Welcome to season 2 episode 2 of Anthony Presotto’s Salon Lifestyle Podcast.

In this episode:

In this episode, I will be having a conversation with Dennis Gebhart who is from Guru Village.

Dennis answers questions submitted by various hairdressers on social media and helps demystify fact from fiction when it comes to choosing a colour range for your hair salon. Dennis discusses the pros and cons of things like PPT and PPD in hair colour. MEA and Ammonia, colour bases and bleaching products. Join us in finding what is real and what is marketing spin when it comes to hair colour companies.

Dennis Gebhart is one of the most sought-after hair colour, business development and sales trainers in the professional salon industry. He has dedicated over three decades of his industry career to helping salon professionals understand and master the art of hair colour. A protégée of hair colour pioneer and legend Sam Lapin, Dennis mastered his craft at an early age which led him to work with industry ICONS in seventeen countries along with leading hair colour manufacturers in positions of education and product development making him responsible, in part, for the development of some of the most famous hair colour brands in the salon industry.

His colour work has been published in many industry magazines including American Salon, Modern Salon, Estetica, Canadian Hairdresser and Behind the Chair.

Dennis and his wife own and operate a successful Salon and Spa, My Hair Color Guru, in southern California, which provides “real life” experiences making his training authentic.

In addition, Dennis is one of the founders and visionaries for his “non-branded” education company, Guru Villages offering pre-recorded webinars, live webinars, and live events for Salon Professionals, Trainers, Distributors, and students. You can find information at www.guruvillage.net

As a highly requested educator and trainer in the professional salon industry, his belief is “If you tell me and I will forget if you teach me I will remember and if you involve me and I will learn!”

I would love to hear your feedback and maybe any thoughts you have on this episode.

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• Guru Villages Website
• Dennis Gebhart on Periscope

Check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast on iTunes.

I Appreciate your iTunes reviews!

I am so incredibly thankful to those who have recently gone into my listing in iTunes to provide a five-star rating and a written review of Anthony Presotto’s Salon Lifestyle Podcast. Leaving a 5-star rating and/or a written review can be so valuable to helping others within our industry find my podcast. But best of all is to share the podcast link directly with your friends on Facebook or Twitter.

The post S2 E2 – Dennis Gebhart Guru Villages appeared first on Anthony Presotto.

Welcome to season 2 episode 1 of Anthony Presotto’s Salon Lifestyle Podcast.

In this episode:

This episode I am chatting with Ryan Baker from Timely.

Timely works “in the cloud”. This means there’s nothing you need to install or keep up to date. Use Timely from your web browser – Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari.

You don’t need to buy any new hardware – Timely will run beautifully on your Desktop PC or Mac, Laptop, Tablet or Smartphone. I use Timely from my Mac, iPhone and iPad mini this means I am never without my appointment book and have my office with me 24 hours a day but still able to have the freedom of not being stuck in the salon.

Your data is secured and encrypted with the same technology used by banks. Focus on running your business and be confident that your data is backed up at all times, Ryan discusses this in a lot more detail in the podcast.

To get your free 30 day trial of TIMELY click this link: https://anthonypresotto.com/timely

I would love to hear your feedback and maybe any thoughts you have on this episode.

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• TIMELY – Company Website

I produce a regular podcast. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast in iTunes.

I Appreciate your iTunes reviews!

I am so incredibly thankful to those who have recently gone into my listing in iTunes to provide a five-star rating and a written review of Anthony Presotto’s Salon Lifestyle Podcast. Leaving a 5 star rating and/or a written review can be so valuable to helping others within our industry find my podcast. But best of all is to share the podcast link directly with your friends on Facebook or Twitter.

The post S2 E1 – Ryan Baker and Timely appeared first on Anthony Presotto.

Welcome to episode 6 of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast.

In this episode:

This episode I am chatting with my good friend Chris Parker. We talk about opening salons. Chris’ thoughts on pricing your salon services, which is a little different from the norm. Chris has over 18 years experience in hairdressing and has not only worked for some of London’s Top Named salons, but has travelled internationally due to demand for his role as one of the industry’s top leading hair educators. Once appointed “Stylist to the Stars” for world cruises onboard the famous 5* luxury liner QE2, and “Stylist to the Stars” on land too, working to style the rich and famous, his career has been fulfilling; one client even flew from Florida to New York just to get one of his haircuts! Chris now concentrates solely on developing training and education for the Parker & Dicce team, as well as travelling to other salons in the UK teaching hair and business management. When not hairdressing he can often be seen with his unusual breed of dog (that looks very much like a bear) in the parks of Woolton.

