Ashley A. Batlle

I attribute my success to trying to make everybody proud of me. There's no bigger joy than having people tell you how proud they are of you. I'm an over-thinker, and I'm a fixer, and I'm a doer. Anything that I see that there's an opportunity to get involved in, or create, or make better, I usually do. For me, everything is figureoutable, and there's only so many roadblocks that can come in the way for me to actually be like, no, I'm done. If I can visualize it and see that something is doable, I go for it if it's going to serve a purpose in my life or in making other people's lives better. I always want to make my mom proud, and it's always been that way since I was young. That thought process of making the people around me feel proud of me gives me that drive to keep pushing and to achieve the things that I set myself to.

My first and favorite piece of advice is that everything is figureoutable. When things just seem really difficult, it doesn't mean that's the end of the road, or that you need to completely switch to something different just because it became difficult. The pivot point of everything is where the learning happens. Every time something negative happens, or something doesn't go the way you expected it, you need to look at it in a way of how to make it better, or what the lesson was in that. And that's not just in business, that's in life overall. It's also about trusting your intuition. The idea of microblading popped in my head out of nowhere, and I trusted that intuition. There are three aspects to doing a business: being the first one to offer something, doing it the most creative way possible, and being the best at it. If you're able to be the person that does all three at once, you're winning, you're already ahead of the curve. But the best way to be able to accomplish anything is to at least hone in on one of those three.

The biggest challenge right now is finding good employment and being properly staffed. Every business owner is going to tell you how difficult it is to find good employment. Nobody cares about your business like you care about your business. Every time you hire somebody, you have to teach them how to be confident in what they're doing to help and to care about your business to a degree. Right now in the era that we're in, it almost feels like people come to work and feel like they're doing you a favor, as opposed to feeling responsible for what their responsibilities are. I've gotten to a stage where I just don't want to micromanage as much, but it's challenging. On the positive side, AI cannot come in and do the services that we're doing in the beauty and wellness industry, so we're not going anywhere anytime soon.

The most important value to me is helping people feel confident. We live in a world where everybody has some sort of insecurity, and my focus is to help people feel better, whether that's looking better or feeling better from the inside out and outside in. All of my free time is spent doing things with my kids, because I work a lot and work so hard, I want to make sure that they know it's for them and that I'm able to be a present parent. That's the beauty of being a business owner - I can maneuver my schedule so I can be at all the school activities. My goal has always been to give my daughters all of the resources that I wasn't able to have when I grew up, and also all of the opportunities, and the confidence in being able to achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve. I'm very involved within the community itself, and if I can visualize something that's going to serve a purpose in my life or in making other people's lives better, I go for it.