How to Reinvest Product Sales in Your Esthetician Business

In this episode, Brittany Hagemann discusses the importance of product sales in an esthetician business and provides strategies for selling products effectively. She emphasizes the need for authenticity and integrity in selling products that clients will love and continue buying. Brittany recommends that 40-60% of the business's revenue should come from product sales. She also advises saving 60% of product sales to reinvest in inventory and back bar supplies. Additionally, Brittany addresses common challenges such as overspending on products and spending money before it is earned, and offers solutions to break these cycles.

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Brittany Hagemann (00:00.526)
You're listening to the Estheticians Earning More podcast with Brittany Hagemann episode number 158. Hello, happy Monday, welcome back. I'm so excited to be back with you today. I...

I feel like I have an echo.

Brittany Hagemann (00:24.462)
to talk today about products, product sales, all of my opinions and thoughts.

and all of the things that I think aren't talked enough about product sales and things that I hope will really give you some framework of how to sell products.

Brittany Hagemann (00:52.878)
that I hope will give you a framework on how to organize your product sales, what goals you should be having, how you should be saving for inventory, reinvestment, all of the things. These are things I talk about with my clients all the time that I think would be really helpful for us to discuss today. So first of all, I'm going to be mostly talking about product sales in a facial skin business. If you're doing hair removal or other things,

It's not the same because people aren't going through products as much. They don't use as many products as a facial skin. So definitely keep that in mind, but you can definitely still use a lot of these principles if you do hair removal and you're not selling the same amount of product and the same amount of money as I'm recommending for the skin, face, skin people.

Brittany Hagemann (01:55.086)
So the first thing that I wanna talk about when it comes to products is how much products should you be selling per person or how much product sales should you be doing? And I think that people are all over the map on this in what they do and I think most of the people I come across, most of my clients or people who I speak to in my discovery calls are on the camp of they're not selling a lot of products.

I definitely meet people who are doing incredible with product sales. That's always the best. I'm always like, yay, this is so good. But I would say a lot of my people that I know, it's definitely on the back burner. So they are selling products, but maybe they're selling a product here or there. They're not selling full routines. And there's a lot of reasons why that can be. And I have other episodes about how to sell skincare routines and how to sell more. So this is not so much about how to sell more products. This is just...

what you should be doing to be a profitable business. So there's two different things to think about when it comes to products. You want to know how to sell products in a way that's authentic, that's not icky, that is integrity, that you're not just selling products to make money. You're actually selling products people will love and continue buying. Because none of this, I'm going to teach you, makes any sense if people do not love the products that they're buying and they will continue buying them. This is not a one -time sell.

the genius and the magic behind product sales in the business, the way I'm teaching it today, is the clients love the products and they will always buy them from you and be addicted to them and not ever not go shopping somewhere else. And I know it may seem, in the age that we're in of the skin talk,

influencers, what do you guys call them? Is that what it calls a skin talk? I don't even know. I'm so out of it. I don't even care what they do. What those girls are doing and Sephora and Ulta and Target and CVS and all the companies that are all trying to compete for people's money and people's loyalty and loving their products. It feels like your products are one of millions and there's so much competition out there.

Brittany Hagemann (04:15.118)
I would say that's true for some people. There are going to be some people that care more about having a product on their shelf they saw Kylie Jenner use than whether it works for them. That's just the thing. That's just a fact. And we're not trying to sell to those people. We're trying to sell to people who really want change in their skin and have tried Drunk Elephant or Lancome or Clinique or whatever that they've tried or whatever drugstore brand and it hasn't worked.

and that's where they're coming to you. So I really wanna just give that mindset shift for you and just remind you that this is what we're doing. We're not trying to convince the people who are obsessed with their Dove bar soap and they've been using it for 30 years. We're not telling them to spend $300 in skincare routine. It's rare we're going to get that person, the Dove cleanser person, spending $30 in a cleanser. That just is not...

something that's gonna happen. So we have to let go of those people and actually look to and think about the people who are really willing to spend the money and they don't really care what brand it is as long as it works and they like the product, right?

Brittany Hagemann (05:29.998)
So having said that, so if we know we're selling enough integrity, we know we're selling products people really love and get great results, which is my experience in selling skincare. The product line that I've used for basically my entire career as a solo esthetician, love the line, love the results. I know that people will like these products and so there's no integrity issue. I'm like.

I'm just selling to selling. I've never just sold to sell in my own business, okay? So this can be totally done in integrity. I'm just gonna keep harping on that because you're like, okay, what you're gonna say sounds like not integrity. But as you know, if you've been with my podcast, two things can be true. You can help people and make money. You can sell a lot of product and make a lot of money. And people can love the product and be super happy. Like both of these things can be true. So.

With that, I'm going to tell you, I want your revenue, so the total number, money that your business brings in, I want 40 to 60 % of that to be product sales.

Brittany Hagemann (06:47.502)
I know. You may have heard me say this before if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, but I really just wanted to come back to that. And if you're not even close to that, if you're selling 10%, 5 % of your sales, let's say you do $6 ,000 in sales a month and 500 of its product, this is what you need to be spending time figuring out. You need to figure out...

