Episode 2 Transcript

All right. So hey, everyone, it’s me, Lisa, and I’m so excited. Welcome to the podcast. This is our first guest of the podcast. We I know she’s like super excited to be here. We have Susan Larimer of Lemongrass Spa. And I just want Susan to jump right in and sort of tell us, how long have you been in the business, Susan? What brought you to direct sales and what did you do before?

Yeah, thank you for having me. I didn’t realize I was your first guest. So now I’m like, oh my gosh, number one episode. So congratulations for starting your own podcast. Super exciting. And I’m honoured to be a guest. So I am Susan Larimer with Lemongrass Spa Products. I’ve been with Lemongrass Spa for nine and a half years. Originally, I was a speech therapist. I was a speech therapist in the healthcare world. I worked with older adults, home care, nursing homes, transitional home care. I did that for 17 years. And during that time, I was with Lemongrass Spa, kind of like a side gig, a hobby. And I also actually started in direct sales with 31 products. Oh, I didn’t see, I didn’t even know that. I was with 31 and then after a year, all of my friends and family and myself, we had enough bags and totes to last us a lifetime and I’m like, okay, this is not going anywhere. So then I was kind of overlapping 31 products with Lemongrass Spa products. Lemongrass Spa products is consumable. So, you know, lotion, skincare, haircare, makeup. So my customers loved it. They were running out. They would reorder. So I have that reorder business.

So it was about 2018, my kids were eight and 10, and I was feeling burned out. I was like, okay, I’m working full time as a speech therapist. I come home, I have to write reports of what I did with each patient. I have to call the patients for the next day to schedule when we were gonna meet. I had to call doctors to get orders. Meanwhile, homework battles were happening. What’s for dinner question is coming up and my husband and I had a long talk. I’m like, Mark, like, if I can do lemongrass full time, I would have that time affluence, that flexibility in our schedule to be there for the kids, to do the things I want to do as a wife and a mom. So it was a long conversation and it was in 2018, we said, okay, let’s try it for the summer. So it was in May, we said, okay, let’s try to do lemongrass spa full time for three months. And if we can do it financially, then great. That summer was the best summer ever because I could be there with my kids. We went to the zoo, we hung out outside. We had a swimming pool at the time. And I was able to not completely match my speech therapy salary, but enough that we could function as a family and be comfortable. So I made the plunge in 2018 and have not gone back to speech therapy since then.

So. That’s awesome. I mean, I think a lot of people in the direct sales field, a lot of moms anyway, they start because it’s really not about anything else, but staying home with the kids, like being there to be a mom. So I love hearing that. I sort of did the same thing when I started, like my youngest was only four months old and I knew like he went through some health issues and I knew there was no way that I could leave him at daycare and go back to work. So it’s like you do whatever you have to do for your kids. And sometimes it just turns out to be like such a great gift because your kids are, are almost grown, right? I think one is what now they’re 15 and 18. Yeah. So yeah. And I love that I’ve been able to go to their sporting events, pick them up from school every day. If they have a half day I’m available. I just love that they can always count on me to be there. And I couldn’t do that before. And a lot of the things that we don’t even realize that they’re learning from us sitting here running businesses, like my youngest, especially, he’s very, he has that entrepreneurial mind and he wants to make money. He sells things, he creates things and wants to sell them online. And…

So, I mean, there’s these little bits and pieces that they’re picking up that they’re gonna carry into their life from us actually running our own business. And I love that about direct sales because, you know, some people don’t view it as a business, but we are business owners. And I mean, we have to do what we have to do to make the money. We know how, okay, A plus B equals C, which is C is our income. So we have to do A and B in order to get our our income flowing in. So I, yeah, I love the all around effect that the business actually has on our family.

Now, you said when you pivoted into like going to a lemongrass spa as your full-time gig, were you doing parties at that time? Because I know your business is probably a little different now. So when did you transition from the party into, and I want you to share a little bit more about how you run your business now, because I love it. Yeah, so starting out, Lemongrass Spa, at least they did. I think they still do. They have a three-party commitment. So when you sign up as a consultant, you write down the dates and the name of a hostess for three separate parties. And that’s because they want to set you up for success. They want to know that you’re doing this as a business and not just a kidnapper. So I am a rule follower. So I’m like, all right, I don’t want to do parties, but I will do my three parties. So I think my sister hosted a party, my friend in Ohio, which is where we lived when I started. And then I think I did a Facebook party too. So I had my three parties just because I was following the rules. But in those parties, I had so many sales and so many people saying, oh my gosh, I’ve been looking for clean skincare products. This is what I’ve been looking for. I’ve been making my own deodorant and soap. This is the easy button. I had, it was like $3,000 in sales in my first month. And I’m like, oh my gosh, like I’m just doing this to follow the rules. I’m sharing these products because I love them. If I love something, I’m going to share it with my friends and family. But it just took off from there. And then I had friends joining my team and it just grew and grew. And I’ve been with the company nine and a half years. It has been steady, consistent sales the entire time. I don’t think I’ve ever been below $1,000 in sales in a month. Over the holidays, November is always my best month, around $5,000, which is fantastic.

