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Welcome to the glam life podcast, where we empower and inspire beauty professionals to take their careers to the next level. Your host, Victoria, is a certified business coach with over a decade of experience in the beauty industry, helping countless beauty professionals start and grow successful businesses. Now she's sharing her knowledge and expertise with you, whether you're just starting out in the beauty industry or looking to take your business to new heights.
This podcast is for you, covering topics like community management, branding, and much more. So join us on this journey to build the beauty business of your dreams. Hey, how's it going? Welcome to the glam life podcast.
I'm Victoria Racca. You might know me as Victoria Glam if you follow me over on Instagram, which you totally should. You can also follow this podcast on Instagram at the glam life podcast.
And today I have an extra crazy special guest. I say this like every week. I've got to come up with something new.
My friend who is not only an educator and a mentor and a colleague of mine, but is someone who still receives rave reviews from people I know. My friend, Emily Joy. Hey, Emily.
Thanks, girl. So great to reconnect with you. Yes.
How are you? How are things? Oh, you know, I'm happy spring is here. I picked the only color in my wardrobe other than black just for you to show. You look like poison ivy today.
That's what my husband said. I'm like, yeah, that's what I was going for. Looking good.
Thank you. The last time you and I chatted was just before your wedding, actually. How's married life? Is it? Yeah.
Well, you know, my husband and I basically waited 10 years to get married. We were engaged for 10 years. I didn't unfortunately have the wedding that I had hoped for.
Oh, stop. It was just one. Thank you.
It was stunning. You guys, you don't even know. So this was during like COVID times.
It was live streamed in like a Spanish castle at night with candles. Thank you. Yeah, it ended up turning out pretty good for planning it two weeks ahead of time.
We just did it on a whim, but, you know, it probably saved, I don't know, 30, $40,000, so we bought a house instead of a wedding. So it's probably the best thing. It was beautiful.
So Emily and I met, um, because we are both permanent makeup education coaches. So we both teach permanent makeup and we coach people on how to build market and scale themselves. So that's how we originally met, but Emily has actually an amazing resume under her belt.
So you started in the corporate world. You worked with Anastasia Beverly Hill. Hey, commercials suck.
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I did before she was the honest, I mean, she was Anastasia soiree still. So, um, you know, back when like the pencils weren't wind up, they were like, you know, the manual Pepto-Bismol pink pencils, she was just expanding outside of Beverly Hills. And I think.
She picked little me because I didn't have a lot of experience. Um, so I was, I guess, shapeable, but yeah, we, I was taught brow shaping brow design from the queen herself. That's amazing.
And then you managed large teams because didn't you run spas inside of hotels also? I did. I was in Michigan working for Anastasia and I pretty much wanted out of Michigan since I was like six years old. So I had set my mind on, I'm going to someplace warm.
I want to be in a big city. I ended up in Miami and I could not find a fricking job for the love of God. I mean, I, I don't, I don't speak Spanish.
I get sunburned. I'm like, what am I doing in fricking Miami? What have I done? But my dad was sort of like, I told you, so that was a bad move. And I was so determined to prove him wrong that I applied for a spa manager position at the four seasons on Brickell.
And I kind of told a little white lie on my resume and I got the job. Well, they obviously want a management experience. And so I considered my, my management, my little counter for Anastasia management experience.
I was only managing myself. So I was way over my fucking head. Wait, am I allowed to manage me? Am I allowed to swear? Yeah.
Okay, good. Um, so I pretty much was like, thank God for Google. Cause this was, I don't know when, but I pretty much taught myself how to run a corporate business the first week I got the job because pretty much as soon as I sat down, they're like, we need profit and loss statements from 2006.
And I'm like, what is, what is a P and L? Like, I didn't even know. Let me figure that out. And so, um, I was sort of like a do or die situation and I was so determined to prove my dad wrong that I, without them knowing, I didn't have expense.
I figured it out and survived. And, um, I went from four seasons, Miami managing a team. I put in a transfer.
I ended up in DC. I managed the Ritz Carlton spa as well as the bliss spot, the W hotel, which is right next to the white house. And then I just got sick of corporate life.
Yeah. Missed being like the hero, you know, like brows were so amazing. Like I could just touch someone for 15 minutes and like change their life, you know, but this was a time where like brows brow tattooing was still a little like, Ooh, like only your weird aunt had it, you know? Yeah.
And so I remember telling myself like, I can't make money doing brows. It just, I won't be able to. And it was literally like the heavens opened up and we're like, Oh yes, you can.
So I took the first microblading training in the United States from Bronco Bobbitt before it was e-brows. And that wasn't in English. No.
