How to start an Aromatherapy business
It’s a billion dollar question really, since based on many reports, essential oils and aromatherapy is an industry that is increasing every year by 6-10% annually. It’s actually one of the fastest and largest growing industries.
Aromatherapy is an unregulated industry, this means that anyone can say they are qualified and start practising, but it's still not a good idea without some form of education and insurance.
The first step to starting an aromatherapy business is to get qualified. We wrote about how to do this called, How to become a certified aromatherapist.
Once you have your education, your professional designation with membership, you are ready for the next steps, starting your business.
Decide what you are going to do
The first step is to decide what you are actually going to do. For some this will mean finding employment, for many this will mean starting a business. In our courses we actually offer a free introduction to business course on how to make this decision and a process of how to find a job if being employed by someone else is the goal.
If you plan to start a business, we also offer an amazing Business Foundations course that walks you through all the steps to get started up to building a website. After you have the foundation to your business, we teach you how to launch it with our Launch my Business course that walks you through everything you need to build a website, and tools for maximizing your online presence.
What kind of business do I want?
Every person has something unique about them and this can be very useful in guiding you to make better business decisions.
For example if you already run a spa, you may opt to add additional aromatherapy services to your menu of services. If you are already a nurse, you may opt to add aromatherapy into your business practices or start working with hospitals on offering aromatherapy from within. If you are a vet assistant, you may opt for more training in animal aromatherapy and use that to create a unique niche for that vet practice. If you are already an RMT, you may add aromatherapy to your existing massages and charge slightly more for the aromatic benefits. If you are a creator you may get into manufacturing practices and design your own product line or become a consultant.
There really is no limit to what you can do with any education, so get creative with where your heart is at and what feels great to do.
Insurance
Every business should have insurance, liability risks exist in every industry and true professionals understand this.
Aromatherapists offering aroma massage and consultations will have some general liability coverage and specific coverage for touching the body.
Aromatherapists creating cosmetics, natural health products, bug repellents and hand sanitizers will have manufacturing insurance typically. This is considerably more expensive, but worth the investment. If your association isn’t large enough to offer a group discount (which happens a lot), you can also join a soap guild or similar other professional association just for the insurance discount.
Basic business foundations
Before even diving into a business and spending money on the tools to get into business, it's always a great investment in yourself and business to secure the foundation.
The foundation of your business will look at the following items:
Why are you even doing this?
Who your ideal customer is?
Evaluate your personality and place yourself in the best professional space
You will understand exactly what kind of business you intend to start (sole, partnership, inc., etc.)
You will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your business idea and similar competing businesses
You will learn how to brand your business and keep it consistent, right down to typography, colours, images, words, and logos
You should get familiar with how to create your own content or whether you are prepared to invest in a content creator for marketing your business
So why are you doing this?
This is a very involved question and believe it or not, if the answer is weak, your business may not thrive. This is a concept that many new businesses flop quickly in because they never got real with their commitment. It’s not a single question with a 1-3 line answer, there is so much more. We strongly encourage you to work through this before doing any business as an entrepreneur.
Who is your customer?
You will find many new to the aromatherapy world or any business may believe their customers are everyone or they are attempting to target a large audience. Spoiler alert, your business is not for everyone and when you dig deep into your heart you will find you actually do have a niche or smaller target market.
Being specific is important because your marketing efforts will be costly if you think everyone needs you and it will be so vague, people may not be interested because they don’t connect with everyone.
Evaluate your personality
This might sound odd, but we all have a unique personality and it can help make or break your business. For example, if you are a lifelong learner, you will become bored quickly in a rigid business that is expected to keep doing the same things long term. So you may need to shift what you are offering to something that involves creating.
Business Strengths
Every business should be doing a regular review of what the strengths and weaknesses are in their business. This is very helpful in creating a business of success vs attempting to grow something that has a lot of weakness loopholes. And understanding how effectively to evaluate this will give you the tools to start your business right and to continue to assess business strengths and weaknesses as markets shift.
Branding matters
Branding helps set a consistent image and feeling. If you opt to be all over the map in branding, people may not recognize some of blogs, freebies, resources and tools you provide in your business. But if you are consistent, you brand will gain recognition and the consistency will make recognizing it easier for the public. All successful businesses have a consistent brand strategy.
