018. The Worst Business Advice I Ever Got (And Why I'm So Glad I Ignored It)

Everyone's handing out business advice. Most of it is wrong. In this episode, Susannah Dellinger breaks down the four pieces of business advice she was given, ignored, and is so glad she did — from five-year business plans to the myth of removing yourself from your own company — and shares what actually built a multi-million dollar agency from zero.

In this episode:

• Why she scaled from zero to $5 million in 48 months without ever writing a business plan
• Why "stay true to your vision no matter what" is some of the most dangerous advice a founder can follow
• How listening to brands who couldn't afford her agency led to launching the Bright Beauty Connect Talent Network
• Why staying invisible as a service provider cost her years of growth — and what she'd do differently
• The truth about "building a business that runs without you" — and why she thinks it's one of the biggest traps in entrepreneurship
• Why the people making the least in beauty retail are the ones generating the most revenue — and how she's changing that
• What she learned about leveling the playing field for female-founded, BIPOC-founded, and LGBTQ-founded brands
• Why if you're still in your business after 10, 15, 20 years — that's not a failure. That's the point.

00:00 The Business Advice Nobody Should Be Taking 

00:40 Why I'm Answering This Question Backwards 

01:31 I Never Wrote a Business Plan. Here's What I Did Instead. 

04:00 How Listening to the Market Changed Everything 

04:50 Why Staying True to Your Vision Can Actually Destroy You 

05:44 How Beauty Field Teams Actually Work and Why Agencies Are Broken 

07:29 Why I Launched the Bright Beauty Connect Talent Network Against All Advice 

11:30 The Four and a Half Years I Stayed Invisible + What It Cost Me 

15:01 Stop Trying to Get Out of the Business You Built 

18:13 These Conversations Matter

Off the Shelf is a podcast about the people, brands, and behind-the-scenes forces shaping the beauty industry — money, relationships, risk, and what it really takes to scale.

CONNECT WITH SUSANNAH

Instagram: @brightbeautyconnect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/susannah-dellinger

