She Almost Gave Up On A 15-Year-Old Business. Here's What Actually Turned It Around.

Jessica Stark has been running her skincare brand, Stark Skincare, for fifteen years. That's not a typo, and it's not a "she got lucky with one viral product" story either. It's a real, established, been-through-it-all e-commerce business. And about a year and a half ago, she was closer to walking away from it than most people would ever guess.

Her sales had dropped 20%. She was exhausted. And if you'd asked her back then whether she had it in her to turn things around, she probably would have laughed at you.

Fast forward to today: her sales are up 27%, and she's got a 59% increase in new customer acquisition. She hasn't missed a single week of tracking her numbers in over a year.

So what happened in between? That's what I want to walk you through, because I don't think Jessica's story is actually about skincare at all. I think it's about something every single one of us who runs a business has felt, and what to do about it once you recognize it.

The Real Reason Her Business Started Slipping

Jessica’s wasn't a bad product. Her problem wasn't bad branding. It wasn't even a bad market.

It was boredom.

After a strong start and years of steady, incremental growth, Jessica hit a point where the business just didn't feel exciting anymore. Nothing was technically wrong. There was, as she put it, "absolutely no reason" to walk away from something that worked. But she got distracted, started volunteering at her son's forest school, ended up in a part-time paid position there, and her business quietly slid into autopilot while her attention went somewhere else.

And here's what I want you to really sit with: autopilot doesn't announce itself. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to stop paying attention to their business. It happens slowly, a little bit at a time, until one day you look at your numbers and you're down 20%, wondering what went wrong.

Then life piled on. Jessica put in her notice at the school, ready to refocus, and almost immediately got injured, hurting her tailbone so badly she couldn't stand, sit, or drive for six or seven months. She was writing emails lying on her side in bed. Her husband was running her packages to the post office. And the business she'd built for fifteen years just kept declining while she physically couldn't show up for it.

That's the moment she told me, in tears, "I can't do this alone anymore."

Why "I Need More Time" Was Never The Real Problem

This is the part so many store owners get wrong, and I've been guilty of it too.

When things feel overwhelming, our instinct is to think we need more time, more energy, more hours in the day. Jessica's husband gives her great advice and genuinely cares about her business, but as she told me, "he's not in it the way I am, and he doesn't like marketing." Support from the people around you matters, but it doesn't replace what actually moves a business forward: attention, and a plan for where to put it.

Jessica found our Browsers to Buyers Bootcamp at exactly the point where she had no idea where to focus. 

"I don't even know what to spend my time on right now. Do I just go whole hog on Instagram? Do I redo my website? Do I redesign my packaging?"

That's a woman drowning in options with no filter to sort them through. She signed up for the $20 course thinking, "who cares, what do I have to lose," and joined the Inner Circle the very next day.

The One Habit Behind Her 27% Increase

If you ask Jessica what actually moved the needle, she won't tell you it was a new product, a rebrand, or an ad campaign. She'll tell you it was tracking. Every single week, without missing one, for over a year.

She built a KPI tracker and backfilled all of 2025 even though she'd joined midway through. She looks at it every month. In January of 2025, her monthly reach was 7,000 people, almost entirely organic. By the time she joined the Inner Circle, it jumped to 27,000. Then 31,000. Then 71,000. Then 87,000. Then 152,000. Then 192,000.

She summed up why this mattered more than almost anything else she'd done:

"What gets measured gets managed."

You've probably heard that idea before. But here's what struck me about Jessica specifically: she'd always known that phrase intellectually. She used to jot her sales down in a bullet journal and set little goals, "let's go up 10% next month," and then never look at it again. Sound familiar? It's one of the most common patterns I see. We set a goal, and then we never check back in on it, and we wonder why nothing changes.

The difference now is she checks in every single week, compares it to the week before, and writes notes on what she did that might have caused the shift. That habit alone turned guessing into decision-making.

Cutting What Wasn't Working, Even When It Felt Scary

Tracking told Jessica where her attention needed to go, but it also gave her the confidence to cut things that weren't serving her.

