Exclusive Interview with L.A.’s Own Sheila Bella
OL: Tell me about your background and how you’ve become so successful.
SB: My name is Sheila Bella, and I legit went from zero to $400,000 a month through my salon and online courses. I don’t tell you that to brag but to show you that you can do it too. If you think I’m lying, it’s probably because you don’t know anybody who’s ever made that much money doing eyebrows and lashes.
Beauty industry babes aren’t taken very seriously by the rest of the world. They think we’re a joke. I want to change that. The beauty industry is one of the most robust and recession-proof industries out there.
I’m an immigrant, a college dropout, English is my second language, and somebody like me shouldn’t be this successful. But I did it, and now I want every girl who loves makeup as much as I do to be awakened to her power to design a life she loves.
OL: How did you get to where you are today? What limitations did you face rising to the top?
SB: I came to this country at eight years old and watched as my parents took our family from ten people in a two-bedroom apartment in a bad part of LA to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle in the Valley. They did it all through strategy and grit.
Business is in my blood. It was only a matter of time before I started my own company- Platinum Vocals Inc., a children’s performing arts school that created young aspiring artists with no experience to Broadway, Disney Channel, America’s Got Talent, and American Idol stardom. Despite the success of this business in 2009, some significant life changes occurred when I decided to get out of a bad relationship that crippled my self-esteem. I divorced my first husband and needed to reinvent myself. I tried new things to get myself out of my comfort zone. I started modeling, acting, freelance makeup artistry, musical theater, and my last job was waiting tables in a schoolgirl outfit at Dillon’s Irish Pub serving avocado fries. A year later, fate brought me to Will, the love of my life, and after we got engaged, I was ready for stability. My dreams changed. Avocado fries, although delicious, weren’t exactly my idea of a dream job if I wanted kids, a house, a beach wedding, and everything else wonderful. I needed to get a better job that made a lot of money, with benefits, that allowed me to make my schedule, where all my best friends worked too so that it would be fun!
But where in the world could I find that job?
I wasn’t qualified to apply for anything I came across, and nothing met my description. So I decided this time I would become a permanent makeup brow artist. Why? Because schooling was only five days, and I thought that it was something I could make “cool.” I’ve always had a knack for makeup, so I can learn to tattoo it on people, right!?
I became one of the first microbladers in Los Angeles. After graduating from the course, it was now time to hustle to build my brand. You know how they say, “Dress for the job you want, not for the job you have.”? That’s precisely what I had to do.
I had ZERO clients. Nobody knew my name. I remember getting dressed to the nines as if my calendar was full.
My face beat was serious. I marched up and down Ventura Blvd. passing out my brochures at hair salons and medispas, asking owners if I could leave my flyers in their waiting areas. Walking into places cold was pride swallowing. It was hard, and I got turned down a lot! But I saw it as a numbers game. For every nine people that turned me down, one would agree to work with me. I was a shameless self-promoter. My friends all thought I was crazy. A bunch of them said, “Tattooing makeup is old-fashioned. I can’t imagine this ever panning out, She.”
But I kept going. There were many ups and downs, and I made many mistakes before I started to figure out what worked. I didn’t have a mentor, but I wish I did! I was promoted everywhere I could. When the phone started ringing for appointments, I pretended to be my receptionist and answered in the most professional voice I could muster. This gave me the freedom to sell my services as a witness and therefore gave me more credibility. I also didn’t have money for a web designer, so I spent three weeks locked in my apartment learning coding from youtube and building my website.
There wasn’t a Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting I didn’t do a trial at, and when people asked me to showcase my product, I spoke with the confidence of a seasoned pro. Why? Because I had to. To me, failure just wasn’t an option. After doing this imperfectly and repetitively, I started getting more clients. My portfolio was getting more extensive, and finally, people began to believe in me and my art. Pretty soon, I hired my first employee, then my second, then my third, and so on. My friends who didn’t believe in me all of a sudden were asking if I was hiring! Yes, that happened!
Fast forward 11,000 clients later, 25+ employees, and hit seven figures in revenue year after year, here I am. I transformed my beauty addiction into a real career helping people.
I meet so many young professionals with the same dreams I used to have, and I want to show them how it’s possible! How they can be worthy of the same success in the beauty industry I have achieved and beyond.
“Pretty Rich” is what I have created to meet the needs of creative beauty artists who want guidance in the area of business and marketing.
You don’t need to wait for someone to offer you your dream job. You can create it!
OL: Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 years? Ten years?
SB: I think that the more traffic sources are, the better. When I wasn’t making a lot, this wasn’t easy to do and keep up. Once you choose a traffic source, the only way it’s going to be successful is if you are consistent with it. And being consistent requires a workforce. Do you know how they’ve always said money begets money? I’m coming to a deeper understanding of that now more than ever before. Once you’ve built the machine and you have the players, all you need to do is duplicate the process to scale. And this year, I’d like to expand my consistency on more than just Instagram podcasts and Facebook. I have a YouTube channel that I was pretty consistent with for a while, and then I got busy and, by the way, pregnant. Haha. After my third son enters the world this coming August, I plan to hire a team to help me make YouTube a more consistent part of my marketing strategy. I feel so blessed to be able to serve people in this way. Not only do I work for me but AS myself. And to me, this is such a tremendous blessing.
OL: What advice do you have to aspire females who hope to be as self-sustaining as you are?
In 2007, I wanted so badly for my life to improve. I could explain the principles of success like:
Be disciplined
Set boundaries
Do hard things
Never give up
Like everyone else in my paradigm, I could quote the principles, name them, list them and even TEACH them.
What changed?
I realized my power to essentially “build myself.” And in business, it’s not in a physical way; it’s mostly mental.
You can inundate your mind with values, ideas, and knowledge to build the person that you want to become literally.
I started developing my mental grit using podcasts, books, masterminds and flooding my brain with the success propaganda I needed to believe before my negative defaults took over.
I paid closer attention to who I was following and what ideas I was allowing into my fragile space.
I had a “QP” rule, “quality people” only, and started surrounding myself with only the highest vibrating people who challenged me.
I started identifying myself as:
SUCCESSFUL
A GO-GETTER
SOMEONE WITH A GROWTH MINDSET
A MORNING PERSON
AND
A LEADER
How you IDENTIFY matters. And I believe our perceptions and our surroundings are influencing us.
Once I realized I was limiting myself by only classifying my surroundings through my physical zip code, when in fact, it was my mindset zip code that mattered most, is when the change started to happen.