I would love to hear your feedback and maybe any thoughts you have on this episode and what sort of budget did you have when opening your salon?

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• PARKER AND DICCE – Chris salon website.

I produce a regular podcast. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast in iTunes.

I Appreciate your iTunes reviews!

I am so incredibly thankful to those who have recently gone into my listing in iTunes to provide a five-star rating and a written review of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast. Leaving a 5 star rating and/or a written review can be so valuable to helping others within our industry find my podcast.

The post S1 E6 Creating a Successful Salon Business appeared first on Anthony Presotto.

 

Welcome to episode 5 of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast.

In this episode:

This episode I am chatting with my good friend Russell Mayes. We talk about The Wizard Council, Education and Mentoring for stylists. Russell also shares some great stories from his younger days. I list some of my favorite education online at the moment, which there are links to below. Check out the link for Russells MODERN/CLASSIC haircutting education DVD’s. I love them and still refer to them after 8 plus years. Highly recommended to hairstylists of all levels.

I would love to hear your feedback and maybe any thoughts you have on training, and who is your current favorite educator?

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• HAIRMAVEN DVD’S – Russells Modern Classic Cutting DVDs.
• HAIRBRAINED.ME.– Awesome website that both Russell and I are members.
• HAIRMAVEN.COM – Russell’s own forum.
• FREESALONEDUCATION.COM– Matt Beck’s site and podcast.
• JOSHXO – Josh Flowers website.
• THE FACTORY TV – DJ Muldoons website.

Transcript:

Today I have the opportunity to catch up with a dear friend of mine, Russell Mayes, some of you may know Russell from his online forum, hairmaeven.com, or his latest venture, The Union, which is a group of awesome guys who are providing independent education to stylists in the United States, and that’s what Russell and I are talking about in this podcast, the Union Wizard Council, free education, paid education, and his current project, mentoring 10 stylists starting out in their career.

Okay, so Russell tell us a bit about the Wizard Council.

Russell:  The Wizard Council was originally a group of guys you know, John, Allen, Authen and Mark, Ruth and myself  that got together and we started thinking about how it’s inspiring for us, the three of us to get together and just kind of talk hair, and sometimes there’d be somebody there that needs a haircut and we’re just kind of jamming just in hair, and we thought that that’s what really makes the industry great and it’s that connection that you have with other like-minded hairdressers, and so we originally started that well maybe we could do like a…there used to be a…something here in the United States called a National Cosmetology Association, NCA, and I think they’re still around but not in the capacity that they are today…they used to be…they had little individual, little groups in every city across the country and you would have a monthly meeting and sometimes they would do presentations and they’d get together with different people and it was just a monthly membership you know, you had your own little council in every city across the country and then they’d have a national meeting where everybody would come together.  It was a really great grassroots kind of thing that built a lot of camaraderie in the industry, and I thought that that would be a really great thing if we got together a group of like-minded people, so I thought if we could do something kind of like that where we would have just like some cool people get together and we would just all share.  And it grew to where we ended up trying to make a natural coherent presentation of independent education that wasn’t really product-based or anything, and it’s just kind of grown.  This was our third event that John called “The Wizard Council” because he had been reading a lot of Lord of the Rings, he has a son that he has been reading Lord of the Rings to so he just said “Aw, that’s awesome!” so…I think we’re actually going to change the union to Wizard Council because it feels so on-point for what we are trying to do.  And so this one was…Michael Levine was coming down from Canada to just a vacation, he said “Hey, we should get together and do something”, and he thought he would come by to my salon and just do something, he had no idea I was going to throw an event around him coming down and so we kind of surprised him with this whole event.

We had 80 people in the salon that would really only hold about 50 in it, it was just fricking packed with people, and I was shocked at how many people we had, and it was a really great turnout, and I think that it shows that there is a lot of, if not necessarily hunger for education, but hunger for that connection and that camaraderie and the uplifting of the reputation of the industry that is really kind of lacking today because it’s become such a sailor’s shtick everywhere you go, and education is nothing but care and stick from a product company that they’re offering and everything has been deluded and convoluted, and so we’re just trying to present quality here from our perspective.  And so this one was about… instead of the hair colour complementing the hair cut, we had this really great colourist called Allison Gaza, she’s working with Davines and so we decided that we would have some models and she could do anything she wanted, we just wanted bright intense colours, some muted, some not muted, some subtle, some really extreme, I think you saw the pictures from them.  And we just wanted bright colours and we wanted the haircut to complement the hair colour as opposed to the hair cut being the biggest prong in the fork, we wanted the hair colour to take kind of front row with this.  And the greatest part of the whole presentation is when we brought all the colour models out, there was an audible gasp “Huh!” in the audience, and that was so great for her to see that kind of reaction to the colour that she did, and some of the colour was absolutely gorgeous and beautiful and it was all done in a classy way, and none of it was just for shock value, it was all pretty colour, even though it was bright, it was all still pretty.  So I liked that…

Anthony: …I saw the…looking at the photos, they were really…for bright colours they weren’t just in your face, they were nice, which is something you don’t see.