Two days over carpet. Um, he didn't even have like, you know, his own pigments now he's got like tools and I mean, I think they've been making like hair extensions now. Like it was not anything like that.
Um, we were taught with color source. I was the only person in the class that didn't have any tattoo experience. Oh yeah.
They probably shouldn't have even let me in, to be quite honest. That's the story of your life. And yeah, Emily, she can't get in that room.
Get in that room. Yeah. You know what? I don't believe in fake until you make it.
I believe in believe it till you achieve it. That's a good one. That's cute.
I was trying to believe it, but I was like, Oh shit. I'm way over my head. Hey friends.
If you're looking for some kind of coaching or guidance in your business, that's not going to break the bank and doesn't cost $10,000. I have a couple of different offers for you. Head over to victoriaglam.com backslash consulting and let me know what you want to work on.
I'll give you some options. And luckily I sat by an angel named Marie Jenkins. And do you know Marie? No.
Okay. She's my mentor. She's been my mentor for 10 years.
And she's literally like a walking encyclopedia. She's a nurse. She's an aesthetic nurse.
She's been doing permanent makeup for a gazillion years. And any question, anything she always knows the answer. And she was like, girl, you, you need more, you need help.
So she urged me to go back to fundamental school in New Jersey. And as you know, New Jersey is pretty strict when it comes to fundamental regs. And then it started to finally like click a little bit.
But, um, yeah, that was the very beginning of PMU. That's amazing. So, and then since then you've scaled, of course, you opened Dollistic in DC where you were living at the time you had a big team.
COVID hit and you guys said, let's reevaluate. And this is when you moved to San Antonio, right? I don't even know that I would call it reevaluate. It was like, holy shit.
Like everything was going so great. And I don't know about you, but like I was busting my ass. Like I'm working every Saturday.
I'm like an eyebrow factory, double booking six clients a day with the help of an assistant. I mean, we were like, we were like the girls of brows in the Northeast. And we were making loads of money.
I was paying loads of money to be in the DC area too, though. You know, my overhead was really high and we didn't know if we were going to be shut down for five years or five weeks or five months. And all I knew was like, well, shit, if my husband's restaurant shut down and my business is shut down, all I can think of is all the bills we have to pay, you know, and rent in DC is not inexpensive.
Um, so we were like, oh God, you know, we'd just been approved to purchase a home in 2019 and we were actively looking to purchase our million dollar fixer upper and, you know, McLean, Virginia. And we kind of had this aha moment where we're like, shit, we need to go on unemployment. But if we go on, if we need to go, if we go on unemployment, we're going to go shopping for a million dollar home to we need unemployment.
Yeah. And, and we knew if we went on unemployment, that's it. We're going to start from ground zero.
We're going to have to, you know what I mean? So I'm like, we need to buy a home that's cheap now. Yeah. And so we were just like, we'll figure it all out when we're allowed to reopen.
And your, your son's name is Waylon, right? I have a lot of Felipe's in my life. My husband's Felipe, my son is Felipe. And so is my father-in-law.
So he's Felipe the third. I don't know where he got Waylon, but I dig it. Oh, you know why? Because Felipe the third and my son, Waylon have the same birthday, but I mixed it up thinking they had the same name.
They're born October 3rd. Yeah, that's right. I taught her to forget that.
Oh, they're the same, same year. Uh, I don't think so. I think you're guys older than mine.
How, what year? Yeah, mine came in 17. Okay. Yeah.
As a statement, I'm going to have a 10 year old this year, girl. Wild. I know he was 10.
So he was five or six at the time. He was, and that was another thing. They were like, he's got to start kindergarten, right? Online.
I'm like, oh, hell to the no, right? So we're looking like, okay, where's cheap and where, who didn't get the COVID memo? Florida and Texas. Right. And they were, that's, that was another big thing we wanted to make sure.
Cause he's an only child, like this child needs socialization or he's going to, you know, end up super weird. Like he needs to be around other kids for sure, especially at that age. And so we just literally took a leap of faith and we were like Packer sold all of our furniture within a week, packed up our shit, put some signs on the studio.
Bye. That's wild. How fast it was a crazy time.
That's really crazy. So, but that wasn't forever, right? Because at some point COVID was done and it was time to get back to work. You still had a handful of employees who were like, what do we do? So I had five employees at that time, other than myself.
And it was always the understanding when we were forced to shut down that we were going to go back to work after we were allowed to, right? Let me, let me ask you this while we're on the subject, you are super good at contracts. You come from the corporate world. Can you please let anyone listening? Who's thinking of hiring or has ever hired? No.