That’s always exciting. But I got I did my, I always say I did my fair share of home parties. It’s so important to do home parties, to get your products in front of people, especially products that you have to feel and smell like our products. So I did my, my fair share of home parties. But I didn’t love it. I wasn’t comfortable standing in front of people selling products. For me, it’s more natural to do a one-on-one or someone says, Hey, I have this eczema or something and I can be like, oh my gosh, I have a product here, try it. That’s more natural for me. But I did home parties. And then I have the repeat orders. Some of my original customers from nine and a half years ago are still with me because they love the products. I’ve moved from Ohio, now we’re in Southern New Jersey, about a year and a half ago we moved I was able to take all of those customers with me because now I’m pretty much all online. Every once in a while, I’ll do some kind of in-person event or maybe a vendor event, but it’s very rare. I do it all online, social media, project broadcast, mail or light for email marketing. All of the systems are kind of in place now so I can continue to get referrals from current customers to continue to grow my business, but really mostly online, which I love, I prefer that.

That’s awesome, awesome. Now I just realized, I’m like, we have probably quite a few listeners from Canada. And when I first met you, I had no idea what Lemongrass Spa was because it’s not available in Canada. I keep on saying to you, you really need to get, go into your company and say, you really need to bring us to Canada. Cause I have people who wanna try it. So can you tell the listeners a little bit about Lemongrass Spa and what the products are? Yeah, I wish we were in Canada. I have asked our owners so many times and I know many other people have. I think it’s a shipping issue unless we get a distributor in Canada. I know there’s a whole lot that I don’t even understand. But anyway, Lemongrass Spa products, we are what, like 21, 22 years old and we are natural organic skincare. So we really focus on clean beauty. You can see a list of all of our ingredients on our websites to see, okay, do I want to use these products? It is like the easy button. Everything is gluten-free, which means a lot for me. I am gluten-free. My daughter was just diagnosed with celiac, so we really need to pay attention to what we have on our skin. And some people are like, okay, what? What products are not gluten-free? There are some products that have fillers that are not gluten-free. And you have to especially pay attention to the lipstick you use because you’re licking your lips, you’re ingesting those products. So gluten-free, we have a lot of vegan products, cruelty-free, everything is made in the United States. We have a warehouse in Tarpon Springs, Florida, where everything is handmade in small batches. Um, so we have skincare, haircare, makeup, deodorant, soap, everything from to cover you from head to toe.

That’s awesome. So if I have any listeners tuning in and the U S and you guys have not tried it, I’m going to link Susan’s contact info in the show notes and you can definitely reach out and learn a little bit more or even, um, see if you could get something ordered because trust me, there’s some things. I said to Susan, I’m like, I try to avoid your website because that just leaves me with FOMO because there’s some things that I said there, I want to try that. And it’s like, Hmm, do I tell Susan like, you know, buy it and ship it to me? Like $500 later. Yeah. The shipping fees are just a little bit crazy when you go cross border, but yeah, no, definitely check them out if you haven’t.

Now, one thing that I do love about you, and I feel that it’s the one thing that makes your business super, super successful is the fact that you have an amazing customer care system. You have built and retained that customer, um, from, and you have that flow. So just wondering if you could sort of share how you nurture that, that customer relationship in your business. Yeah, our business, all direct sales businesses are all about relationships. You have got to have the relationships there. And I think it was a couple of years into my lemongrass spa journey where I was like trying to find new customers, new customers. And I’m like, why am I not really taking care of the people who have purchased from me in the past? One of my biggest pet peeves is if I purchase from a consultant from a direct sales company and I don’t get any acknowledgement that I purchased, no, thank you, no acknowledgement that my order shipped, like no response. I will never purchase from them again. Cause I’m like, obviously they don’t need my business. They’re doing great without taking care of their customers. So I drill it into my team. I do it myself. I have a, I do pride myself in my customer care.

