How I Built 5 Multi-Million Dollar Companies: Marcia Kilgore
Marcia Kilgore, a serial entrepreneur, shares insights from building five successful companies like Bliss, Soap and Glory, and Beauty Pie. The conversation explores her unique approach to customer experience, resilience, and identifying high-value ideas.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
Childhood Experiences and Early Drive for Improvement
Impact of Father's Death and Developing Independence
Transition to New York: Bodybuilding and Personal Training
Founding Bliss Spa: Customer Experience and Loyalty
The Art of Sales, Trust, and Behavioral Economics
Scaling and Selling Bliss to LVMH
The 'So What' Test for Business Ideas
Launching Soap & Glory: Mass Market Beauty and Retail Challenges
The Importance of Connecting Dots and Feeding Creativity
Entrepreneurial Partnership and Work-Life Balance
The 'Deathbed Test' and Choosing Yourself
Learning from Failure and Maintaining Perspective
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Continuous Improvement and Customer Obsession
5 Key Concepts
Democratization of the good stuff
This concept refers to the idea of making high-quality products or services accessible and equal for everyone, regardless of their social or economic status. Marcia applied this by treating all clients at her Bliss spa the same, from celebrities to teenagers, and later with Beauty Pie, offering luxury products at affordable prices.
Behavioral Economics
This field of study explores how human emotions and psychological factors influence economic decisions, often leading to outcomes that deviate from purely rational expectations. It helps understand why people make certain buying choices and how to frame new ideas for better reception.
So What Test
A method for evaluating the viability of a business idea. If you cannot explain the core value or reason why anyone should care about your idea in a single, concise sentence after asking 'so what?', then it is likely not a strong enough concept to pursue.
Connecting the dots
This describes the process of generating innovative ideas by deeply understanding one area of expertise while also maintaining broad curiosity across many other disciplines. By scanning diverse information and identifying unexpected links, new and valuable concepts can emerge.
Deathbed Test
A mental framework for making life and career decisions by envisioning what one would regret or wish they had done differently on their deathbed. This perspective helps prioritize what truly matters, such as spending time with family or pursuing meaningful experiences, over less significant achievements.
8 Questions Answered
Marcia's drive stemmed from growing up in a mediocre setting in a small Canadian city, where she constantly sought more stimulation and noticed ways to improve the experiences in her part-time jobs, like making aerobics classes more fun.
With only $300 and no money for university, Marcia leveraged her bodybuilding background to become a personal trainer, charging $15-20 an hour, which was a significant income compared to minimum wage at the time.
She learned to always be pleasant, patient, and absolutely focused on the customer, ensuring the experience was enjoyable enough that clients wouldn't cancel, and never burdening them with her own problems.
During a summer lull in personal training clients, she took a crash course in facials to fix her own skin, realized she loved it, and convinced her trusting personal training clients to let her practice on them, eventually leading to her first spa.
The 'So What Test' involves presenting an idea and then asking 'So what?' If the value or reason for the idea cannot be clearly articulated in a single sentence, it's considered not a good enough idea to pursue.
She feeds her 'funnel' by being an expert in one area (beauty) but also being intensely curious and scanning information from many other disciplines, then connecting these disparate 'dots' to form novel and valuable concepts.
Marcia views failure as a crucial mentor, providing valuable feedback that becomes part of her DNA. She believes experiencing failure firsthand is more impactful than being warned about it, helping her learn and avoid repeating mistakes.
She advises rolling up your sleeves to learn as many skills as possible, looking at feedback without defensiveness, constantly asking how to improve, and treating customers with gratitude and respect, always delivering a product you yourself would be thrilled to buy.
25 Actionable Insights
1. Choose Yourself, Don’t Wait
Don’t wait for others to validate or choose you; decide you are worthy and capable, then take action to put yourself out there and make things happen.
2. Apply The Deathbed Test
Make decisions by considering what you will regret on your deathbed, prioritizing important life events and relationships over transient achievements like conversion rates.
3. Uncompromising Standards Drive Success
Maintain extremely high standards for every detail of your product or service, from the smallest elements to the overall experience, as this compounds over time to create exceptional quality and loyalty.
4. Connect Disparate Dots for Ideas
Become an expert in one area while maintaining broad curiosity across many others; scan diverse information to find new connections that can spark innovative and valuable ideas.
5. Brutally Edit Your Own Ideas
Don’t fall in love with your own ideas; apply a ‘so what test’ to determine if anyone else would care, and be willing to cut out concepts that lack genuine resonance or value.
6. Let Ideas Bubble to Surface
Jot down all your ideas, but only pursue the ones that consistently resurface and demand your attention, as these are likely the most compelling and worthwhile.
7. Failure as Your Best Mentor
Embrace failure as a critical learning tool; internalize feedback from mistakes and use that direct experience to avoid repeating them, as it’s more impactful than being told you might fail.
8. Prioritize Customer Focus
Always make the experience about the customer, not yourself; be absolutely focused on their needs, listen intently, and ensure they feel heard and attended to.
