ASHLEY: Welcome to Outgrowth: A Slice of Pro Beauty with your hosts Ashley Gregory.

JAIME: And Jaime Schrabeck. As the beauty industry moves through the reopening process, frustration and anger have been building over the lack of information and conflicting standards.

ASHLEY: When will salons open and what will be required? Who makes those decisions? We need to talk about why state boards haven’t done more and who actually speaks for individual beauty professionals. Let’s grow together.

JAIME: Ashley, we’re not lacking for ideas for reopening beauty salons. We’ve been bombarded with recommendations from everywhere: industry organizations, manufacturers, distributors, publications, consultants, salon owners, individual licensees, and even clients.

ASHLEY: Jaime, you’re so right. It is coming from every direction but none of that matters as much as what our actual government officials have to say, particularly the CDC, our individual states, governors, health departments, and, of course, our state boards.

JAIME: In more recent episodes, we’ve already discussed what we predict would happen, and that was with our experts: Leslie Roste of Barbicide, Tracy Donley of Associated Professionals,   and Amy Toepper of Legal In A Box, representing the manufacturer, insurance, and legal industries.

ASHLEY: And their advice is invaluable as we try to navigate the next steps in our industry. So if you haven’t listened to those episodes, I highly recommend that you do because they really break it down for everybody as far as what’s needed and what you need to focus on as you move towards reopening and transitioning into opening fully.

JAIME: Those of us who are salon owners legally and financially responsible for implementing these guidelines have many difficult decisions to make, including are we adequately prepared? Have we done enough to be safe? And how long will that last exactly?

ASHLEY: And unfortunately, we don’t yet have the answers to all of those questions, but it doesn’t stop us from having an opinion. It seems like every salon owner, every licensed professional has an opinion and is expressing it loudly, but those who are sharing on social media have really been the most visible. For me, it gets harder and harder to open a social media app because it seems like every post contains the same questions and no answers and we’re really at a crossroads.

JAIME: So it is no wonder that everyone is getting frustrated to a certain extent because when we lack the national standards within our industry, and we lack a federal plan to address our industry, we’re all just looking at each other wondering who’s going next, what will those guidelines say and how will we actually apply them in our salons?

ASHLEY: And that’s really the difficulty with, to your point, lack of a national standard, because each state, each locality, each city it seems, has different guidelines and different requirements of us as we open our salons and start to see clients again and we’re looking to each other for support and advice, but it’s almost like asking, what should I charge? It really depends on your own situation and where you’re located and what guidelines and restrictions have been placed upon you and so until we know that information, we’re all really just guessing.

JAIME: And it’s apparent that some don’t like the guesses because witnessing comments where salon owners or individual beauty pros are commenting that they are refusing to do that, if that’s what it takes to reopen. It makes me wonder, are you really going to stop working, or not go back to work and perhaps leave the industry, because you’re asked to wear a mask, for example?

ASHLEY: Yeah, and that stance, really, I can say pretty equivocally doesn’t really make much sense to me because gloves and masks and things like that were present in our industry before this. So I guess it’s time to separate the politics from those decisions and really focus on what steps can we take to make sure that we’re keeping our clients safe, but as well that we’re keeping ourselves safe. PPE stands for personal protective equipment, and whether clients will wear it or what you’re requiring, or if you’re charging more for the PPE if you’re supplying it, none of that really matters. If at your core you think, well, this doesn’t apply to me because we don’t have many cases where I’m located or what have you. Whatever your reason is for justifying that decision, it gets down to, at the end of the day, what are you willing to do to protect your business? Because who knows where this is going to go in the next two months and two years. It’s a whole new world out there and we don’t yet know what that looks like, but to say already, I’m not going to wear a mask, if that’s what it takes to do my job, that’s not a salon I want to visit.

JAIME: Nor I, and I’m so grateful that you just defined what PPE is because if you can believe it or not, earlier this week someone posted, what’s PPE?

