Tag: creative entrepreneur

What My Old Cosmetics Business Taught Me About Mailing Lists

Welcome back to another piece where I use myself as the case study. More than ten years ago I had a small cosmetics business for handmade products, hair and skin. That business is not here with us anymore. It is gone. Yet we talk about it anyway, because there is a lesson buried in that time frame. The honest question I sit with now is simple. What would have been different if I had used the resources that we have at hand today?

The answer changes everything about how I would build a brand a second time around.

Small Businesses Underestimate the Mailing List

Small businesses underestimate the power of having a mailing list. Say hallelujah, because this point matters. A mailing list is part of sales. It is not only digital marketing. It belongs to the sales strategy itself, sitting right alongside your social media management and your content creation.

Having a mailing list is a strong way for businesses at any magnitude to build a relationship with their customers. Listen carefully to what I am about to say. These are people who chose to be in your inbox. They told you, in their own way, that they want you to share what you have to offer. That permission carries weight. It is the closest thing to a direct line a founder can own.

Many founders, content creators, influencers, artists, and art galleries treat that inbox as an afterthought. The result is a missed relationship with the very audience that raised a hand and asked to hear from them.

Why Social Media Alone Will Not Reach Everyone

We forget that the messages we send through social media never reach all of the people. I keep going back to this hill, and I will keep standing on it. The reach of any single platform is limited by an algorithm you do not control.

Everything you talk about in your social media management, your content creation, and your videos is strong material that serves people inside a newsletter. The work already exists. The audio exists. The video exists. The blog posts exist. The task is moving that value into a channel where the people who asked to hear from you read it in full.

A social media management tool keeps the front of the house running, while the mailing list protects the relationship behind it. One feeds the other.

Use Workflow Automation to Turn Content Into Newsletters

Here is where I would have done things differently. Workflow automation builds a system that takes your audio and your video and turns it into newsletters. The same system turns that material into blog posts, and the blog posts feed back into the newsletter. You make a mini website out of your newsletter, where each issue lives on and keeps working for you.

I cannot stress enough how much this helps. Had I known to set up workflow automation for that cosmetics brand, it would have saved an enormous amount of time. Tools such as Claude Cowork and chatGPT now sit at the center of that process, restructuring a single video into a week of written communication without losing the voice behind it. A creative agency leans on this same approach when outsourcing social media for clients who produce constantly and have no hours left to repurpose any of it.

This is the work that content creators, influencers, and founders give away every day. The raw material is already paid for in your time. Workflow automation collects the return.

Newsletters Are for the Good Stuff

A newsletter is an opportunity for deep insight. People are there for the good stuff, so bring the good stuff. Nobody wants a bland repetition of what already sits on your website. Nobody wants to open an inbox and find the same offers and discounts wrapped in a new subject line.

You are far more than your offer. You are not the discount. Build the relationship first, and let it carry through into the newsletter, into the distribution channels, into every piece of communication you send. That relationship is what turns a reader into a customer and a customer into someone who stays.

For artists and art galleries, this is the difference between a one-time sale and a collector who follows the whole body of work. For founders and content creators, it is the foundation that social media creation rests on. The platforms move fast and change their rules. The inbox stays yours.

That cosmetics business never had this. Yours can.

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Footnotes

1. Chaffey, Dave. Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks. Smart Insights, January 2024. https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/ This report shows that email consistently returns higher engagement and conversion than organic social reach, which supports the point that a mailing list reaches your audience more reliably than social media alone.

2. Patel, Sujan. Email Marketing Rules. 2019. https://emailmarketingrules.com This work argues that permission-based email earns attention because subscribers opt in, which backs the idea that people in your inbox chose to hear from you and expect real value rather than repeated offers.

3. McKinsey and Company. The State of AI in Early 2024. McKinsey, May 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai This research documents how automation and generative tools cut repetitive content work, supporting the case for using workflow automation to convert video and audio into newsletters and blog posts.

What Ten Years of Selling at Fairs Taught Me

This is another entry in my case study series, where I look back at a customer experience from more than ten years ago. The woman at the center of this story has since passed away, and I share this with respect for her memory. The purpose of the series stays the same throughout: what would I have done differently if I had the tools and resources available to me today. So let us get into it.

