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Welcome back to the Candle Business Pro podcast. This is part three of our opening episodes giving you a bird's eye view of how we started our business. In episode one, we discussed our why and how we got started. In episode two, we discussed the sales channels that we use to move our products, and today we're gonna talk about mindset marketing and making it last. Starting next week, we will do deep dives into specifics, but I wanted to open up this brand new podcast by shaping an overall picture of what it takes to run a successful candle business.

Speaker 1: 0:45 

Okay, so let me be real with you. Candle making is the easy part. Building a business around it, that's where the real work starts. There will be days you feel like a total imposter, days you question your prices, your posts and even your purpose. I've been there, but I've also come out the other side with more clarity, community and confidence than I've ever expected. In this episode, we're talking about what it actually takes to keep growing without burning out and how to build something that truly lasts. So let's jump in. I'll show the mindset stuff that we had to work through, the kind of marketing that actually helped us grow, and how we've managed to keep things moving forward without totally burning out, All right.

Speaker 1: 1:27 

So the first thing we have to do if we want to have a candle business is we got to shift our mind from candle making to a business owner. So we aren't just going to be able to make candles that we want, that we just enjoy all the time and turn it into a business necessarily. Now we do want to as I mentioned in a previous episode think about a niche that we kind of already belong in, so we'll already have a really good idea of what our customers are going to want. We have to make further shifts with our mind to understand that we are now trying to run a business. So we can't always be chasing the latest trends because we want to. We have to be thinking about what is it our customers want? So shifting from being a candle maker to a business owner is one of the first things we have to do. If we don't do that, we're going to start chasing the latest trends in waxes, the latest trends in oils, and we're going to start kind of being all over the place and losing sight of what our focus is. Now there are going to be trending oils out there that our customers may want, for instance, the last couple of years Santal has been a super popular scent.

Speaker 1: 2:34 

It was one of our biggest sellers last summer with our customers. They just loved it. It was following that trend in the perfume space. There were a lot of popular and designer fragrances out there that were introducing Santal as a scent note and it trickles down to the candle space and that one has done really well for us. But there are other designer fragrances out there that people are chasing after and they don't necessarily do well amongst our wider audience. So that's something just to be cautious of is chasing the latest scent trend, because oftentimes they'll come and go pretty quickly.

Speaker 1: 3:11 

Another scent that did really well for us this last 12 months is going to be like a grapefruit scent. It's one of those scents that have kind of come in and it's been popular and it's been in other spaces outside of candle making recently, and so that's something that we started selling within our candle line. We have a line called Duos where we blend a couple of scents together. So it's not just a grapefruit, we're blending it with something else, but it was really popular. It's almost a buzzword, you know, in a way where people are seeing it and they're buying it. In fact, we were getting a lot of traffic on our website of people buying those type of candles. They are people that are searching for something online and, because of the SEO that we've done on our website, they are landing on those products and buying those, which is fantastic. So it certainly is important to stay up on some of the trends that are more widespread, but because of just when a fragrance line comes out from one of our suppliers, going and buying all 12 of them and thinking that you need to create your entire business around those because they're the newest, they are just putting out more product because that's how they operate. They want to continuously give us great scents, and most of these scents are great, but you don't need to shift your business to the latest trends. So our classic line of candles our Sugar Lemon Candle, our Hello Sunshine, which is gonna be like our orange agave citrus blend those type of scents we've had since we started three years ago and this is our number one selling candle it's our Sugar Lemon Candle.

Speaker 1: 4:44 

I always recommend anyone that's starting brand new to start out with having at least a couple of citrus scents in your business. I know I'm getting a little bit off topic here, but I want to let you know what's really working for us is having our citrus scents and then building, of course, other scents in there, but definitely having that, because those are scents that what I say to people is they're non-offensive. No one's going to smell that Sugar Lemon Candle of Ours or that Hello, sunshine Candle of Ours, that is that you know that orange peel that I just mentioned. They're not going to smell that and not like it or be, like you know, appalled at that scent. It might not be the scent they're going for, but it's not one of those that they're taken back by. Now, some of those scents that they might be taken back by are gonna be those overly masculine woodsy scents sometimes people don't like those or a super floral, like a lilac Some of those types of scents people are like, oh no, I don't want that or think of, like a patchouli, a patchouli scent people either love it or hate it right. Or an incense scent people love it or hate it. With a citrus scent, it's one of those that, even if they don't buy it for themselves, they weren't turned off by it right. So they are our best sellers in our shop.

