SALON
Interviewee: For yourself, but they [inaudible 00:00:01] so…
Interviewer: So, let’s just kind of start. Tell me a little bit about when you started a salon and why?
Interviewee: When I started a salon, fresh out of high school.
Interviewer: Really?
Interviewee: 22 years, and yeah. So, I went into a salon fresh out of high school in North Carolina and work there and always worked…I was always lucky enough to work in like nice salons and went straight down on the floor, should have assist. Now, I would tell anybody to assist, but I didn’t do it that way, and then move to Florida, worked in commission salons for about 10 years in Florida and then kind of had outgrown that. It was just nowhere else for me to go there, and I had started doing all of my competition work, and it was beginning to be a conflict of interest, like, all my days off they didn’t like me coming into the salon, or not that they didn’t like me, but I was getting more people wanting to do like the fun competition stuff, and there wasn’t chairs available for us to come here on the days off. And they were open seven days a week, and I just I needed my own space. And I would not like I said, I would not be where I am if it wasn’t for their because they really taught me business. They taught me about my numbers. I had never done numbers before. The first 15 years of my career, I never did my numbers.
Interviewer: Meaning, like…
Interviewee: How many your clients, like your average retail tickets, your average service ticket, and clients per day? I’d never done any of that stuff. I was just [inaudible 00:01:38].
Interviewer: And they talked you through it.
Interviewee: And they taught me all that, kicking and screaming honestly, but it was something I really needed.
Interviewer: Something everybody needs [crosstalk 00:01:47].
Interviewee: It’s a business. And so, that’s where I think we’re different in our salon because we are coaching. Now, legally we can’t make up our girls, if they don’t wanna go through our coaching program, they don’t have to because they’re independent contractors. We can’t because of them being independent contractors, we can’t, [inaudible 00:02:05].
Interviewer: Okay, this is interesting. I didn’t know that.
Interviewee: Yeah, legally.
Interviewer: Okay. So, let’s back up just a little bit to now when you go out on your own. So, you needed your own business?
Interviewee: Okay, I’m emotional, and I had a bad day one day. I’m not the kind of person that could have planned to leave because the owner of that salon had been one of my best friends, and so, I couldn’t. I’d been unhappy for a long time, and so, when I left, it was a bad day. I left crying and didn’t know what I was gonna do. And so, I went to another girlfriend’s slot and rented a booth, and thought that I would be fine doing that, and I was gonna really pursue education. I wasn’t gonna open my salon, but I tried to do rent a booth for about a week [inaudible 00:02:52]. They just didn’t have a team, and I really wanted a team. The girls I worked who I love dearly, they were all young mothers. They came to work, they did their hair, and they left. They didn’t, help each other. I mean, they didn’t even sweep up after each other, which is fine, but that’s just not the situation I wanted to be. And so, that’s when I started, my business partner and I started the idea of Studio Sage.
And so, that took us about six months to get the doors open, and we have been about six months after I walked out crying, and it’s been a little over two years now. And so, when we started Studio Sage, there were three of us. They were fully booked, and we all had an assistant. In the first year it was just the three of us with assistance, and we really, like, worked a lot. But now we’re up to 12 stylists in four microbladers or three microbladers. And we added the microblading after about, just about three months of being open. We had a girl, we had this space in the back where our photography studio is. We have a little area that we have two microblading chairs and a curtain around them. And when we do a big shoot, we move that out of the way. But like on a daily, I’ve taken pictures of our clients. There’s plenty of room in the studio, and we just had more stylists come to us and wanna work there.
Interviewer: So, in that six months from crying to opening, how did you sort of define, like, here’s what we want it to look like. How would you describe what you wanted it to look like?
Interviewee: I wanted an artist space. I wanted it very clean white walls, so when I record, I don’t have a bunch of crap in the background. So, like, my station is actually against a wall. My next design I will not have stations as close to the walls as I do right now just because I’m constantly white paint covering because, I mean, I’m a hairdresser, color flies. But I have a nice white wall behind me, so when I do my recording, it looks clean. And I wanted artsy, I don’t want, like, all the artwork on the wall is our work we’ve created in our photography studio, and that’s what I wanted. So, it’s very basic. It’s a lot of wood, it’s some metal. We kind of have a mixture of contemporary and like a vintage look, and we started with six stations. Within the first year we added two more stations and were up to eight now, eight hair styling stations, two microblading stations, and we’re 1500 square feet. So, we’re not real big.