Russell:  They weren’t the punk rock, it was glamour.  Glamour dominated…a really bright primary coloured style, which I think is very difficult to do, it’s easy to just colour somebody’s hair pink and undercut it and disconnect it and “Oh, I got cool hair!”, but I’m so bored with that, I’m so bored with education and I use air quotes with this “education being all about let me stand up and show you what an awesome hair cutter I am by undercutting and disconnecting it and trying to out-Sassoon Sassoon”.  If I want to copy what Sassoon has done…don’t get me wrong,  I think Mark Hayes is a genius and brilliant and one of  my absolute favourite hairdressers of all time, and he did a magnificent work, but if I just copy that…you know I just kind of like “Why copy it?  Do something a little different, do something in your own style”.  And I’ve seen photographs you know on Hair Break that I look at and I think, “That is a direct copy of what Sassoon collection did a couple years ago”, and it’s just kind of … it’s kind of lame in my humble opinion, not that the hair I do is all that edgy and great, I tend to do a real…I try to do pretty hair, I’m over disconnected, undercut, asymmetrical shit, I’m over it. Let’s do something that’s even on both sides, let’s do something that’s connected and blended through or…it’s just so easy to make a statement and have some drama by undercutting and disconnecting an asymmetrical…and making something asymmetrical.  It’s difficult to have that same drama in something that is connected and even and balanced and all that stuff.  And so that’s always the mindset that I take when I’m trying to do hair for presentation, I want to do something that’s pretty and I want to do something that has a little bit of drama to it in some way to capture someone’s attention.  And sometimes I hit it and sometimes I don’t but…what was the question?  I got lost there.

Anthony: So did I, but yeah it’s really true and..

Russell:  I feel like Michael in his first interview where he’s just starting “What was the question again?”

Anthony:  I think pretty hair and elegant hair is very much in focus of…I know with the clients I do…I’m doing hardly any disconnected, undercut, and I’m even at the point of starting to turn those sort of people away, it’s just not the space I’m in, it’s just not what I want to do, I want to do pretty hair, I want to do something that looks beautiful and maybe I’m just getting too old to be edgy…

Russell:  It’s fun to do…no, no, no, not at all.  I mean it’s still fun to do but if I’m going to present something to another hairdresser and to my group of peers, I can’t do just something that I’ve always done or have just do the same stuff or copy someone else’s stuff without changing it some way, shape or form or do it…the edginess of an undercut, disconnected, asymmetrical thing you know with bold things is no longer edgy, it’s…to me it ‘s no longer interesting you know like when I see stuff, I’d rather see that beautiful blow out kind of Veronica Lake kind of finger wave thing, that is so difficult to do, I mean I wish I could do that Veronica Lake kind of sexy wave thing, that is magnificent, that captures my eye even though it’s not new or edgy or that’s like “Wow!” that captures my eye.  If I see another volka, I’m like “Naa, whatever…next…”, it doesn’t capture my eyes.  So sometimes I tend to not put things out because it’s just kind of like the same thing I’ve done before, it’s my comfort zone.  The only time it’s really worth putting something out to my peers is when it’s out of my comfort zone and then let’s see what the results are. And it’s a scary thing to put yourself out there and…cause you’re always think “I want to put this out, but it’s not perfect”, and you think everyone’s going to shit all over it and poo poo you but you know, you do what you can, and that’s the scary thing about putting your own work out and your own content out, it’s never good enough.

Josh posted something from Ira Glass, it was about your level of taste and your level of skill not living up to that taste level, and that’s the path that every artist is on, you have this idea and this vision of what you want but your skill level can’t get you there and so you’re always disappointed with your work and I don’t know that that ever really goes away, I mean I’ve done hair for quite a long time, I hesitate to say it cause then you’ll judge me based on how old I am, but I’ve done hair you know 28 years, 29 years, and there has been very few haircuts I ever look at and say “That’s good”, I always look at it, you know, the critical eye and think “Oh I could do it better here, I could do better there…yeah I like that part there…”, there’s always something that’s a little bit off.  And one of the things that I’m trying to do now that I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks is my last client of the day I will look at it and say “Okay I’m going to do this hair for myself, it’s not for the client, it’s not for the salon, it’s the last one, I can run behind if I want to, but this is one that I’m going to do for myself”.  And I’ll take my time and I’ll really try to do something that makes me pleased, that makes me proud, whether it’s blowing it up better than I usually do, being a little more meticulous about it ….using a different tool, fine-tuning the cut a little bit more and really paying less attention to the client and more attention to me as an artist, that’s something that I’ve been trying to do in the salon lately.