Speaker 1: 5:55 

So, thinking about what people are going to continuously buy and making sure that it fits in with your brand, with your niches. That is really how we have to shift our minds. So stop chasing after the latest thing. You got to start thinking about everything from a business owner's perspective, and that goes not only just within the products that you're making. It also goes to vessels as well. Vessels is one of those things that are always coming out from suppliers that we don't need to chase after the latest thing. We make our classics in a. They're 10 ounce pours, they're in 12 ounce plain glass, straight sided jars that we put labeling on. We're not chasing after the latest vessel For one. Vessels are expensive and we'll get into more price points in an episode coming up here really soon about price points and how to get your cost of goods down as low as possible so that your margins can be wide enough. So you can do a lot of different cool things with your business.

Speaker 1: 6:50 

But it all starts with having just solid candles, and so we've had these candles for over three years now and we haven't swapped them out. Besides, when we first started, we did have that super lilac candle. We had to cut that right away because it did not do very well for us. We also had one of those fresh linen scented candles that I personally love. I absolutely love that scent. Our customers didn't, and so it was good to know. We cut those from our line and we kept that line. We didn't swap out anything else there. So that's one thing to keep your focus on is being a business owner and making decisions as a business, not necessarily chasing after your personal wants within the candle space and fragrances and vessels and all of that Okay.

Speaker 1: 7:34 

So the second thing we had to get over was imposter syndrome. Now I'm going to be really honest with you. It will continue to come back and creep its ugly head up anytime we're doing something brand new. So when we first started, the imposter syndrome was can we even make candles? Why are we struggling? Why can we not make candles like we have bought from markets and from stores and from other candle makers? Why can't we do this? And so we had to get into the understanding of how and why the candles do what they do, right when we're making them.

Speaker 1: 8:11 

Once you have that foundation, you're making candles, which is a very long struggle to get through for many people. There are so many times we were just like this isn't for us, let's get into baking cookies. In fact, we almost had Chad open up a chocolate chip cookie business. That's all it was going to be. It was just me and chocolate chips it was you. You bought just this one kind that we had. We were going to start with that and expand from there. I'm so glad we did it. I'd be so much heavier right now because I absolutely love his chocolate chip cookies. They are fantastic. Maybe we'll do that one day.

Speaker 1: 8:41 

But we stuck with the candles. But it's so hard to think I can't do this, I'm not good enough. Why am I not getting it right? And, honestly, a lot of it comes to looking for answers in too many places, not necessarily the wrong places. It's OK to use YouTube to learn how to make candles. It is OK to rely on some of the social media groups. That is all fine to do if you want to spend the time doing that. It's one of the reasons why we created our candle making course just to get people from A to B as quick as possible.

Speaker 1: 9:13 

We say you can go from brand new to selling candles in 28 days. Four weeks of going through it, you're going to understand the testing for how we make our number one selling candles. You know some people are going to go through it slower. They're not going to have enough time to go through it at that speed, and that's totally fine. But you also have to have the mindset that and the confidence that you can do it and imposter syndrome will continuously creep up. So when you get that, realize that that's all it is, that it's completely normal and you are going to get through it. So with us, I personally face it every time we do something new. So when we were making candles we had that.

Speaker 1: 9:52 

Once we figured out how to make candles, it was okay. How do we sell these candles? How do we build a Shopify store? How are we going to get traffic to that Shopify store? Why am I going to be able to take business away from some of these big chains and retailers that people are buying their candles from? When we go and see prices of other candles and think, gosh, like that candle at that store was only $8, $10. That's how much it cost me to make my candle. I got to sell my candle for $30. How am I ever going to be able to sell them? Remember, it's all about that niche and who you're selling to that customer that's buying those $5 candles at Walmart. That's not my customer, my customers. It's not that those aren't good candles, they're just not my customer. My customer's not shopping their candles. My customers are shopping small businesses, like I spoke about in the previous episode, and we'll dive a lot more into that coming up. But don't compare your prices to others unless you are in the exact same niche and you're selling to the exact same customer, and most likely that's not going to be the case.