Content creator
You will either need to take the time to learn how to market your business by developing your graphic design skills or pay someone to do this for you. Most entrepreneurs opt to learn, but the process of learning can be time and money sensitive. So researching a valuable learning course will help considerably and taking the time to perfect your skills will make for an easy and exciting marketing campaign.
Launching your business
Once you have established your business foundation, then it's time to start working on how to launch your business
This may look unique based on the type of business you decide to start, for example if you want to open a little apothecary type shop, you will need to secure a location and have funds for retail rent. But if you wanted to start a small Mobile practice, you won’t have these things to look at.
All business models in our opinion should have an online presence. Your website is like an online face that does the talking and advertising for you.
To launch your business we suggest the following things:
Create content to bring people to your website, like free tools, guides, etc., before building your website.
You can opt to start a social media page like Facebook and/or Instagram, both are valuable in our opinion and we know many businesses that have grown great businesses using these tools.
Build a website.
Market like crazy!
Create content
You will need 1-3 tools already prepared before you launch your business. The point of this is to give your customers something of value from you and typically in exchange for their email so you can continue to contact them about things your business is offering.
Social Media
Almost everyone is using it and it's one of the largest and fastest growing online platforms. It would be a mistake not to use at least on social media platforms to market your business. Both Facebook and Instagram are great options, there are other options as well like Pinterest, TicTok, LinkedIn, SnapChat etc. And the list is always growing.
Each social media option actually has a more specific intent and this is important to consider so you are not using them wrong. For example, Instagram is all about the lovely images, while Tik Tok is about videos. LinkedIn is a professional social media platform that is not as casual as say Facebook. And SnapChat is fun and young, but may not be the vibe of a professional business or maybe it is.
Lastly it’s always helpful to look at places you already learned from. Many educators do have resources and courses, but we sometimes forget about them. If you loved a course you took before, you will likely love the content of another course.
Build a Website
Every new business should have one. Think about it, when you are looking for something the first thing most people do is search online. If you don’t have a website, you could miss a much larger market and your marketing strategies may end up costing you more because you are getting less exposure.
Websites can be expensive to hire out, the average web developer will charge $6000-10000 to build a basic website. Often they build it in a way that you will need a web developer to make changes or the foreseeable future.
You can build a website on your own however. There are several platforms that are tried and true to entrepreneurs everywhere. We prefer SquareSpace, but there are also other platforms like WordPress, Wix, Weebly and Shopify to name a few. Most web platforms do have tutorials to teach you how to build a website.
In aromatherapy we suggest you learn how to build a website as an aromatherapist, because the pages you require may vary slightly from other industries.
It’s also important to learn about how to set your website up correctly, there are things to consider like SEOs, google analytics, registering with google and so much more.
We will be offering a Launch my business course that explains how to do these many things.
Market, market, market
You have to advertise and promote any business. Businesses will continue to thrive and grow this way. Do not rely on someone else to do the marketing for you, like listing your business with a website and then expecting to just spontaneously grow without any further effort.
Marketing can look like Facebook boosts, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, blogs, articles, promotional items, events, webinars and so much more.
Gone are the days of door to door sale and unless you're selling flowers for your kids hockey team or a real estate agent, the only thing you will gain from door to door attempts is a lot of exercise
Be careful of high cost low return marketing. Some examples of this may be unnecessary merchandising like creating notepads and t-shirts with your brand for no real purpose but to give away and with nothing in return. Some markets are expensive to participate in and in aromatherapy you may not even get a single client, so your cost recovery could be in the negative. Paying for expensive ads in unrelated platforms or with platforms that don’t specially target your ideal customer can be a waste of money.
Some other fun marketing ideas could be, host or volunteer to do an interview on a popular podcast, write an article for a popular magazine or blog for a website, partner with a business that could use your expertise while promoting their own at the same time.
Most importantly - have fun!
Starting a business can be so incredibly fun, so we hope you will take this blog and use these tools to develop everything you need to succeed or join our business courses (Free Introduction to Business or Business Foundations) for some detailed directions on what to do next! We also offer a bundle Clinical Aromatherapy & Business Foundations where you can learn about both and save!
