do to help ourselves along today will serve us for the rest of our lives. So I thought, what if I teach other salon owners how to have this sense of balance in their life that I’m having to create for myself? So this is back in the day. We you know, PowerPoint I don’t even know PowerPoint may have existed, but I certainly wasn’t using it. I was using a full chart. Right? And colored magic markers on the stage. And, yeah, it was it was fun. I so what I would do, I would meet with the salon and spa owners because by this time, spas were now starting to become a thing in the United States. I would meet with them the night before, friendly casual dinner, and I would ask them what the biggest problems were that they were having in their salons. And the number one theme was running on time. So I thought, okay, I’m gonna call this time management. I’m gonna because today it’s called the time class, and it’s really for all entrepreneurs. But I started teaching this little workshop for a half of a day to the staff and owners, and it was way more fun than anything else that I was doing. And this one day, I, you know, I’m, I’m in, in the class, and I start sharing just a little bit about the rocky relationship with my father that nothing I ever did was good enough. Nothing I ever did was like, I was never I was never enough for him. You know, the most primary relationships we have with our mother and father, And we start these belief patterns about ourself rather than, you know, we don’t know. They’re just being who they are. We think it’s true about us. And I started talking about how hard I had to overwork, you know, overcome that, putting myself in landmark education trainings and hiring coaches and reading all the books and doing the work to get over that. And a man started to cry in the audience. You know, it’s kind of disconcerting when you’re in the front of the room and somebody starts to cry. So I thought I could just keep going here. And afterwards, he came up and and said, could I hug you? And he said, I’m I’m I’m a gay hairdresser. My father has never accepted me. I didn’t think that I could think about myself in any other way than not good enough for him. Wow. Parents, in that moment, I thought this this is where I need to pay attention to what I’m doing because I’m managing a huge staff myself, and I’m now interacting with a lot of people. And it put me into a state of empathy and understanding and wanting to learn more so I could teach more. And that was really the beginning in nineteen ninety five of the workshop that I still teach today. And now, of course, it’s online and it’s six parts and it’s a big hefty thing. It’s no longer just a half a day workshop, but it’s life changing for people.

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I like it how this like business sprouted because you genuinely wanted to surf. I mean, you didn’t really say, oh, I’m gonna start this because I’m gonna make seven figures in revenue. You you started it because, hey, you saw a need in the market, and people needed it, and you just did it. And like you say, the rest naturally flows. The money naturally flows after you serve people and, you know, you have your other pieces in your life all balanced out.

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Yes. So I

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really like that.

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Thank you. Thank you for that. You know, there’s another really a big pivotal point in my career. So I put myself in a business growth conference in based out of Toronto, Canada called the Strategic Coach. And you your business had to be at certain financial markers and profit levels to do it. And it’s really a fabulous program. Yeah. And it

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was by the way.

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Are you? Oh, my gosh. Dan Sullivan’s such a great guy. So when I was in it, there was, like, I think I was the only female in the group. There were sixteen men and me. And so seventeen of us. And of course, I’m the only person coming from the beauty industry. I have, you know, at this point, my best spa had multiple locations, and we were really doing well, but I really wanted to see what was next. And I always thought it would be about opening more brick and mortar stores. And so we’re in a workshop one day and the question is, where are the bottlenecks in your business? And so I start thinking, you know, I had really been, like, humming along, putting the systems in place, and I thought the bottlenecks really are around the holidays. We had a huge gift certificate business. I really figured out that a spa is a wonderful solution to men for gifts. So all of my advertising, TV, radio, billboards, print, this was really right Internet wasn’t really a thing yet, but all of it was geared towards marketing gift certificates that were an easy purchase to men to buy around holidays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, dinner and summer sale. Yes. Everything that would make it would be an easy solution for men.

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Yeah. But we’re just so lazy to think about what to buy. Right?