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Don't waste time trying to figure out also what is going to happen in five years, because I can guarantee you almost nothing in life except for this one thing. What you think is going to happen or what you're building of where it's gonna lead to you in five years almost certainly will not be the thing that you actually end up building. Okay? Figure out what you need in the here and now. Go do that. Go make money, honey, and then listen along the way to what your customers start to tell you they also need help with, and figure out if your skill set or resources can also then build to that. This is Off the Shelf, where we take the most iconic beauty brands, products, and people in the beauty industry off the shelf and examine the stories behind the story. It's where beauty is treated like the economic, cultural, and power-building force it really is. I'm Susanna Dillinger, and here we're gonna talk about what really shapes the industry, who holds the power, how the decisions get made, and what it actually takes to build, scale, and quite frankly, survive in beauty. These are the conversations happening behind closed doors about money, relationships, risks, and cult moments. If you're building, breaking through, or trying to understand how beauty really works, or just love a really good story, you're in the right place. Welcome back to Off the Shelf. I'm your host, Susanna Dallinger. Today I am answering a common question I get, which is what is the best business advice you've ever been given on how you built and scaled your company? And I'm going to answer that by not saying what the best advice is, but by what the worst advice I have been given along the way. And it is also advice that I consistently see repeated in entrepreneurship type Instagram accounts or online coaches sidebar. Also, please stop paying a coach to tell you how to build a business that they've never built. Okay, there's that. Um, but there is some horrible business advice out there, and I want to tell you what it is so you don't take it, you don't waste your time, you don't waste your money, and you stop beating yourself up thinking that you're doing something wrong. First piece of business advice that I completely ignored simply because I didn't know how to do it, and it worked out in my favor, which is make sure you have a five-year business plan. I don't. I did not have a five-year business plan. I had an immediate need to go make money. I figured out how to use the skills that I had, how to go find somebody to pay me for do it to do it, and then I built it along the way. Fun fact, I am on year five of my multi-million dollar agency that I scaled from zero dollars to five million dollars in revenue in 48 months, and I have still never written a business plan. Do you understand how much time I would have wasted trying to teach myself how to write a business plan? There was even, I think I got fed an ad for like software that will write a business plan for you. And of course, this is pre-Chat GPT. Can't believe that five years ago sounds like dinosaurs roamed. Um, don't waste time trying to figure out also what is going to happen in five years, because I can guarantee you almost nothing in life except for this one thing. What you think is going to happen or what you're building of where it's going to lead to you in five years almost certainly will not be the thing that you actually end up building. Okay. Figure out what you need in the here and now. Go do that, go make money, honey, and then listen along the way to what your customers start to tell you they also need help with, and figure out if your skill set or resources can also then build to that, right? So I started out consulting with people on how to build their own in-house field team agencies. Figured out really quickly, nobody actually wanted to build. They thought they wanted to have their own in-house field agency, but they didn't want to run it themselves. They didn't want to coach, they didn't want to figure out payroll, they didn't want to do all of the state-by-state compliance. And I remember vividly sitting there being like, I probably need to do all of this myself, but I don't know how to, but I know how to figure it out. And nobody has figured this out yet for these very large brands with resources to pay me. I could probably charge a heck of a lot more money if I solved that total problem than just helping them with this one thing. And that is how I scaled and built so rapidly. Also, second worst piece of business advice I ever got was figure out your vision, stay true to it. No matter what the outside world tells you to change about your business, stay true to your vision and never give up. Please, for all that is holy, do not go into business with this idea that you're gonna have blinders on and just stay focused on the thing that exists only in your head as the idea that you should build. The best, most impactful feedback you will ever get as a business owner is listening to the market, listening to your customers, listening to people that work for you. Those are where the best ideas come from. Listening to the market, listening is what got me here today completely up-ending my own business model and an entire industry of how agencies run. I run, as I have said before, but if you're new to this podcast, I run a field team agency, Meet for Beauty Brands, that are in Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom, Blue Mercury. That means I provide the people and the teams that are in-store selling the products off the shelf, hence off the shelf, so that they make their money and the brands get the orders from the retailers to get more product to refill the shelf. Okay. That is how the beauty industry model works. Most people don't know that in-store support is typically who you're talking to when you go into Sephora or Ulta. If there's like, oh my gosh, I had the best help by so-and-so at that brand, probably was not a Sephora, Ulta, or Nordstrom employee. Nine times out of 10, it was a brand paid person. So anyway, we have teams, that's what we do. Agencies are very expensive because of the overhead to run them. I accidentally figured out that agencies also create exclusion. If you cannot afford a field team agency, you are not going to have as much of a shot at getting your brand that just got launched in one of these major retailers into a top seller. So what do you do? You have to go figure out how to get funding. You have to take out loans, you have to take these big financial risks. And I started hearing from brands, I can't afford agencies. I can't afford agencies. How can I do it? Can you just help me to tell me like where do I find a few people? If I just want to try, try to do it myself, bootstrap this from the ground up. I also heard from people who were out there looking for work because we can only help so many brands at a time, meaning I can only employ so many people at a time. Well, what about me? I'm looking for work. I'm trying to find brands that are looking for my type of help. So as of today, we just launched the Bright Beauty Connect Talent Network. It has removed the entire agency overhead. This is for brands that have come to me over the past five years and said, we don't want an agency because we love to have our own in-house field team. We love the connection, or we can't afford an agency, but we don't know how to find great talent as we expand and go into new cities, go into new markets. How do we find great talent? So that launch today, we take nothing off of what people on their list. So some type, some marketplaces, you see a rate that's listed and the person's only getting a certain percentage. We wanted to change the industry and make sure that the people in store who are making all this money for the brands get their paycheck in full and pay us nothing. It is completely free for field team members because that was another problem we saw was that the people who are making the less amount, least amount in this industry are the people in the store making the millions of dollars for the brands. And that is something that while I wish I could change an entire industry, I can change that one thing and make sure that the people in store are making the most amount of money possible and not having to give that back to anybody else. The brand pays a monthly flat subscription fee, can hire as many people as they want, do whatever they want. They can hire a hundred people, they can hire five people. It's the same price. So we were able to level the playing field and give access to great talent by launching a marketplace. And I was told by so many people do not launch your talent network. Because now, why does the brain have to come to the agency? And the agency is how I make all of the revenue. I'm the sole provider for my household. I have a lot