Speaker 1: 10:54 

But to continue with the imposter syndrome discussion, we had it when we started selling candles. We had it when we started reaching out to do wholesale. I couldn't get people to buy our candles right away. I send one email and they didn't say yes, I will place in a wholesale order. So I thought we had problems. I thought we're never gonna be able to do this. It took some understanding of how wholesale work, what kind of emails needed to be written.

Speaker 1: 11:17 

All about the follow-up. I will give you this tip the follow-up is the number one way to grow your wholesale business. You will reach out to lots of potential retailers. If you are not following up with them, you will not succeed. I think that at least 70% of these wholesale accounts that we have we have over 140 of them now since we started wholesaling about three years ago we're at about 140. It would be more if we weren't so focused on our retail, direct-to-consumer side and we just went all in with wholesale, which is a fantastic way if you don't want to deal with the public, necessarily, or sell directly to customers. If you want to do wholesale, it's a fantastic avenue to go down.

Speaker 1: 12:02 

But you've got to be able to do a couple of things with wholesale. You've got to be able to accept rejection. Usually, rejection is going to come in the form of just not getting a response. People are just going to delete the email, but you have to continuously follow up with them until you get that. No, you're now a business owner. Your focus is selling candles, so when you email potential retailers that carry your product and you don't get a response, you need to follow up with them.

Speaker 1: 12:30 

Generally, what happens is they're just too busy. They don't respond to you to say no, thank you, or yes, please let me. Let me know more, cause, as a retail owner myself we have three stores I'm super busy when I get emails from potential makers that want us to carry their brand. I would absolutely love to dive into and see what they have. That's how we we've got. We stock tons of different makers in our stores not candles, but we have perfumes, we have soaps, we have people that make dips, we have people that make hats. We do, we have, we carry, all kinds of locally made plenty of jewelry, uh, of course. Uh, all of that's all locally made that we like to to stock in our shop. So people are reaching out all the time.

Speaker 1: 13:12 

There's what happens. You're going to send me an email on Saturday afternoon because that's when you have time off as the maker. I'm busy in my store. I look at your email real quick and think, oh yeah, I'll get back to them on Monday. I'm going to move that into a folder that's follow up later. That folder never gets checked and then I just forget and then I'm on to just operating and, you know, keeping the wheels moving with my business. Now down the road I might think, oh shoot, didn't someone reach out that was was selling that thing that we need? Let me go and try to find that email. I'm never gonna be able to find that email. So you've got to follow up. At least 70% of the wholesale accounts that we have gotten over the last few years have been from that follow-up email, that reminder that we're sending them that we would love to have our products in that store. So that was another case of imposter syndrome. Was all of those no's or just lack of responses?

Speaker 1: 14:06 

Then, when we open up a brick and mortar store, we're going to have those days where we have zero sales. We're paying staff members to be there managing the store and they get zero customers coming through those doors, especially here in Michigan where we have really long, cold winters. We can't just close down. We still have to at least cover our overhead and our expenses. So there's very, very few days ever that will completely close the shop, because in Michigan people are used to getting out in the winter and the cold, so we got to be there. But there will be days that we make no sales. We have rent to pay that day. We have the payroll of the employees that are working that day. So we're going in the hole that day, right, we're going negative on those days.

Speaker 1: 14:51 

You just have to be able to balance as a business owner that you're going to have those type of days, but when we would have those days, I would think is this it Like? Are we done? Like is it? Are we never going to get a customer again? Have people just lost all of their interest in us? You sleep on it or you lose sleep about it, and then the next day you're going to get some sales. It's going to start working out for you again. Same thing that's going to happen with your online store. You open up an online store.

Speaker 1: 15:19 

If you've done the things you need to do, which is, you know, seo, optimizing your meta descriptions, your product descriptions, your titles, your photos you can't go halfway. I don't want to get off topic too much here, but you can't go halfway in anything you do as a business owner, because there's so much competition out there. You just have to rise above what the others are doing. That's what we've done. I don't want to say that there's nothing special about our candles. I have so much love and admiration for the work that Chad has put into creating all of these scent blends for us. Our team makes outstanding candles that perform really, really well, but what we're doing, others can do. The thing is, we're working harder than most people. So if you want to make this work. You just got to work harder than most people and you got to keep trying and not giving up.