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Right. So it’s so that all of the marketing was geared to that out interesting impression. You know? So those were my campaigns. And I I really saw the bottleneck was around the holidays. We would be so busy with men. This was, you know, points credit cards weren’t really even a thing yet then either. So it was a lot of cash. We would be so busy with men walking in with cash at the last minute, Christmas Eve. You know, my husband, we were now divorced at this time. He would have the kids at his family’s house. They’re from Italy. They were having the big Italian seven fish dinner. I would be working until 11:00 at night with men desperate running in on Christmas Eve to buy gift cards. And we had to stop our services because you can’t have women in robes and slippers when there’s so many men floating through the business. That was a bottleneck. So then I started thinking, what if you could go to my website and click a button and print out a BARC numbered gift certificate? So this was my idea this day in the course. So I bring it up to all the guys in my course. What do you think? This is my idea. You know, we’re all sharing our ideas. I love community is always so much more important. Like the collaboration of community. And everybody’s like, that would be a game changer for me. Oh, my God. I’ve felt like such a jerk so many years. I forget my wife’s birthday. It’s like our anniversary. That would be wonderful if I could print it out. It took me a year to find code writers. I came back to Pittsburgh. I was introduced to person after person. At that time, the guy who did Dell computers, who built their website, was based out of Pittsburgh. I met with him, and he said that kind of technology is just online printable gift certificates. That’s not gonna be here for many, many years. You know, it would cost you a hundred thousand dollars for me to start to piece this together. And I’m thinking, well, you know, my business was doing well, but that was still a hefty chunk of chain. So I was introduced to a group of kids from Carnegie Mellon University, such a great university based in Pittsburgh. And I told these kids what my vision was. I want people to come to my website, click a button, print it out, and they said, it doesn’t exist. Give us six months and twenty thousand dollars and we’ll build it for you. So Sweet. Oh, my gosh. It was so good. It was so good. And I was turned down by five code writers up until I met them saying that technology printable gift certificates will never, never happen. Might be ten years, but not now.

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Wow.

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So the night we went live on Christmas Eve, we had been testing it, and we were really bringing our necks to get it live before Christmas. The week leading up to that, I had set up that our phone number would come off of all advertising, and there would be just the message. You can purchase and print your gift card now from the convenience of your computer. Souicklaspa dot com. You would land on my website. You would click on it. I woke up Christmas morning. We went live at 6PM Christmas Eve. 6AM Christmas morning, we had done twenty one thousand dollars in sales and overnight online gift cards with the technology that nobody had ever used before. So it was very exciting. We spent the next couple of months sort of tweaking it, put out a couple press releases, and I started getting calls from around the country. Can I have this? So then I started another company called Spa Edge, and the advertising for that was like a computer screen with somebody’s hands holding out a gift certificate with a red bow on it. And it was very fun. If they contracted with me, I got five percent of every gift card they sold, and they got one hour of marketing with me a month because I had to learn how to market it for myself. Again, Terrence, specifically to your point, I wasn’t looking to start another company. It ended up transforming the beauty industry. You know, it it was really transformational. And a few years later, people caught up with me. I didn’t have it properly intellectual property protected, but it was good. I had a really good run and, you know, got a lot of recognition for that in the industry. But it was I was looking for a solution for my clients. And out of that industry transformation happened. And, you know, I started a whole new company, and it was I think this is the way that it works. It’s not about the goal. It’s about the positive fallout that happens when we’re working towards the goal where the really good juicy stuff happens.

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Yeah. That that is so cool. I think because, like, just listening to you, you just sprouted so many businesses, and it’s just all because you there was need in the marketplace, and you wanted to help people, and you just fulfilled it and grew into a great business.