9. Deliver Exceptional Service Consistently
Go above and beyond in service to ensure customers return, striving to provide an experience so superior that no one else tries as hard or delivers as consistently.
10. Show Gratitude to Customers
Actively demonstrate gratitude to customers through actions like apologizing for delays or sending thank-you notes, reinforcing that you value their business and trust.
11. Be Pleasant and Likable
Cultivate a pleasant demeanor in all interactions, as people choose who they engage with, and being likable can open doors and foster better relationships with team members, clients, and the public.
12. Build Trust Through Objectivity
Be willing to tell clients or customers when your own product or service might not be the best fit or could be a waste of their money; this honesty builds trust and makes them more receptive to your genuine recommendations.
13. Roll Up Sleeves, Learn Skills
Continuously learn as many practical skills as possible by doing, rather than just studying; this hands-on experience builds confidence and allows you to take on more responsibilities.
14. Don’t Get Stuck in Identity
Avoid having your identity completely wrapped up in your current job or career; cultivate a mindset of being a lifelong learner, ready to morph and pivot as industries and roles change.
15. Find Passion in Improving Lives
Seek out work that genuinely improves people’s existence or brings them joy; this intrinsic passion will sustain you through difficult times and provide a fulfilling reason to show up every day.
16. Sell What You Would Buy
Only create or sell products and services that you genuinely love, believe in, and would personally buy; this authenticity makes selling easier and more effective.
17. Learn Operations by Doing
Gain business experience by simply starting and doing, rather than waiting for formal education; observe patterns of what goes wrong and what works to build practical operational knowledge.
18. Recognize Patterns in People
Develop an ability to recognize patterns in people’s behavior and business outcomes; this experience-based intelligence helps predict results, reduces panic, and improves decision-making.
19. Embrace Employee Turnover
Don’t panic when employees leave; understand that it’s an unavoidable part of an ecosystem, and new hires often bring fresh, additive value to the team, leading to more overall happiness.
20. Improve Mediocre Experiences
Actively seek to improve any mediocre experience you encounter, whether in a job or daily life; this proactive mindset can lead to innovative solutions and new opportunities.
21. Profound Experiences Reshape Perspective
Allow profound life experiences, especially early losses, to help you grow up fast, understand what’s truly important, and prioritize your life decisions with a broader perspective.
22. Build Mental Frameworks for New
When introducing radical or disruptive ideas, relate them to existing, familiar concepts; this helps people build mental frameworks and understand the new idea more easily through comparison.
23. Listen to Customer Needs
Pay close attention to what your customers are asking for, as they will often tell you exactly what they want, guiding your product development and service offerings.
24. Analyze Feedback Non-Defensively
Look at all feedback, positive or negative, without defensiveness; use it as an objective tool to understand what works and continuously improve your actions and offerings.
25. Treat Life as an A-B Test
Approach life and business as a continuous A-B test; observe what works well and do more of that, while identifying what doesn’t and doing less of it.
7 Key Quotes
If you can connect the dots and see your way to something that might be more elevating for your mind and then for others or make something a little bit more fun...
Marcia Kilgore
It's about making them thrilled, feel great about themselves, look great. They should walk out of there feeling like we had literally, I think the testament to it when you think back is crazy loyalty.
Marcia Kilgore
I connect the dots in new ways. So that, if that were to be kind of my thing, it's about, um, have you read the book? It's called Originals by Adam Grant.
Marcia Kilgore
You can't fall in love with your own words. You need to be able to go into your writing and just chop it out. Right. Just so it's succinct. And you like, you can't love what you did. You have to hate what you did and cut it all down so that just the crispy parts are there. And I think it's the same with ideas.
Marcia Kilgore
You're the one who is going to tell you that you can do something. No one is going to pick you out of a line and say, Hey, go, you have to put yourself out there.
Marcia Kilgore
I don't want to miss my kids, you know, this particular event or ceremony, right? You will kick yourself if you miss the grade five graduation. That is always going to be more important than your conversion rate.
Marcia Kilgore
I think any kind of, you know, grief or really emotional situation that you go through, you become a different person and you can relate to other people who have the same situation or have, you know, a difficult home situation in a very quick way because they see the world in a similar way that you do. That small things don't really matter.
Marcia Kilgore
1 Protocols
Bliss Spa Customer Service Protocol
Marcia Kilgore- Ensure every aspect of the physical experience is perfect, from how clients lie on the table to the smell of the sheets and proper bolstering for comfort.
- Train all staff to be pleasant, patient, and absolutely focused on the customer, making them feel good mentally and physically.
- Avoid staff discussing their own problems; the focus is entirely on the customer's experience.
- Maintain extreme loyalty by allowing customers to book regular spots far in advance (e.g., monthly for two years).
- Keep a waiting list for cancellations and make 'sorry calls' to every person who couldn't get an appointment that day, apologizing and updating them.
- Have the person who performed each treatment write a personalized thank-you note to be mailed out the same night.