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BUSINESS
CRAFTING A CULTURE OF GENEROSITY By Elle Wilson
As the world is changing, so must we. Often there are parts of us that love change and other aspects that fear it. That is SO normal. If change is looming, I love to take a moment to look back and find a time when it was exhilarating. I take this feeling and move, without overthinking, into the future, guns blazing. It makes for a smooth transition into the next. Overthinking is so overrated, right? With a world that is going through a huge acceleration right now on so many different levels, including uncertainty, we need to find ways to stay not only connected to our clients, but to build something that meets more of their needs. It’s time to open up our minds and look at beauty business with new and fresh eyes. Let’s look at what we are probably already creating but just not with a level of awareness or deliberateness, yet. And therefore, we are not using it as a powerful resource in our businesses that we want to build and grow for years to come. Culture crafting is our topic today. We will pull this powerful and insightful skill apart and really get to understand it. Its power, its rewards and finally, its ability to build a great and very profitable brand/business. Whether we are culture crafting for our internal teams or our clients and prospects, we need the codes to do this really well and enter the new digital world of beauty. Now let’s look at the 72
Beauty Biz Year 13 Issue 6
foundational code that works every time without fail. Our clients and prospects are often seen as frequent visitors to our salon and women or men that we communicate with via social platforms. We may nurture them via email campaigns but ultimately we see them as separate to each other. Now, I am going to challenge you to go way beyond that and embrace what is really happening in the beauty industry. Sure, you’re a salon owner with clients, but you are so much more; you are a culture crafter. You are building a community, a tribe of women or men that are like-minded, adore the values of your brand and most definitely, think you are the ant’s pants. They may even refer clients to you, but did you know that the fastest way to create an amazing community is to connect people to each other? I love to look at it this way. Clients love to belong
and whether they belong to your Facebook group or email list, they truly feel as though they are coming home each time they enter your space. They know the moment they leave, they will feel better and often look fabulous. The beauty industry offers us the opportunity to explore often very dear and intimate relationships with our clients. We get to help them with some of their most challenging problems and help them feel better about themselves. However, we don’t often go the entire way and connect them with each other. To belong and feel a part of something bigger than ourselves is what culture crafters understand to be a deep, unconscious need of each human being. The value is in the culture crafter having awesome values and a love for humanity and then you have something so very special to build on. It is where all the magic happens. Having built several international communities from ground zero, I realized there are codes; codes that make communities work. Often you will find that some communities don’t really