What is the difference? How do you know if you have employees or if they are contractors, meaning if they could have gotten unemployment like you, or if you're responsible for opening back up for them or what? Well, I'll tell you what, this is the, one of the biggest mistakes I see in the beauty industry, in the tattoo industry is misclassification of employees and contractors, and you don't get to fricking decide the IRS decides what they are. Now you can decide what is best for your business. So for example, if you feel that you want some level of control over what your employees are wearing, how they're treating your clients or your students, or, you know, have any sort of behavioral control, they need to be employees.
Okay. You want to control their schedule, how often they work, when they work. That's an employee.
A contractor essentially is someone you're just basically like the landlord. Yeah. You don't get to tell them what tools they use.
You don't get to tell them what pigments they use. You don't need to tell them what apps they have to download. A contractor is someone who is independent.
That's why it's called independent contractor. Also a 1099. That's the same thing as an independent contractor.
They're independent of you. Right. So, so if you just want someone to come in and rent a chair, a bed, a room, and not have to worry about managing them.
And that's a contractor. So, um, or a booth renter in the salon. Term.
And I think a lot of people's first question when they hear that is, yeah, but she works in my building under my name. So people say, oh, that's a contractor. People don't think that like clients will think, well, she works for dollistic.
So then they want to say, well, if it's under my name, I want to be able to say like how, what the business standards are, but that's illegal. It depends. There's a lot more there.
I would have a lot more questions for this person. Okay. Um, yeah.
And that's why for me, I, I'm, I'm a control freak. I want my goals. Like if, if one of my clients goes to see another girl, I don't want them to be like, well, you know, when I got it done with Emily, it didn't hurt because she's using, you know, a different numbing than you experience.
She's using gel sister, the best numbing on the market. That was your cue. I wanted it to be a streamlined experience.
I wanted, you know, to have some level of control when my, you know, employees were coming and going. And I want it to be, you know, a cohesive girl party. Yeah.
Right. Um, and so I knew for, for sure, employees were the way to go, especially because I had to train those girls. I mean, I learned back when microblading, nobody knew what it was.
Right. And so I was the only person they could learn it from at the time. And so I also wanted to make sure that I protected my business because of that, because I didn't want someone to, oh yeah, I'll be your employee.
Let me learn all this shit and then move across the street and compete. Right. So I, you know, paid an attorney, a lot of money to come up with employment agreements to protect my business and my trade secrets.
And, you know, now I don't know that that would be enforceable because you can learn microblading everywhere now, even online, which I don't recommend. Not for your first time, for sure. So when you're coming back from this world-class mindfuck of COVID, you have employees, so people who are dependent on you and you have to make decisions, not just for you and Jose and Felipe and Felipe, but also for five other girls.
Yeah. I mean, so basically the story was that we closed on our home and the very next day, governor Northam in Virginia reopened. And I called my attorney and she was like, you got to go back tonight.
Because if you don't go back, your landlord could say that you abandoned your business. You could be a lawsuit, la, la, la, la. And I'm like, oh shit.
So, and at that point I had donated my gloves and my mask, like the hospital. And, you know, I don't know if you remember, but like masks were like a hundred dollars on eBay and buying things. It was like so stressful.
And there was also no government oversight. They had suggestions in Virginia that for close contact procedures, basically saying like, you need to limit your close contact. I mean, looking back on it, it was so such a mindfuck.
All of it was so, it was like a fever dream. None of it made sense. Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's still a little PTSD because it's like a little blurry in my brain. I think a lot of it out. I had just had a baby.
It was a lot. It was a lot. Oh my gosh.
That's right. You know? So essentially I was like, okay, I want to protect my staff. I want to make sure everybody feels safe enough to return because that was the plan.
Everyone was going to return. We had a thousand clients who had paid us 50% deposits. Waiting, waiting for us to reopen.
They were so excited. I mean, our phone was blowing up. You know, and everybody felt so ugly because they like couldn't get their nails done and couldn't, they, they could not wait for their eyebrow appointment and they knew we were allowed to reopen.
Yeah. So I started looking at like, okay, the, the, the government's not telling me how to protect myself. So like, what's, what are the dentists doing? So I'm like on the ADA website.
Yeah. I mean, their mouths are open, you know, like they're like close contact, similar, much the same thing. Except we're not deemed essential.
Right. Which I, you know, the second I could vote against my governor, I did solely out of a bloodthirst because he called me non-essential. Oh, I'm not essential.
