“Welcome to Pretty Rich podcast where you are totally the heroine of your own story. I’m your host, Sheila Bella, and I built a 7-figure PMU beauty biz and a 7-figure online biz without a degree, without a fancy website, or a sugar daddy. You and I hang out on here long enough, you are going to believe you can do it too!”
Permanent make-up beauty boss Sheila Bella begins her podcasts the same way … and it never gets old. Bella is engaging, energetic, and endearing. And though her focus is on beauty — specifically, microblading (eyebrow tattooing) and permanent make-up — her professional advice will help anyone rock their business.
Sheila Bella Reinvented Herself and Wants to Help You Do It Too
Bella came to the States when she was eight years old. Her family of 10 lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a seedy part of LA. “I watched my parents move our family to a comfortable, middle-class life in the Valley,” she says. “They did it all through strategy and grit.
Business is in my blood. It was only a matter of time before I started my own company.”
Bella’s first business was Platinum Vocals Inc. a children’s performing arts school that created young aspiring artists with no experience to get to Broadway, Disney Channel, America’s Got Talent, and American Idol stardom. The business was a success, but Bella was in a bad marriage. In 2009, her self-esteem was crumbling, and she had to make a change.
“I divorced my first husband and needed to reinvent myself. I started modeling, acting, freelance makeup artistry, and musical theater. My last job was waiting tables in a school-girl outfit at Dillon’s Irish Pub serving avocado fries,” she says. “A year later, fate brought me to Will, the love of my life, and after we got engaged I was ready for stability. Avocado fries, although delicious, wasn’t exactly my idea of a dream job. My dreams changed.”
Sheila Bella Is an LA Beauty Trendsetter
Bella soon realized that while she wasn’t anyone’s ideal employee, she was her own ideal boss. She always had a knack for beauty products and application and capitalized on that by taking a microblading course that taught her how to tattoo eyebrows. Her friends said that permanent make-up was old and over, but Bella followed her instincts.
“I became one of the first microbladers in Los Angeles. After graduating, I had to hustle to build my brand. You know how they say, ‘Dress for the job you want not for the job you have?’ That’s exactly what I had to do,” she says. “I had zero clients. Nobody knew my name. I remember getting dressed to the nines as if my calendar was full.”
And hustle she did, marching up and down Ventura Boulevard, leaving brochures about her work at salons and spas. She faced a lot of rejection. “But I saw it as a numbers game. For every nine people that turned me down, one would agree to work with me. I was a shameless self-promoter.”
In the beginning, Bella was a one-woman wonder. She would answer her own phone as a receptionist. She couldn’t afford a website designer, so she learned to code from YouTube and built her own site. She showed up at every Chamber of Commerce breakfast to showcase her product.
“I spoke with the confidence of a seasoned pro. Why? Because I had to. To me, failure just wasn’t an option. After doing this imperfectly and repetitively, I started getting more clients. My portfolio was getting larger and finally, people started to believe in me and my art. Soon, I hired my first employee, then my second, then my third, and so on,” she says. “Fast forward 11,000 clients later, 25+ employees, and hitting 7 figures in revenue year after year, here I am.”
Sheila Bella married Will, now has two children, serves as the board president of the American Academy of Micropigmentation, and is living her dream. “I transformed my beauty addiction into a real career helping people.”