In this episode of Built to Shine, Vanessa sits down with Jessica Carothers, owner of Blo Albuquerque and multiple beauty businesses, to talk about what it really takes to grow sustainable businesses through people-first leadership. Jessica shares her unconventional path from education to entrepreneurship, the hard lessons she learned while opening three businesses in three years, and how vulnerability, trust, and intentional culture-building became the foundation of her success. This conversation explores leadership development, delegation, balance, and why creating opportunity for others is both the hardest and most rewarding part of business ownership.
You can also read a synopsis here:
When Jessica Carothers opened her first business, she had never run one before. She’d spent her career in classrooms and admissions offices, not behind a P&L statement. A decade later, she owns three thriving businesses — two Waxing the City locations and a Blo Blow Dry Bar in Albuquerque — and she rarely needs to set foot in any of them on a given day.
That shift didn’t happen because Carothers found a way to work herself out of the details. It happened because she spent years learning, often the hard way, how to develop leaders and build a culture strong enough to run the business without her constant presence.
Her path from high school French teacher to multi-unit franchise owner offers a practical playbook for any business owner wondering how to grow past the point where everything depends on them.
A Career Built on the Unexpected
Carothers came to entrepreneurship from an unlikely place. She taught high school French, later worked as a director of admissions and financial aid, and stayed home for a few years once she had children. There were no small business owners in her family on either side. What drew her in was simple: the appeal of setting her own schedule and, more than that, the idea of becoming a job creator.
She started with Waxing the City, then noticed a gap in the market — an entire state with no blow dry bar — and opened a Blo location next to her second waxing studio. Within three years, she had opened three businesses. The franchise model, she says, gave her something a from-scratch startup couldn’t have: a system and support in place while she figured out everything else.
Promote From the Floor, Not From a Resume
One of the clearest lessons from Carothers’ experience is where leadership actually comes from. Every manager across her businesses is a working manager — someone who still takes clients and works the floor alongside the team. That, she says, is what earns instant credibility. No employee can say a manager doesn’t understand the job, because the manager is doing the same job every day.
Her early mistakes taught her what to look for. Technical skill and tenure matter less than temperament. Carothers looks for people with, in her words, “zero pettiness” — no favoritism, no drama, an instinct to lift up teammates and stay calm under pressure. Those traits can’t be taught. The management skills that go with them can be, and she builds those deliberately once she’s identified the right person.
Trust Grows When Leaders Admit What They Don’t Know
Carothers meets with every manager at least once a week, whether over coffee or on a Zoom call, to talk through what’s happening in the business and coach through problems as they come up. Part of what makes those conversations work, she says, is her own willingness to say she doesn’t have an answer yet.
That habit has paid off in retention. Long-term staff across all three businesses, she believes, comes down to trust — and trust is hard to build with someone who acts like they know everything. Admitting a gap, then following through, has become one of her core leadership tools, and she sees the same behavior show up in her managers when they bring problems to her instead of hiding them.
Culture Doesn’t Happen by Accident
Carothers describes her businesses as running on a “babes supporting babes” culture — a workplace built around kindness among a nearly all-women staff, many of whom are juggling their own personal and family pressures. She’s intentional about how that culture gets built and maintained, starting with soft-skills training for every new hire across all three businesses, where culture is discussed explicitly rather than assumed.
The payoff, she says, shows up with clients as much as with staff. Guests can feel the tone of a business the moment they walk in, and the reviews tend to mention the team as often as the service itself. Once a culture is established, the team itself becomes its guardian — new hires are held to the standard almost automatically, and it becomes obvious within months whether someone is a fit.
The Six-Month Rule for New Owners
Asked what advice she gives new franchise owners, Carothers points to timing. She recommends working in the business yourself for at least the first six months rather than hiring a manager on day one — learning the point-of-sale system, working the front desk, closing out the drawer, understanding every operational rhythm firsthand. During that stretch, the goal is to watch for who naturally rises to the occasion: who shows up early, picks up slack, and earns the trust of coworkers without being asked.
Carothers admits she didn’t follow her own advice quickly enough. It took her more than five years to fully step back from day-to-day operations across her businesses, largely because it took that long to learn what good leadership looked like well enough to install it. She’s candid that a faster learning curve would have meant an earlier, calmer version of the balance she has now.
Three Takeaways from This Episode
- Promote from the team, not around it. Look for natural traits — no pettiness, a genuine instinct to support others, an even keel under pressure — before worrying about management experience. The skills can be trained; the temperament has to already be there.
- Build culture on purpose, not by accident. A strong culture comes from repeated, explicit practices — soft-skills training, regular coaching, clear standards — not from a mission statement on the wall. Done well, the team eventually maintains it without you.
- Learn the operations before you delegate them. Spending real time in the day-to-day early on, even when it’s tempting to hire it out, gives you the judgment to spot the right leaders later and the credibility to coach them well.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This article only scratches the surface of Jessica Carothers’ journey from first-time small business owner to multi-unit franchisee. Listen to the full episode of the Built to Shine podcast to hear more of her story — including how she handles HR issues, what she learned from trading services for outside HR advice, and how she balanced running three businesses with raising a family.