The Hidden Cost of Showing Up at Fairs

The thing I dealt with most back then was the presence of being at fairs. I underestimated, and I mean I underestimated deeply, the size of the investment a fair demands. There is the money you put in, and there is the maintenance that follows you while you travel from one space to the next space to the next space. For small businesses and founders who attend fairs to sell their product, showcase what they make, find their customer, and use the moment for marketing, the format holds a clear appeal. People still want human contact. We want to interact with each other. We want to look, touch, feel, and sniff before we make our decision.

That appeal is honest, and it is the reason fairs continue to fill rooms. What I missed was the question sitting underneath all of it. I had not yet sat down to understand what sales truly means, or what distribution channels are meant to do for a business. Once you understand that, the whole approach looks different.

Why I Would Have Built My Own Online Fair

Had I understood distribution then the way I understand it now, I would not have spent my energy traveling to fairs. I would have built my own online fair instead. Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the voices I hold in high regard on this topic, and for years he has spoken about the growth of social shopping, the idea that people will do more of their buying directly through social platforms. We see it everywhere now, and his point is that we are not at the start of this shift, we are barely approaching it. China sits far ahead of where we are, while many people here have not caught on yet.

That is the tool I would have reached for. Social shopping would have been my fair, the place where people experience the product without standing in a crowded hall. Look at it closely and it is QVC in a new form. I would have used it to speak about the product, to let people share their experience, and to keep a conversation going around it. A social media management approach turns one event into an ongoing presence, and that is what a small business needs when budgets and time are limited.

Social Shopping as a Distribution Channel

Treating social media as a distribution channel changes how a founder sells. The skill set behind selling sits in your soft skills. You stay cognizant of how people think, the psychology behind their choices, the way they present themselves, and what they are looking for. You hold a conversation where you gather information rather than push a script. That awareness would have served me well in that period, because I was green, as green as the leaves behind me when I recorded this.

For content creators, artists, and influencers who build a following around what they make, social media creation and steady content creation carry the same weight a fair stall once did. The work of producing posts, replying, and keeping a calendar full is where workflow automation earns its place. Tools such as ChatGPT and Claude Cowork take the repetitive load off a small team, and a social media management tool keeps the schedule moving while you focus on the human side of the sale. This is also where a creative agency or outsourcing social media becomes sensible, freeing a founder to stay close to the customer.

Keeping the In Person Magic Alive

Online presence would not have been the only thing I did. Absolutely not. I would have kept a physical moment alive as a promotion channel, because the anticipation builds when people know you are coming somewhere. There is a heightened feeling, that sense of finally being able to meet you, to see the product in person, to sniff it and judge it for themselves. People want to experience a thing first, and that desire is a gift to any seller who knows how to use it. So I would have held on to that, and I would have let social shopping carry the weight of daily selling between those appearances.

The lesson is steady. Sales lives where attention lives, and attention now lives on social platforms. A fair gives you a day. A well run social presence gives you every day, and it gives your audience a reason to keep coming back.

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Footnotes

1. Vaynerchuk, Gary. Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence and How You Can, Too. HarperBusiness, 2018. https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/crushing-it. This source supports the article because Vaynerchuk sets out the case for selling and building a brand directly through social platforms, which underpins the argument that social shopping replaces the traditional fair as a distribution channel.

2. McKinsey and Company. Social Commerce: The Future of How Consumers Interact with Brands. October 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights. This report supports the article because it documents the rapid scale of social commerce and the lead held by markets such as China, which confirms the observation that Western markets sit at an early stage of this shift.

3. Pink, Daniel H. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 2012. https://www.danpink.com/books/to-sell-is-human. This source supports the article because Pink frames selling as a set of soft skills grounded in human psychology and active listening, which reinforces the point that sales success depends on understanding how people think and what they are looking for.

What My Cosmetics Business Taught Me About Scaling With Today’s Tools

More than ten years ago, I ran a small cosmetics business. I sold body butters, hair products, and skin products, most of them handmade. I no longer have that business, but it was a good time and a learnful season of my life. It came with plenty of mistakes, and those mistakes are the reason I want to use it as a case study. The question I keep returning to is simple: what would have changed if I had access to the resources founders carry in their pockets today?

The Hidden Weight of Production Costs

One of the biggest costs for self-made entrepreneurs who make handmade products sits inside production. That cost lives in two places. The first is human resources, the hands and hours that go into making each item. The second is stock, the inventory you have to buy before you sell a single unit. Both grow quietly, and both have a habit of catching small business owners off guard.

