Beauty Business School

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I'm going back to ground zero and it scares the sh*t out of me.

In this episode I share why I'm starting a second podcast and a mindset course alongside Beauty Business School, the fears that came up (capacity, burnout, "who do I think I am") and the question my husband asked that stopped me in my tracks.

Then I take you through three moments from my own business where growth was on the other side of fear: being the first in my area to bring in deposits (and losing clients for it), doubling the BBS price and stepping into the next version of you before you feel ready.

Plus a catch up on Tamara Reid's personal branding intensive, 25,000 downloads and next week's 100th episode with Brooke Cherry.

In this episode

• Your nervous system will try to keep you safe, which means keeping you small
• Do the scary, aligned action: the deposits that lost me clients kept the ones I actually wanted
• Confidence comes after: 90% of students since doubling the price are doing the work
• Your why has to be bigger than the failures that are coming
• The next version of you is going to cost the old one

This podcast is sponsored by aglow.  aglow is the only membership platform built for clinics and salons to manage your memberships and your members. Missed payments, cancellations, contracts, the lot, handled by real people,
 
Think of them as an extension of your team. Try it free at getaglow.co.

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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Chelsey Gardener came into the beauty industry in her 40s with nothing. A marriage that ended, a stretch of being homeless and no family to fall back on.

Two years ago she was doing lashes from home with a handful of clients and no plan. Today she's the CEO of Baddie HQ on the Gold Coast. Chelsea's story is going to BLOW your mind. She's gone viral on TikTok, gets recognised at the shops, hosts her own podcast and is building a beginner lash course. Let this be the episode to show you anything is possible babe.

Chelsey's podcast: Baddie After Hours
Chelsey's Instagram: Baddie HQ
Chelsey's Tik Tok: Baddie HQ

In this episode:

• Why one lash set made her feel like she could take on the world, and why she wanted to give that feeling to others
• The rebrand that changed everything (her old logo "doesn't show who I am")
• Why I tell you to date your brand instead of picking a colour palette
• How one event and hearing that 20K months were possible flipped her ambition
• Why TikTok works for her: her clients book on a feeling
• 4am starts, a supportive husband and the discipline of knowing what you want
• Why clients always have money; they're choosing where it goes
• Her one piece of advice: back yourself, it's okay to be different

If you've ever felt too late, too different or too far behind to build the business you want, start here.

This podcast is sponsored by aglow.  aglow is the only membership platform built for clinics and salons to manage your memberships and your members. Missed payments, cancellations, contracts, the lot, handled by real people,
 
Think of them as an extension of your team. Try it free at getaglow.co.

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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Memberships are the fastest way to predictable revenue in a beauty business. Set them up wrong and they become a liability you can't see.

Kimberley sits down with Karl Margrain (co-founder and CEO) and Jo Blundell (co-founder and CRO) of aglow, the only dedicated membership platform built for clinics and salons. Karl has spent 20 years in payments. Jo spent five years building Timely into a household name in beauty. Together they've helped around 1,000 salons across Australia and New Zealand move from feast and famine bookings to recurring revenue.

This one also comes with a backstory. Kimberley publicly called Aglow out for leaving sole traders behind. Their response is the reason they're on the podcast.

Inside this episode:

• Why filling next week's calendar is the wrong problem to solve
• The credit-based membership trap: balance sheet liability and chargeback risk
• Packages are not memberships, and why discounting them backfires
• Member vs non-member pricing and how it protects your margin
• Perks that add value without cutting your price
• Who handles failed payments, cancellations and awkward conversations
• The three membership models: subscriptions, treatment plans and the treatment wallet
• How the treatment wallet makes the credit model safe for salons and clients

If your income rises and falls with your calendar every week, start with 10 members.

Find aglow at getaglow.co or @aglow_app on Instagram. Send BBF on Instagram to get the pricing and retention frameworks Kimberley teaches inside Beauty Business Foundations.

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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Getting clients through the door is the easy part. Keeping them is where most beauty businesses lose money.