But you know like I…like you and I, we’re both salon-based hairdressers so…it’s…maybe that changes the lens that we focus the hair business on because we work in the salon and we deal with the client all the time whereas I mean I know some guys who’re just platform artists, they just go around and teach, and it’s real easy to just get off into that world of trying to impress hairdressers as opposed to trying to impress a client, they’re really different mindsets.

Anthony:  Most definitely.  That sort of leads into my next topic…is education, the quality of free education out there.  I remember I was talking probably a couple years ago and I really love the comment you had that everybody’s got a camera now so everybody’s become an educator, and it seems to be true and even more so than…I guess I’m seeing more education appearing that’s not so bad, I think everyone has got a camera, there’s a lot of people putting out stuff that is not necessarily good, it’s free, a lot of it tends to be, from my point of view, “Let’s see how I can shred this hair up, but I have a really cool technique to do it”.  It’s not necessarily producing good hair.

Russell:  I think that a lot of hair dressers, and this is myself included, I’m not distancing myself cause I see it in myself too, I think that everybody in the hair business is a little insecure, especially in the United States, cause the United States, being a hairdresser is not a real glamorous job…I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, I know in London it’s kind of…it’s a well-respected craft.  You know in America it’s kind of like a step above being a waitress in a coffee shop, not that there’s anything wrong with being a server, I’m just saying it’s not something that people really look at or glamorize unless you’re one of the few celebrity hairdressers that does Britney Spears hair or something.  But I think a lot of hairdressers they strive for that credibility and that being okay, being okay with my career and okay with myself and having some respect, so one way to gain respect in the business that “I’m an educator, I teach other hairdressers how to do hair”, so it’s kind of a title that I’ll slap on my chest and say “Oh that makes me better than the average hairdresser so you can trust me”, sort of like segmenting yourself from others so that you kind of have a little credibility, cause credibility is tough to gain in the business because once you do a haircut, the haircut’s gone and if she’s not making it look good then you don’t have a whole lot of credibility.

So I think that that a lot of young guys coming up into it are striving to kind of gain that credibility and so they’ll start sharing stuff and if I share stuff on the Internet, I think it’s really great, but sometimes if I share it from a place inside of me that is lacking and that I’m trying to fill that lack of with…that insecurity in myself, I’m trying to fill that with other people saying that it’s good or okay…does that make sense?  I’m trying to fill it from a wrong position itself, instead of trying to give something, I’m trying to take something.  So I’m sharing it not with the intent of sharing it, I’m sharing it with the intent of taking something from the audience to fill the hole in my heart and I think that that’s where a lot of bad…bad hair comes out on some videos and some pictures and things like that and it’s not about the craft or doing the hair or sharing something, it’s me filling the hole in my heart, so if they can come from a position of “Oh let me share this thing that I think, that I learned”, then I think it can be really great.  And it can be something very very simple, it doesn’t have to be “Oh I’m going to be the hair professor and drop some knowledge on you and blow your mind”, it can be as simple as “Okay, this is how you’re going to hold some scissors”.

I saw Christian Awsom for instance did a little how-to-hold-your-scissor tutorial that I thought was really great, and I think that is probably the best video that he did because it provided clear, concise information that can be really useful.  I mean I know the information, I know how to my scissors correct, but I can still appreciate and respect it, I mean he put it out for the right reasons.  Does that make sense?

Anthony:  Most definitely, and I think yeah, that there is a lot of that happening now, which is really great, yeah and I think it does…

Russell:  Who is good that you like?

Anthony:  Who is good?

Russell:  Yeah, what education have you seen that you’ve like?

Anthony:  That I’ve really liked?  I’m always impressed by everything you do.

Russell:  Aw!  I wasn’t fishing for compliments… Yeah, I am…

Russell:  I’ll pay you five bucks for that one.

Anthony:  I forget how long ago we first met…Hair Maeven, I watch your DVDs and my learning curve was just so steep from then on.  Like you said, I look back over the first 15 years of my career and think “Shit! I was really bad.”  You all deserve a refund, but yeah, so like…I like your stuff, it’s great.  DJ Muldoon I really like a lot of the work he puts out, I…

Russell:    DJ a really clean haircut.