ASHLEY: Yeah. Well, if it’s not something you’ve ever had to use, like both of us coming from the nail industry, gloves and masks are a part of our everyday life just because of the dust that’s generated and, the fact that if we touch on cured product, too often we can create an allergy and that will severely limit our ability to do our jobs. So I know for the hair side of things, there are masks for keratin straightening treatments and things like that that might contain formaldehyde or have fumes that can be harmful. So I’m not sure why, suddenly, this is such a burden. I can understand the access issue because that’s definitely a problem. Trying to compete with health care in order to find masks, gloves, capes, all of the other visors, what have you, that’s definitely an issue, but as far as wearing it, I think we need to be a bit more adaptable.

JAIME: That sense of being burdened or inconvenienced informs lots of opinions on social media, certainly, and even though we perhaps had those things as best practices, I don’t know that there were any states that were actually mandating wearing gloves or wearing masks to perform, for example, in our area, nail services, before this happened. So while certainly those things were available to us, I’m not so sure how many beauty pros were actually using them on a regular basis and using them appropriately.

ASHLEY: And that’s why I think social media can be a little bit dangerous, especially right now, because when you have an opinion online and just one person agrees with you, you feel like there’s a movement behind you, whether that’s true or not. And I understand having the government tell you, you have to do this in order to do your job can really seem like an imposition. Um, but at the end of the day, it’s designed to protect you. And if you’ve listened to our previous episodes about the legal side of things, the liability side of things, you know that this is just to help you limit your risk and not just your risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19. It’s more about limiting your liability. If you were able to say, I wore a mask for every service starting May 1st or whenever you opened or will open then your client doesn’t really have much of a leg to stand on if they were to bring something like that to your door and say, I’m now COVID-19 positive and I got it here.

JAIME: That we have these guidelines, as they’re being rolled out slowly state by state, the lack of clarity within them leaves a lot of questions and again, more frustration. So now you have some guidelines and yet, because of the language that’s being used in the guidelines, it’s still not clear what’s required and what’s suggested.

ASHLEY: Absolutely, and I totally understand that frustration because I see a lot of beauty professionals looking to their state boards for clarification because we look to them for our general regulation, and when we’re not getting that information back, we then start talking amongst ourselves and looking for clarity. So yeah, that’s really frustrating because we want someone to just say definitively, you need this, this, and this in order to reopen, go. And so that way we can start working on procuring those supplies and we can start pricing our services because we know our overhead will be higher in order to perform the services that we do normally. When you don’t hear back, it’s, it feels like shouting into the void. So I completely understand that frustration. I do think it’s a bit displaced or misplaced because the state board, as it turns out, really isn’t in charge of that.

JAIME: And that may be a revelation to everyone should know that the state board exists as part of government and they can’t get out ahead of their governors. They are there to protect consumers and to provide guidance to the governor, but they’re not in a position to dictate the terms under which salons can reopen. They can make suggestions, but it’s up to the governor to decide how much of that to actually put into guidelines and what of that is required.

ASHLEY: I think a great case in point for this as being here in Illinois, the board of barbering and cosmetology here can make recommendations. So there’s even, I think still, living on the Illinois state board website, a statement about fish pedicures. Now, that was a recommendation that the board was making to the legislating body saying, this should not be allowed in our state because of these reasons. It wasn’t an overall statement of saying fish pedicures are illegal. It’s a recommendation. It’s a guideline. It’s someone who has expertise in our industry telling lawmakers who may not have that same level of expertise, here’s what we believe is best practice for public safety. And that’s the long and the short of it. Where the frustration, I think, comes in is PPE is all about public safety, and the guidelines really are parallel with the mission of the state board. So when we’re not getting that direct direction, when we’re not getting the specifics, I guess, I can really see that frustration flare up. And of course, now that we have social media, and have created these communities on social media, we’re seeing just a constant flow of that frustration coming forward.

JAIME: Even when specifics are offered, Ashley, if someone doesn’t like the answer, they’re still going to be upset.

ASHLEY: That’s true.