Speaker 1: 16:13 

If you open up a website and just throw a few photos that you took and pop them out there, they're not cohesive, they don't show the brand, they're not explaining the story. If you have, there's certain areas of your website that you really need to optimize on. Have you filled out the about us section? Do people know who they're buying from? If you haven't done those things, then you haven't done the best that you can on your website. Right, and we know that. We. We know when we can do a little bit more. I I know that I need to move some things around on my website. We have some items that are selling better than others that I want to make sure more people see. I need to do that. I got to find the time to get that done right.

Speaker 1: 16:54 

Our photos we have gotten them to a place that we are really, really happy with them. It works. Our customers like it. It looks sleek, but it took us a while to get there and there was a lot of navigating that we had to do to get it there, but we knew we had to do that to compete with other candle shops. So you just got to work harder than the next person and rise above when other people are going to want to give up. You're going to have those down days, that imposter syndrome is definitely going to creep up on you, but you just got to keep working through it and if you do that, this is going to end up working out for you. It might take some people longer than others, but it's going to work for you. Okay.

Speaker 1: 17:31 

So now let's talk about a few marketing tactics that we've used from day one that have really helped us with our cleanup business. So the first one is going to be email marketing. Email marketing, building a list and staying consistent is going to be key for the long-term success of your business. You have to be able to collect and communicate with your email list consistently. You just have to, whether you are out at pop-up markets or you're selling online, you're selling to coworkers or even if you're selling through social media channels. Collecting those customers' email addresses is going to be huge for rapid growth in your business, because you're going to want to have an email marketing plan that lays out when and how you communicate to them through email.

Speaker 1: 18:20 

It's not always just about selling them and all the emails. It's not hey buy this, hey buy this, hey buy this. It's about providing value to your customer based on the types of emails that they would want to receive and based on what your niche is. That will dictate how you write those emails. So back to the analogy that I spoke about in an earlier episode about, say, you had a line of candles. It's all about world travelers. You can send them emails that are not just about selling and buying this candle. It would be travel tips, it would be places to explore some of the top 10 destinations things like that to them. If you were building an entire brand around, say, zodiac sign and astrology, you know from every Zodiac sign, when they change over, you can be sending out an email to your list with a story related to that. So you're not always just selling them. That is not what email marketing is. What we want to do is stay top of mind with our customers so that when they are ready to buy something, you're in their inbox, they're remembering you and they're going to buy from you. So that's a little bit about email marketing that we do. It's been part of our journey from day one and it's really helped us to grow because, as I've mentioned in an earlier episode, anytime we had those slow days and, for instance, when we just talked about the slow days in the shop where we got no one coming into our stores I can send an email out and I can talk about how miserably cold and icy it is outside and how my customers should want to stay home, enjoy a nice candle and cozy up. Here's a candle that we recommend doing that with right now, and so we can subtly promote some of our products in email.

Speaker 1: 20:08 

Social media, social media this is a social media world. So many people are addicted to it. We're on our phones too much. We're scrolling, we're watching stories, we're watching TikToks whatever the latest craze is out there right now. Right, social media people love it or hate it. I enjoy it when it's not work, but so much of what we do with social media now is work related. But we have to do it. We can't say I don't want to do social media, I don't want to promote my products, because it is just the way the world operates. If the world's on social media, I'm trying to sell my candles. As a business owner, I have to promote my products, and the way we do that is through social media. You do not need to have a large following. In fact, three years into this, we have less than 3000 followers, I believe, on our accounts, and we still promote through our social media and sell a decent amount from whenever we're promoting a product to them, clicking on that link and going out to our website. It's all actually tracked right in our Shopify of where they come from, and so we're still getting decent traffic when we promote on social media.