For years, Stark Skincare carried other brands alongside her own, over 200 SKUs at one point. The idea was that carrying other brands would bring in new customers who were searching for those names. Instead, it wrecked her SEO. A fifteen-year-old website, and the thing she was ranking for was mint cocoa.

Once she saw the data clearly, she made the call to cut it all. She ran a blowout sale to clear the extra inventory, which gave her a nice bump during what's usually a slow month for her. And here's the part I love: the following year, when that same month approached and last year's numbers loomed, old Jessica would have panicked and launched a flash sale to try to beat it. New Jessica didn't. She looked at her trend, trusted it, and let it be.

She called those knee-jerk, panic-driven flash sales exactly what they are: cheap tricks to get sales. 

A hamster wheel of discounting the same loyal customers over and over, which is exactly the trap she was trying to escape when she first came to us worried about training her audience to wait for a deal.

What She Stopped Doing Mattered More Than What She Started

This is maybe my favorite thing Jessica said in our entire conversation, and I think about it constantly:

"It's not what I'm doing, it's what I'm not doing."

She wasn't missing some secret marketing tactic. She was missing consistency. She used to email her list once a month because she didn't want to "bother people." Now she emails twice a week and has stopped worrying about being annoying. She switched email providers three times in one year before finally committing to Klaviyo, resistant at first because of the cost, until she saw what segmentation based on actual customer behavior could do.

She also stopped avoiding the parts of the business that scared her, the spreadsheets, the ad numbers, the uncomfortable truths sitting in her data. 

"I stopped hiding from the numbers, from the systems, from what's working."

That's the whole thing, isn't it? So much of what holds us back isn't a lack of ability. It's avoidance. It's not wanting to look too closely because we're afraid of what we'll find.

Consistency Isn't Glamorous, But It's What Works

If Jessica could give one piece of advice to a store owner who feels stuck and bored in a business that has real potential, it's this: get consistent. Build structure around the creative parts of your business. Have things you do every week and every month, and keep coming back to them instead of chasing something new every time the old thing feels slow.

"A new spreadsheet isn't the secret sauce, it's the consistency, and it's not boring."

She's not wrong. There's something genuinely satisfying about watching your own data stack up week over week in a tracker you actually trust, instead of just glancing at whatever Shopify or Google Analytics shows you on the surface.

Where Jessica Is Headed Next

Jessica isn't chasing a moonshot for the rest of this year. She wants to stay on her current trajectory, finish the year up 20 to 30% over last year, and keep refining her customer acquisition process into something repeatable. She's even reconsidering whether she needs a second seasonal sale at all, because burning herself out chasing every industry norm isn't worth it anymore.

That's the kind of goal I want more of you to set. Steady, sustainable growth built on paying attention to what's actually happening in your business.

If Any Of This Sounds Familiar

If you read Jessica's story and felt a little seen – the boredom, the avoidance, the not knowing where to spend your time or energy, I want you to know that's incredibly common, and it's fixable. It wasn't a dramatic overhaul that turned her business around. It was tracking one thing consistently, having the courage to cut what wasn't working, and showing up for her list even when it felt uncomfortable.

That's exactly the kind of support our Inner Circle members get, dedicated coaches, a community that will genuinely cheer you on, and training built for wherever your business actually is right now, not generic advice for a stage you're not even at. If you're feeling stuck in a business you know has potential, come check us out. You don't have to figure this out alone.

RELATED LINKS

Check out Jessica’s website here: https://starkskincare.com/

Get on the Inner Circle Waitlist here: https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/inner-circle-membership

Sales Plateaued? Do this to grow profitably https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/sales-plateaued-do-this-to-grow-profitably-episode-284

How Pivoting and Consistency Doubled Sales for Wendy https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/how-pivoting-and-consistency-doubled-sales-for-wendy-episode-256

5 Things to do every month (Don't skip this). https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/5-things-to-do-every-month-dont-skip-this-episode-246