If your clients stay for two or three appointments and then go quiet, that is not bad luck and it is not the economy. It is a gap in your client journey and it is showing up at the same point every single time.

In part two of the client journey series, Kimberley breaks down the 10 areas that decide whether a client stays with you for years or leaves at the seven month mark without telling you why. This is the same review she runs on her own businesses every three to six months, straight off the back of a Beauty Expo panel with Emily (The Cosmetic Industry Coach) and Kelly (The Skin Queen) that sent her back to her own gaps.

Inside this episode:

• The 5 second rule: what someone decides about your brand before they ever message you
• What people say about you when you are not in the room, and how to control it
• Why "who is this for" is a business decision, not a marketing exercise
• The identity your clients are actually buying (it is rarely the treatment)
• Greeting and entry: why hugging a corporate client was the right call
• The nervous system moment that makes someone feel safe enough to spend money with you
• How you speak to clients, and why second-guessing yourself out loud kills your authority
• Educating at the start, not the checkout, so you never feel like a salesperson
• The feeling they came in for, and what happens when you miss it
• The details that carry the brand: colours, music, scent, snacks, robes

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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This is the FREE RESOURCE I promised

"I need more clients" is the number one thing beauty business owners say to Kimberley. It is almost never the actual problem.

Most of the businesses she works with sit at 50 to 60% booked. That gap is not a marketing problem. It is an optimisation problem, and it is far cheaper to fix than finding new people. Katie added $10,000 a month to her business without a single piece of external marketing, purely by looking at the clients she already had.

In this episode Kimberley walks through the five numbers that move a beauty business from 50 to 60% booked up to 80 to 90%: your rebooking rate, your retention rate, your average client spend, your visit frequency and your retail percentage. She covers what to do before you touch any of them, which is pricing, and finishes on the client journey, which decides whether any of it sticks.

If you are constantly chasing new clients, this is the episode that tells you why.

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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This one was meant to be about optimising the client journey. It turned into a full debrief instead.

Kimberley is a week off the back of Beauty Expo, still tired, still processing, and she recorded this one exactly as it came out. What travelling every two to four weeks for a year actually costs. Why she was nervous going into Sydney again, and what made this year completely different. The students who walked into expo, got overwhelmed and went home.

Then it turns into something else. A woman walked up to her at the Circadia awards and said she joined Beauty Business School four weeks ago, binged the content, put her prices up, moved into a new clinic and is now booked four weeks in advance.

Kimberley pulls up the number she says most coaches will never show you. The industry average completion rate for an online course sits at 12 to 15%. Beauty Business School sits at 31%. She talks through what that number does to her head, why she ties her worth to it, and what the students who finish have actually gone on to do.

If you have ever paid for an event and left feeling worse than when you arrived or bought a course that is still sitting in your logins, this is the one.

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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Rhiannon Davis packed up her Queensland salon, moved her family to East Gippsland, and opened Skin Bar by Rhiannon in a town of 1400 people. She took 38 bookings in the first three days.

She did not arrive with a client base. She did not know a single person there. She built the demand months before she unlocked the door.

In this episode we pull the whole launch apart. The waitlist she opened on a whim that hit 11 signups on day one and 92 by launch. The local Facebook groups she posted into three times a week. The emails she sent to strangers about who she is, before she ever asked them to book. Changing her location and SEO while she was still trading in Queensland. And the decision most people get wrong: she did not run an opening special. She raised her prices.

Three weeks in, her book runs into October and her clients are rebooking.

If you have ever told yourself your town is too small, this one is for you.

You can find Rhi on instagram HERE

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

Send us Fan Mail

This one was by request, and there was no plan.

I had a tarot reading at a castle in Ballarat with a woman who did not know my name, could not have looked me up and proceeded to describe the exact thing I had not been able to put words to for six months. Then I had a second reading in Bali four days later and she said almost the same thing word for word.

So this is the full debrief. What was said, what I have actually done about it and the business decisions that came out of it.

