Today I did not intend to share my business week as usual but intended to take a look back at my business YEAR and what has happened in my career in 2017 :)

This week has still not been so exciting haha, Monday and Tuesday the salon was closed. Wed-Fri I worked for full mugs with things that need to be finished before New Year and sat in the office and cave all day. And it has been quite calm overall as several of the staff have taken holidays these days.

So therefore comes a lot with an interesting look back at the whole year instead, like this January 1, 2018! :) ♥

When privacy affects working days
You should not let privacy affect your job, but when you as an entrepreneur work more than full time, it is more difficult than if you have a job where you can let go of everything when you get home and do not have as much pressure, stress and responsibility on you 24 / 7.

And that's probably the only thing I see in front of me when I think about what my working days looked like at the beginning of 2017, how I had to make calls about insurance, estate registration and loans when I really needed to work with other things. That I received messages and calls about family problems during working hours and could not focus because my heart was pounding with frustration and my head was spinning from internal stress. When my mother passed away, my whole private life changed and I lost two family members due to circumstances. Death makes people see more clearly, some people get closer to each other and some slip apart.

So the first months were not very effective months for me compared to the rest of the year, the creativity and energy was totally blown away and I remember how I sometimes had to do practical things like fix with products in the store or clean just to brainwash could not think.

BUT I had grown as a person and it is with a relieved sigh that I look back on the year and see how far I have already come. No energy thieves who take my time, we have been allowed to keep our childhood home and the personal finances are stable! Now it's just full speed ahead and I'm more inspired and pep than ever! :)

The first positive change came when I moved my makeup studio home! When I would do both make-up, photography and all the admin job, customer job and manager job at the salon, I became much more locked in and had zero structure in my own work.

Now I only do computer jobs and salon jobs in Uppsala and fix everything creatively at home in Gimo before work and it works so much better :)

Here is my nail polish shelf at home in the makeup studio room, love it :)

Last New Year's Eve, I thought this about 2017:
Every New Year I write what I think and hope will happen in the coming years, some always change of course but a lot is true every year and it is always just as fun to read because I never remember a single point I wrote down haha.

1. "Eyelash permanent will be the new beauty hype"
This was almost scary haha, we have offered lash lift for at least 10 years at Creative Makeup and this year it has said bang! We have had a total of 1301 eyelash permanents in 2017 and if you compare with 2016 where we had 362, you can see what a huge difference it is, like a thousand more people in a single year :)

2. "We have hired Olga + a barber and Zahra and Ida are fully booked"
All these things concerning the staff also agreed! I could not have dreamed that we would also hire Ämma and increase Lisa's times and still fill up all the ones with bookings, that's totally good!

It is especially clear at our hug meetings (staff meetings) we have every other week, we are really many now compared to the beginning of the year and also it becomes harder and harder to list all the to-do tasks because in some periods it is so fully booked that you do not have time for much other than your tasks. A positive problem you can say! :)

The best meeting was when Miska and I welcomed the staff with vitamin C bubble, disco lighting and the song "I wanna dance with somebody": D

3. "I will blog more about my entrepreneurship"
I had not come up with the thing with my business week posts when I wrote this but I started with that in September and look at both your comments but above all the statistics that you like these posts, great fun! I was a little shocked when I read this point, really no memory of me thinking about this already a year ago.

4. "We will turn over 3 million in VAT"
I have not calculated the exact total yet but we have definitely come across this!

After closing yesterday, I pulled out the report for 2017 and I really long to sit in front of the statistics documents and see how the year has been!

We reached the goals!
In March 2016, we set a goal for the company that would be achieved in June 2017 - we managed it! We celebrated this with dinner after work with the whole salon, it is very important to celebrate when things are going well :)

New goals and kickoff
In September, we had a kickoff at Odalgården where we presented our new goals and metrics.

Here Annika gives a small lecture for the staff at our kickoff! You can read more about what we went through this day in this post which was my very first business week post!

Our team at Creative Makeup
That we reached all goals is not just because me, Miska and Annika have done a good job. We have built the company structure and trained everyone at the salon, but it is mainly thanks to our awesome staff that we reached our goals in June!

Amir who was one of our permanent makeup artists moved to Stockholm and left with us at the beginning of the year, which was very sad. And during the summer, our teeth whitening Alexander stopped with us as well. But we have received several new additions! :) In January we had 4 employees of which Lisa only worked on Saturdays, but now we have hired Olga, Ämma and our barber Niclas also + increased the times for Lisa.

And above all, we have grown so extremely strong together during this year, with clear communication and structure with meetings, routines, etc. Everything works so heavenly well at the salon now and it is really thanks to that we built the best team!

Upsalite collaboration
I write a diary every day and took a look at the beginning of the year and then saw that it was on January 13 that I met Maria Strömme (professor of nanotechnology) for the first time and gave her my business card. Last New Year's Eve I did not even know what Upsalite is and now I have made a lot of collaborations with Disruptive Materials who work with this new material that has extreme absorbency of moisture and fat - perfect in many types of cosmetic products especially for people with oily skin!

I have made a film where I showed how I use the product on half the side of the face and film again after 9 hours where you see how oily I am on the side without upsalite and how nice the makeup is on the other half of the face. This movie was shown to 30 million (!) People in China over the course of a day! Crazy.

After that I have made two more films with Upsalite, one where I show how to use powder spray on the face and one where I use the same spray as dry shampoo. These were also made for China and are not shown in Sweden.

Then there have been a lot of product testing, blind tests meetings about product development and one day I was also in their lab :)

No matter how cool, right now this is during a break for me but as I understand it, this collaboration will continue in 2018 as well!

Here I make up the CEO of Disruptive Materials!

I also participated in an exhibition at a trade fair on nanotechnology where Disruptive Materials won the Nanocompany of the Year 2017 :)

Substitute at high school
In February, I was a substitute 2 days a week at a high school in Uppsala, I had students who took a stylist line and I was in charge of the makeup part. More fun than I had actually thought, but nothing I got more taste of :) However, a self-confidence boost when everyone thought I was such a good teacher and the principal told me afterwards that a student had told her that they should give me a higher salary hahaha . So goa!

Marketing photos & photographer
This year we have really stepped up in terms of our marketing and graphic profile, the website has received a makeover and we do campaign photos regularly which I have photographed, edited and published. Unbelievably funny!

The funniest photography was this one where we had an offer on yard pigmentation in connection with the Pink Ribbon. It's our logo that nipples :)

I have also made commercials and campaign photos for Jannika's treatments with facials, massages and hot stone massages.

It's so much fun to always use your own images and not buy ready-made ones like many companies do, but our images are so heavenly good that many people may think that they are ordinary advertising images from google type. But it's not :)

Investment of advertising screens
Speaking of marketing, we have also invested in large screens for the store, which we have the campaign images in both outside the shop window and inside the store.

Not cheap but so nice!

At the beginning of the year we fixed a lot of signs as well, including this huge one on me! :)

I published this picture on Creative Makeup's social media yesterday, 1706 eyebrows in one year is unbelievable, I wonder how many hairs we have pulled in total hahah!

A proud Helena behind our flashy checkout counter in the salon :)

Summary
It has been a perfect mix between new collaborations, assignments and news mixed with working with what we have and building a stable foundation. The beginning of the year was a little calmer for me personally, during the summer it said bang and we were totally fully booked and since then it has rolled on with improvements and development and I feel really pissed for 2018!

Hope you all had a fantastic New Year's Eve yesterday and enjoy the first day of this exciting new year ♥

Hugs are!