March 28, 2025
My journey with Jelly Wax has been filled with incredible highs and challenging lows.
Through both the successes and setbacks, I’ve learned critical lessons about what it truly takes to build a sustainable business.
Here are the three most important business lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Master Your Finances
The first and most important lesson I’ve learned is to understand your finances thoroughly. Talk to a CPA, become best friends with your CPA and tax accountant, and understand how money works.
Understand cash flow, learn how to do your books, track everything—track your expenses, track your income, and keep your bank accounts separate.
You don’t need to be an expert accountant by any means, but understanding how money flows and how to do things correctly is essential.
This is a lesson I ignored early on, even though I heard it repeatedly. Especially when you grow a business rapidly, which can happen nowadays with e-commerce and the access we have to social media, financial understanding becomes even more critical.
With TikTok, for example, you could post a video and literally make a million dollars by the end of the month from just one video.
Being prepared financially is non-negotiable. At the very minimum, track your expenses and income. This basic practice will save you from countless headaches down the road.
Surround Yourself with the Right People
The people you surround yourself with are crucial to your success.
A significant part of what I credit to Jelly Wax’s success is the evolution of my values. The values I had when I started Jelly Wax are significantly different from the values I have now.
Knowing your values is an ongoing process, not something that happens overnight. This is especially true if you start young, as I did.
Being self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses is crucial because it helps you recognize what kind of support you need.
Initially, I didn’t choose great people to work with, which hindered my progress. If I had been more selective with the people I trusted, I could have avoided dealing with many problems.
Finding the right people who complement your skills and share your values makes all the difference between struggling alone and building a successful team.
Balance Passion with Practicality
This third lesson might be controversial because you’ll hear conflicting advice. Some people will tell you to check your industry value and market share—analyze all those statistics before starting a business.
While I do think that’s important (the market size for frogs versus waxing products is very different), I believe the most important thing is to follow your passion.
However, you must balance passion with financial numbers to determine whether your idea can be a viable business.
This balance is critical. The reason I emphasize passion is that I’ve found one of the biggest differentiating factors for my companies is me.
With Jelly Wax, we have excellent products, but if I’m not able to talk about them and present them to people authentically, we easily blend in with thousands of other wax brands on the internet.
A huge shift for Jelly Wax came when I focused on being authentic and following my passion. It might sound funny, but I’ve become passionate about body hair.
When I started, I wasn’t passionate about it—I actually hated body hair. But as I grew, I realized how messed up it was that I hated something natural about my body.
I recognized this as a societal issue where young women are made to feel awful for having something completely natural. This realization connected my values with my passion for the business.
Conclusion
You need to have a great product with a good unique selling proposition, but you also need to talk about it in a way that gets people enrolled in your ideas and passions.
The best way to do that is to work on something you already love.
I love business, I love talking about my values, and I love helping people feel comfortable being themselves. These passions infuse every part of our brand now, making Jelly Wax stand out in a crowded market.
By mastering your finances, surrounding yourself with the right people, and balancing passion with practicality, you create a foundation for sustainable business growth that goes beyond just making sales.
These lessons have transformed how I approach business and have been instrumental in rebuilding Jelly Wax into something I’m truly proud of.