JAIME: So we complain when we don’t have answers, and then we complain when we get the answers we don’t want.

ASHLEY: That’s the beauty industry for you. Well, I know that we can look to states that have already opened and find best practice from what they’ve been doing and what they’ve been recommended to do, and see what we can really formulate and add to our own. I believe we’re going to have to be pretty self-guided when it comes to what level of protection we have to offer to our clients and what level of protection we need to wear ourselves. It just comes down to doing the research, finding out what’s going to limit the risk and exposure for everyone involved, and some of the best practices and common sense solutions that we’ve seen from other states that we know we can apply to our own situations.

JAIME: At the federal level, the ultimate authority would be the CDC in terms of providing that guidance, but even more recently, the CDC only offered interim guidance and it covered things like restaurants and bars and camps and schools, for example, but not the beauty industry yet. So we’re still waiting for guidance from the CDC from which the governors could take recommendations and adapt them to their state’s circumstances.

ASHLEY: And I wonder if that is down to the fact that a lot of these policymakers are on the outside looking in to the beauty industry. There isn’t maybe an established channel of resources.   The beauty industry as a whole, meaning those who work individually or the individual licensees, don’t have a lobbying body that’s nationwide that federal governments or a federal agency like the CDC could pull in and look to you and say, you’re our subject matter expert. We need guidelines based on what’s actually going to work in the real world. And I think our lack of organization that way is actually hurting us because now they’re looking out for different resources and different bodies where they know they can get accurate information in order to formulate those recommendations. What do you think about that?

JAIME: Let’s hope they do get accurate information because it would be horrible to have a federal guideline come out that misrepresented either how we work, or the products that we work with or what’s reasonable to expect of us in our situations. For example. I’ve seen repeatedly people refer to the type of cleaning that they do in their salon as creating a sterile environment. If we have misinformation at our level, I certainly wouldn’t want that to rise to the level of a federal standard. I would hope they would know better because there at least they do have doctors and public health experts who would understand there’s a difference between the health industry and the beauty industry, but the health industry informs what the beauty industry does because we are touching people.

ASHLEY: I think we can actually use what happened in New York state as a case study here, where the New York Times exposé came out, there was immediate backlash in the nail industry, both inside and out, and the governor’s office came down with pretty restrictive guidelines and requirements immediately. And it involved masks. It involved retrofitting salons with expensive and often ineffective ventilation systems and creating a new burden for salons that wanted to open in New York state that they needed these eyesore-type ventilation outlets at each station, which wasn’t always easy to do for these salon owners or prospective salon owners. And if I think an industry expert had been called in to help with that, there may have been a different result. This outcry for guidelines and saying, we need these recommendations and we need these requirements and we need them now, putting that pressure on there might create a rushed result and it might create a result we don’t want to have to live with. That’s why I think it’s important to really do the due diligence and take the time needed to come up with actual guidelines, recommendations, and requirements that work in the real world in the salon industry.

JAIME:  Those new laws affecting nail salons in New York came so quickly after those New York Times articles that salon owners didn’t have much time to process it or have much input.   And so what ended up happening was the requirement to provide workers with gloves and face masks is not the same as requiring workers to wear them. So while salon owners were required to provide them, unless there was a requirement for someone doing the services to actually wear them, I ask, then what did you actually accomplish? Likewise with the ventilation requirements, the requirements became law in 2015 but I believe there was a five year delay in implementation, so that’d be coming up this year that salons would actually be accountable for providing those systems within their salon. So that timing, I think, is probably gone given what’s happening now. I don’t think any salons are going to be in a position financially to invest in doing that, even if it were physically feasible to do that within your building.

ASHLEY: Yeah, so I think we have to be careful what we wish for here. If we’re asking governmental bodies that have little to no expertise in our industry to make these recommendations and to do them quickly so we can reopen, again, we might be saddled with something that would be very difficult to bear and it would be likely permanent. I think that’s why it’s really important to consult experts and to ensure that we get this right the first time because, first of all, we want to make sure that there isn’t a second wave and that we don’t have to close again, and secondly, we want to make sure that whatever recommendations, requirements, or legislation come down the pike, it’s something we can live with.

