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In general, there’s a lot of under usage of social media and it’s such a, in my opinion, a missed opportunity. I mean, you can absolutely explode a company just with social media.
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Howdy y’all. I’m Elizabeth Gore. Welcome to The Big Idea from Yahoo Finance presented by Block Advisors built by H&R Block. As a co-founder of the small business funding platform, Hello Alice, it has always been my mission to help ensure entrepreneurs have the tools they need to succeed. So let’s cowboy up.Today’s big idea question is, how do I choose the right business partner? Our industry is beauty. Joining me today to talk about this are the co-founders of POV Beauty, Michaela Naira and Ani Hajinian. I cannot wait for y’all to hear this conversation. So let’s talk to Maya and Annie.All right, howdy y’all. Welcome to the Big Idea. We’re so excited to have you both on.
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Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it.
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Planes, trains, and automobiles were all over the country together fighting winter storms, right?Yeah, trying to look good while doing it. Um, well, thank you both, Michaela, Annie. I am so, uh, into your partnership, and I want to know how you two chose to work together.
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Totally. So, uh, we began this project 22 years ago now, right, Annie? Yeah, yeah, a little over 2 years. Uh, yeah, yeah, a little over 2 years, and, um.We work with Imaginary Ventures. They’re our investor, and when we were first talking about bringing this to life, they, one of the first things they said was, you need a CEO. So I was like, OK, and they wanted to make sure that not only did I have a co-founder CEO thatUm, I connected with, but also, uh, someone who was somewhat different than me in the sense of ideas and ways of thinking, cause I think that there’s something kind of interesting about yin and yang. So they told me when we were talking to, you know, different potential candidates, um, to keep an open mind about someone who may be like slightly different than you, um.And so I met a few different people, but when I met Annie for the first time, uh, I was really, really just blown away, not only by her resume, obviously, with she has so much success in the beauty industry, which was a major green flag, but also justHer and I are very different, but not in a bad way, in a way that it’s explosive with ideas because I think one way and she thinks another way, and I, I kind of like having that different dynamic, um, and also it, it, it opens the door to ways of thinking that I maybe didn’t know. And also I’m only, uh, when we started this, I think it was only 2025, 26.Uh, very unfamiliar with the business world in totality. I, I know nothing about business, so I knew that I needed a CEO who really, really understood how to build a business from essentially nothing. So, um, I knew right away that that was Annie for
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sure. And Annie, what did you think in meeting Michaela?So
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it was, um, it was sort of a similar but different experience. And I think I, I knew going in that we were going to be incredibly complimentary.Um, but that was the thing to me that really was exciting about this partnership, because I do think, you know, at the center of whatever you want to call it, whether it’s like the yin and yang or the contradiction, to me, that’s where the magic lies, and I think, you know, in a lot of ourYou know, creation and partnership, it is sort of us coming together and really leaning into that, that has created some of the best ideas. And I think it was, you know, a huge sort of, um, I would say, you know, gratitude to to Michaela for being having that open mind because I think not a lot of people would see that.And so it’s been such a fun and incredible journey just because it’s just been like approaching it from all different angles, and it’s certainly been such a huge learning opportunity for me as well. I’ve learned so much from Maya, and I think it’s just, you know, I think that’s, that’s the piece, and I know we’re going to talk about like the building of the business, but I think that is the number one thing.That just excited me from day one with this partnership is how much learning opportunity there was and how green we were, we both were, right? Even whatever stage we were of building this business, we were still incredibly green in the relationship.
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So, and Michaela, did you have a moment where it was like, OK, I trust this woman with my baby? Was that like a
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moment? There was absolutely a moment. I don’t think I’ve ever told Lonnie this.But um, fun. When I was talking to Annie the first time, I, I, I, I asked her where she lived and she said she lived in Paris, and I was like, OK.You live in Paris. There’s no way this is gonna work. And she was like, I would move here. I would move to back to the US and I’m like, you would?Um, and she literally moved her family here from Paris to do this, and I think that’s like that, that to me was a massive sign of dedication, and, and she has since we, you know, started this two years ago, the amount of just dedication that she has where you can tell likeShe really, really cares about this, and it is, it’s her baby. Like I, I, I, I, from that moment, I, I knew rightaway.
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That is a that is a heck of a leap of faith, I’ll tell you, all the way, all the way over the pond. Well, yeah, well, let’s get into POV, um, I, I want to know why y’all chose skin prep versus straight up makeup. I’m just so curious about that, that product choice.
