Overcoming adversity: How Elizabeth Sands built a beauty empire
Welcome to the latest edition of Entrepreneur NI – a newsletter which drops into your inbox of a Sunday morning, showcasing how founders created some of the best businesses in Northern Ireland – big, small and everything in between. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can do so here… or below
“I had no family here in Northern Ireland, I had about two friends and no clients..”
Owner of the eponymous Elizabeth Sands Beauty School, Elizabeth Sands, who was this week named the Ulster Tatler Businesswoman of the Year, has come a long way from the days of not being able to afford to turn on the heating in her home.
Originally from England, Elizabeth moved to Portadown with her then husband 14 years ago, but less than two years after upping sticks from London, she found herself living as a single mother with two young daughters to care for.
Despite a split from her husband – who has gone on to be an excellent support for her daughters – Elizabeth decided she would forge her future in Northern Ireland. For the first few years living in Co Armagh, Elizabeth concentrated on raising her children, until her youngest started primary school.
“I just made the decision that I'm going to stay, so I set a room up in the back of my house and I went and did a nail course...,” Elizabeth told me when we spoke this week.
“Separating from my husband and being a single mum, I needed to carve a future for my children and myself and that's what fuelled me, so I put my head down, did the nail course and it went from there.”
And it all started with a good old fashioned newspaper ad in her local newspaper.
Elizabeth explained: “It was at the time when no needle botox was all in the press, and that was back in 2014; I got my hands on the first device for facials which was no needle botox. So I went to the Portadown Times and asked, 'will you do an article please?' So they did a spread for me. I didn't have any clients so I advertised an open day and I think eight people turned up and that's where I started my business. And two of them today are now my best friends.”
While beauty had always interested Elizabeth, it was a change of pace for a woman who worked on the trading floor for Goldman Sachs as an assistant to a founding partner, Brace Young. In terms of a business grounding; it doesn’t get much better than that. But Elizabeth was always destined to work for herself.
“The people that I interacted with, worked with, sitting in boardrooms, understanding businesses, definitely gave me the drive to progress. I always knew I wanted something, but having children, I decided I didn't want to put them into childcare; I wanted to raise them my way until I could launch my own career.
“It was a difficult one because I moved here to Northern Ireland, I wasn't in the city anymore, it's a very different environment. I always wanted to go into beauty but when I was 16, it was never an option because, at the time, it wasn’t considered a great career choice.
“But when my children started school I thought, ‘come on, let's go and do something I really want to do’ so by doing this it gave me the freedom to work around the children which meant I wasn't paying for expensive childcare.
“I remember those days when I couldn't afford to put the heating on during the day, and I had a little heater in my back room while I was just doing skin treatments and appointments for my first clients.
“You always remember those things and you're always grateful for what you have now. I think when you go through an awful lot in your life it makes you sink or swim; I've learnt and grown a lot through adversity.”
Covid presented another opportunity for Elizabeth to either sink or swim – fortunately she already had her proverbial life raft at the ready. The pandemic affected many businesses in a lot of different ways. Many businesses spawned from it but for Elizabeth, hers entered a whole new stratosphere.
“Covid was one of the biggest things that happened to me. It was actually amazing because I had decided, before anybody had heard of Covid-19, that I was going to launch an online platform. I wanted this platform to be incredible, something different. I wanted proper online learning, which was blended learning and so we were writing this a year before anybody knew what Covid was.
“We were ready to launch the day we went into our first Covid lockdown and it just exploded across the UK because people were at home furloughed, and everybody's businesses were shutting.”
Elizabeth and her courses have now helped train over 14,000 people from across Ireland and the UK, thanks to a little forward thinking, not that she could have predicted a global pandemic – but she saw the potential of the internet.
Nonetheless, it was still important that she created an online course that stood apart from many others.
“I wanted to make sure that we were the best possible online training platform students could have because I didn't want people daunted by just being given a course and told ‘off you go’. It's not in my interest to create people that aren't going to be successful.”
And many of her students have gone on to become award winners.
While the business is reaching new levels, Elizabeth is still able to keep her overheads low and her time in check. She outsources the management of her social media and IT and has someone in charge of her products. This, she says, gives her time to focus on growing the business. Time management for Elizabeth is a fine art she has mastered. And she does it all from the comfort of her own home, foregoing the expensive offices and the added extras.
Courses are all automated online and “it's only when your students ask questions or have queries, that's what you have to answer”.
“Other than that we've got an incredible IT person that does all that work on the technical side, and because the systems are in place, it takes an awful lot of work off my hands.
“We're not doing Zoom calls, which take hours; we've got a really groundbreaking online platform, which we set up, so it's self sufficient for students. Online is the way to go!”
And because of the growth and expansion of her online courses and products, Elizabeth has given up her face-to-face work. While difficult to say goodbye to a part of the business she built her foundations from “it was the fairest thing to do” in order to help achieve the scale and growth she is now seeing.
Building an expanding business with the right people has also been important for Elizabeth and building others up to be successful is a key driver in how she goes about her work. Creating so many future business owners in the beauty field is what she loves doing. For Elizabeth, competition is healthy as it gives people like her impetus to rise above the field.
“There's always going to be competition in any business but the interesting thing about any business; if you look at a market that’s saturated like beauty, there's only three or four companies at the top of it. It's about getting to the top of that business, where it's not saturated, that's the key.
“And the key to that is customer service and making sure that you are absolutely the best. Making sure that you actually care about your customers. I think, if you can get that right, and your pricing structure correct, that leads to a winning formula.”
Elizabeth has set herself apart. She started from the bottom and worked hard at being the best at what she does. But it takes time, patience, as well as “being open to criticism”.
“You've got to be open minded because everybody that comes into your life, and even if they're negative, they're always going to be your teachers; you are going to learn something from them, you're always going to improve from the experience, but unfortunately, people don't always get that. You might hear something uncomfortable but there's a reason and I've always learned things from adversity, I've always made it my strength.”
For anyone looking to start their own business, Elizabeth suggests doing some self-reflecting, and asking the difficult questions about what they really want, for more often than not, people struggle to actually answer that question.
“So, when someone wants to go into the beauty business, it's really important they do their research. Also, go with their gut feeling on what they're interested in and don't try and do 20 things at once.
“When I started, I didn't have any family here and I had about two friends; I didn't have any clients. I had a diary and I wrote loads of names in it – that weren't real – and I just believed that these clients were going to come – and they did come.
“You have to have the right mindset. If you go in thinking you're going to fail, you're going to fail. You have to go into it believing that you are going to be successful.
“I know that what I've got really works because it really worked for me. You have to believe in your product and what you're doing. And if you don’t believe you’re the best, you've got to change that mindset.
“A lot of the problems that people have is they don't have the confidence and when you lack confidence, that’s something you need to work on and overcome. When you lack that confidence, that feeling expands. Whatever you think about expands and expands so, when you start a business, it has to be done with the right mindset.”
Elizabeth, who is also a trained life coach, is continuously advocating personal growth. Her guiding principle and motto is simply “By Building People, They Build Your Business."