Interviewer: Was it a salon before?
Interviewee: It was not a salon. Just we tried to find, and I understand moneywise, why you would try to find that, but I couldn’t, and I was a little bit weird about. I didn’t want to go somewhere [inaudible 00:05:50].
Interviewer: Like bad juju?
Interviewee: Yeah, I mean the name of our salon is Sage. So, I just felt like that was, and looking back now as much as we speared Luckily I had been at that other salon, and I saved a lot of money because we were able to open it with no debt.
Interviewer: Wow, that’s great.
Interviewee: Because of the…And that was something my friend had told me to point out because she said a lot of businesses don’t open that way.
Interviewer: No, no. And you’re not gonna pay yourself for years sometimes.
Interviewee: Yeah. So, we are just now at two years, like, how our structure is, is it 70, 30? Contractors get 70%. They buy their own hair color, and they do have to…They’re technically, if it was legal, the legal term that would be rent a booth because they do have to give us $100 a month because we have to take a rental fee. So, they are technically rent a booth, but our contract is more of a hybrid contract. And so, they give us the 30%, and then they buy their own hair color.
Interviewer: Hair color is a huge cost.
Interviewee: Sure is. And I wasted a lot of color until I bought my own color. And so, I think that that’s a cost that I’ll let them pay for. And then with $100 a month, we pay for all sodas, electrical, sodas, waters, coffee, towels. We provide towels, we provide back bar. We have a full retail area, and that was the big thing that we wanted, one point of sale because we didn’t want it to be like, okay, you pay your hairdresser for your hair, you buy your product here. So, that’s why we kind of came up with the hybrid one point of sale system, and then they get paid twice a month. So, it’s not like rent a booth where you get paid every day.
Interviewer: Right. So, how many of the…you say you have 12.
Interviewee: Mm-hmm. Four of them are support staff. So, they support, they split their time being support staff to all of us, and then they’re behind the chair at least two days a week bringing in their own clients, and they’re at a more discounted rate. And then we help them on their days that they’re behind the chair and I’ll come in, and I’ll help them, or I don’t double book the days that are…either myself or my business partner are not double booked. So, we can help them with their styler, or with their clientele’s [inaudible 00:08:22].
Interviewer: So, if you had to describe your salon culture, how would you describe it?
Interviewee: I mean, right now, very, very teamwork. I think a lot of people see the fun stuff we do, the editorial stuff, and see us through on all that, but we don’t get paid for that. I mean, some of it we do, you know, like some of the work that Dorina brings me, but a lot of that stuff is just fine. Our everyday clientele is you. It’s base colors, highlights. I don’t even do opening balayage. I do fallayage because I was trained 20 years ago, and you had to put everything in foils, you know. And so, in my mind, I have a hard time not putting things in foils. But all of my younger girl, newer stylist, they’re all balayage. We have TV in the back where we subscribed to some of the different educational things, and we provide that for them.
So, they, like, for example, Hairbrained or some of the other companies that do the educational platforms. We subscribed to that, and then we have an area in the back where we can get mannequins, and we can practice and have the TV. And so, we do a lot education that way too. You have to be self-motivated to work with us. And I’m probably gonna hate these words in a few years. I try not to micro-manage. So, a lot of, like, we book our own appointments, and…
Interviewer: Every stylist their own book, okay.
Interviewee: They keep their own books. We do use one point of sale, so we have a book, and we’d like for everybody to use that. We cannot make them use our point of sale. Well to run it through the process, so yes, they do have to, but that’s something that we can’t make them do, but they all wanna use it. We have millennium, so then we can follow our numbers and track all that stuff, and we do provide that. Partly the $100 helps pay for that too.
Interviewer: There was something that was mentioned when Cecily sent out the initial email about the mentoring and then the reverse mentoring you have. Talk about that.
Interviewee: Yeah. So, like, recently, one of my, like, junior stylist had gone to New York to do the DevaCurl, class and she came back and taught me how to do my hair because I had not been doing the soaking wet. I don’t know if you know anything about there?