JAIME: That’s such an excellent point because, earlier in this process, we were focused on cleaning surfaces, and if we were going to have to do an incredibly thorough job, more thorough than we’ve ever done in the past, to prepare our workspaces for each client that we see, it diminishes what we now know to be the more likely cause of spreading coronavirus, which would be the respiratory droplets. So if we were putting all that effort there and we were expecting guidelines and laws, perhaps, focusing on that, requiring us to space our appointments 15, 30 minutes apart or whatever was felt appropriate in order to accomplish all that cleaning, it does diminish now what the CDC is prioritizing, which is, it’s the close physical contact. That’s a double-edged sword for us because that is the one thing we can’t get away from is the close physical contact. So for all of the effort and promises of cleaning between clients, it still comes down to our interaction directly with individuals in our spaces.

ASHLEY: I don’t think I could have said that any better. It is absolutely about the close physical contact and I think that’s the part that our industry’s having such a hard time with as we point to, well, we have all these disinfectant products and we do do this as part of our regular course of business, our regular service protocol. That’s great. But if it were just down to surfaces, we wouldn’t see all these plexiglass partitions coming out. We wouldn’t see the disposable capes and all of those other things that help limit the actual respiratory droplets in the air and so I think one of the big questions is, can we blow dry? Is that going to be spreading things around? If we open the front and back door to our salon, is that doing enough? It’s hard to know because, again, there’s no official guidelines or requirements but we have to understand that even if we were to get definitive specific requirements, it wouldn’t apply to everyone the same way, just based on the physical layout of our salon, the number of stations we have, the services we perform, whether we’re full service. We’re just a blow dry bar. We’re just a nail salon, whatever that looks like. Again, we have to be prepared to take on whatever we’re given. And just seeing the conversations happening in the industry right now, I don’t think the majority of the industry is ready for that, just based on the pushback that we’re getting and so when the example is set by people who would rather misbehave, and make an example of themselves in order to make a point, it’s really going to create a slippery slope of compliance, which, if we’re being real, was the slope we were on before this all happened.

JAIME: We’re just moving down the slope faster.

ASHLEY: Yeah. We’ve gained some momentum

JAIME: A lot of momentum and we anticipated these recommendations, and yet as we see actual guidelines roll out, it’s so interesting to see what’s missing. So let’s talk about what we expected to have happen. We thought for sure that we’d likely have to have some sort of plan, and if we had workers in our spaces, we definitely have to have a written plan and we’d have to train our staff or each other in order to do the same thing for every client that walked through the door. Screening was another thing that we heard a lot about, that we would have to screen ourselves and we’d have to screen clients before they came in. We’d need to reduce the capacity. This is something we’ve been hearing a lot about in the restaurant industry because they are opening sooner than we are, but reducing capacity, spacing out our stations so that we’re not so close to each other. Working by appointment only, and I would assume with that would come the requirement to actually record the contact information for the individuals that we’re seeing at our salons. Removing contact points. Reducing the amount of things that people would touch once they’re in your salon space. And then of course the PPE, face coverings being the most important of those different PPE supplies. And then erecting barriers. This was something that with those partitions came out very quickly, which made me think, okay, so again, to your point earlier, how big of a partition do you need in order to make that safe and is that even reasonable given how much you can project with those droplets as you’re speaking or coughing or laughing or singing or whatever you’re doing? Which also begs the question, Ashley, can a beauty professional do a service without talking?

ASHLEY: Oh, that’d be tough for me. I am very chatty when I’m doing services and that’s what makes me slow. 

JAIME: The other thing we’ve mentioned, it would be the limiting the access to spaces where we’d normally gather in a salon, whether it’s the waiting area for the clients or a break room or the place in your salon where perhaps you’re mixing color, or cleaning tools, or accessing your supplies. Those are places that we can’t gather anymore because we can’t do so and stay far enough apart from each other.