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Yeah. It was and, you know, I know this sounds crazy and counterproductive. It was not ever about the money, but the money came. And so in the wellness industry in general, there’s a lot of thinking, I’m a healer, I don’t sell. But I employed, this was my industry, right? These were my employees. And a big part of how you have a healthy profit margin in most businesses are you have to sell products. I realized I had to get them through a money mindset that was holding them back. And that’s one of the courses that I teach right now money mindset moves, I start teaching it a couple years ago when I realized there’s a huge need in the marketplace for this. I was called in to to speak in a pitching platform, and I saw that when it was time to make the call to action, people really froze up. And I started thinking, what’s underneath of that? They’re afraid. They’re afraid to make their offer. That fear is linked to their money mindset. And it really is. So I even, I mean, during the downturn of two thousand and nine, we sailed through it beautifully. We lost a ton of our competition, and we came out ahead. The downturn of two thousand fifteen in the beauty industry, thirty nine percent of the business was gone by the end of that year. I had to close one of my locations, but the other locations were thriving. They were absolutely thriving, and it was scary. It went me caused me to go back and cut all the fat and really get my staff together and onboard and online. So it’s not like scary times don’t happen. They happen. But I’ve also, over the years, there’s been so many crazy tragic things that I developed this mindset that it’s never a failure. I never lose. I’m only seeing this as feedback as what to do or not do next. And if this isn’t working, and this isn’t making money, and this isn’t profitable, I gotta change very quickly. And if this is working, let’s do more. And most entrepreneurs don’t take the time to look at their business that way. And I learned this in these courses that I took over the decades. So that ability to be flexible and to pivot was really, really an important piece.

[00:31:29.40]
So Dorothy, there there seems to be this thing where, you know, there there are certain entrepreneurs out there who say, look, you should stick to your one thing and just stay the course. Right? And then this of course, this on the other side is, like, there’s people that jump on every opportunity, which I think entrepreneurs have this DNA to jump on every opportunity that that they see. Where do you find that balance, and how important is awareness in in this whole spectrum and deciding what to do?

[00:31:58.70]
Yeah. It’s look, there are entrepreneurs who are very enthusiastic, and I’ve coached many of them. They have a great idea and they start, and before it’s really to full fruition, they’ll jump off and start something else. And that is very difficult. It’s very difficult. It’s hard to get success in any business. I think this is how I was able to open multiple locations. And I years ago, I was asked to run a workshop for Duquesne University in Pittsburgh on how to open multiple locations of any business. And I thought, why are they calling on me to do this? You know, there’s other people that own franchises. And I thought, well, it’s the fundamentals. I’m gonna teach on the fundamentals. And the fundamental that I figured out was until one business could run profitably and successfully, whether I was there or not, Because the culture in the business is what happens when the owner or the manager or the boss, when they’re gone. When that business can run without me, then I can start a new business. So when I when it was time to start the gift certificate business, I had a management team. I had a director of operations. We had a pretty nice team. We all got together. It wasn’t like I went off on this past path by myself. We talked about what is it going to look like for a big chunk of my time focus to be over here when you need me over here. So we came up with a formula for who could rely on each other that really, you know, I was still the owner of the company. So any big decisions went by me, but I had to really prepare and effectively delegate a lot of what I was doing. And I think this is it. So many entrepreneurs or founders do believe we have to do it all. I would have lost my mind had I done that. Even like when my kids were little, I had a lot of pressure from family, a lot of pressure. Like you work, you travel, you’ve got little kids. It was not about quantity, but it was about quality. If I’m with them three and a half hours a night before I’m putting them to bed, Those three and a half hours have to be super focused, super engaged, where they really know who their mother is, and I really understand who my kids are. And the people who I brought in, and fortunately, I had my mother, my mother-in-law, then my mother had a stroke, and that’s a whole other chapter of a conversation. But I brought in really good people to take care of my kids who I vetted. We had, you know, young girls in the neighborhood who were valedictorian in their class, who spoke multiple languages, who did sports. You know, they were, they were my babysitters. I just, yeah, it was fun. And my kids had fun. They were having fun when I was at work.

[00:34:33.40]
Nice. Alright. Let’s talk a little bit about your coaching business. And, obviously, you started it because there was a need. And after that, how did you started growing the business? Because a lot of our listeners today would be coaches. So they’re probably wondering, how do I go go about growing a business once I have this, like, great product, great service, great coaching system? What do I do next to grow it? Do you have some tips there?