Why aren't you selling products? Is it you don't believe in the products? You think they're good, but not great? Is it that you believe they're too expensive and so you're afraid to sell them? That's a big problem. Is it that you believe that your clients won't buy them even though you love them and you think they're great? Like what is happening with you that you aren't selling products? Is it that you just kind of don't know what to say to people?

and you're just kind of hiding behind the like, I don't know, I don't want to like have an awkward conversation. Because let me tell you, I've sold.

over $100 ,000 in products. If I had to go back and look at all my numbers, I have sold thousands and thousands of dollars of product and I've never been out of integrity and I also do not have any weirdness when it comes to stocking my products. I definitely did beginning. If you know you've been listening to podcasts, you know that was a thing and I had to get over it. So if I can get over it, you can get over it too.

The year that I did $112 ,000 in 2019 in my solo esthetician business, I think like $46 ,000 of that was products. So I really wasn't working that many hours and making a good amount of money.

Brittany Hagemann (08:39.47)
And I'd see a lot of clients that really want to make more money and they're like, I have to work more hours and have more like services. That is not true, you just need to sell more products. You can work the same amount of hours you're working now, you can actually work less and sell more products. Okay, so that's the first thing that I want you to kind of start wrapping your brain around. The second thing is I want you to save

60 % of all the products that you sell to reinvest in products in back bar. So if you sell something for $100, you have to save for, excuse me, sorry. So if you sell something for $100, you have to save $60 to reinvest. That's not your money

to either rebuy that product or another product. Let's say you sold a product that you never really sell and you don't really wanna buy it again, fine. Either that product again or another product and then a little extra for those back bar things that you need. Like cleansers, toners, peels, things like that. And if you're doing really high end services where your cost is high, it may even be higher than that on some of your services and some of your assailants.

And if you're doing really high end services like micro channeling or a peel that costs a lot of money every time that you do it, I know like the, I think the perfect peel the Derm peel, I think that's a really high

taking that money that you make, you sold a $100 product, and then you just go and spend $100, like take that money and just put it somewhere else in your business, or you transfer it into your personal account. This is why it's so chaotic, this is why you're going crazy. Because you're not saving your money, you're not being intentional, you're just kind of like, And so I really wanna encourage you to do that.

Brittany Hagemann (11:03.822)
It can be really hard and overwhelming if this is me to help with this is why I work with my clients on all the time. Okay. So that's definitely something else I want to talk about with that. The third thing I want to talk about with product in general, all the product stuff, and I'm not sure what I'm gonna call this episode. It was all about products is those of you. I know this is probably the case for most of you that overspend in products. So you sell a hundred dollars with their products.

and you reinvest $100. So you could just keep buying more and more products and you're not keeping any of that money towards profit.

There is a time and a place for this, especially if you're new. I know, when you're new, it's so hard. I think back to those days when I have clients that are new or they're just still trying to really grow their business. And so I have so much empathy. This is hard, okay? But you're new, you're trying to grow, you don't have a lot of clients, you don't have a big back bar yet. So you do have to invest more to build up how much you can order.

Maybe you can only order $200 worth of product at a time and now you're getting more clients and you need more product and so you need to reinvest that whole $200. You can't just invest.

60 % of 200.

Brittany Hagemann (12:32.462)
I don't know.

Brittany Hagemann (12:38.702)
$120, right? You have to invest that whole 200 for actual products that you're selling, and then you have to even spend more money on the back bar. So that is a short period of time in your life. And if you've been doing this for a few years, there's something we have to figure out that's not working in your business. So if that's the problem, like you're like, hey, but I've been doing this now like two years, there's other things that we need to figure out because that should just be like a few months, maybe six months at most of

just reinvesting, reinvesting, reinvesting. But if you've kind of gotten into the habit of doing that, of just being like, I make 100, spend 100 towards reinvesting and your product back bar is just huge, I really want you to look at that and look at that spending because you are losing money every month. If you sell, I'm just gonna keep saying 100 because it's easier to explain. If you sell 100 and then always,

reinvest a hundred in your back bar in your product line is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you don't have the clientele to support that.

month after month, you should be taking that money home in your profit and you're losing it. Because I get, I know it's like this line comes out with a new product. This thing everyone's talking about, I understand. I understand. But this is where it really is strategy and being mindful and really looking at what are your clients buying, what are your clients needing? Yes, the line that you love may come out of a product that you.

interested in, okay, buy one, try it, see if you really love it, if your clients really need it. If that's the case, keep going, but don't just like go buy 10 of them because this is what you think is the next best thing. You really need to be really strategic about it. Okay.

Brittany Hagemann (14:40.014)
And the fourth thing, which I kind of already talked about is you sell a product and you've already spent that money, so you need that money to pay for something else. Like you've already spent it on your credit card, buying something or whatever, and so that money before you've even sold it has been spoken for. This is a very difficult cycle to break out of, and I think a lot of estheticians are in this cycle.