ASHLEY: And to add to that list, even taking and processing payments, finding touchless ways to do that and dragging people kicking and screaming into this century with some contactless things, but that even creates an issue because a lot of that is phone-based. And I’ve seen people saying, well, I’m going to require my clients to keep their phones in the car because we don’t want them touching their dirty phone and then touching everything in our salon, which is absolutely correct. That’s a pretty inclusive list. I think that touches on almost everything we’ve been hearing from the different states that have been opening. But we have to be willing as beauty professionals to really wrap our arms around all of them. And we can’t necessarily just pick and choose from this list because if you’re doing everything but wearing a mask, you’re really negating all of the other steps you’re taking. Same thing with allowing clients to come in maskless, or erecting a barrier between you and your client doesn’t necessarily remove the requirement for a mask.   

JAIME: It’s the totality of what’s being asked of us. And yet if we were to prioritize, it would be the PPE.

ASHLEY: Yeah. But then again, should we be prioritizing anything off of this list or is it, you have to do all of this? That’s really I think the question at hand here is, are masks enough? No, we know that but those of us who look to places like grocery stores or hardware stores and say, you can wander those aisles for hours and no one’s gonna say anything to you but I’m with my client for one hour. Why should they have to wear a mask? Or why should I have to buy special protective equipment, et cetera? I don’t know about you, Jaime, but I don’t touch anyone at the grocery store. I don’t go around holding hands with anyone at the grocery store. I don’t look at the eyelashes of anybody at Home Depot.  

JAIME: Well, because home Depot isn’t a licensed establishment in which I can provide beauty service, I don’t find myself offering massages there either, so yeah, I get it. Yeah. And so these ridiculous comparisons between what we do in our salon spaces and what happens in retail or in restaurants really breaks down over the physical distance, and the fact that we’re touching people. You cannot get away from that. And so all of these other precautions that are being suggested or required as they may well be, are meant to mitigate the most obvious thing that we can’t get around, which is the physical distancing. And even as we mentioned masks, we’re not saying what kind of mask, because as we know, if we’re just wearing a cloth mask that does more to protect other people than it does to protect us, whereas if we were wearing a K95 mask, that would be protecting us and protecting other people.

ASHLEY: Definitely, that’s the part that kind of scares me honestly. If you are hell bent and dead set on doing something a certain way, you can find any justification out there to support your decision. And because we’re not getting official guidelines from the sources, we’re expecting it from, like a state board or a local health department yet, we’re starting to see these groups form of like-minded individuals in our industry that are looking to actually start some sort of advocacy in order to get their point across. It’s very interesting to see who is supporting that and, where we’re not seeing the direct support from maybe a national organization so that everyone’s really starting to feel like they need to form grassroots organizations of beauty professionals in their own state or their own city. And those are popping up everywhere.

JAIME: They certainly are. They’re happening state by state and no doubt there’s a void, because just like we can’t get on board with the same national standard, at a national level, our industry is still comprised of different aspects, whether it be salon owners, independent beauty professionals, distributors, manufacturers, all the different industries that go into making the beauty industry work. And normally that’s wonderful when things are going well, but what we’re not seeing doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening behind the scenes. So I think that also creates even more frustration because of the lack of transparency. There’s likely a lot happening behind the scenes that we don’t know about, because it would probably ruin some of these negotiations, if in fact that’s what’s happening, in order to get salons open as quickly as we can, as long as it’s safe. And I think that is the big question. How much can we possibly do? What can clients reasonably expect? How can we protect ourselves and our businesses and get back to work?

ASHLEY: Yeah. We don’t know how many different drafts of guidelines and recommendations are being passed back and forth between governmental bodies and industry associations, those associations and our state boards, whether it’s something to make them more accessible, or easier to follow, or more based in reality. So we’re out here with our torches and pitchforks asking for guidelines now, and again, we might be given something that we can’t live with. 

