” If I want what I want, not to work a billion hours a week, I have to let some things go and let other people in to help.”

Meet Tiana (Instagram | Website)

Location – Ferris, TX

Retail store owner & candle maker

Service: Creates own candles, sells them, and has a physical shop location for retail. Tiana also sell a digital course teaching how to make a candle business.

Went from 0 team member to 1, candle making assistant.

Grindaholics Anonymous Graduate

Challenges before Grindaholics Anonymous

I started making candles from home in 2015, and I quit my day job in 2019 to pursue candle-making full time. I was selling them on Amazon and Walmart online, and shortly after, I started a digital course on how to make a candle business.

Before Grindaholics Anonymous, I had employees for about a year, but I didn’t know how to manage them. I didn’t know how to break tasks down to make the role and duties easy to understand. I didn’t have SOPs. There weren’t any systems to guide anyone or make them comfortable making candles(the position I hired for). So it was a struggle to figure out what I should be expecting from them.

And because I didn’t know how to break the rules down, they were doing a little bit of everything; candles plus some stuff with the online course. It was a mess.

I struggled with having hard conversations with people, so I would not say anything when I should have.

Solution Grindaholics Anonymous Provided

With Grindaholics Anonymous, I learned how to establish those things. Using the Guide to Tough Convos, it became a lot easier for me to have hard conversations with the online course clients and employees, communicating the policies and expectations.

Also, the hiring process has gotten a lot easier. I was always afraid to hire people I’d never met before. I learned how to put the job application out there and make it look appealing and represent me. I’m very comfortable putting out a job application and following up with interviews. I learned how to weed through people to get an idea of who would be a good fit for the role. And once they did finally come to the interview, I learned what questions to ask. So that part was very valuable; to weed out people and find my ideal employee. It’s been a lot easier to train someone now too. The person I have is very comfortable and has learned how to do everything.

Having systems in place has made things much more manageable. Click up has been amazing. I never used Click up before, and now I have this whole Click up set up with the SOPs. I’m starting to grow there, and I learned how to make the SOPs, which has been valuable. We used it recently to train her on how to make a certain aspect of the candles. I just printed them out, had her read them through, and followed the directions by herself. And it was easy; she could do everything just from the SOP. I’m so glad I learned how to do that.

Life after Grindaholics Anonymous

For a while, I didn’t have an employee in the storefront; I was kind of in-between. Now that I have her and she’s trained, it’s amazing because she works on the weekends. So now I’m available to do other marketing like pop-up shops and little farmer’s markets on the weekend. So we can be open in both locations on the weekends.

I’m excited about spring because we’re going to be able to have the store open and do other things, or I can, you know, take time off on the weekends. So it puts my mind at ease that she knows how to run the retail store by herself, and I can work on more marketing on the weekends.

Once she learned how to do everything, I was able to walk in, give her assignments and then walk out, and then she could pretty much handle everything the rest of the day.

Being in Grindaholics Anonymous has made me more confident about hiring and just establishing things from the very beginning. It’s easier now for me to lead people and have tough conversations and stuff like that. And the program gave me the tool to train someone and have realistic expectations.

Now that I have a clear understanding of her role, I am more confident that I know what I’m doing as a business owner.

As a product-based business making the product takes a lot of time. So I had to be strategic with how I went through the course material because I didn’t have time to dive deep into the curriculum. I couldn’t log on to the live coaching calls because I would be at the store. But Grindaholics Anonymous is built to allow me to do it at my own pace and learn by asking questions and getting feedback from submissions.

Everything was very easy to understand and implement on my own. So that was really nice.

Grindaholics Anonymous is so unique for a product-based business. You may get busy or have events you have to go to and things like that. But you’re still able to go through the material, implement everything, and still get support.