Anthony:  He’s just absolutely brilliant and it’s…it’s unfortunately the times he has a lot of  his education on it’s…doesn’t work well here in Australia, but it’s great stuff.  Joshua Flowers, surprising me, he’s coming up with some great stuff, actually…he’s…something he said on his last video was really great was “We all learn and get to a point where we learn to cut hair and from there on its more about the tricks and tips we can learn to make our job easier”, and I thought “You know that is so true”.

Who else is producing great stuff?    Guys over at Free Salon Education are doing some stuff that’s not bad.

Russell:  Yeah…you know, yeah…Matt… oh my goodness…

Anthony:  I can’t remember his name either… for everybody listening, I will put a link…I’ll put a link in the show to all these guys we’re talking about so you can go and follow up with them and find out more.

Russell:  I’ve never met Matt but just from his videos he seems like a really genuine cool dude, I like him no matter what, even though I’ve never met him.

Anthony:  Yeah, me either, I haven’t even had a chance to speak to him but I love the videos they do, they do some good stuff and…yeah and I think it comes from like we were saying, a place that’s…that is about education and sharing, not necessarily about filling that void or seeking validation of the work they do, which is really really good.

Russell:  It’s a scary thing that when you go out and you start to share your philosophies and the way you think about things because somebody will…and eventually ask you a question and you think “I never thought about that”, and then when you start thinking about it you realize they pointed out a hole in your technique, and so it’s that realization of okay, let me kind of protect myself and defend myself from…and it makes it difficult to share but it does make you a lot better when you go and you share your stuff and you share your opinion and as long as you just present it and say “Hey this is just the way I do it, take the good, discard the bad” you know versely “Take what’s good, use it, what you don’t like, chuck it…”

Anthony:  Exactly, and I want to say I’m reading a few different …books here and there’s a lot of philosophy there that’s taken out of martial arts that’s very life-important.

Russell:  Without a doubt, without a doubt you know, especially…and it could really apply to pretty much anything you know because it’s taught a lot about self-reflection and I think anybody that spends a lot of time in self-reflection it makes them a better person, and that’s part of the path of being a great hairdresser, and when you first start doing hair you’re learning technique, “Let me learn how to do what the client asks for…let me learn how to cut hair so that I have a clue…”, and then as you get good at doing hair and you can please the client, you start getting good at the personal-relationship side of it, “Okay, let me build a personal relationship with the client in the chair and deal with that part of the whole salon interaction”, and then you start, after you get good at that and being able to have a conversation and make them feel good and warm and fuzzy inside, you start thinking about “Okay, what am I doing to hold myself back”, you start reflecting on yourself and how you are preventing yourself from really growing.  That’s the hardest stage is admitting to yourself “Where’d I screw up?” and admitting to yourself “Yeah, I shouldn’t have said that to that person, I’m an asshole”, and it’s hard to admit that but that’s part of the obstacles that we have to hurdle over down the road of the hair-dresser life, it’s tough.

Anthony:  Most definitely, and  it’s a constant struggle because I find myself now you know, I’ve put a lot of effort into training, a lot of effort into my personal skills and I still suck up, it just happens.  You have a bad day, something pisses you off in your personal life…and it’s hard to keep it separate and you do take it into the salon, and you think “Yeah I really shouldn’t have done that or said that”, and those are the days you probably should shut the door and go home.

Russell:  And it’s tough because then if you go home, “Are you sick?”  “No, not really, I’m just having a bad day”  “Oh well suck it up chumly”, you know.

Anthony:  That’s exactly right.

Russell:  Not a whole lot of sympathy from the client you know.

Anthony:  You know what we kind of…exactly and yeah, when you go into the salon pissed off people don’t want you cutting their hair that day, not at all.

Russell:  Well, they don’t want you not cutting it because they really don’t know when they’re going to get in there.  I warn them, I tell them…I tell them if I’m having a bad hair day where I’m not cutting good hair, I’ll tell them, “I don’t know if you want me cutting your hair today, I’m a little bit off today”.  And some are going to be like “Okay I’ll just wait til you’re on…”  I stopped doing that because then I had clients call up “Is he on today?”  “Oh yeah, he’s on”, so…

Anthony:  So you put a call out looking for students to mentor, how’d that ….how’d that go?

Russell:  I…you know I’m working on a new website you know Hair Mentor, because the mentoring aspect here in the United States is really lacklustre and it’s…there’s a huge vacuum of people to share and pass knowledge there and not everybody has an opportunity to go to a salon and apprentice someone’s that’s really skilled or knowledgeable, or even cares.  There’s a lot of you know…burnt our folks out there that don’t take time for themselves like what we were just talking about, and it’s hard to give of yourself if you don’t have a lot in your own heart to give.

