Why the beauty business isn’t always pretty

Mooi said the first thousand days of owning a business demands resilience. Picture: Supplied The beauty business isn’t always pretty. Sometimes, it’s as tough as leathery skin long before it smooths out the wrinkles.

Entrepreneur Jaaminique Mooi knows all about the going getting tough, but she’s also the kind of tough that gets going (apologies to Billy Ocean). Building confidence has become Mooi’s business, but building the business also demanded just as much resilience as many of the clients walking through her doors needed to win back their own. There was a time when the owner ofRevive Skin and Body Clinicin Waterfall, Midrand, wondered whether the business would make it through another month.

Cash flow was tight; stock was difficult to keep on the shelves, and the first thousand days of owning the clinic proved every bit as difficult as other entrepreneurs had warned her they would be. Today, Revive has grown into a two-branch business, but Mooi said what clients see today was built on years of uncertainty, tough decisions and more than a few calculated risks. “I thought buying the clinic would be the hard part,” Mooi said.

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“What I didn’t realise was that keeping it alive would test me every day.” She bought an existing aesthetics practice after an unexpected conversation with a supplier at the company she worked for at the time, rebranded it, and set out to conquer. This, despite owning a business never really forming part of a carefully mapped-out career plan. The opportunity arrived just after she had prayed for a breakthrough, because every day felt like rinse and repeat.

“You know that look when someone’s there, but just not present. That was me,” she said. “The next day the rep mentioned there was a clinic for sale. Something inside me immediately said this was what I was supposed to do.” Aesthetics had already become a passion while working at her day job, where she discovered that treating skin conditions could change far more than a person’s appearance.

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