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So before I, I’m, I’m going to handle this one like is all Michaela, but this is one of the things that I, again, wanted to sort of establish of the genius that she is and the vision that she brought on from the beginning.And I think typically, like, you just kind of do like the market analysis and like she just saw right through it, and that was the moment from my perspective, where I was like, I’m booking my next flight to LA and like we’re moving across the pond because that to me was like, this is the beginning of something like incredible because it’s not.And we’ll get into this in a little bit, but her vision and her dedication and her our commitment and just her ability to break through the noise is unlike anyone’s I’ve seen.Let Michaela go. Tell your vision.
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Let’s hear it.
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So it’s from an artistry perspective, I think that as a as an MUA.Skin prep is key for us. We will not do a client without it. Um, and no matter what style of makeup you’re doing, you are prepping, whether you’re doing a very natural look or a drag look, you are prepping. It’s just so, so foundational. But what I found is as I was working as an MUA and I’m working at Ulta Beauty at the time.Uh, there was a, a, a sincere lack of knowledge about skin prep, and I found that it wasn’t that people didn’t know how to do makeup. It was more so that they didn’t have the right tools and the right foundation to figure out the full routine, and a lot of times people came in not loving how their makeup was looking, and that’s why people come to Alta, right? They come to Alta, they want to talk to an associate because they’re looking for a solution.100% of the time that’s why they come up to an associate. They want a solution. And the most common solution they were seeking is how can I make my makeup actually look good. And a lot of times they were mistaken in the sense that they thought the reason their makeup didn’t look good was because of the makeup itself. But what I always found was it was not the makeup, it was what they were putting on first to set the foundation up for the makeup.Uh, so I would go all over the store and help people build these skin prep routines, and I always knew.For years, if I ever did a beauty brand, that’s what I wanted to do, because there was no clear-cut, simplified, approachable, easy solution to skin prep that I could easily explain to people and they could easily digest it. So that’s how this was born.
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And then I, I’m curious from a business perspective, um, on the, on the pricing and the SKUs and which ones go to market. I, I’m, I’m curious how do you balance that side of it, the choices.
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Yeah, I mean, I think uh it was really executing on Michaela’s vision. Um, there were specific routines and a system that she wanted to create for the skin prep. Um, and then from there, it was really looking at market size opportunity, right? Like within each space, kind of like looking at the competitive landscape, um, within each SKU.Um, and really understanding like where do we want to position the brands. And for us, when, uh, Michaela and I started on this, uh, this venture, we wanted to make sure it was bringing the best formulation with the highest efficacy at a very accessible pricing. And so, like, I mean, it’s not like, you know, drugstore pricing, but from the, we push the efficacy of our ingredients to the max. And so, and, and, um,You know, part of the working with Korea innovation and the textures, and they’re sort of focused on ingredients and marrying that with the West Western efficacy of ingredients and putting them together and delivering that to the customer at um not outrageous prices. And so competitively, we wanted to make sure that we were within a certain sector of pricing.Um, but really it was bringing that value to the customer of opening the, the gates to accessibility to amazing, amazing skin prep.
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Is filing taxes feeling overwhelming? You are not alone. Block Advisors by H&R Block has your back with real experts who make small business taxes simple. So take a breath, help is here. Visit blockadvisors.com.Welcome back to The Big Idea presented by Block Advisors built by H&R Block. With tax season in full swing, I want to take a second to break down estimated tax payments for small business owners.As a small business owner, you likely will not have income tax and other payroll taxes withheld from your earnings like an employee would. That’s where estimated tax payments come in. They are designed to make sure you are paying taxes periodically during the year instead of all at once, because that’s too much.Most small business owners use Form 1040ES to figure out their estimated payments. The good news is you can submit all of that online. These payments typically cover income tax and self-employed tax. Self-employment taxes are basically your Social Security and Medicare contributions similar to what employees have withheld from their wages. SoWhen are you required to make these payments? Generally, you’ll need to if you expect to owe $1000 or more in taxes. Now that’s income tax plus self-employment tax, and your withholding doesn’t cover 90% of this year’s tax or 100% of last year’s tax. It’s also important to consider all your sources of income when estimating how much you’ll owe.Estimated payments are due on a quarterly schedule. April 15th for Q1, June 15th for Q2, September 15th for Q3, and don’t forget January 15th of the following year for Q4. Making these payments on time is really important, y’all, because there’s a penalty for missing them. It’s not a flat fee like many payments you might be used to, but it’s calculated for each quarter you miss. So put it on your calendar.The IRS determines that penalty by taking the federal short-term rate for the quarter you missed and adding 3%. 1 last thing now, if your business is taxed as a C corporation, the rules are a little different. The corporation itself pays income tax and has to make its own estimated payments. So make sure you understand the requirements for your business type. All right, let’s get back to my conversation with Makaya and Annie.I want to flip over to, to really help our business owners watching to learn from y’all on your use of social media. Um, I mean, I don’t think there’s been a better example of how to grow a business and really leverage social. Um, and I, I, I love social because it’s a way, especially for business owners who don’t have a lot of capital to start to really break through.And I, I’d love to start with you, Michaela, just on, you know, what is your advice to small business owners on the use of social to get their products out?