Back then, I knew how to find my way through a spreadsheet, though I would never call myself an Excel guru. What I missed was a way to make my spreadsheets work harder. With the tools available now, I would have built a sheet that produced a prognosis instead of a static record. I would have wanted to see what happens to my inventory the moment sales begin to climb or stagnate.

Where Spreadsheets and Language Models Meet

Here is where modern resources change the picture. I would have taken my Google Sheet, the one holding every line of my inventory cost, and fed it into a language model like ChatGPT or a system such as Claude Cowork. Then I would have asked a direct question: if the volume of sales grows by a certain amount, what happens to my costs, and how do I keep the value sensible for the customer while still earning a return?

This is workflow automation applied to the part of a business that quietly drains founders. The sheet stops being a ledger and becomes a forecasting tool. It answers questions about stocking decisions, about timing your inventory purchases, and about the cost-effective choices that protect margin. For content creators, artists, and small product makers who wear every hat at once, that kind of insight removes guesswork from decisions that used to depend on instinct alone.

The Trap of Scaling for Its Own Sake

There is a pattern that affects both small business owners and large companies. Sales multiply. The instinct that follows is loud: expand, find a bigger building, hire more people, serve more customers. The expansion feels like progress.

The question that gets skipped is the one that matters most. In what way does scaling up serve the customer better? When founders rush to grow, they often surface what they believe to be the solution for their business. That belief is not always the solution for the customer. A bigger space and a larger team solve the owner’s problem of volume. They do nothing on their own to improve the value the customer receives. Would yhis be a problem when the same founder understands its data and makes it into a dynamic tool…with AI?

What would have served my customers far better was a control mechanism. A way to predict, with high probability, how I would handle rising costs while still offering a strong product. That kind of control does not push prices down for the sake of it. It produces a clearer value proposition for the customer and a sharper cost prognosis for me, so the price I ask carries a reason behind it.

Forecasting by the Quarter Instead of by Reaction

The difference between a thriving small business and an exhausted one often comes down to timing. Reacting to growth after it arrives leads to ad hoc decisions. More orders appear, and suddenly the owner needs more space, more staff, and more spending, all at once and all under pressure. Deciding by the quarter (or any other desired term) changes that rhythm. A forecast built from real numbers shows the cost curve before it bends, which gives founders room to choose rather than scramble.

Inventory forecasting has a long history in business research, and the principle holds whether you sell body butters or run a creative agency. Predict demand, model the cost, and let the data guide the pace of growth. The tools that make this accessible to a solo maker today are the same ones reshaping social media management and content creation. A language model paired with a clean spreadsheet gives a small operation the kind of foresight that once belonged to companies with full finance teams.

What I Would Build Today

If I had that cosmetics business now, my approach would be steady and deliberate. I would keep a living spreadsheet of every inventory cost. I would connect it to ChatGPT or Claude Cowork and run growth scenarios each quarter. I would treat every potential expansion as a question about customer value first and operational size second. The result would be a business that grows because the numbers support it, not because the orders frightened me into it.

That mindset reaches well beyond cosmetics. Artists, influencers, content creators, and founders running lean operations all face the same tension between growth and control. The resources to manage it are here, sitting in the same tools many already use for social media management and daily workflow automation.

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Footnotes

1. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2011, http://theleanstartup.com. Ries argues that validated learning and measured growth outperform reactive expansion. This supports the article’s central point that scaling should follow evidence and customer value rather than the pressure of rising orders.

2. Marshall L. Fisher, What Is the Right Supply Chain for Your Product, Harvard Business Review, March 1997, https://hbr.org/1997/03/what-is-the-right-supply-chain-for-your-product. Fisher links inventory strategy to demand predictability, which reinforces the case for forecasting inventory cost before committing to expansion.

3. Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, 2005, https://steveblank.com. Blank stresses building around verified customer needs, supporting the argument that a founder’s idea of the solution is not automatically the customer’s solution.

The Level of Wealth You Are Built to Hold

Financial abundance is not about the numbers. It is the level of wealth your mind and body are able to hold without flinching. Some people are born into ease with money. Others spend years learning what that ease even feels like. It took me a long time to understand this, and once it landed, everything shifted.

Why People Go From Rags to Riches and Back Again

Look at how many people say they want to be a millionaire. Then look at the ones who get there and lose it all. They rise, they fall, and the millionaire status never returns. The reason sits in the mind. The subconscious has never been able to conceive what being a millionaire means. It knows how to survive in scarcity. It has no map for abundance.