of employees, I have a lot of people I'm responsible for. Will this blow up the agency? If it does blow up the agency, I don't have a very good agency. What my agency does, of course, is we do the whole thing. We coach, we train, we educate, we do all the strategy, we know how to execute, we know how to make sure we're compliant. We take all of that off the hands of anybody else. And that's what an agency should do is absorb all of the risk, all of the compliance, all of the coaching, all of that. This is merely how you go find people to go do that with, right? So if a brand knows, hey, I've got it, I can figure out compliance, I can figure out how to coach my team that's in store, I can figure out how to train, I can do all of that. They never needed an agency anyway. This was a complete white space that was not being serviced. So figure out by listening who out there has a need that's not being serviced and put away the fear of, well, I can only focus on this one vision of what I have. Sometimes ideas come to you from people who tell you they can't actually afford the thing that you're doing. And it can lead down a beautiful, beautiful rabbit hole that also in our case really helps to amplify why I even started Bright Beauty Connect, which was to level the playing field in the beauty industry. I was very tired. I was exhausted of seeing the same five conglomerates win. Tired of it, right? We've all, if you've listened to my podcast, you know how I feel. It's around 95%, you know, old white men that are just making money, just making money. And it's fine, it's capitalism, but also uninteresting to me. I believe in representation of beauty. I think it's very impactful when the beauty industry can put money back in female-founded, BIPAC-founded, LGBTQ-founded brand pockets. And it's historically proven that when women founded and funded brands make money, they give back to the communities at a multiple that men do not. So it can literally change the world. Am I worried that somebody might choose the talent network instead of the agency? No, I'm actually not because it's completely different customers. Now, the third worst ever piece of advice I got, I listened to for about four and a half years, which was nobody cares about you as a business owner. You don't have to have a website, you don't need to be on Instagram, you don't need to be visible at all. And I listen, you're like, what? Who gave you that advice? Because the one thing that the algorithm of any social media will tell you, especially now, is visibility, build in public. But I am in rooms with very powerful, seasoned CEO, C-suite board, people that have built billions of dollars in companies that in behind closed doors have told me, stay out of the press, stay off of social, nobody cares. I have had actual brand partners when they see me post anything, and this is in the past, isn't it current, but they would say they would actually text me and say, Why are you on social media? Nobody cares about you. Just go win and word of mouth will take care of you. Now, that seems like obvious bad advice, but when again, you have people who have done multiple, multiple millions of dollars telling you that as a service provider, you should completely remove yourself from what you do publicly, you're like, oh, well, I don't know any better. They must know better. That's fine. Lesson learned that if you're not visible as a founder, if you're not getting out there and talking, not just necessarily about yourself, right? Like, you don't necessarily care that I have a seven-year-old daughter, you don't care that I live in Charleston, South Carolina, but you probably care about the fact that I scaled a company in 48 months, right? From zero to five million. That might be interesting to you. You might care that I did it while breastfeeding for three years with no child care at home. You might be like, that's an insane thing, right? But that gets attention and we are in a attention-based economy now more than ever. You need eyeballs on what you're doing because the cost of entry to building business has never been lower. So your competition has never been higher. You have to figure out to break through that noise. Marketing is expensive. What are some inexpensive, cost-effective ways? I started this company with zero dollars. I put nothing into it. It had to be producing dollars from day one. It wasn't about I'm gonna make this $10,000 marketing investment. I didn't have that capital to go do that. Things that are free, right? Go post on social, go go on LinkedIn Live, go figure out ways to show up that people can find you and you can find your people. Now, do not fall into the visibility trap that you have to sacrifice everything else and be online 24-7. No, I still also believe that there are some types of balances to that. I'm finding my own rhythm about it. However, if I could go back and do anything different, I would have been visible because my goal is to be able to have enough capital to change the world. I want to be able to do things like I've done, which is give back through organizations that built the first ever neonatal center in Uganda and addressed, you know, maternal, you know, death rates. I'm able to support Gloria Steinem's Foundation and their fellowships of women doing amazing things around the world. And that is because of capital that I make in this business that I can then spend on things that matter to me. And the way to do that is to get eyeballs, to get attention, and to bring in people. The final worst piece of advice that I ever got in business, which is figure out how to make everything run without you. If you are not living under a rock, you see this as a very prevalent theme on TikTok, on Instagram, on LinkedIn right now that you're not a real business owner unless you've gotten out of your business. If you're working in your business, you're at a different sub-level of entrepreneurship, of business ownership. Here's what I have to say to that. Honey, you just don't like to work. As an entrepreneur, there are different ways to approach it. However, what I was paid for at the beginning was my unique ability to go run world-class best-selling field teams. Some things in life are operationalizable, if that's a word that you can operate. Like, I cannot figure out how to automate making another human feel excited about going into a store and valuable for their work. What ex what I know after 24 and a half years of having people work for me, me picking up the phone, having conversations with my team, that makes them run through a ball. My actual presence and relationship. And yes, I hire other people and we have different leaders within our company who I also bring on to help me do that. But if I remove myself from the business, I remove what made that business great. And I spent probably 12 to 15 months trying to build and figure out how to take myself out of the business because I was fed the same stuff, you guys, of well, if you want your business to be saleable, you can't be at the center of your business. You have to figure out how this business can survive without you. How about just go build a really kick-ass business and figure out the rest? When you build something great, people are gonna want it. And you can figure it all out in terms of how if I ever wanted to hand it off and ride off into the sunset at a certain age, then I will have the resources and the capital to figure it out then because also industries might change, things might be different. Stop trying to figure out how to get out of the very thing you built. It's like literally figuring out how to get divorced before you walk down the aisle, right? Like if you're already planning the exit, how do you build something meaningful? How do you build something that feels like you? How do you build something that your customer is like, yes, I'm working with that company, not, oh, it's just one of another dozen and it's being run by some tech stack of operationalized SOPs. It's, I think, one of the things that slow me down the most, but what I see slow down other entrepreneurs is they think that they've built something that is not recognized or respective enough if they're actually the ones still in it. And here's what I say to that: if you're the one that's in your business, if you're still leading it, if you're still grinding, if you're still up to one o'clock in the night and it's still been five, 10, 15, 20 years, honey, I see you. You are building. You're an entrepreneur, and you are absolutely F and amazing. Respect to that. These conversations matter because who gets to speak shapes who gets to win. If this episode challenged how you see beauty, business, or the power behind the industry, share it with someone who needs to hear it. To connect or explore more, check the show notes. I'm Susanna Dellinger, and this has been Off the Shelf.