Neither are you John? Yeah. I have a pretty valid argument for, I don't know anything else about you, but I know that you physically insulted me, not essential. So long story short, I went and I took one week of clients wearing, you know, basically a hazmat suit, nose plugs, earplugs, mouth plugs, butt plugs, fricking every orifice was plugged.
Okay. I had a welder shield on. I have evidence heavy because I was, we were all, I knew my girls were scared.
So I then drafted a well, you terrified them, need some PPE out of gloves, out of masks, head to brow sister.com. We've got your back. Welcome to the moon. I mean, you know, I wanted to make sure that they felt I did my due diligence and, you know, protecting them protocols.
I mean, we made everybody drop their person. I mean, it was crazy. So I welcomed everybody back to work.
That's what my attorney said to do. Welcome back to work. Cause you know, they were on unemployment.
Yeah. Here are the new safety protocols. I can't wait for us to get started.
And every single one of them, but one sent me an email resigning. And then I thought, well, well, I don't know. I mean, and I can't judge them, but I remember we were also getting inflated unemployment.
I think that they got some really bad advice and I think that they felt ashamed that they didn't come back. And I don't judge them. A lot of them had little babies and, you know, I'm sure it was great to have a paid vacation with your baby and, you know, do all these things.
I wish them the best, but I didn't have a choice, you know, I would have loved to stay home with my baby. You know, but I say that all the time to people who come and work at the microblading Institute. I say, listen, it's at the end of the day, nobody cares about the wedding as much as the bride.
Everybody else is here to have a party, but I'm married now it's legal for me. So if the door is closed tomorrow, you get another job. Yeah.
If the door is closed tomorrow, I go bankrupt. Yeah. Yeah.
And it was a real, you know, and back then that was the only time like my attorney and my accountant and my banker, like nobody knew what to tell me. Yeah. They were given it was unprecedented, right? That was the big term.
Everyone kept saying, they thought I should do this. So I, you know, I really believe in like going above and beyond. So I'm like, I'm gonna, I'm just going to do my best.
And if I can show that I did my best, then hopefully nobody's going to try to sue me or come after me or, you know, whatever. And, um, I had just moved to Texas. Well, my attorney suggested that it may, that the landlord may try to come after me if I, if I abandoned my business abandoned, right.
So we've got this big commercial space. There's literally me and Holly. Holly was my apprentice for three years.
And I said, guess what girl? You're no longer an apprentice. We have an apprenticing for three years. I have in DC, we have a thousand people who either want to book tomorrow or we need to give refunds to, and guess what? The money's gone.
That money. So I can't give refunds. So I just sucked it up and basically went back for 10 days at a time and crammed them all in as much as I could.
And it took me about a year and a half. So it took us about a year and a half to get through it. Um, I hired a couple other artists, um, remotely for the DC location.
How do you tattoo remotely? I'm saying I, I interviewed them remotely, hired them for DC, even though it was a very, yeah, it was a very strange time. Um, and we got through it. We survived, but unfortunately I wasn't building my business here in Texas because I was just focused on running that one.
Yeah. So I really didn't start. And I'll be honest with you after that year and a half, I was like, I hate eyebrows, fucking hate that.
I never want to see another eyebrow. And I realized, and I could cry thinking about it, that I started to really hate what I love because it started to turn into something that it wasn't. Like we couldn't even see people smile, girl.
Like how am I supposed to measure your face with this contraption on? And I got this welder shield on and there's fricking glare. I'm like, and people were just, you know, weird. Do you have a vaccine? Are you, is your staff vaccinated? I mean, it was just, it was so traumatizing and it was like, how could it be that I've worked my ass off? I didn't do anything wrong.
You know, that's the hard part. I didn't do anything. Nothing I can do.
And so, um, it, that time really made me hate what I love. And I decided to take about a year off, um, which is when I started focusing more on coaching and mentoring and, um, but I'm back in it, girl. I see you are.
I have a question for you. I just want to follow up on something that you said. You were talking about how you weren't getting strong guidance from the government.
So you kind of deferred to the ADA to see what the dental, the dental association was doing and pulled your guidance from there. I don't remember. Cause I had just had a baby and also I have the world's worst memory.
My best friend, Katie calls me Dory. Um, what was, I think you were on the board at the time. What was the guidance or where was the AAM and the SPCP on this? Did they have strong guidance for us? I think it took them a minute.
I think it took a minute. Um, I, I'd have to go back and look again. I, my, my memory's really foggy.
I think it's because of PTSD during that time. Um, I don't believe they had it at the time that I was allowed to reopen my business, which is why I sought out my mentor, Marie, who's a nurse and she told me all the, and all the things. And, um, you know, people were, I wanted my, my clients to also feel safe.
