Your Three Most Important Hires

I know this because I was guilty of it too. We gravitate to what we know, and what we know is inside the treatment room. But what happens inside a treatment room is rarely what grows a business. The two things that grow a business are finance and marketing and you can’t convince me otherwise. That is why the first three people who genuinely grow your business are not the ones holding a beauty license. 

Hire One: A Bookkeeper / CPA 

You do not actually know how much money you are making. I promise you don’t. 

You might say “I bring in $10K a month.” That is your top line, before you deduct your rent, your backbar supplies, and the adorable expenses that are necessary to operate, like your Gloss Genius subscription, the tweezers you keep losing, and that $5,000 hydraulic bed. If you cannot tell me what you actually profit from every Brazilian wax or hydrafacial without scrambling for a bank statement, you are guessing. And guessing is how you end up writing the IRS a check with one hand and Googling “is bankruptcy bad” with the other. 

A bookkeeper tracks every transaction. Income in. Expenses out. All charges are categorized correctly so a business meal is logged as 50% deductible and office snacks are logged as 100%, because not all consumables are deducted the same way. A competent bookkeeper produces an accurate Profit and Loss statement, the document that tells you each month what your business actually profited. 

A CPA reads what the bookkeeper produces and tells you what to do about it. She is the strategist who looks at the numbers and says, “You are on track to make $100K this year, which means you will owe $20K. Here are three legal ways to drop that to $5K before December 31.” Your CPA can only do that if you have updated monthly P&Ls. Without one, your CPA is being handed a shoebox and asked to build a house. 

Sometimes the CPA is also the bookkeeper. Sometimes they are separate people. For a solo operator, the combo should run $150 to $400 a month depending on the complexity of your business. Yes, they cost money. They also save you four times what they charge, so do that math. 

But go ahead and pretend you do not need to know your numbers. Just don’t tag me in the April 14 Instagram story where you’re “processing things.” 

Hire Two: A Mentor (Pay Them) 

When Facebook was facing a tough patch early in its history, Mark Zuckerberg talked to Steve Jobs. When Bill Gates had issues, he called Warren Buffett. Mentorship is linked to success, with 92% of small business owners crediting it for growth, and mentored businesses seeing average revenue growth of 83%. 

In my own ecommerce business, I paid a mentor $2,500 for two hours of her time. She suggested one small move and it grew my business by 20%. Worth every dollar. 

Asking for help is not weakness. It is how you 10x success. Every successful person you admire in this industry has done it. They asked. They paid. They sat at someone else’s feet for an hour and walked away with a year of clarity. 

If you want to figure out social media, you find a creator whose content style you could actually replicate (this part matters, because what they do is what they will teach you to do) and pay them for a consultation. If you want to fix your studio operations, you find a studio owner doing it well and pay them. 

The mentor does not have to be famous. They just have to be three steps ahead of you and willing to talk. Most are. 

Hire Three: A Virtual Assistant 

I found a virtual assistant on Upwork. She is based overseas and costs roughly $8 an hour, works on a flat schedule, and has never asked me about benefits. She edits my content, schedules my social media, organizes my Google Drive, hunts down mystery charges on my P&L, and replies to basic emails using templates I wrote once. 

I do not micromanage her. The whole point of the system is that she works independently. We communicate in two places. A Google Sheet is the bible. If it is not in the sheet, it does not exist. A Google Drive holds the files. We have one 15-minute check-in every two weeks. That is the entire relationship. 

Before you hire a group of VAs, realize this: you cannot delegate to a VA if you do not have systems. I can hand my VA a Google Doc with 50 quote ideas and 20 photos and she will produce a month of static social posts in the time it takes me to fold one load of laundry. But only because I wrote the doc and built the system first. 

If you cannot afford a VA yet, build the systems anyway. The day you can afford her, the handoff is already done. 

The Pattern 

Your bookkeeper and CPA tell you what is happening with your money and how to keep more of it. Your mentor tells you what to do next so you stop reinventing wheels other people already finished building. Your VA buys back the hours to complete tasks you’ve been avoiding. 

There are only two things required for success in hiring these three: patience, and being rooted in reality. 

Your team members will only hold themselves to the standard you hold them to. If you have high standards, they will meet them. If you have low standards, they will find a basement under your basement. You already know this as a service provider. If you’re a waxer, you already know exactly what a good waxer looks like because you have enough industry knowledge to separate the bad from the good from the exceptional. 

That same baseline knowledge is the price of admission to every hire on this list. You cannot hold your accountant accountable if you don’t know basic tax principles. You cannot evaluate your VA’s output if you don’t know that a static post takes roughly 6 minutes to build, not 60. Your first accountant will almost certainly disappoint you, and that is not her failure. You hired a tax professional, not a tax professor. She expected you to walk in with baseline knowledge, and if you don’t have it, she’s not going to hold your hand. Same with a VA. If you don’t invest time training her on your brand, your voice, and your systems, she will mirror your effort exactly. Pay attention to that. 

This brings us to patience. You have to be patient enough to learn what you don’t know. Patient enough to fire the wrong person without dramatically declaring you’ll never hire a VA again because it doesn’t work. The first hire of anything rarely works out. My current VA has been with me for four years. Finding her took twelve VAs in two years. That is the actual ratio. Plan for it. 

The sooner you accept that growing a beauty business is more about the people behind the scenes than the people on the schedule, the sooner you grow the business instead of just the team. 

Bio: Jane Pham is the founder of Lady Peng (ladypeng.com), an education-forward B2B supply company for licensed body waxers, and the owner of Ted D Bare Waxing Studio (teddbare.com) in San Jose, a seven-figure brick-and-mortar known for its 15-minute Brazilian. She is best known in the industry for translating the boring side of business (SEO, taxes, profit margins) into language beauty professionals will actually sit through.