Problem Solving

Have you ever given your esthetician client a product or a treatment and they had a reaction? Do you panic? How do you problem solve in your esthetician business? Today's podcast episode is for you.

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Summary

In this episode, Brittany Hagemann discusses the importance of problem-solving in running a successful esthetician business. She emphasizes the need to approach problems with curiosity and a willingness to explore different solutions. Brittany shares examples of how problem-solving can be applied to various aspects of a business, such as pricing, marketing, and client interactions. She encourages estheticians to be open to change and to view problem-solving as an opportunity for growth.

Transcript:
You are listening to the Estheticians Earning More podcast with Brittany Hagemann episode number 145.

Hey Monday and welcome back. I'm so excited to be back here talking with you today. I have had a lot of different things, conversations with people over the past few weeks. I just had my free event about how to sell more skincare in your esthetician business and I just love interacting with estheticians and learning from you, like what are things that you're struggling with. And something that I see consistently,

when I coach my clients and just also as a business strategy that I think is often overlooked is problem solving.
And problem solving, be able to solve a problem in your business is a business requirement. And I think often as kids, we aren't taught to learn how to problem solve in practical ways. We are taught to find the correct answer, like the correct answer in a test, the correct answer for like if you're writing an essay or whatever to get it right.

but we don't spend a lot of time encouraging and praising the process of problem solving and knowing also that part of problem solving is not having a solution, it not being very clear for you and having to try things and if it doesn't work, being okay with that. And I think that there's a lot of different things that are kind of at play here. I think that...

If you yourself are a competitive person, I think it's hard to problem solve because you just want the right answer and you wanna be right and you wanna figure it out as quickly as possible. You want it to be easy and done. I think also just as a human brain, problem solving can be really uncomfortable, especially when it's something that is very precious to you, like your business and where your money's coming from and things like that. So it can be a challenging thing to...

really embrace and see the positives of it. The other day, it was kind of raining unexpectedly here and I was out and I was just getting drenched in rain. I had like a sweaty purse and so there's Target nearby so I went in and got an umbrella and it had like a security thing on it so you can essentially seal it and I bought it and I asked the Target cashier if she had scissors so I could open it up.

Now if you've listened to this podcast, you know I used to be a Target store manager. I used to manage, I used to be a manager of the managers of the cashiers. So I was like the front end was a big part of my job. And at the time, I don't know if it's the case anymore, but the red card, which is like their debit and or credit card was like a big focus. I spent a lot of time with the cashiers and working with cashiers. And of course we had wonderful cashiers and then we had some people that were just...
barely did their job. They just really didn't care and they just barely did it. And this woman was really nice. This cashier, super, super nice, which was a very important quality of being Target cashier when I was there. But I asked her for scissors. She just like literally like opened the drawer of her register and like looked in and was like, no, I do not. And like, that was it. And like she has a radio I can see, like I know.

I know the structure of Target. It hasn't changed so dramatically, right? But that was it. That was it for her. There was no problem solving. There was no like, well, let me turn and ask the cashier behind me. Let me look in here. Let me ask someone. Go to guest service. They should have nothing. It was just, I can't help it. I can't help you. And I think...

Bad customer service, bad customer experiences come from us not problem solving and getting defensive or not really seeing the actual problem and looking at it from a personal view versus an actual situational view. Because let's say you really want to build your business, you're not making enough money in your business, and you have a new client come in and you do services or whatever.

and then they go home and then you reach out to them so you haven't heard from them in a while and you're really just trying to, you know, engage your people, right?
And you hear from them and they're like, oh, I had a rash after your facial. And most people, including myself, for a long time, until I learned how to kind of work through this, most estheticians that I coach, that I work with and talk to, like that would be a problem that, the problem to the esthetician is the person is never coming back.

The person hates me, the person thinks I'm a bad aesthetician, versus gonna go and tell everyone I gave them a rash. The person becomes a centered about the aesthetician versus actually solving the actual problem of the rash. Like there's an actual problem here of someone having a rash. Whether or not it had anything to do with your servers, we don't know. That person doesn't know either. You can get defensive, you can be like, well, what did you do to your skin?

You can get like, yeah, you can get like, um, you can get like, what's the word with you for? You can get like offensive, I guess, or like, like a kind of aggressive about it and like deflect any responsibility. And that doesn't really help. You can also take all the accountability, which also is not problem solving and being like, I'm so sorry. And not to say you can't apologize and also not take all responsibility, but like,

I didn't mean to, I feel terrible. Like again, we don't know what the actual root of the problem is. Now the person may or may not be interested in exploring that with you, they may or may not be interested in talking to you or coming back and so you can see their skin and ask them more questions and figure out exactly what it is that's going on. But the problem is not you or your service necessarily. The problem could be something,

that neither of you even thought to think of, including yourself, to not tell them not to do, or you forgot to tell them, or you told them that they didn't understand it, or a number of things, right? But if we look at it from the lens of like panic, thinking about ourselves, and not actually about the problem, then we lose so much from that. Like when you have a job that's not in your own business, and something happens, like,
this cashier was not paid to problem solve, right? She's paid minimum wage. She's not paid to problem solve. But if you've had a job where that's part of your job, it's like to problem solve. And of course, like if you don't do your job, you could lose your job. Of course, there's always that. But usually, like if a problem is presented in a work situation, nine times out of 10, you're not gonna think you are the problem.