I talk about the comparison spiral I have been stuck in, the trap of believing I have to keep giving more value to be valuable, why I doubled the price of Beauty Business School after teetering on it for far too long and the decision I made to stop travelling to speak unless I am paid.

What we cover

• The comparison spiral and why comparing yourself to someone 11 years ahead of you is a trap
• Starting over in a new field still means putting in the reps. It does not accelerate just because you have experience elsewhere
• "The universe has put you in a waiting room and you're not allowed to leave"
• Why simplicity is the thing standing between where you are and where you want to be
• The value trap: constantly adding more so you feel worthy of the money
• How over-delivering robs your clients of proving to themselves that they can do it
• Why 600 members was the wrong goal and 200 engaged members is the right one
• Doubling the price of BBS, and the two aligned clients who signed up within 48 hours
• Redesigning the ideal client by looking at the best people already inside the community
• Releasing control, and why controlling every outcome was the thing keeping her stuck
• The decision to stop speaking for free
• The one filter she now runs every business decision through: will this add more work for me?

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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I have never sat across from a guest and forgotten my interview questions before. This episode did that to me.

Lilliane Caron has run the same salon for 45 years. Not a franchise, not multiple locations, one salon that now has 16 rooms and sees around 2,000 clients a week. She's waxing third generations of the same families. Then at the same time build one of the biggest waxing supply businesses in Australia (which is also in the UK and USA)

In this episode she tells me how it actually happened. Buying the business with money her family trusted her with. Making sugar wax at the back of the salon at night. Driving to massage parlours to teach the girls how to wax because she needed a bigger audience than one front door at a time, then coming home at 4am with wads of cash to fund her product development. Getting her products into pharmacies and supermarkets, then getting deleted after five years and learning the hard way what retail loyalty really looks like.

She also shares the client complaint that could have ended everything and instead became the reason her clients now fall asleep during Brazilians. That story alone is worth the listen.

We talk staff retention (she keeps her team for 10 years in an industry that struggles to get three), why she runs her salon like McDonald's, what she'd tell anyone starting a product line today and the part nobody posts about: how lonely building something really is.

If you've ever felt like you're too far behind, too unqualified or too unsupported to build something that lasts, this is your episode.

You can find Lilliane's incredible products here: https://caronlab.com.au/ 
Stalk the Smooth and Tan salon here: https://smoothandtan.com.au/

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.

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Rebecca MacArthur is a solo therapist specialising in Brazilian waxing from a studio behind her house in Helena Valley. Two kids, eight and a half years of working from home and a business that had gone from busy to boring.

Four and a half months after joining Beauty Business School she is on track to double her income, she has a minimum of five people on her waitlist and she has not added a single hour to her week.

In this episode Rebecca walks through the whole thing: failing business class in year 12, winning State Therapist of the Year twice, burning out in a high pressure salon, learning connection in a salon she still gets emotional about  and finally sticking a sign up across the road from a school.

What's covered

• Why a home-based business is not the lesser option (lower overheads, more control, better wage)
• What "ticking along" actually looks like, and why steady is a warning sign
• Getting specific about the ideal client, and why that was the single biggest lever in her business
• How to market an intimate service like Brazilian waxing without putting vaginas all over your feed
• Two Brazilian specialists, two completely opposite marketing directions, both working
• Rebooking, retail, and the client journey lessons she carried out of two very different salons
• Trusting the process before you have proof it works
• Why the goal does not have to be a team, a second location, or education

Rebecca is what I call a silent assassin. No live calls, no noise, just implementation.
You can fine Rebecca here: https://www.instagram.com/rebeccamacarthur.wax/

Are you looking to level up your salon in 2026? Every beauty business owner needs Beauty Business Foundation, this is the KEY areas you need to have a successful beauty business. Want to learn more? 

https://beautybusinessschool.com.au/beauty-business-foundations-2025/

Loved it? Leave a five-star review, it helps more beauty business owners find the show.