Starting her own business at the age of 17-years-old, Jade Guy, is the true definition of a young girl boss. From an obsession with lip gloss as teenage girl with a YouTube channel to owning an entire line of cosmetics, Guy remains focused on not getting too comfortable with reaching success at such an early age. Although she was able to quit her day job as a teen and devote all of her time to Shaded by Jade cosmetics, it wasn’t an easy road to success. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Guy comes from a family of men and women who she calls, ‘hustlers,’ meaning they always go after whatever they want and get it on their own. Being apart of a family that only breeds hustlers, Jade emphasizes that all the money from her business is from her and her alone. Her work ethic first started to develop when she got her first job at the age of 14, and continued when she received her Certified Nursing Assistant license. “If I did not have that kind of work ethic, all of the money I made from my business, I would not have learned how to put it back in my business. I wouldn’t have learned what to do, how to manage it--none of that,” Guy says. Her work ethic was only the beginning and what taught her to save for her business that she had always dreamed of. It was until Shaded By Jade became official that she learned how to run an actual company all virtually online. The business became so successful as such a fast pace, she started to notice and then came the real issues. “When I first started, I thought okay…I’m making all this money, this is great!” Guy says. The 17-year-old did what any average teenager would do with a thriving business and a bank account. She went to the mall and cashed out instead of cashing back in to her business which caused a major setback. Around the same time, she learned that she had to take care of her responsibilities outside of her business because those bills didn't pay themselves at the end of the day. She started to realize that if she did not begin to closely monitor her finances and invest back into Shaded By Jade, her business would start to demolish. Before she took action, it was too late and her decisions started to take a turn for the worst. “Once I lost all that money, basically I was like starting all over again. I couldn’t get anything above my minimum,” Guy says. In the world of cosmetics, when you purchase products from chemists you have to buy in bulk and Jade was in such a pinch that she could not even buy above that minimum number of product. Making that known as one of her first failures, it clearly took a few mistakes to teach her how to manage Shaded By Jade and also the importance of investing back into something that had the potential to make it big. She was surely stacking money and making it big but she explains that you have to make the money work for you. This is something she learned then mastered at an early age, to the point where it had become like clockwork. Once she started to notice that she was mastering this concept and the ease she felt, she was eager to expand. “None of this was planned. None of it was planned. I never wanted to do any of this. But you expand because you start seeing, when stuff starts getting too easy, that’s when you know you got to expand,” says the young entrepreneur. After seeing what she needed to do to run her business and she started to get into the swing of things, she simply thought she needed to do more. More as in expansion and growth to take her business to the next level. She describes herself as the type of person who has to see growth in her money over time. If she wanted to make the same consistent amount of money without any growth, now would she be a girl boss? At that point she would have never quit her average day job. “I don’t like knowing that, okay, I’m going to make $500 dollars every two weeks. It irritates me,” says Guy. Being set on not remaining comfortable with a steady flow of income is what expanded her from a makeup artist to owning a lipgloss line to a whole line of cosmetics and most currently her own studio space all by the age of 19-years-old. She explains the importance of utilizing your resources and managing her money, and being strong enough to withstand the changes that took place while building her business are all keys to how she became successful so young. “By people saying I’m so young with this, it's like I need to do more. Like I don’t know It just pushes me to want to do more,” says the young owner. Her plans to expand even more are definitely are not too far from her everyday thoughts. Aside from what she’s done already, she plans to turn Shaded By Jade into something even bigger. Ultimately it will be a franchise offering in person products and services opening stores across the country.
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