You know, it's not all vanity and we have a lot of people that are, you know, compromised that are getting sure. Tattooing. Right.
And so I had clients that were like, I just got done with chemo. Are you sure it's safe to come in? And I was just like, I don't know, but I'm going to do all the things necessary to try to keep you as safe as possible and to keep us as safe as possible. I don't know.
So, um, the ADA had it all spelled out. So I just basically subscribed to the newsletter. I got, I still get their emails, but, um, yeah, they had it all spelled out.
And so I just kind of tried to mirror what they did. I mean, they were sanitizing mail. They were making everybody drop their purses in a bag when you arrived.
I mean, we did it all. We did all that. You you've been with both boards.
And to my knowledge, there are only the two, right? AAM, SPC. The AAM I'm sure has value when it comes to like networking and marketing and social stuff. And it looks really fun and it's like a party, but I kind of.
At this point, consider them not the valedictorian. They're more like the cheerleader that puts out more of a cheerleader. I was a cheerleader too.
Like what's the attraction for someone to sign up? I mean, it's the only for, for, for which, for both, for, for any, like, if you're like, I should, I should belong to an organization. Hello. What we do is hard.
Why do you want to try to figure it out on your own? When you've got matriarchs in the industry that have already figured it out for you and are willing to help you and mentor you to learn more about the Society of Permanent Cosmetic Professionals head to spcp.org and meet me and Emily in Texas this year at the SPCP convention, I knew pretty much from day one that I was over my head. Like, you know, I knew I needed to sit my ass down and humble myself, even though I thought, oh, I'm good at brows. Like this is going to be a cinch.
I was like, oh hell no. Like pretty, pretty early on. You know, wildly here.
You say that literally came from such a rich background in brows with a concentration in brows. And then the second you got into this, you were like, I need help. I need help.
I didn't even know that people bled till I showed up at class and I was like, you know, and people were in pain. I mean, no, I mean, nobody was talking about microblading. Literally no one knew it about it.
And I just happened to find it because I followed a bunch of brow artists from all over the world. So I think I just won the timing lottery, but yeah, pretty early on. I was humbled.
And, um, I mean, listen, these women are eager to see what this next generation of artists does. And I really feel like we're feeling the matriarchs at this point. I think so.
Yeah. Where'd we take, where'd we go left? Well, we're at this weird transition in permanent cosmetics. You know, there are a lot of states that have recently, you know, up the regs and I, I am not necessarily a huge fan of regs and I did move to Texas for a reason.
You know, so, but to give you an example here in Texas, cosmetic tattooing is unregulated. I don't know. What is it for you? Um, we're under the board of health, but it's, it's the same pretty much.
Okay. Do you have to have a bloodborne pathogen certificate? BBP first aid and we don't even need a BBP, sir, girl. So we need a licensed facility, but essentially anyone that walks into my licensed facility can legally tattoo and also train people.
So there's no standard minimum standard for fundamental education and people kind of come to Texas or come to Maryland, the places that are unregulated to get rich quick and take advantage of maybe people that don't know any better. And so it's sort of like the blind leading the blind. And it's kind of because of accessibility to online education.
People are like, well, shit, they don't require me to go to school. So I'm just going to take some online course and get my studio license. And so it's no wonder, like, you know, people just it's, it's, it's become so big so quickly that we're just, it's a bit of a house of cards.
And I think that it's falling apart a little bit because every single day with the way that the economy is right now, every single day, I'm seeing people saying, uh, I'm listing all my stuff. I'm closing my shop on Facebook. I mean, I think we're just now starting to see the repercussions of what, what it did to businesses.
And I don't know if you experienced this, but we had an influx of demand, you know, everybody had, Oh yeah. Nobody was spending their money on clothes vacation. Nobody can do shit.
So they had all, they were, you know, had all this excess money. And all of those people came out of the woodworks because they were looking busted on zoom, wanted eyebrows, lips, help me. Right.
And we're like, Holy crap. You know, we can't keep up with the demand. And we kind of saw this increase in business.
And at that time there were a lot of people that opened new studios and now, and they had a lot of grant money for it. And now our economy has really taken a hit. Um, and you know, I don't know.
I know that there was the PPP loan, which was, which was forgivable, but there were SBA loans that weren't forgivable that people started to have to pay back this year. Small businesses start paying back. And if you're struggling at all.
Um, yeah, that's going to be hard. So, yeah, I think, um, that's why so many people get into microblading and especially the way you just described, like they get into it as cheap as possible, dirt, you know, paid dirt basically, but they don't have business education, they don't have a solid foundation. So I think people don't realize that when they get into.
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