You're going to think, what happened here? What, like, general curiosity? Like, what could it be? How is this a problem? Like, where is the root of the problem? What's really happening? And again, from like pure curiosity, not blame, deflection, defensiveness, anything else.

It's really hard for us not to feel defensive when these things happen because again, your livelihood is connected to your business and you have a human brain, right? Like a human brain that is going to want to protect you. So like no shame if you feel defensive when these things kind of happen, but I just really want you to like take yourself out of the situation and be like, if this wasn't...

my business, if I was just an esthetician working, how would I want to solve this problem? Or how would I want someone working for me to solve this problem? And again, sitting down and brainstorming, what are all the different things that could happen? Why did this happen this way? What could be different? Really looking into it all, because you may see trends. You may see things like,
Like for instance, when I was working as an esthetician in San Diego and had my business, I found it really challenging for my clients to even want to try to change their diet and or lifestyle. It was like I was trying to convince them all and persuade them and it was just always very uncomfortable, right? It was just like really frustrating for me.

And so I started looking at it as if I was someone who went, you know, as someone who had acne, he like went in and all the things, how would I feel if someone told me that? And I would for sure like, I would have felt like really skeptical and really like annoyed. And it would have been really hard for me to believe them. So like, what would I have had to say? What would the S .A. shouldn't have to say to...

help me understand it and get a buy in. And so that is how I problem solve. That is how I put myself in the situation with my client. How would I respond to this? What would I think? Why would I think that? And again, I'm not putting down the esthetician at all or not respecting them and their education. It's nothing to do with the esthetician. It's my own stuff, my own...

history with acne, my own personal experiences, my own thoughts on diet and stuff that would be contributing. So you just kind of have to like...

If the problem, if you're seeing the video, the problem is the center, you have to look at every single angle. And this is the part where I think most aestheticians give up and quit. This is the part where I think most aestheticians are like, I don't know, I don't know what happened. I don't know why this isn't working, and they just kind of give up. It can be the same for marketing, it can be the same for understanding how you made business in a month.
It can be the same for selling product. It can be the same, honestly. This problem solving skill can be applied to every single part of your business. If you overspend in your business, you can look at it from a problem solving thing like, why does this happen? Where is it happening? Why am I overspending? What are the things that I think I need to spend money on? Am I getting a return on them? That happens a lot when I coach my clients and we do the business assessment and profit calculator and to look at the profit of their business. It's like,

No judgment how you want to spend your money, but this is what's happening. Is this what you want to happen? If it is, great, keep going. But if it isn't, let's figure out what we want it to be because we have control of the situation.
But again, that's looking at it from a problem solving standpoint, not being defensive, not accusing someone of something, not being like, I'm right, you're wrong, right? It's like really like, what do we want to do here? What do we want this to do? If you're marketing, if you're out there marketing yourself and you're trying and you're trying and you're trying and it feels like nothing's working, there has to be evaluation there. Like,

If you're putting out posts, are people actually looking at them? Who's looking at them? Who's liking them? What are the people engaging with? Like being really honest about it and being really open to making change based on what you learn. And by developing that skill, and again, taking your own self out of it, by developing that skill,

you will make progress so much faster in your business. But if you're like, well, I don't like selling products or I really hate marketing, I hate showing up on social media, I hate talking to people about my business, I feel really uncomfortable asking people to buy a product or tell people about product. I really this, I really that. Like it's just gonna be the same thing for you. You have to come at it with a different frame of mind, a different lens and a different way of being like, okay,

I have been doing these things, just like if a client came to you and was like, I'm using these products and they're like, okay, the products are not working for you. Let's literally try these other ones and see what happens. And you may give them products that don't work and then you learn from that and they learn that also a product doesn't work for them and everyone is learning as we continue to move forward.

But that's the only way. I think a lot of us, myself included, I've done this myself in business and also, especially when I first became an Asset Edition business owner, I was like, I just want someone to tell me. Just tell me how to solve my problem. And for sure, there's things out there that can help you and things that I teach for sure that can help you. But really, the work is just doing problem solving. This isn't working. Why isn't it working?

What are the reasons that are contributing to it? How can I affect change? How can I do something different? What would happen if I did this? What would happen if I did that? What would happen if I

That is it for today's podcast. I hope that you liked it. I'll be back next week. I know this week was a little bit shorter, but I hope it was impactful, just the same. And always say hi, I'm at esthetician .coach on Instagram, or you can find me at theestheticiancoach .com. Thanks for listening, I'll talk to you next week. Bye for now.