Speaker 1: 21:20 

But again, just like our email marketing, it's not all about selling. You want to break up your social media content into different categories. We want to be giving advice and giving tips, whether it's wellness tips, whether it's eco-friendly tips, whatever your niche is right. Using the same type of content that's going to be in your emails is what you're going to do on social media. In fact, what we'll do is we'll take a photo, we'll put a caption with it for social media and then we will turn that into a longer form for email so that we're getting in front of the majority of our customers, because social media is only going to show to just a small percentage of your customers, because meta and all these social media platforms want you to pay to promote your posts, and if you don't want to do that, you're going to have to continuously post often. But also making sure that you're following up with social media.

Speaker 1: 22:18 

Now, another way that marketing has done well for us is just word of mouth. When we are out of markets, people buy our products. And word of mouth, because people do talk about products that they love Also. You talk about products that they love Also. When your product is in someone's home, if it has a label on it that has a unique logo and branding that sticks out, people are going to want to pick that up. How many times have you been over at a friend or family member's house? You smell a candle, you love it, you look at it and now you know where to go and buy that candle. That's just how it works, right? That's how word of mouth is going to work, and so making sure that you have branding and logos that are going to stick out and be memorable to customers is going to be a way that word of mouth is really going to help you.

Speaker 1: 23:11 

Okay, so another marketing strategy that does really, really well for us is going to be that community-based marketing. So that's going to be doing fundraisers. That's going to be doing things such as just wearing shirts with your logo on it out in public. When you go to the gym, wear a shirt that says Garcinet, Beacon, canto Company on it. Having conversation with people, the waitress and waiters at restaurants will ask us about a brand. When they read that, they're like, oh, what is that? Or they may recognize the logo because we will sponsor softball teams, kids, sporting events. We will do all kinds of things in our community and making sure that we attach our brand and our logo to it.

Speaker 1: 23:53 

One of the things that we like to do is all the nonprofits out there that are always asking for donations and sponsorships for the theater, for sports teams, for church groups, all kinds of things out there. Instead of making a personal donation from yourself, make it on behalf of your brand. That way, the recognition goes to the brand, right. So when you are at a kid's baseball game, right, and they have all of the signs out in the field and it's thanking all of the sponsors that have contributed to their season, instead of having Sebastian Garznett on there, I want to have Garznett Beacon Candle Company. When we make a donation to our local nonprofit theater, I want it to be listed that Garznett Beacon Candle Company was that sponsor, not Sebastian Garzin. Also, what's fantastic about that is these are generally going to be business expense tax deductions that you're gonna be able to take at the end of the year to reduce the taxes owed on your business. So that's one of the fantastic things about making donations on behalf of your business. So we do lots of fundraisers. That gets people to come into our store. But before we even had our store, we were doing these fundraisers, reaching out to the different nonprofits, setting up a campaign with them and utilizing their email list and their social media channels to promote your business. So doing all types of things in your local community is really going to help you get your name out there.

Speaker 1: 25:32 

In fact, when me and Chad first started, we were making candles in the bedroom, the spare room of our house. We moved into the smallest room of the house so we can make candles in the largest room. We reached out to the news station because there was a festival coming up called Tulip Time, which is really popular here in Holland, michigan, and I reached out to the news saying, hey, we have this two of time themed candle that we made. We're a small business. We would absolutely love if you you know, if you wanted to do a segment on that. We actually do a PR workshop inside of the inner circle that explains and gives a templates for how we reach out to all different things, from your local newspaper to how we got an Oprah daily, how we got in parade magazine, all of that stuff Right.

Speaker 1: 26:17 

So we are always doing outreach and you don't have to have a storefront to do any of that stuff. You just have to have a brand, you have to have a website, you have to have your social medias. You have everything in place because there is going to be a trust factor that they need to research. But we reached out to the local news. They came to our house and we sat there in that candle making room and did a news article. That was the biggest weekend of sales we ever had because it drove so many people to our website that weekend.

Speaker 1: 26:46 

It also opened up a lot of opportunity to do wholesale in our community, because then all the stores saw that. A lot of stores started emailing us saying, hey, we would love to carry your candles, we would love to carry your candles, because obviously they know that they're going to be able to make money on them because we are getting publicity for them. So the next thing that we have to do when we are shifting our mind from being a candle maker to a business owner is think about our launching of promotions and collections. When and how are we going to launch new releases out to our customers and when are we going to do that? It's key that we are getting our products to them when they want them. Now I do think that it's kind of insane these days that it will be April and we'll start seeing Halloween stuff pop up right. It's just crazy how early these big box stores are promoting it.