So immediately, as soon as someone places an order, I get the notification through email for my website. Within 24 hours, I am texting them. Thank you so much for your order. I appreciate you. If it’s a new customer, I might link them to my website or my Facebook group, but thank you so much for your order. I’ll be in touch when your order ships. So that is within 24 hours. When I get notification with Lemongrass Spa, we get notification when an order ships and a expected delivery date, although with shipping, sometimes that’s accurate, sometimes it’s not, but as soon as I get notification. I will set up a text to go out the day before their order is supposed to arrive. So it’ll say, Hey, Lisa, just want to let you know your order shipped. It’s scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Enjoy. Or I might say, snap a picture, share it on your personal profile, share it in my Facebook group, let us know how you like everything. So that’s when order ships two weeks after their order is delivered. I’ll send them another message saying, hey, I just want to make sure you’re doing okay with your products. Do you have any questions? At that time, I might send a video or a tip in how to use one of the products that they ordered. Or if you like that product, you might like this product too. And then they get on a three month rotation. So every three months they’ll get a message, hey, are you running low on anything? Do you want to see our monthly specials? Now, if they already ordered before they get to that three month spot, then I take them out of the loop and put them back at the beginning at a thank you. So a lot of my customers never make it to the, Hey, are you ready to reorder? Because they’ve already placed another order.

But what I love too is because I’ve been so intentional in taking care of my customers from a business standpoint, I’ve gotten to know them personally. So they know they’re gonna get a text message from me, a very personal one. And then all of a sudden I was getting like pictures of grandkids and vacations and hey, I thought of you, I was at this place or I was in Bath and Body Works. Am I allowed to say that? I don’t know if I’m allowed to say it. I don’t know. I don’t think we’re gonna have a ton of listeners at the beginning anyway, so we’ll let it go. How’s that? Another skincare product company. Um, and you know, the, the, the scents were so strong and I immediately thought, okay, I need some unscented lotion from Lemongrass Spa, but you’re building that relationship. And that to me is so rewarding when people think of me, not just as Susan, the Lemongrass Spa consultant, but Susan, my friend, um, that just, that just makes me smile.

And it’s so amazing how many different relationships you can build from a direct sales business. I mean, you’re just talking about the customer relationship and building into friendships. But I mean, I’ve never met you in person. I, you know, like we live miles and miles and miles apart. And it’s like, we came together on the Modern Direct Seller Academy. We’re both members of that. And you know, we created a working pod and there’s four of us and we just seem to click so well together and we work our business in so many different ways together but then we also support each other so I absolutely love that about the direct sales field how you can build all these these amazing friendships like I feel like if we ever met in person it would just be like, pick up, let’s go grab a coffee. And it would like continue the conversation. It would not be awkward. It would be just like, hey, there’s my old friend, Susan. Let’s go, right? I know, cause it was like three years ago when I joined the Academy. And I think it was right around the time that you did. Yeah, I probably was only a couple months after you. So. Yeah. And we’ve never met, but we’ve done many events together. Together, I use it in quotes. And it’s just, that is the second piece of it. You’ve got your customers, but you’ve got your co workers to people that you collaborate with you learn from you learn together with. And that has been huge.

Well, the one of the biggest things that has helped me over the last few years, in growing and expanding my business was getting outside of my company. Before I before I joined the academy, I always found that I was trying to just keep within the Epicure world, right? I would only wanna learn from Epicure people. And it’s just crazy the amount of information that I’ve been able to take in and use in my business once I expand it outside of that. Because when we all think about it, direct sales is direct sales. The only difference is the product that you’re selling. The way the business is run, it can be adapted to no matter what product that you use. So that’s what I think that, you know, when we do our collaborations, it’s great because we’re learning from each other and we’re able to build with that. So I, I’m so thankful for that pivot that we all made. I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll say that the pivot that we all had to make in 2020 where we all like went online and, you know, had to discover new ways of doing our business. Because honestly, if it wasn’t for that, I think my business would be in a really different place right now and you have to take the good with the bad, but I think that was definitely one of the good things that came out of that time in 2020 for sure.

Yeah. And I think with Lemongrass Spa, and I think with many direct sales companies, they still push the home parties. And a lot of us, we don’t want to do the home parties. And being a part of Modern Direct Seller Academy, hearing from other leaders, how they’re being successful, it made me realize and get really excited about the fact that I can do business my way. I don’t have to do the home parties. So that has been huge. You can do the business your way how you feel comfortable and what feels good for you and still be very successful. Absolutely. And I love that you touch on that because that’s the whole point of the podcast is showing that, you know, there’s no cookie cutter approach to being successful in this business. And the main reason why, and I’m just going to be honest, why you’re like my first guest is I know that I sent you something to read because guys, let’s be honest. I’m just going to put it out there. I’m horrible at proofreading. And if anybody’s seen the first little bit, I actually had a typo on my podcast cover. It said POSCAST instead of podcast. And it took a couple of days for the system to generate the change, but I was giggling because that’s just me.