Interviewer: I know. I toured one of their salons, and I’ve seen like the big claw diffuser, and I don’t remember that much.
Interviewee: Well you basically put your product in when it’s soaking wet, like when you get out of the shower, and I started diffusing my hair because I don’t have a super tight curl. I have more of a wedge, so I get more curled that way. But yeah, we all learn from each other. And then we have specialists like we have Sarah Jane who is [inaudible 00:11:22]. She only does wedding here. I mean, she just won the color contest. I helped her. She shows me braids, I tried it, we’re all equal. Some of us just know a little bit more than others. You know, I feel very honored that people wanna work with me now, and I can be a little pickier, but everybody, say everybody in my salon, is not only passionate about doing hair on clients, but they’re truly passionate about the art of hair. I’ve got six of my girls that are helping Christopher Benson right now with all of his collar prep.
Interviewer: Oh really?
Interviewee: So, yeah, I mean they’re all passionate.
Interviewer: Six came from the salon here?
Interviewee: Mm-hmm. Well, because [inaudible 00:12:08] Jane place [inaudible 00:12:08]. One of them was her makeup artist when helped her do it. So, yeah.
Interviewer: Oh, so they wanna be at the show?
Interviewee: Yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah. Yeah. So, we all love our clients, and love doing here, but we were really passionate about the artistic side of it too. And like I had a buddy that just left another salon who wanted to come and work for us. But after we sat down and talked, he has no desire to do any of the…Now, I think now [inaudible 00:12:38].
Interviewer: No, decides to do any of the…
Interviewee: The fun stuff like the photos and stuff like that. And I said, “Well, you’re going on your own now. You’re gonna have to do the Instagram, like, you’re gonna have to do photos, and like, because right now your books are full, but 10 years from now, I don’t think if you’re willing to do some of this stuff, they may not be for 10 years from now.”
Interviewer: Good. You know, can you….Will conclude, and then we’ll shoot a quick…You just gave me an idea for the video I wanna do with you because you’re a salon owner, but you also have really done so well with social media. So, as a salon owner, encouraging team to use social media…
Interviewee: How to fill their books, you know. Well, then I don’t think it helps fill your books, but I think a lot of people who won’t do it, the reason if you’re not gonna do it, that means you’re not gonna move forward. I don’t think social media is gonna keep your books for forever, but you’ve at least got to be open to do those things. So, I think that’s important, and even if all of our girls, I mean, a lot of our girls are under 30, 31 to 32 and younger, and so, that generation, all of them, social media is easy for them, but we do have some 40 plus just like myself that I just, that [inaudible 00:14:03]. I happen to get into it at the right time. I’ve never tried. This year I say I’m gonna try to build my following because I’ve never tried to. I’ve just been with the competition work and getting repost and stuff up, and I feel honored enough that I’ve just gotten the following, but I’m actually gonna try this.
Interviewer: That’s good. I mean, why not see what happens, right?
Interviewee: Yeah, and that’s with getting Cecily to help me. That’s part of me trying is I’ve never really tried.
Interviewer: Now, conclude with, like you said, what you wanna do next. You wanna open…
Interviewee: Ideally, I would love to open a bigger space with more options, like, for when my girls think that they’re ready to open their salons, but they not wanna go to a big salon. I would like to have space for them to have a little studio suites, and inevitably we would end up having full photo studio and a video room because video is everywhere right now. And so, I would love to have all of that.
Interviewer: And you mentioned earlier about how you feel like people gravitated toward the suites and then they’re realizing maybe they don’t necessarily wanna be stuck in there by themselves.
Interviewee: And I really, like, I don’t know if you know Eric Taylor, Salon Republic. I love listening to his podcast. I love his business model. I’m not trying to get a thousand hairdressers to be in mine, but I want something in Jacksonville that I can at least have 20 or 30 that are in suites that wanna come and do our photo shoots, but maybe don’t want, because I don’t want a bigger team than what I have right now. Fifteen is when we went into opening a salon, we said we didn’t want any more than 15 people because that’s, I feel like a good number for a salon team, and then I would love to have some honorary team members in the suites.
Interviewer: That’s great. I love it.