If you're in the cycle, I want to just again remind you that there's no judgment. You're not morally good or bad if this is something that you're struggling with. It's like you can be struggling with this and be an incredible person and someone could be really good at this, I'm putting in quotation marks, and be like a mass murderer, right? Like there's no morality when it comes to spending habits and managing money. The two are not linked.

So if this is something you struggle with, you're like, I am on this hamster wheel of stress and trying to manage money and trying to figure out this product thing and this, and then you're just like spinning. I just want to remind you, it's not like you aren't a good person or a good business owner because the morality of being a business owner is not have to do with your ability to manage your money.

Okay? I'm laughing because it seems so ridiculous when you say it that way, but I know that that's how you feel. I know this is like very heavy sometimes to think about it. So if you're spending the money first, if this is the cycle that you're in, I just want to like allow yourself to give yourself compassion first. And then I really need you to make a plan and stick to the plan. Like this is what we're doing now. If that means you're not buying...

the next best thing that comes out, the next next education that just dropped, that everyone's doing. You're not like, whatever. You're like, I know that these things are fun, exciting. You're not going to a trade show, right? Which we know costs so, it costs so much money to go to the trade shows. You don't buy anything. It's just all the things. Like the travel and the hotels and the food, it's just so expensive.

Brittany Hagemann (17:01.838)
You're not doing these things, which I know can help your business grow, for sure. But until you dig yourself out of the hole that you put yourself in with the spending money before you even made it, you're going to continue this cycle. Unless you get a huge influx of clients that can kind of get you out, you're gonna continue this cycle. And even if you get a huge influx of clients and product sales and all these things, if these are habits that you have,

You're just going to have the same problems with more money, right? Like money isn't solving the problem necessarily. It's your habits that need to change. Sometimes like 1 ,000 % more money can solve problems for sure. But a lot of the times it doesn't because the spending problems are still the same. Yeah, so you're like, there's this new device I want to buy that's $20 ,000. It's going to make me all this money.

I'm going to spend all my money on that and then I have no money left over and now I can't buy product. That makes quite literally no sense. That makes quite literally no sense. What makes more sense is you sell products, reinvest, sell products, reinvest, sell products, reinvest, and in that profit you can put aside towards the thing that you want, machine that you want or whatever. It's very mindful spending.

And I know this is really hard. This is really hard mentally to do, to actually make a plan. I know this is going to be really intimidating. But if we look at it from a business perspective, we're looking at what is making money, how money is coming in. You make money with selling products, for sure. That is a direct money back when you sell a product. When you buy a $20 ,000 machine,

You can 1 ,000 % make the money back. I'm not saying you can't. But it's not, the return is not as quick. And if you are in a cash need space in your business, products are the answer. Products are the answer. Because you know why? It's consumable. People run out and they want more. So this is where I'm gonna kind of end today because if the beauty of a consumable business...

Brittany Hagemann (19:23.054)
is that people run out and they want more. So if we start back to it being integrity where people, you're selling products people love, people want more of, they will continue buying more of, you wanna have that available to sell them so you make that money. It's a very easy sale. Like I just had an online order come in, I still sell products, I have an online shop, and I've been selling this first product for like four years.

And it just came in, it was like $200. I went online, I actually just shopped from the company. It's like easy, easy money. Before I used to have it on shelf, I would just give it. It was like not a problem.

Brittany Hagemann (20:08.59)
It's such an easy way to make money. I'm not to say the machines are not. They for sure can be. But if you are in a money, you need money in your business, the big investments that are take longer to see results are not the place that you need to be. You need to sell product. Product. That product needs to be your number one thing. Every person who walks out the door is buying product.

That can be a whole thing to figure out. And that can feel a lot more intimidating and hard to do than buying a new hydrofacial machine or something else. I understand. I totally do. But I'm just gonna say this to you. If you can't talk to someone about products and make it seem an easy buy for them and it makes sense for them and it's a financial good decision for them,

It's gonna be really hard to sell them on the new machine, which in order for you to pay for the machine, for the machine to make sense, it's gonna be this higher price point than they're probably paying right now for their current service. So if you get good at selling the products, it's easy for you, you understand, it makes sense, you're selling it at integrity, people love it, they keep buying it, it keeps confirming that belief that you know how to sell products, people love your product, all the things. Then if you decide to buy this expensive machine that

is expensive to do services on or appeals or whatever, right? Like we talked about some of them already today, like Derma Peel or whatever. I forget what they're called, Derma Peel I don't know. If you are already good at selling products, selling those services will be just so much easier because you already have that ability to sell out of integrity and be like, I know it's more money, but this is why you need it. Just like the products, like, I know this is more money, but this is why you need it.

it's so much easier to sell those services. But what happens, happens so often, is like, I need money, I'm gonna buy more products, so I'm gonna buy, no, I need more money, so I'm going to buy these services to have better services so I can make more money. And then you have it, and then you're not selling that service, and you're losing money just left and right. So solution is products, every single time. Every single time, okay?

Brittany Hagemann (22:32.014)
That's it for today. Have a fantastic week. I'll talk to you next week. Bye for now.