[00:34:59.19]
I I can give you a a little overview of how it happened for me and and share some tips that are really effective that that I share with my clients. So in nineteen, I’m sorry, twenty eighteen, I was invited to participate in a workshop in Los Angeles with Joel Bauer. I think we all know and love Joel. And I went, it was a free workshop. And I went there and I’m sitting there thinking this is a very expensive course, you know, am I going to do this? And I thought, well, I was challenging myself. I mean, my competition is always with myself. Right? So if I put this on a credit card, I’ve got to make enough money before that credit card bill is due to pay this credit card bill off. Like, that was my game I gave myself. So before lunch, I went and registered to get the price break and came back, sat down with a completely different energy, very serious because I had just invested. And over my career, I’d invested, I’ve invested over a million dollars in coaches and coaching programs because I didn’t go to college. So I always needed to learn and fortify myself. It’s paid back forty, fifty fold for me. So it’s the investment is really how far we’re gonna stretch ourselves. So I was stretching myself with this investment into Joel, both with time and money, and it worked out really well. I registered it for for his course. I went back to his course in October, and I started really seeing the thing that I love to do the most was speaking. It was more fun for me than owning the businesses, and I love my staff. I I loved it. But what I really was feeling the energetic connection with was people in the audience who we could relate to each other and they could see some possibility for themselves. So thing as a coach, I mean, I’m speaking to all the coaches right now. Hear what I’m saying. Coaching is about allowing people to see what’s possible for themselves that they couldn’t see before you were in front of them. So that’s really

[00:36:50.50]
like that.

[00:36:51.30]
That’s it. And so I started writing my first book on the airplane on the way home. This was at the end of October. I came back and I had a company meeting. This was right before the last we were in the election process. There was a lot of negativity. My staff was not agreeing with each other, and we never had that before. So I called a staff meeting, got everybody together, had to get them back on track, profitable, making money, loving it so I could now focus on this book I’m about to do. I do the book four months after I started writing it, found an editor, got a guy Colin Campbell from from Joel’s group, got the book out there, went to best seller, and immediately I started getting calls and my price went up. My stage price went up. So that was awesome. People would be in the audience and reach out to me. And at this time, I also hired a coach right after I did Joel’s program. I hired a coach, Jeff Faldalen, who he and I often coach courses together now. But he started saying to me, you need to start a coaching practice. And I was saying, what would I even coach on? I mean, I know how to run a business, but he said, you’re already coaching. You’ve been coaching staff for decades.

[00:37:59.19]
Yeah.

[00:37:59.69]
How do you think you get them to do what they do? You coach them. You coach them up to their greatness. And I’m like, no. No. No. No. And it’s the how the how it very first happened was I was doing a live on Instagram that was a challenge from him. I want you to Jeff, my coach at that time, this is, you know, twenty eighteen, said, I want you to go live for thirty days on Instagram and just talk about what you’re dealing with. And so I had somebody reach out to me and say, What does it look like to work with you? And I was like, what what do I do now? This is like a coaching client. And then I’m speaking on stages and people were reaching out to me on LinkedIn. So I wrote up a set of questions for a discovery call. I gave myself a price. I totally made the price up. I totally made it up. Like, you know, I’ve got at that point, I had thirty, you know, forty four years of experience now. At that time, it was, like, thirty eight years of experience. I’ve put a lot of money into myself. This is this is a lot. So I put a price out there and I did it with a money back guarantee that if you don’t see a result in in four weeks, I’ll give you one hundred percent of your money back. And in four weeks, people were like, can I sign a year contract with you? You know, we’re things are changing here. So there’s two components to it. There’s the emotional component of what a coach has to do because the very moment that you start to coach somebody, every issue that’s unresolved in your life is going to be presented to you on a silver platter. And

[00:39:26.69]
Oh, really?