Speaker 1: 27:43 

But we do need to keep in mind especially if you wanted to go down the wholesale route that people that are buying wholesale retailers that are stocking their shelves for fall and winter are definitely for fall, starting to plan for that in April and May because they need to have that fall stuff by August and then by July they want to have their plan for winter already done so that they know where they're going to stock. So we get a lot of our holiday season wholesale orders submitted to us in July. Now many of them know that they're not going to get those. We will have a posted release date. So for our winter products generally, we're going to go ahead and get those started out to the retailers by October 15th and our fall stuff we're going to have to our retailers by August 1st because, depending on where they are in the country, cooler weather is going to start to happen and creep in and then you're going to see Starbucks is promoting their pumpkin spice latte or whatnot Like in August. When people go into that mindset they want to have those candles. So you do want to think ahead.

Speaker 1: 28:54 

We have a business planner on our website that you can check out. It's like 207 pages. It's super robust. But one of the things inside of it is the launch strategy and so you can think about and you can map out when you are going to launch specific collections and so thinking ahead for that. You can't wait until December 1st to put out a holiday collection. It's just not going to work. One of the other things inside of that business planner is you can do a SWOT analysis. If you're not familiar with what a SWOT analysis is, it's a template like a worksheet that will have it broken up into four different sections. It's going to be your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and then your threats. So that's what a SWOT analysis is Completing that can really shift your mind to making you think like a business. So that's something that you may want to check out and see if it would be something good for you, depending on where you're at in your business growth. So that is launching promotions and collections making sure that you're doing this with advanced notice so that your customers will be able to get your products when they are needed.

Speaker 1: 30:00 

So one of the things that's going to happen as you are building out all these different areas of your business you're going from a maker to a candle business owner and you've got your hands in so many different things the stress is going to rise. You are going to start experiencing some burnout. So when you start to experience burnout, you have to start minimizing the tasks that you're taking on. For instance, I said that I needed to move some things around on my website, but that's just not the highest priority for me right now. If I mentally get burnt out on my business, I'm not going to be able to operate my best. It's just like if you're getting burnt out at home. Sometimes you just need a break.

Speaker 1: 30:43 

Do what it is that you need to do to make sure that you keep your mental health in the right space and I'm trying to avoid burnout and recognizing the signs of burnout in advance, so that you don't go too far with that, into where you just want to give up, because that's what a lot of people will end up doing is I'm not getting sales. I'm trying this, I'm trying that I'm burnt out. I don't want to do this anymore. Try to recognize when that's starting to creep up on you and take a step back and reevaluate all the efforts that you're putting in there and try to minimize and only prioritize the ones that are actually moving your business forward at this time. For instance, right now it's May of the year and we are going into our really busy season at the store. I can't put all the focus that is required of the direct-to-consumer, my retail stores and also working on my wholesale and on my private label and these other different candle lines that we're coming out with. I just can't do all of it at once. So I have to prioritize what makes the most sense for us right now and put some of those projects on the back burner, because I know if I get to a point where it kind of boils over and I'm just like I need to take a week off, I know my business is going to suffer from that. So I need to recognize those signs in advance. So when you start to think that you're getting burnt out, that means you are getting burnt out. Take a step back and relax and try to shift your mind back to remembering why you enjoyed candle making in the first place.

Speaker 1: 32:19 

Now, one of the things that does help us avoid burnout now is making sure that we build out the systems and we delegate out the work properly. I'm one of those that I often have a mindset of. If it's going to take me a half hour to explain to you how to do the task, it's only going to take me 20 minutes to do the task myself. I'm just going to do the task, but then, when that task has to happen again next month, I'm just going to do the task, and then at the end of the year, you put in hours amongst hours of that task, when I should have just spent 30 minutes months ago teaching someone else how to do it. It's something that I've always kind of liked the ownership of a lot of projects but I have to let some of that stuff go and you're gonna have to do the same as you grow. You're gonna have to start delegating out tasks. Now, many times, we're operating this on our own and I totally understand that.