JAIME: And we’re going to be doing more, whatever it is, whether it’s more cleaning, more disposable things in the form of PPE, more time, more recordkeeping. There’s just a lot more to it. And I’ve even seen, and I’ve been proud to see this actually. Some step up and say, don’t make an appointment with me if you’re not going to show up. My time is valuable, I think to myself, wow. It’s taken this to realize that your time is valuable. Your time has always been valuable. It just is more valuable now because of the reduced capacity that we’re going to have going forward for the foreseeable future. I think that if in years past, when the industry has evolved, and whether that’s the introduction of gel polish within the nail segment or how perms just completely fell out of favor in hair, things have happened more gradually and now that things are happening very abruptly, it is very disruptive. Those that are able to innovate and either pivot or adapt or scale things down while I scale other things up. Those are going to be the people that survive.

ASHLEY: It’s all about staying agile and being able to go with the flow and figure out a new way of doing things, and those are the people who will absolutely survive this, of course, speaking metaphorically. Their businesses will survive this whole situation because I guess you have to pick your battles and if wearing a mask is the hill you want to die on with regard to your business, then that’s your choice, of course. But things aren’t always going to stay the same and we have to embrace change if we’re going to move forward. Everything is going to look different moving forward: beauty shows, education, license renewal, and just our interactions with our clients every day. It’s going to look different and I think the sooner we can wrap our brains around that, accept it, and incorporate it into our daily lives, the better.

JAIME: As we’re seeing decisions being made by salon owners and beauty pros, they should expect to be judged for those decisions, and to think that somehow you’re entitled to make those decisions, which you are, and not face any sort of consequences, whether they be good or bad, is being naive. If, for example, you choose to not require every client to wear a mask in your salon, well, it’s no better than not requiring anyone to wear a mask. 

ASHLEY: Right. 

JAIME: And if a client decides that that’s not good enough, that they expect more protection, more precautions to be taken, don’t be mad when they go somewhere else.

ASHLEY: Yeah. We all have choice. We all have the choice to comply or not and our clients have the choice to stay or not. I guess we all just have to weigh what’s important to us, and what we stand for as business owners and as stylists and beauty professionals.   

JAIME: You know, it’s unfortunate that we have to use the word survive to talk about businesses when this is a deadly disease and survival can mean life or death for either us, a loved one or a client. It does seem rather, I don’t want to say shallow, because certainly economic survival is very important, but there’s so many different levels to this. If we were to be responsible for causing harm to someone else, getting back to the advice of our experts, we don’t want to be liable, whether it be legally liable or just even feeling morally obligated. I don’t want to be in that position myself, and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone else in the industry to feel responsible for that. So my recommendation would be is that if you don’t feel comfortable reopening, you’re not required to reopen when you’re given permission to do so. You can take your time. You can adapt to the point that you’re comfortable and if you’re never going to get to that point, then I would think that, perhaps, leaving the industry or repositioning yourself some other way, whether it be going to work for somebody else might be a better option.

ASHLEY: Definitely. We all need to have those conversations with ourselves and establish what is our comfort level, whether it’s through education, or just waiting, or figuring out what you’re willing to compromise on and what you aren’t. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of that going forward and I don’t think anyone’s going to judge you for making the decision that’s right for you and for your family, et cetera.

JAIME: This kind of awkwardness of a lack of confidence, it’s something that we don’t feel later in our careers. It’s something that we feel at the beginning of our careers, right? Like when your skills aren’t strong and you’re not sure how you’re going to build relationships with clients. So the advantage that we have is that we already have relationships with clients. You already have the trust of your clients. What are you going to do with that? Are you going to honor that and move forward in a way where you could acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers. Not everything that you’re going to do can 100% guarantee that everyone’s going to be perfectly safe, but you can do your best, and if you’re not able to do your best, that’s when I think you should consider doing something else. I think clients will be forgiving. I think they’re going to want to know what it is that you’re doing. So don’t assume that because a lot of this is public information that they know exactly what you’re doing. You need to be prepared to describe it and show them through your actions that you do have their best interests in mind, which also happen to coincide with yours. I think that’s one of the nice things about the fact that in doing the basic things, like wearing a mask and asking a client to wear a mask also, or in fact requiring it. You’re not asking your client to do anything that you’re not willing, yourself, to do.