[00:39:27.50]
If you haven’t worked through it or you don’t have a backdoor to go through, it’s it it just causes a lack of confidence. So it’s it’s really getting clear on what are your issues in life. I had to get over my father’s story. I had to stop being a victim about that. I had to realize he was who he was. And if he didn’t set this super high bar by telling me I was never enough, I would have never worked so hard. When I shifted that story to I’m not enough to wow, he thought I was so big that he just kept dangling the carrot for me to work harder. I saw my whole life differently. That was a huge breakthrough. So so the first part of this is for anybody who wants to start a coaching practice, the things that trigger you, the things that trigger you in other people or relationships, things you see on TV or whatever, If it triggers you, get to work on those things in yourself because you’re only noticing it in the other person because it’s unhealed in yourself. Otherwise, you go, isn’t that interesting? I don’t like it. I don’t agree. And you move on. When we get emotional, there’s work to do in ourselves. And that is, I think, a really important piece that a lot of coaches might not ever be told. You know, here, you’ll we’ll see it all the time. Buy my coaching program and get a hundred leads in a month. Well, then what do I do when I get a client and I’m in a session with a client and I don’t know what to do with them? So you gotta get really clear for yourself. The second point is come up with a good set of questions that you’re going to ask in the discovery call to make sure that you are a good fit. I mean, my questions are pretty intense and I give people if people want a discovery call with me, get this back to me in seven days because I want you thinking about it for seven days because they’re pretty deep comprehensive questions. If somebody comes to me and says, I don’t have a business and I want to be making a million dollars coaching by the end of this year. There’s a really rare chance that in one year with no practice, no business at all, that you’re gonna get to a million dollars in sales. Now could you get there in a couple million in a couple years rather? Yes. Yes. I have a client right now, started out with brick and mortar stores, really pushed her off the cliff to start coaching two and a half years ago. She got to buy six figures this year. This year, she’s already almost at seven figures. Same thing as me. I don’t I don’t wanna start a coaching program. I just and it’s like, yeah, there comes a point where that’s just what you need to do because there’s nothing left in business you can do but help other people. So it’s getting, you know, getting clear on your own stuff, creating a very good set of questions that weed people out because I learned that pretty quickly. A lot of people want the discovery call and then they’re tire kickers. And and I that first year, I spent a lot of, you know, sixty and ninety minute discovery calls with people who really were not gonna be a fit for me or I was not a fit for them. Yeah. Then come up with your price. You know, what is your market? And if it is a comfortable price, people aren’t going to work so hard because it’s comfortable. If that price is a little bit of a stretch, they’re gonna work a little bit harder. If that price is the I’ll use the example of the client who’s now a very successful coach. When I said to her, we’ll meet for an hour once a week, four times a month. Months that have five weeks, we don’t. That’s a week off. It will be twelve hundred and fifty dollars. So this is six years ago. That was more than she was paying in rent for her business, and she’s like, I can’t afford that. And I said, I promise you that if at the end of four months, you’re not producing a result, I will give you I’ll put it in writing. I’ll send you an email. I will I don’t even think we had Venmo then it was PayPal. I’ll PayPal you back. You’re twelve hundred fifty dollars plus the fees. And she said, really? Would you? And I said, yes. You gotta do the work. You don’t do the work. You know, you’ve got to work as hard on your business as I’m going to work on you to have a good business. So I came up with that twelve it’s, you know, it’s now my price is higher because the results I see or my clients see are really phenomenal. But it was scary for me to come out with that price. That was more than I was paying my coach at that time. So I immediately called him and said, hey, I have to give you a raise because I can’t be making more than my coach. And it was pretty funny. So come up with your price. And there are four areas. I’ve never spent a penny to get a coaching client, and I’ve got a waiting list of people waiting to coach with me. They come from four places. They’ve read one of my books and they reach out to me. They’ve seen me speak on a stage and they reach out to me. We’ve been in a group where people see me produce results in a group and wanna figure out how to do that. So they’ll hire me or they’re referred to me by somebody who I’ve already produced results with. So those four areas. So for anybody who’s watching or listening to this right now, really think about where is your market? Where is your market? If you don’t have a book yet, I would encourage you to think about writing a book. The book should be a book that is a massive solution. You know, when I came out with this book, this was my second book. It’s a little book, Conflict Revelation, right? I was invited to run a workshop on employee retention for a chain, a restaurant chain in the United States, a fairly big chain, at their annual conference. And it was a referral. Somebody in there saw me speaking online somewhere and referred them in, and I got the invitation to do that. And then COVID happened and it was shut down and they were canceling they were canceling it. This comes back to the why we do what we do that’s not linked to money. So everybody was so, you know, sad during COVID. We couldn’t get together. So I called the director of education of this company, and I said, you know, clearly, we’re not doing the annual conference. Can you set up a room and and get fifty of your GMs in that room, the general managers of your franchises in that room? I’ll come in and run the workshop for free. And he said, you would do that? I said, people need a connection. I need a connection. You know, their stages aren’t open right now. So I go in, and I have my, you know, my workshop in my head. I’ve got my PowerPoint and my laptop there, and everybody’s socially distanced in the room. And right before I’m ready to start, the CEO walks in, and I’m like, oh my god. I knew who he was, but this is like the CEO. And I’m like, I could feel myself like, oh my god. What if I’m not good enough? You know? What if what if this isn’t good? What if he thinks I’m this is crazy or something? And I’m like, you know what? I’ve got slides here. Thank God I’ve got slides. I can keep myself on track here because I was getting way in my head. So I run the workshop. The workshop is over. He stands up. He comes up on the stage. And it wasn’t actually a stage. It was like at the front of a little bit of an elevated room. And he says, these are things we never talk about, resolving conflict in the service industry before it becomes an issue. Dorothy, if you have a book on this, I’ll buy one for everybody in the system. And I said, oh, I’m writing one. And I went home that day and started writing this book, And I finished it in two weeks, got it out. This book launched the week of the George Floyd in America. George Floyd was a very dark chapter in in our history.