Speaker 1: 33:17 

But do you have family members, friends, that want to help you out with your business? Do you have a friend that's fantastic at social media and you're just like hey, can I trade you candles for you to do the social media for me? I'll pay you in product. Can you do that for me? In fact, all of the photography that we started out on our website with was an exchange of product with someone that was a professional photographer. So swapping out what you can do with others that have a skill set that you don't have is a great way to try to avoid burnout. So delegating out some stuff. If you need your books in order, is there a bookkeeper that you know, a family friend, that would love to have dozens of candles from you at Christmas time to give out as gifts and in exchange, they are going to help you keep your books right.

Speaker 1: 34:04 

So think about ways that you can swap out work with people, also myself. We do have a staff, so there's really no excuse for me getting burnout when I should be delegating this more to my team. We have very, very competent managers in my stores and oftentimes I'm still doing some of those tasks that are really at a manager's level that they should be doing. It's tough to let go. I'm not the best one at it, so it's hard for me to sit here and tell you to do it, but we've got to do it. We just got to let it go and give those tasks to others that can do it. And doing a product swap, especially when you're first starting out, is fantastic way of doing that.

Speaker 1: 34:42 

The other thing is building out systems. So one of the things that I really like to do because people ask all the time like how do you do so much stuff? You're in your stores every day. You're operating Candle Business Pro, not only just on doing the candle making bootcamps in the course, but we also have the inner circle where we meet every single week. Then we also do our family dinners together as candle makers and all these other workshops that we put on. The reason why I'm personally able to do. That is, I have built systems that I operate by, so almost everything that I do now goes into a system somewhere. If this is going to sound morbid in a way, but like if I was to, if I was to no longer be part of this business and it was just Chad, chad should be able to step in and keep it going the way that it is going because we have systems in place. Building out systems when you are first starting your candle business will be huge, because if you wait too long and then you look back and you think about all the things that you have to build systems out for to teach other people, it's going to take a long time, and that's when you end up saying what I say is oh, I'll just do it myself instead of just having a system in place.

Speaker 1: 35:55 

So now, when, anytime I take on something new, I try to write out the steps of what I'm doing creating an SOP, which is a standard operating procedure, so that someone can open it up and they understand when people get hired into our stores as a new team member operating in our store, whether they're a manager or they are just going to be there on the weekends or a college student in the summer. Regardless of their role, they can open up this manual that we have. They understand how to do candle pouring. They understand how to do candle making. They understand how things should be set on our tables. They understand how to merchandise. They understand how to put inventory into the system, so they can come in and not have to get training from myself on how to do their job.

Speaker 1: 36:40 

Now, of course, we want to give them really good training with a manager or one of us, but they can do it also without us, and it's always a good reference guide, because when we train on new employees, they are going to be overwhelmed because they're going to spend a week with me and I'm going to teach them everything I possibly know about running the business as it pertains to what their responsibilities are going to be. You're going to forget some things. They're going to need to be able to look at some type of reference, but for the first year, we didn't have a onboarding procedure. Once we built an onboarding procedure, it made training employees so much easier, so now we do an onboarding for just about every task, right, we have this SOP. So whether it is for social media, whether it is for writing emails, whether it is for people that are getting into our QuickBooks. Whatever we are doing, we try to map it out so that someone else can step in and do it at any time in the future. If you start that early in your candle business journey, it's going to help out so much when you start getting really busy and kind of things start getting a little crazy right.

Speaker 1: 37:48 

So even how wholesale orders work when a wholesale order comes in, people often may think oh, I just got my first wholesale order. I don't know how am I going to box it up. How am I going to box it up? How am I going to ship it out? What do I do? We're all going to go through that our first times. When you learn something, document that you've learned it and so that someone else can come along, read it, understand how to do that Right, because oftentimes we're going to, we're going to do something, but someone brand new that you bring on in the future is not going to know.

Speaker 1: 38:19 

Or if, down the line, you want to sell your business, if you want to sell your business, that potential business, next business owner that is looking to buy your business they need to know exactly. They're going to want to know exactly how to operate every aspect of your business. Because if I go and tell someone that I'm trying to sell my business to hey, we are going to do $500,000 in revenue this year. Look at my track record. We are now a million dollar business. We have sold all of this amount of stuff. This is how we do it. They need to be able to step in and say, okay, how is this going to operate with me? Without knowing anything about candles, they should be able to step in as a new business owner and have a roadmap from making a candle all the way through to operating a six-figure business. So, making sure that you put those systems in place. There's also little systems that you can put in place. We might be thinking way too big. Some of you may be thinking like, oh, I'm never gonna get there. I definitely don't need to do that. There's other systems that you can put into place to avoid burnout, for instance.

