Lexi Miles Corrin is the Founder and CEO of WAXON Laser + Waxbar and a champion for women’s empowerment by mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs.
The idea may seem counterintuitive when one is working so hard to build their own business. How would spending time and energy supporting other female business owners help me? I am over here struggling to stay above water or maybe I have just hit my stride in business, I can’t afford any distractions.
Allow me for a moment to walk you through how investing in fellow females directly impacted the success of my own business at every stage. My name is Lexi Miles Corrin and I am the proud founder and CEO of a laser waxbar. I began the business over 10 years ago when I noticed a great need in Canada for a safe, effective and affordable hair removal solution. Originally, the business—with one location in the heart of Toronto—gained a following with predominantly female clients looking to get smoother, and has grown to 16 locations nationwide with four new locations opening this year.
We very quickly, through the insights and feedback of our teams and clients, narrowed in on our real reason for existing. Yes, it was to deliver a premium hair removal experience, but more so, it is to create a safe space for everyone to live more confidently in their skin.
This was the first example of my business shifting focus onto the women around us. And it cascaded into every area of my life. I realized the more I could grow my business, and the more skills I could develop and learnings along the way, the more I could grow and impact the lives of women around me, from fellow female entrepreneurs to our management and location team members.
Lean into vulnerability.
Something I’ve always loved and admired about women in business is our ability to be humble and lean into our vulnerability. As my business grew to five corporate locations (locations I owned personally), I found the list of questions around the direction of my business mounting to extreme levels. I was white knuckling a bootstrapped business, holding onto it as tightly as I could, trying to avoid raising capital and diluting my ownership. And by the way, I knew nothing when it came to raising money, anyways! Cash was tight, I couldn’t afford the team I needed to support the number of locations I wanted to open, and the craziest part was my locations were putting up insanely strong numbers. It was a success in the eyes of many, but to me, it felt like I needed a support system and answers STAT. So, I set out to find and connect with more women entrepreneurs who could teach me all the things I needed to know. I dedicated a day a week to meeting these women and soaking it all up. I very much did not have as a small start-up, but what I gained from this time commitment, I could have never expected.
I spoke to female trailblazers about how I created corporate culture, how I built an authentic brand and how I designed an amazing guest experience. To my utmost surprise, these meetings became more of a roundtable. I was so humbled by their desire to learn from me. It was a huge moment of awakening. There is always more to learn, no matter how big your business might be and as women, we are truly incredible at taking moments with each other and turning them into learnings. By being vulnerable, humble and allowing yourself to be mentored, you can turn into a mentor yourself.
Foster strong partnerships.
I give credit to those women as they played a big role in many of my decisions at pivotal times in my business, but one that I am most proud and passionate about is my decision to franchise. This created yet another opportunity to focus on building more female entrepreneurs. There truly is no greater compliment than getting to see another female take a leap into the life of an entrepreneur through a business that my team and I built. A brand, whose sheer existence is centered around providing a safe space for women to live more confidently in their own skin.
Before my very eyes, I was growing my business alongside female franchise partners, many of whom came from the corporate world and were powerhouses in their own right.
If you are considering franchising, be sure to lean into humbling moments, and onto strong supportive systems. I believed, and still do, in a true partnership—one where you stand to learn just as much from partners as they do from you. Betting on your franchise partners, and in turn, giving them confidence to bet on themselves, without question, can be a massive key to your success.
You see, as business owners, especially small business owners who can tend to wear a lot of hats, our instinct is to go inward. To focus on our own business and the steps we need to follow to grow. We can find ourselves so wrapped up in the day to day that we often forget to come up for air. In my 10-plus years of experience scaling my brand (and subsequent brands under our own umbrella), I have learned it is in the moments that I did come up for air that real growth was fostered. It’s in these moments that I was able to foster these relationships with other female entrepreneurs and grow them into opportunities.
Women are powerful and in building each other up, collaborating, sharing, mentoring, listening and learning, we all win.
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