Where there is a will, there is a way – small business Covid-19 success story.

Business Owner gives us the scoop on how they kept their small business alive during the time of Covid and shares great tips on how to succeed as a business owner in this new normal.

“It’s amazing, when you are put in a spot, you find a way. You just absolutely find a way” – Carrie Schönborn

Business owner Carrie Schönborn is considered to be a great inspiration to business owners all over South Africa. When COVID-19 hit, it hit hard and business owners across the world experienced great loss and difficulty. However, Carrie took up the challenge and was determined to push through this trying time with great success, a focused and determined mindset towards a goal where her business came out even stronger, showing us that COVID-19 could not stop this train from running!

Carrie showed a great heart of determination from a young age by taking over a slimming and toning business called Inch-by-Inch in 2002 in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal. A few months down the line Carrie wanted to add more to her business by incorporating the beauty aspect to it. After qualifying as a beautician, Carrie combined both the slimming and beauty together. However, Carrie still wanted to evolve her business by adding hair to it. Beauty and hair became a match made in heaven and from that point, Carrie never looked back. Beauty Incorporated and Trend.y Hair Space has now become one of the most well-known businesses in Pietermaritzburg and has started to expand to nearby Hilton.

Last year when COVID-19 hit, Beauty Inc. and Trend.y Hair Space was not going down without a fight. Carrie and her team quickly made new plans on how to keep their business alive by supplying clients with products. On top of this, a very good friend of Carrie’s approached her and informed her that a business in Hilton was up for sale. Seeing this great opportunity Carrie moved quickly to acquire it.  The expansion has been a positive move for Carrie and her team and also reaching her clients in Hilton making it a lot more convenient and close.

However, we know that starting up a business does not always run smoothly and one will most definitely face challenges. In the midst of this, Carrie shared some of her experiences and how to succeed in the midst of these challenges rather than being swallowed up by them:

“The most important thing when going into business or starting up something, is just to have a really big fighting spirit. You need to just never take ‘no’ for an answer and you just have to keep on keeping on. There are going to be good days and bad days. At the end of the day, the rewards definitely outweigh the challenges and getting to where you are.” – Carrie

COVID-19 has been a very big challenge but as Carrie shared: one should just grow and see what your target market is and adapt accordingly. For Beauty Inc. and Trend.y Hair Space to get through COVID-19, selling products was the way. They had to up their game and got hold of their clients and supplied them with the necessary products and steps to do beauty and hair at home, through selling little kits until they could resume normal services again. When it came to meet again, being in beauty therapy, germ control and hygiene was already implemented thus making it really easy to adapt to safety measures.

Carrie Schönborn and Beauty Incorporated and Trend.y Hair Space have really been an inspiration to businesses on how to survive this time period and also to go ahead towards a brighter future. At the end of the day we can take these words of advice from Carrie to heart, and muster up the strength in helping one another move on to a better future together:

“When you are handed a difficult situation, you really do have to just take a deep breath and realise it is not necessarily over or it’s not necessarily more challenging, it’s just giving you a different way to think, and that sometimes ends up really well because you perhaps come up with ideas or implement plans that you did not think of before. If you are a business owner, chances are that you already have that mindset, so you just need to sit and breathe and figure something else out. Where there is a will, there is a way. You can most definitely turn anything into a positive” – Carrie Schönborn.