Founders: Marcia Kilgore on still fighting imposter syndrome despite Beauty Pie success

Hannah Mullane (0:02)

Hello, this is Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Mullane. What started as a crash course in skincare to make her own skin better, led to a spa business worth millions of dollars. One successful business led to another and another, before this founder created Beauty Pie, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand taking away that retail markup. It made the beauty industry more accessible, and now that business is worth almost a billion dollars.

We're speaking to Marcia Kilgore, serial entrepreneur and founder of Beauty Pie. Hi, Marcia.

Marcia Kilgore (0:34)

Hello, how are you?

Hannah Mullane (0:35)

Yeah, great. Thanks for joining us.

Marcia Kilgore (0:37)

It's such a pleasure.

Hannah Mullane (0:38)

Let's start at the beginning then, because you grew up in Canada, didn't you? In what was quite a small town. What was that like?

Marcia Kilgore (0:46)

In fact, I was born in a little town called Outlook, Saskatchewan. We moved to Calgary, which was a small town then, not such a small town anymore when I was probably too young to know. Eighteen months, maybe two years old, and then lived in Calgary until I was an early teenager when my father passed away. What it was like? It was cold. We had two television channels. There was a tremendous amount of snow, and life was pretty typical, I suppose, for a young Canadian in the 70s.

Yeah.

Hannah Mullane (1:18)

And you were raised mostly by your mother and your two older sisters. Your mother being the main provider, what did you learn from her? What was that like?

Marcia Kilgore (1:26)

My mother was super stoic. She was a really hard worker, and she did not suffer any kind of pity lately. I sort of learned the value of hard work, of not having time to feel sorry for myself, of just getting on with it. If you were disciplined and constantly honed what you were doing, you could end up being successful at anything you put your mind to.

Hannah Mullane (1:48)

And that discipline led to you in your teenage years training to be a bodybuilder. I hate this question where they ask you for a fun fact when you meet new people, but that is such a good fun fact that you were training as a bodybuilder in your teenage years. How did that all come about?

Marcia Kilgore (2:04)

At that point, I lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, so we'd moved back to Saskatchewan, where my mother's family was based after my father passed away, and there really wasn't much to do. My older sister met a guy whose brother owned a gym and was Mr. Western Canada in bodybuilding. I didn't have that many extracurricular activities. To keep yourself busy in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I ended up going to the gym. It was a challenge, and it was something, I think, that gave me the feeling that I had a little bit of control over something. And I wanted something to master. School wasn't that difficult for me, and I just needed something to achieve. And it was put on a plate in front of me, so I took it.

Hannah Mullane (2:43)

Yeah, it seems like you are the kind of person that really needs a challenge and a goal and an achievement to reach. Did that then take you into business, do you think, those kind of skills?

Marcia Kilgore (2:53)

Yes. I mean, there's so many things. If you do the post-mortem on how I ended up the way I am, I think a lot of it comes down to my father passing away when I was young and having sort of a feeling of insecurity my whole life. And not knowing where your next $10 is coming from, you always want to make sure that you provide that stability for yourself, or you're looking for something to ease your own stress. I've never been particularly good at having a job where I worked for other people. Had a few when I was a teenager and always thought, well, I could improve this, I could improve that. Why are we doing it this way? Why are we doing that way? This seems ridiculous, but you can't necessarily speak up. So I was born to be self-employed, let's put it that way. It was just easier for me, I think, spiritually or mentally to work for myself, despite the stresses and the pressure that comes along with it. It's actually less pressure than being told what to do by somebody else. In fact, I remember sitting in a car, I was probably 45 at the time, and I was in a car with a very good friend, Anne, who was a lawyer doing business development for Warner Electra Atlantic in New York for a very long time, and we became good friends because she used to come to me for facials when I had my first facial studio.