So I’m trying to do this Hair Mentor website but I’m thinking “Okay, what’s the best way for me to share the…have you learned of the 80/20 Rule where 80% of your work comes from 20% of your effort, so I’m thinking “What is the 20% that I can give somebody that will give them 80% of their success? What are the key things that I can really focus on to teach somebody and mentor somebody so that they can make a living?”  And there’s so many people that go to beauty school, they get out, they go try to find a job, their either get a job assisting shampooing hair and making minimum wage and can’t make a living, or they go work in a…a service salon and they don’t make enough money to really grow, and no one’s really showing them what it takes to be successful.  And so, so many people just die on the vine as soon as they graduate beauty school the first couple years, I mean it’s a massacre…a massacre, I mean there’s no telling what the percentage is, some people say it’s high as 90%…98%, I wouldn’t doubt if it was 98% in the first five years that are no longer in business and it’s not because there’s a lack of wealth with the craft, there’s a lack of knowledge, a lack of anyone showing them.  So I put out a little post on Facebook that said “I’m looking for 10 people that’s willing to go through a mentoring programme with me and they got to be local”, and so I got…I got 12 or 13 people signed up, I only took 10, and I asked them ‘Why do you want to do hair?”  I don’t expect anything profound, but what I wanted to hear from their why was something about servicing somebody else, something about giving to somebody else as opposed to it being “Oh I really love doing hair, I love making people look good…I love this…I love that”, I wanted it to be more of “I want someone to feel good about the way they look”, I wanted it to be from a perspective of making the client feel good, giving the client a good service, giving the client a self-esteem boost or making them happy.  And so anybody that answered that in that vein, which was most of them, came in and I started out last Monday was my first week and I did it with the basic haircut, B-layer…you hold everything down, you get cut it one layer, hold everything up in the middle in the Mohawk section, you cut it all in the centre, I covered about an hour of some hair-cutting theory, how to control weight and movement and just how to cut a straight line sort of thing, and we did the haircut and we all…I did a demonstration and they did it.

I learned a lot from that first class of teaching these 10 people what is so second nature for me… section, comb, clean, pat, I mean I just do it automatically and naturally get it clean from roots to the ends.  It’s so hard for someone new to come in and create the physical dexterity that’s required to be able to cut a clean straight line and keep their mind where they’re supposed to be and know all these things, and they’re not even carrying a conversation on.  So it’s going to take a little bit of time, so I think that they all did fairly well, they…I didn’t have anybody that didn’t want to be there so that’s certainly helps.

Anthony:  Yeah.

Russell:  I think they all did well but some of them could not follow, I mean it’s…cut it down, I did everything, I showed them what to do and then next thing you know they’re going from horizontal sections to vertical sections and their sections are not parallel and they’re going all over the place, so I think…I’m beginning to develop the philosophy that educating young people today, you cannot give them War and Peace or cutting the Sassoon way, you can’t give them a bible of hair, you know, and expect them to read it, you have to feed it to them in Tweets, they can only understand or comprehend a hundred and 60 characters at a time.  So give it to them one Tweet at a time…one Tweet at a time…one Tweet at a time, then they’ll be able to retain it because everything is so sensory overloaded today that it’s hard for people to focus. So I think that this next class what I’m going to do is I’m going to have everybody get their doll head and we’re all going to section it the same way all at the same time, and I’m going to take a section and then they’re going to take the same section…I’m going to take the next section, they going to take the next section, I’m going to comb the next section and cut it…so we’re going to do basically the Tweet haircut, one Tweet at a time, one cut one section at a time, and hopefully that can…that can start to get some repetitive…and I think we’re going to…twice.  So repetitive, you know, repetition is the mother of skill so…it’s really opening my eyes the difficulty that it is to train someone that’s young in the business and how there has to be a lot of self-motivation to strive to be excellent that I cannot teach them because…I was talking to an educator about a child’s brain and as they develop and how young adolescents develop, and there’s a certain…growth that the brain goes through where they can’t comprehend algebra, they can understand two plus two equals four, but they cannot comprehend two plus B equals four, what is B, they can’t understand that, and then as the brain develops they do it enough, then all of a sudden a light bulb goes off and clicks “Ah, I got it!”, they can understand these abstract terms.  Hair cutting is a lot like that, you start and you struggle, and you struggle and you don’t get it and you don’t get it, and you don’t get it and then all of a sudden on day, pop! It clicks and it’s like “I got it!”  And it’s tough because you’re taking a three-dimensional shape that you’re cutting on somebody’s head, and you’re compressing it, it’s a two dimensions of your finger.  And then after you cut it into your two dimensions of your finger you’re releasing it and the three-dimensional shape is not collapsing.  So to make that leap in your mind of three-dimensional shape compressed released and collapsing, that’s a lot to take in and it takes a while for people to learn that.