But I sent Susan my blog to read and it was about the podcast and how I was starting the podcast. And I love your response when you came back and said, you know, reading that made me feel like I, like it was talking to me because I am one of the 99 percent. And that is that’s the main reason why I think that a lot of us, we feel like we’re not doing the business when we don’t see our name in the spotlight and it’s okay not to have your name in the spotlight. Are you doing what you need to do or what you want to do in this business? If so, then you’re successful in what you’re doing. But, and I’m sure you’ll agree. Like, that’s just, and I think many more people need to be aware of the fact that success comes in many different forms.

Yeah, and sometimes I think too, I could have, I could be in the top 10, but I don’t think I’d have any friends because I wouldn’t be doing it authentically Susan, it would be me trying to be someone else using the verbiage that someone else uses that’s successful and I wouldn’t feel good about it. So am I making millions? No. Am I earning every incentive trip? No. But I love how I do my business. I love what it does for our family. Like I said, that time affluence for me is huge. So I’m happy.

Awesome. If mama’s happy, everyone’s happy. So true.

Now this leads us to our next question. What is the one thing that you’re most proud of that came from your direct sales business? I think, and this is something that, I don’t know if I’ve 100% grasped, but sometimes we define ourselves through our careers and our jobs. And for me being a speech therapist, that is how I define myself because the question always comes up. You meet someone new, you’re like, oh, what do you do? I’m a speech therapist. Like everyone knows, okay, I know what a speech therapist is. You know, you went to college for many years. I felt like I was kind of happy to define myself that way. But when I transitioned to direct sales, I went through kind of a weird phase where I’m like, okay, is direct sales something that I can be as proud of as I was when I was a speech therapist? And then at one point I even thought like, maybe I should go back to work. And then, you know, Mark and I, thankfully I have a very supportive husband too. I mean, we have great conversations. We talk through everything. It’s not like, oh, do whatever you wanna do. It’s like, okay, let’s decide what we’re gonna do together as a couple, as a family. But, you know, going through that and I’m like, okay, what if I do go back to work full-time? Then I was thinking, okay, you’re gonna have to pick up the kids. You’re gonna have to go to all the doctor’s appointments you’re gonna have to do all of this. He’s a pastor, so he has a flexible schedule too, but he’s very busy. I’m like, this just wouldn’t work for our family. So when I was able to very much accept the role that I feel like God has given me as a pastor’s wife, as a wife, as a mom of two teenage, well, one adult kid now, doing my business how I want to do it, I feel like I am so blessed to have the life that I have so transitioning from being proud of the career label that I had to embracing and loving the life that God has blessed me with, that took me a while, but now that I’m here, I just love it. I’m so thankful.

Awesome. Now this is one thing that I think I’m gonna start asking all podcast guests. And I know when I prepped you for the podcast, I didn’t really give you this info, but I’m sure you have it at the top of your head. So I want to know if there is one quote or one tip that somebody has told you in the direct sales world that has stuck with you. So my favourite quote, and I actually use this as my team quote too, and I can never remember the guy’s name because it’s a name that is not very common, but I’ll put it, I’ll send it to Lisa. But it’s individually, we are one drop, together we are an ocean – quote by Ryunoskuke Satoro. That means so much to me because I love the ocean. If you know me, you know that I am all about the beach. I live a couple miles from the beach now, which also makes me super happy. But individually, we are one drop. We can do so little individually, but when we combine with all those other drops, with Lisa, with the people in the Modern Direct Seller Academy, with my teammates, with my upline, my downline, my community, that’s when you can do amazing things. And it makes it so much more fun too. Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that quote. That’s so cool.

All right. Well, I won’t keep you too much longer, Susan. I do wanna thank you. But before we go, do you have like one place that people can find you online? Uh, I know you have a website, so maybe now’s a plug for that one. Yeah, absolutely. And my website, it’s kind of like my, we learned today, it’s my hub. It’s where you can find all the things. So Susan Larimer.com. Um, I’m sure Lisa will put that in the show notes, but, um, I know my last name can be a little funny, but that’s where you can find a little bit more about me, my Instagram, my, um, lemongrass spa page, I have blog posts on there, some personal, some business, but that’s where you can find me, www.susanlarimer.com. Well, I appreciate you so much for being here, Susan, and thank you for taking the time to talk to me and to share with the audience. And stay tuned for more stuff. I have some exciting guests coming up. And yeah, thanks everybody for supporting the podcast. If you wouldn’t mind leaving a little rating and like I promised last week, I promise I will get better as we go. I’m just so nervous when I’m doing these, but I’m sure it will get easier. So anyway, guys, we’ll sign off for now and we’ll see you soon. Take care.