For 35 years, Heidi-Marie Balcombe worked behind the scenes of the aesthetic industry — inside dermatology, facial plastic surgery and body plastic surgery. She created Imagine Your Best after realizing that everyone a woman consults about her face has something to sell her. Here, there is nothing to buy but clarity, no commissions, no affiliations, no arrangement of any kind. This leaves her free to say what is worth doing, what is not and what belongs first. Each consultation is private, unhurried and shaped entirely around one person’s goals, her life and the timing that matters to her. Clients leave with a plan they can carry to any provider and the certainty that the decision was their own.
What inspired you to start your business?
It takes a certain courage to sit across from a stranger and name the thing about yourself you would like to change. For 35 years, I watched women do exactly that. They could not see how beautiful they already were, naming the one thing they wanted to change. Then they received an answer shaped by what the office happened to sell. Not dishonesty. Just commission deciding what she was told. She had been brave enough to ask, and no one in the room was free to simply answer her. I built Imagine Your Best so that someone would be.
Describe your company in three words.
Independent Aesthetic Guidance
How do you differentiate your company from other similar offerings?
Most people offering advice about aesthetics are paid by someone: a practice, a product line, a device company, a brand hoping for a mention. That is simply how the industry is built. It means the recommendation you receive has already been shaped before you walk in. Imagine Your Best takes no commissions, no referral fees, no product margin, no affiliate revenue and no sponsored education from any source. Nothing arrives from anywhere except the client. It is not a promise of good intentions; it is a structure. And it is the reason I can tell you that a treatment is not worth your money, or that the right answer is to wait a year or that the provider you already have is the correct one. Thirty-five years inside dermatology and plastic surgery taught me what works. Independence is what allows me to say so.
What advice would you give to other female entrepreneurs?
Most of us start by doing everything ourselves. It feels responsible, careful with money, in control, no one else to rely on. What it actually does is fill your week with tasks you are the worst at and slowest at, while the thing you are genuinely exceptional at gets whatever hours are left. I spent thirty-five years learning how to guide someone through a decision about her aesthetics. That is what my clients are paying for. Every hour I spend wrestling with something I do not understand is an hour that expertise sits idle, and it is far more expensive than paying someone who could have done it in twenty minutes. Get clear on the handful of things only you can do. Find good people for everything else, and start before you feel ready to.
What excites you about your work?
Being able to talk to a client the way I would talk to my closest friend. Some women arrive with a list of things they want to fix. Others only know that something has shifted and they are not sure what to do about it. Either way, they are facing hundreds of options and everyone offering one has something to sell. So I tell her what I would tell someone I love: what is worth doing, what is not and what can wait. Watching the shift that follows, from overwhelmed to certain, is the part I have never tired of. After thirty-five years, I still find it remarkable how little it takes.
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