ASHLEY: Agreed and there’s no better time than now to be very specific about advertising, what steps you’re taking to protect your clients and yourselves. And that’s something I’ve always been a proponent of, but especially now in great detail. This is definitely something you can post on your social channels and show them exactly what happens from the moment a client walks in to the moment they leave and all the things you do to turn your chair over and make sure it’s disinfected and ready for the next one. That’s definitely something we should all be talking about.

JAIME: As we get more information, we might expect that those guidelines will change a bit. I think as long as you’re making your best effort, you’re going to win their business and they’re going to stay with you.

ASHLEY: Definitely.

JAIME: It still seems like a downer and I don’t know why.

ASHLEY: Well, because it’s so uncertain, in these uncertain times.

JAIME: In these uncertain times.

ASHLEY: It’s hard to end episodes like this definitively because we can’t say, okay, here’s a bookend to this subject because it is still so open-ended and we have yet to be given any kind of definitive answer. I think this whole episode we’ve been explaining that there isn’t one coming.

JAIME: Right.

ASHLEY: And so we have to make our own definitive answers within the guidelines that do already exist.

JAIME: Right. On a more positive note, Ashley, would you share a review that we received recently?

ASHLEY: I would love to. I want to thank nail chick on Apple podcasts for sharing this five star review that’s titled “Meaningful content. Thank you for giving meaningful and relevant content. I just finished with parts one and two of the insurance episodes, and then then there’s the mind blown emoji. Very informative. I’ll definitely be checking my policy, salon policy, and having booth renters review their own policies. Thanks for covering all the issues we’re facing during this pandemic. I have listened to all but one episode. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, bringing in professionals, and asking the questions that help us raise the bar in our chosen profession.” So thank you so much. Nail chick. If you’d like your review to be read, you need to leave one on Apple podcasts, on Podchaser, or wherever you listen to Outgrowth.

JAIME: That makes me feel better because as we’re doing these episodes, and we’re trying to anticipate what information beauty pros could use, knowing that things change on a daily basis, I really am grateful that we’re being discovered.

ASHLEY: I am too. It’s very cathartic to have these conversations with you and to work through some of the feelings I’ve been feeling about being out of work and then now transitioning into going back to work and the uncertainty I feel about the safety of that. And so it’s really helpful to me and I hope to our listeners as well, that we can just sort of work through these feelings and thoughts and come to hopefully a more peaceful place with it.

JAIME: It’s so much better than talking to our pets about it.

ASHLEY: Yeah. They don’t, they tend not to answer.

JAIME: No, no. They don’t respond the same way. And they don’t challenge us either, so that’s the difference because we want to hear from everyone. We want to know what the thought process is, what actions are being taken, and where we see the industry going, beyond this because we were already facing challenges before. They’re just going to become greater, and will we come together as an industry to face them or will we just crumble? And I hope we don’t do that. I’m optimistic actually. It doesn’t sound like I’m optimistic, but I’m actually optimistic that through this, everyone will realize just how important it is to pay attention to what’s happening and to advocate for themselves.

ASHLEY: Well, we will definitely come through this stronger, whatever that looks like. it’s really going to bring the absolute best of our industry forward and I can’t wait to see what that looks like. Thank you for listening to Outgrowth. Please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform. It really does help us reach more listeners like you.

JAIME: And Ashley, as you and I are both residing in states where we’re not open yet, let’s be smart in the meanwhile.

ASHLEY: Absolutely. As always, you can follow and comment on recent episodes on our Instagram at @outgrowthpodcast, and as Jaime said, be smart. Stay safe.

JAIME: Until next time.

ASHLEY: Bye.