Five Things Inc. Asked Me About Running a Business — And the Answers I Wish I'd Had Sooner
When Inc. reached out to feature my perspective across several recent stories, I didn't expect the topics to connect as clearly as they did. But looking at them together — AI, growth, leadership, decision-making, and the future of clean beauty — they read like a real-time map of the questions I navigate every day as a founder and formulator.
Here's what came up, and what I've learned the hard way.
On AI: Use It Like an Intern, Not a Replacement Brain
AI is everywhere in beauty right now — from formulation databases to marketing copy generators — and most founders are quietly wondering the same thing: how much do I let it do?
My answer: a lot, with guardrails. At Maya Chia, AI is encouraged as a workhorse for research, first drafts, and deep dives into ingredient data. But it never gets final cut. Every output gets edited, fact-checked, and filtered through brand voice before it sees daylight. The moment you let AI think for you instead of with you, you've handed over the one thing that makes your brand distinct.
I shared more on this in Inc.'s feature, How 21 Leaders Let Employees Use AI in the Workplace.
On Growth vs. Profitability: They Should Be Splitting the Bill
There's a particular flavor of advice in the beauty industry that sounds like courage but smells like recklessness: invest in growth now, worry about profit later. I've watched brands burn through funding on influencer activations and retail launches that looked impressive on Instagram and disastrous on a P&L.
Maya Chia has been self-funded for over twelve years. That's not a badge of honor — it's a constraint that taught me to ask "Can we actually afford this?" before "Will this look good?" Growth and profitability aren't at odds. They're in a functional relationship, and both should be contributing equally.
The full conversation is in Inc.'s piece, Growth Investment or Maintaining Profitability?.
On Leadership: The Hardest Part Is Not Grabbing the Work Back
Every founder eventually gets promoted out of the job they're best at. One day you're formulating, sourcing, and quality-checking every detail. The next, you're managing people who do those things — and resisting the gravitational pull to just do it yourself because it would be faster.
The shift from founder to manager means becoming part coach, part hall monitor, part sounding board — and learning to tolerate watching someone else do it slower or differently. That tension is where real teams are built. Not in the moments when everything is seamless, but in the ones where you let go and trust the process.
I explored this more in 22 Ways to Go From Founder to Manager.
On Decision-Making: Research First, Then Trust Your Gut
Founders rarely have perfect information. You're choosing suppliers with incomplete data, launching products into uncertain markets, and making calls that affect real people and real money — often before the full picture is available.
My approach: do the research, benchmark the market (not to copy competitors, but to understand the range of normal), and then check in with your intuition — which is really just pattern recognition built from every win, flop, and 3 a.m. panic you've already survived. After that, call a trusted peer who's seen something similar and can tell you whether you're heading toward a breakthrough or a dumpster fire. Imperfect decisions can still be high-quality decisions if the process behind them is sound.
More on this in Inc.'s feature, 27 Ways to Make Decisions Without Complete Information.
On Clean Beauty: What's Dying Isn't the Movement — It's the Old Script
Clean beauty has an identity crisis, and it's overdue. The desire for safer, more intentional products isn't going anywhere. What is fading — and should fade faster — is the era of fear-based marketing, endless "free-from" lists, and formulas that can't demonstrate they do anything beyond looking elegant on a shelf.
Maya Chia has always embraced carefully vetted synthetics alongside high-performance botanicals. We let peer-reviewed research and ingredient safety data — not ideology — determine what earns a place in a formula. That's not a departure from clean beauty. It's where clean beauty was always supposed to land: better, safer, and backed by science.
I wrote about this evolution in my authored piece for Inc., How the 'Clean Beauty' Movement Is Changing.
The Through Line
What connects all five of these conversations is something I come back to constantly: building with intention. Whether it's deciding how AI fits into our workflow, choosing not to chase growth that the business can't sustain, learning to lead people instead of tasks, making decisions without a complete map, or pushing clean beauty past its own mythology — the thread is the same. Do the work. Ask the harder question. And let the results speak for themselves.