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Um, yeah, I think in general there’s a lot of under usage of social media, and it’s such a, in my opinion, a missed opportunity. I mean, you can absolutely explode a company just with social media, and we’re really seeing that especially with, you know, the explosion of TikTok shop too, you know, brands are brands are taking the risks, um, putting their products on TikTok shop and, and seeing massive, massive success, POV included.Um, but, you know, when we, when we launched the brand.I said to Annie, I was like, Annie, I got this with the with the marketing cause we didn’t, we didn’t really have a full built out team yet at all. We, we had no team literally when we launched the brand, uh, we were just starting to to bring people in andI said I got this with the marketing and uh we did this massive uh campaign and I, I said we need to blow up social media. That is how this is going to be successful. That’s how we’re gonna sell out.And we pumped out content. We were feeding people, you know, that’s, that’s what people want on social media. They wanna be fed, they wanna be, they, yeah, they’re hungry, they wanna be brought in, they wanna see everything, the behind the scenes, they wanna understand, um, the products, the education. We, we posted a ton of education.Uh, we posted a lot of things that make people curious and things that make people say, OK, I’m interested, maybe I wanna try this, um, and I, I personally have the philosophy of whether people are talking good or bad, they’re talking and that’s what you want. You want people talking. So we had so many people talking and the day we launched.It was an insane success, and that’s kind of the philosophy. I, I wanted to do that in the beginning to kind of show Annie like this is how this is gonna blow up, um, and we kind of take those, obviously now things are different cause we have a much larger team and there’s a lot more like practices in place and and strategy, but um.Just it was, I think it was good for Annie to see like how I operate in that in that way and, and now she kind of, uh, as we launch other things, lets me use that genius in those in those ways as well. So yeah, social media is everything.
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So you’d say it’s underutilized by most companies.
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Yeah, I mean, I think that.This is just my personal opinion and I’m speaking as a social media creator, obviously, and I do have a marketing degree, but um I think that people take social media too seriously. Um, people don’t care about the aesthetics of things. They don’t, they don’t want to look at a pretty picture. They want to be brought into your life. They want to see the behind the scenes, they wantThey want the, the nitty gritty of it, you know, they don’t, the polished picture at the end is great, but what got you to that picture? Um, so I think POV tries to implement that a lot.
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Alot of authenticity, and Annie, I’m curious then, you know, you’re able to use Michaela’s social media genius and monetize it, right? And, and, and look at it as almost a P&L strategy. Is that a fair statement?
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Well, I think in any time with like a founder, I think that’s essentially the sort of the the strategy, right? I think with Michaela where her, um, you know, I thinkAnd I think this is where there is this sort of misconception of like a influencer founder or creator founder. What I think people miss is the undeniable hours that has gone into creating content and the understanding behind essentially the psychology of how people engage, right?And so she has this down to essentially like a science. And so for her, like when she looks at it across all the different like social channels that we have, it’s so innately intuitive for her, right? And so,That’s where I think as any company who’s starting it off, you know, I think one advice would be to get someone, whether it’s on the team or whether it’s a partner or whatever it is, to truly understand the social platform, because I do agree with Michaela. I do think it’s like underutilized. Um, but that said, I think you have to bring in the right sort of talent to help you see through what’s actually happening in that space and figure out how do youTruly leverage it because I do agree with Michaela and particularly with her and her community. They want, they want the realness, they want the authenticity, they want to be taken behind the scenes to really understand like, how do you create it? Because the thing with Michaela is she’s incredibly um relatable. And I think when people see that, they’re like, OK, well, I could do that too. And so like when you take them behind the journey, you’re like, yeah, like,You know, join us, like, come, like, if you want to do this, you can do this. And so, I think it’s that journey that you take the people on to truly just see the vision and, and see what we’re, we’re trying to build. And Michaela, I don’t know if you want to give your example of how you even launched it with taking everybody behind the scenes, but I think that in itself was like such a genius, you know, strategy.
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Yeah, that authentic moment, right? Well, y’all have had so much success. We, we also on the show talk about our biggest mistakes, so we can all learn from each other and we call them our dirty unicorns. So I’d love to hear, um, first you, Michaela, just on a mistake that you made in business that we can all learn from.
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Well, I’ve made many, many mistakes.