Speaker 1: 39:32 

I talk about this a lot in the inner circle when people are like how do I manage doing all of these different things and keeping up with social media? Because social media for some of us, like I said, is a struggle. I'm not good at it. It's one of those things I like to delegate out. But when we are tasked with doing the social media and we don't enjoy doing it, I love to time block. So what I'll do on a Monday night sitting in front of the television, because I don't want to burn out, so I do want to spend time with my family or watching TV. While I'm there, I am creating social media content for the next week or month, or chat, in fact, for Kindle Business Pro, he has created assets for like 90 days and then he takes all of those social media posts and he goes ahead and schedules them all inside of the Facebook, instagram, the meta platform. Inside of the business suite. They have a planner where you can go ahead and schedule all of those out. So now we don't even have to think about social media for 90 days, which is fantastic and then he'll spend an afternoon creating the next 90 days worth of stuff, because every day, spending five or 10 minutes coming up with a concept, shooting those photos or the videos, putting the caption behind it and posting it takes a long time when you're gonna do it every day. We just don't have time for that. So we like to do a lot of time blocking to where we get into a mind shift of something and we just focus on that. So that's another way to hopefully help you from burning out.

Speaker 1: 41:02 

Okay, so now, as you evolve and grow your business, you're going to want to start doing a lot of cool stuff. You're going to want to start doing new collections, even new brands. We actually have several brands. We have Garden and Beacon Candle Company that we started several years ago and that most people follow our journey from. But we also have a brand by itself called Pet Palace Candles. It's our pet odor eliminating candles. It actually redirects now to Garza Beacon Candle Company, but it's just a whole other avenue that we decided to do to separate from Garza Beacon Candle Company so that when we are reaching out to potential pet boutiques to carry those products, it's not overwhelming them with all that we have and that we can just focus on certain lines. So as we evolve, you're going to want to do different things, and you can only do that when you have clarity. So thinking ahead of what direction you want to go with your business and really trying to plan it out and map it out is going to be some steps that you're going to want to take.

Speaker 1: 41:59 

We've got Garza and Beacon Candle Company to a place that we're really happy with it, to where we don't want to necessarily expand into more stores. We have three retail locations now. We would rather focus more on the wholesale and growing that side up, because we enjoy the candle making. Chad enjoys the scent creation, we enjoy the creative side and we've grown to a point where growing more is just now managing a business and we do enjoy being in the business a little bit. We enjoy working in the shop some, so we aren't wanting to grow larger than that. Right now we are doing some consulting work and helping other people open up candle shops and businesses. These are things that I enjoy doing. I enjoy helping other candle makers. That's why we created Candle Business Pro. That's why we have the inner circle where we're actually helping other candle business owners grow.

Speaker 1: 42:52 

We love when we have members that are hitting their 10th wholesale account and then their 20th wholesale account and watching them grow. In fact, we just had one of our members just landed a massive account in wine country out in Napa Valley, like totally above my, like so bougie, and like way up there. The candles are amazing. They're gorgeous and like landing those accounts and being able to celebrate those wins with our members something I love to do. I love helping people grow, so definitely check out Candle Business Pro.

Speaker 1: 43:25 

We have free resources out there. We have a checklist of all the candle making supplies that we use In the show notes below. I'll link that out. We also have a candle calculator that shows you how we come up with doing our candle math Cause I know math is not everyone's strong suit. That's free on our website as well, along with our courses and our membership. So just remember, if you're serious about growing your candle business, mindset and marketing are just as important as your melt points and your fragrance loads. You got to keep learning, keep refining and keep believing that you can build a business that you love. We've got your back in every future episode, one topic at a time. Come, follow us over on Instagram at Candle Business Pro. Send us a message, let us know what obstacles that you're facing right now in your business and how you're trying to overcome them, or let's see if we can help you out as well. Thank you so much for tuning in. Take care you.