Anthony:  It certainly does…I think…

Russell:  I know.

Anthony:  Here in Australia…

Russell:  Does that make any sense at all?

Anthony:  It does.  Here in Australia we have…I think it’s now a three-year apprenticeship, so the numbers that go to like a beauty school are very minimal compared to the people that are doing it in salon apprenticeship with going off to beauty school once a week or a month or whatever, and it is, you know you’re dealing with young people, their attention span is very limited, I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist and “I grasped it straight away, why can’t you?”  And that was…that’s been one of my biggest things with educating people…apprentices in the salon I guess, people in general it’s not so bad because you see them for that period of time and they’re gone, and apprentices are there five, six days a week, and you know if they frustrate you, they frustrate you for days on end.  And it’s true you know…it’s yeah, I guess it’s teaching them in Tweet sections, yeah, that’s really….

Russell:  It’s tough…

Anthony:  What’s the…what’s the level of experience of the people you’re mentoring at the moment?  Is it less than five years or…

Russell:  Oh yes, yes, all under five years, I’d say probably most of them are around two years, year and a half, two years, they’re all out of school, they’re all…most of them are apprenticing in a salon, there might be a few that are doing hair in a salon but it’s on a very limited basis.  A lot of apprentices are still going through their apprenticeship program and still trying to get their feet wet you know, still trying to search and find that voice that they have to share you know and it’s hard to share that voice if you don’t know how to sing or talk, so it’s like we’re trying to learn how to talk in the hair business so to speak…losing my hair.

Anthony:  And just thinking back to…educators hairdressers alike, I’ve been watching a little bit of stuff from Alan Belfield Bush lately and one thing that I really admire that he has tried to do is create a universal language for hairdressers, which is something I’ve found very very difficult now that I’m attending educating through Politure…I’ve become a Politure salon looking at different education online and videos now… everything has a different way of describing it and it’s usually the same thing, and that must just drive people new to the industry…and I know it drives me crazy and I’ve been in it for a long time, so I don’t know how it affects people that are just trying to get their head around something when is all new to them.

Russell:  And there’s times when people use terminology that’s completely the opposite of terminology that somebody else uses, and so it’s very very confusing and I think sometimes it’s confusing for no reason.  When I’m teaching a class I use very little terminology at all…I don’t ever really talk about over direction unless I’m trying to explain something to someone that thinks in over direction kind of terms, I pull it straight up to the ceiling, straight down to the floor, forward, left, right, tee to my parting, it’s always like I try to cut out as much terminology as possible.  Terminology can be a barrier to communication cause if we don’t communicate using the same terminology, then nobody understands, so I always try to cut as much of that out as possible.  It doesn’t really matter in the end, it doesn’t matter you know if it’s triangular graduation, square graduation…it doesn’t matter, especially someone that’s new to the business doesn’t need to get into the esoterics of terminology, they’re just trying to do a fricking haircut to make a client happy.

Anthony:  That’s exactly right, yeah.

Russell: So I cut all of that…as much of it out as possible.

Anthony:  That’s great, and that’s what I find I tend to do, I find it easier just to, like you said I mean to pulling it up, pulling it out, pulling it towards this, doing that, sectioning it this way, sectioning it that way and it saves me a hell of a lot of confusion let alone trying to teach somebody that hasn’t been doing it for 20 odd years.

Russell:  Yeah…it is simpler, it’s more straightforward…it’s simpler, it’s more straightforward,  it’s more concise and somebody can get his…can just grasp it.  If I’m teaching you engineering and I’m using engineering terms or… see even when you go to the doctor, the doctor says “Oh you’ve got manginogritis”, like “What the hell is that?!!  I don’t know.”  You say “I don’t even… something…whatever”,   “You got a cold.”   “Okay, I got it”, but it’s…they can use terminology and just you become swimming because you don’t understand what the terminology is, you have to say “Oh speak English.”

When Michael came down for…when Michael came down for Wizard Council, I mean it was really great having him here and he is such a cool dude, you know he came down and just rolled with the punches and just…you know whenever you’re doing one of those shows it never goes off like you hope it does, and it’s like we were expecting maybe 40 people, 45…50 was…we were doing good at 50 and when we started there was a line of 30 people lined up out front buying tickets to get in, which we did not expect at all and so the place was packed and I mean we were running behind on getting people in and getting things over and stuff like this, and oh I mean it was…you know you always know how things are supposed to go so when it’s over  you think “Oh, what a disaster”, but hopefully that the people that were there enjoyed it and they had some great hair, so…

Anthony:  Yeah, you had a massive turnout.