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I made 10 before breakfast, so
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I gotta tell you, I, I really, I’m someone who’s so open to making mistakes. I like making mistakes, uh, because that’s just how you grow. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re lying. You’re lying, um, uh, I think.Something that I have struggled with, and I’m speaking as a creator founder, an influencer founder.IBalancing theBalancing what it takes to beAt the scale I am as a creator.Which requiresIntenseClickbaitness and um attention grabbing intros and and scripts and just doing everything in your power to get a viral video, right? Balancing that with creating a brand.That relies heavily on education.Because I find myself wanting to really draw people in my videos about the brand.But doing it in a way that’sI don’t know how to explain what I’m saying. I know that Annie knows what I mean.Trying to be educational and taking it seriously, but not being education can sometimes be slow and boring, right, right. So, so one of our brand things is edutainment. There you go. So how do I, how do I be entertaining and educating at the same time, and there have been times where I have failed to do that well, but I’m stilllearning.
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Yeah, I mean, it’s a balance, right? And every mistake gives us a new thing to try and a new thing to learn from. I mean, you, you are very entertaining and educational. I even was, you know, showing you your own products like, uh, like this is Whippet, and all I can think of is Whip It Good, the song, like all of your stuff is both gorgeous, smart, andVery entertaining. I can tell you that. So I think you’re doing a great job, not that I’m an expert by any means. Um, I wanna, I wanna go all the way back to our big idea question for both of you. Now that you have chosen a successful business partner, could each of you give just one piece of advice on an entrepreneur who’s choosing their partner?Anna, do you want to start?
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Um, yes,I will start. So, I mean, this kind of goes like there’s an underlying assumption that there’s, you know, decent amount of time invested into understanding who the other person is. Um, I, aside from that, I would say, um, really listening to what is most important to them. And what I mean by that is I think, you know, there are contractual partnerships, and then there are like partner partnerships, right? And I thinkReally finding someone who is going to be a true thought partner to you and who’s going to be a real person who’s going to be there through the great times and also the not so great times, because like, it’s, this isn’t linear, right? Building a business isn’t linear.And so, like, to me, that’s the real essence of like, what are the real values of the other person and how are they going to look at things, not just only when it’s going the, you know, the right way, but also the not the right way. And I think to toYou know, Maya and I, like, we spent a lot of time together. And so it was just really learning about the, the different ways of how we, how we operate and what our values are. And that was really important to both of us.
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And Maya, for you, other than having someone move across the world for you, what is, what is your piece of advice?
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Um,Well, I’ll just say I have two points I want to make. So one thing I want people to consider is Annie and I’s age difference, um, and I actually think that’s important becauseI have a lack of experience. I also act my age.I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m, I’m in my twenties. I act like a 20 year old. I have very minimal business etiquette.That’s great, and I own that. I, I totally own that. Like if you put me in a boardroom meeting, I don’t know how to act, um, uh, so.Because of that, uh, I, I genuinely just believe that trust is very significant. I mean, I, I just, I put my full trust into Annie. Like I’m handing her this massive vision on a platter, and I’m saying, here you go.Um, I know you know what you’re doing, and I know that you are going to be the key to the success of this, and together we will create magic. So I, I, I try to never really question what Annie does. I let her do it because she knows what she’s doing more than I do. So, um, I, I don’t feel I have a right to give a strong opinion on certain things because she has so much more experience than me.Um, of course I will give my opinion where I feel like it matters, but, um, I think she just does an exceptional job doing the, the big boss lady things that I can’t do, so I just trust her wholeheartedly 100%.
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Well, you two are a blessing. Thank you for coming on and teaching our business owners all your lessons, and Michaela, thanks for helping us feel confident and beautiful and I teaching us so much about business. Thanks for coming on the Big Idea, and, um, my daughter said especially Michaela to tell you hi. So thanks for comingon,
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y’all. Thank you.
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Thank you for having us.At the end of each episode, I’d like to give a shout out to a small business who’s doing amazing work today. I’d like to shout out Finleya, a salon and spa in Jenkinstown, Pennsylvania owned by Declan McIlroy. Finleya is a full hair salon and spa that focuses on guest experiences to realize their own authentic beauty. Check them out at Finleyahair salon.Dot com. Thank you to Michaela and Annie for coming on the show and thank all of you for joining us. We hope you’ve learned a lot. This has been the Big Idea from Yahoo Finance. Please make sure to scan the QR code below to follow Yahoo Finance podcast or check us out at the Big Idea wherever you get your podcast. You can also come say hi to me at any of my social channels at Elizabeth Gore USA. I’m Elizabeth Gore, and as my grandma always said, hold your head up high and give them hell. See you next time.
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This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.
