Yannize Joshua is the managing partner of The Teknique Agency, which manages celebrity makeup artists, hairstylists, fashion stylists and business leaders through their lifestyle and beauty divisions.
As an accomplished beauty marketing expert and business professional in glam, talent management, and production, her day-to-day consists of leveraging opportunities for minorities in the beauty and entertainment industry by advocating for equal positioning and fair wages.
Joshua gave three tips for to help professionals attain success.
What is the Teknique Agency?
The Teknique Agency is a management agency that specializes in beauty and lifestyle. Our beauty division represents 75 of some of the nation’s best makeup, hair, and fashion stylists who focus primarily on television and film. Still, we also do red carpets, we do advertising, and we do editorial. Our lifestyle division manages business leaders from anywhere from tech to fashion photography.
Teknique has nothing to do with my name and people always ask that. Tekoa [Hash] and I have been business partners for the past 10 to 11 years, but there was a woman named Monique who preceded me. Teknique is a combination of Tecoa and Monique. They were the original Teknique Agency. That’s where it comes from.
What sets Teknique apart as a beauty professional and talent management agency?
What sets us apart is how we operate in the television and film space. We’re not the only Black-owned, woman-owned agency in the land, but I don’t know of another one that operates in television and film the way that we do. Because of that, over the past 12 years, 40% of our roster has been able to join the hair and makeup union because of their work in television and film. I would say that our technique is to operate with integrity in a space that is not heavily occupied by people who look like Tekoa and I or have many Black and Brown artists in it, but not enough. We advocate for these artists with fair wages, fair pay, and fair treatment across the board.
What are the three top tips people need to apply to their businesses?
This is not specific to beauty, but this is specific to success. Number one, you need to chart your business out like it’s a [top 10] Fortune 500 company. My second tip is you need to have three things: an assistant, a lawyer, and an accountant. Three goes back to [what] my father would always say: “Plan your work and work your plan. If you don’t have a road map of what it is that you want to do and how you want to do it, then what are we doing here?” We’re just kind of wandering in the wilderness looking crazy alone, but when you have a plan, when it’s time to shift, when it’s time to pivot, when it’s time to stop something, when it’s time to start something new, you can see it, because you have a plan that you are adjusting instead of just winging it.