[00:46:38.80]
Yeah. Yes. Yes.

[00:46:40.00]
Where everybody was online looking for books on conflict. And here’s my book launching, went to best seller and got me invitations to speak in platforms on conflict that I never would have thought about speaking with that. What’s the common theme here, Terrence? I turned a no, no conference, into an opportunity, not for money. Don’t pay me. I just wanna come and connect. I wanna serve your manager. And I need the personal connection because right now, I’m not even allowed to walk outside of my house without a mask on my face. You know? So and out of that came this. When we stay open to possibility and we get ourselves out of our head so I’m gonna talk about this for one second, like, the head energy and the heart energy. The head energy is our analytical mind. When that CEO came in, I went into my analytical mind. Oh, my God. How do I win? How do I make myself look good? How do I do this? I’ve done enough self development work that I knew I had to like take a breath, drop my shoulders, and tell myself, drop down into your heart and deliver with love. Connect to the audience with love. It can’t be about how they’re judging me. How they’re judging me is on them. It’s not on me. You know, we’re always so worried what people think about us. Like, we’re not powerful enough to make people feel certain ways. They feel the way they feel because of the way their life is. So why two of us could go to a restaurant and have the best steak in town. One person writes a five star review. The other person said, I didn’t like it. It’s all the filters that we bias our information through.

[00:48:10.30]
True. Wow. That was yeah. That’s fascinating. And, yeah, I really enjoyed that, Dorothy. I think there was so much today in this interview, and I think if people are listening, they should listen again. I myself would like to go back and listen to this interview because I think there’s so many gems for business growth and even personal development. I think that’s great. Thank you so much, Dorothy.

[00:48:30.50]
Thank you, Terrence. That’s it’s really thank you. I mean, I I hope the audience is served from the message. Just thank you for the opportunity to to be with you right now.

[00:48:40.00]
I just want to know now that people are listening and they say, I really want to connect with Dorothy. I wanna find out more about the programs and the books. How do they find out more about you?

[00:48:50.19]
Thank you so much. Yes. There’s a few places. On Instagram, it’s streamline success, all one word, streamline success. On LinkedIn, it’s dorothy andreas, d o r o t a n d r e a s. On TikTok, it’s dorothy andreas, and my website is streamlinesuccess dot com. And you can reach out to me from any one of those places. And there’s some free giveaways over on the website. Things that three things to think about as you’re getting ready to scale your business. So thank you.

[00:49:20.50]
Alright. And your books, can people Google your name and find them on Amazon?

[00:49:25.50]
Yes. If you go to Amazon and Google Dorothy Andreas books, you’ll find three books, Streamline Success, Conflict Revelation, and then Build a Million Dollar Beauty Business, which really could be applied to any service based business. I wrote it for the beauty industry because that’s my background, but it’s really a great service based business growth book too. So, yes, on Amazon, Dorothy Andreas books.

[00:49:50.30]
Alright, guys. Now that you’ve heard it, make sure you take action and hook up with Dorothy. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:49:58.50]
Thank you.