So when the money arrives, the subconscious stares at it like a stranger. What is all of that? It does not recognise it. Give it away. Spend it. And the money disappears. At the end they wonder where it went. It is gone because the mind was never able to sit with the amount. Only a few people are able to sit with it, and that is the difference.

Wealth Is Alignment, Not Wishful Thinking

A lot of people say they want to be wealthy, yet wealth means being aligned at such a level that everything around you agrees with it. Think of your spine. When your spine is crooked anywhere, you cannot walk well, you cannot sit well, you live in discomfort. You still have a spine, you still move somewhat, but where is the comfort in that?

Money works the same way. When anything inside you is misaligned, the wealth will not arrive, and it will not feel good when it does. You sit there and picture dollars falling from the sky. I am a visual person too, so I am able to do the same. The question that matters is what that image makes you feel deep inside. For many people the honest answer is that it does not feel good. That feeling is tied to your environment, the home you grew up in, the words you absorbed.

Your Brain Is As Old As You Are

Your brain has been marinating in old beliefs for as long as you have been alive. If daddy said money was bad, if mommy said money was bad, if every bill arrived with a sigh, that recording is still playing. You look at your bills and panic instead of seeing them as the ordinary expenses of life.

Then you toss one tiny drop into that ocean of negativity and say, I want to be a millionaire. That single drop does nada, nada, nopes, nunca, niente. Nothing moves, because everything is misaligned. And on top of that you add another layer of stress about not having money while wanting it. Misalignment stacked on misalignment. This is where content creators, founders, and influencers building income online often stay stuck, fighting their own wiring while chasing more.

You Do Not Need Six Zeros

Here is the part most people resist. Abundance does not have to mean six zeros. Going from two K’s to four or five might be the level that brings you ease. When you feel at ease there, you move on. You start to wonder how wonderful it would be to have more options, and the options arrive because you have aligned with them. Not everyone reaches millionaire status, and that is fine. Doubling your income or a steady raise of a few percent is a real and worthy step. From that place you become the container for more.

Scratch the Old Record

People who hold more have dealt with the subconscious belief and replaced it. They scratched the record. If the old track said money is bad, the new one says money is a tool. To have it is a tool. To give it is a tool. To receive it is a tool. To pay with it is a tool. All of it serves you. Start there, set the new belief, and align yourself for a little more. Most people move forward in baby steps, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Wealth Includes Your Health

Wealth lives in a wide space. There is wealth in health. Last April was the final day I felt back pain after a serious injury. I dance, I get to the floor, my knees hold, I throw weights in the gym without fear. Many women in their forties struggle with their knees and their backs. My recovery is wealth, and it is another way to align myself for more.

Regulate the Nervous System and Stay There

The hard part is staying aligned. This is why regulating your nervous system matters so much for anyone running a creative agency, managing social media, or building something of their own. An unexpected bill arrives and you react with why now, why this. That reaction is a pebble in the water, and it pulls you back to the old way of thinking. Getting positive about money is not the goal, because negative people win the lottery too and still lose it. What you hold is the point.

You Are the Container

A cup keeps coffee warm for an hour. Wrap foil around it all you want, it will not hold heat longer, because that is not what the cup is built for. You have to change the container, and you are the container. The nervous system inside it. The beliefs inside it. The self-talk, what you consume, what you watch, what you laugh at, what your friends show you. Do not compare your path to someone else and feel small. Be happy for what you hold.

My grandmother never had much, yet she always had ten guilders tucked somewhere. She taught me there is always money somewhere, that you are never fully without. I never lost that knowing, and it has carried me. Something always comes in. That is wealth, and from that knowing you move forward.

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Footnotes

1. T. Harv Eker, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, HarperBusiness, 2005, https://www.harpercollins.com/products/secrets-of-the-millionaire-mind-t-harv-eker. Eker presents the idea of a financial blueprint set in childhood, which supports the point that the subconscious decides the level of wealth a person is able to hold and why people return to old income levels.

2. Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics, Prentice-Hall, 1960, https://www.psycho-cybernetics.com. Maltz explains how self-image governs results, supporting the container idea that lasting change in wealth follows a change in internal identity rather than effort alone.

3. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, Viking, 2014, https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score. Van der Kolk documents how the nervous system stores past conditioning, supporting the point that regulating the nervous system is needed to hold a new level of abundance.