Russell: …and he’s such a great guy.

Anthony: Michael’s just awesome you know, I put him on the spot for my first podcast and he was just great and obliging to do that for me and he just…he’s got so much…and we just finished interviewing Van Counsel last week and what an amazing guy….

Russell:  Yeah, Ben’s a cool guy…Van’s a cool guy, when I was  young growing up you know Van Counsel was just popping on the scene with the Aveda and he had a couple of hot salons in Atlanta, and so being from Kentucky, I get out of school and I’m doing like these photo shoots and stuff like and I think ‘I want to go work somewhere where it’s really hip and cool”, so I got in the car, I drove fricking seven hours to Atlanta and I went in and go into a salon and said “Oh yeah, I’d like to apply for a job, I drove here from Kentucky…” and all this stuff and I had a bunch of slides of hair cuts that I had done, and I filled out the application and I had the slides and I had a little resume which, you know…nothing on it cause you know sure I’m just out of school, I’d been a hairdresser for a couple of years and so I put it all say “Great!”  Never fricking heard back from you, that hurt my feelings so bad, I’m like “At least say hey dude I appreciate you coming in but you know, just like nothing”.  So I always, whenever someone comes in, I always try to at least say “You know I don’t have any spots right now, I really appreciate your coming in and all that”.  But I ended up meeting him face to face for the first time when I was doing the interview with Christopher Brooker and he was a cool dude, I didn’t tell him that I had gone to Atlanta and applied in his salon and got snubbed and all that, but he was a cool guy, I liked him, nice guy.

Anthony:  And that was a great interview with Christopher Brooker too…what an amazing guy!  He was just really great to watch.

Russell:  Yeah, yeah, and it…when I was going to edit that I figured  oh I’ll edit this down to the five minutes, just the interview part where…cause I went to the hotel room and I had like 30 minutes, like beginning to end, so I tried to set things up as quick as possible, I didn’t have any lights, I just turned every light on in the hotel room and set up a camera and turned the mike on him and I was just to…you know like nervous about doing the whole thing, let’s make sure to get him, I didn’t have anything for me or the two shot or the microphone or anything like that.  It was…technically it was horrible, horrible, but he was so great and the information he provided was so on-point and honest and sincere, I thought I hope that when I mature in my career that I can be as humble and as cool and as honest and have as much dignity as he has for as much as he’s been through and all his career and life, he’s so modest and humble and cool and nice and I really like that dude, I like him a lot.  So I figured  let me just go ahead and put the whole video up, I’m not going to bother to edit it because anybody that’s going to want to watch the video is going to want to see the whole thing, so let me…so I would want to see the whole thing, yeah, so I just put the whole thing up.

Anthony:  Yeah, that was definitely…

Russell:…the show part was like six hours long, it was like half and a half hours long.

Anthony:  I know, it was incredible, yeah, that looked really good.

Russell:  I had to edit it though, that man can really talk.

Anthony: I’ve got the…I’ve got that from IS…

Russell:  And Horst was there in attendance and it was great to see him…yeah and I like Horst a lot.

Anthony:  There was definitely some great characters in this industry and it’s…you know the last 12 months has been an absolute blast for me getting to talk to so many of them, it’s been amazing, my only…my only regret is I’m stuck on the other side of the world and I’m not going to get a chance to meet a lot of them for a long time but we’re planning on going to the ISSE show next year.

Russell:  Really! Really!

Anthony:  Yeah, apparently they tell me SO Magazine is going to the Ice show so I…I don’t know if I’m allowed say it, whether it’s a secret or not, but we’re also going to the Sassoon Mash-Up after it when it’s on, something like…so yeah Tony Beckerman invited us, so another great man, Tony Beckerman is just an amazing guy…

Russell:  Yeah Tony Beckerman is a cool guy.

Anthony: …the knowledge that pours out of him is just like aw it’s a pity you have to stop an interview after an hour because you can just sit there forever, and it just … towards the end of the interview, he was just getting on the roll and it’s like “Aw really, now we got to stop?”

Russell:  You should have just kept it rolling… just kept it going…rolled out a Christopher Brooker six-hour interview.

Anthony:  He had to go and pick up his kids from school or something…or something like that, I don’t know what it was, so we had to stop, it was such a pity, but yeah, he was…

Russell:  Gotch you.

Anthony: You know there’s just been so many that have been so good it’s unbelievable.  Hairbrained are doing really really well, they’re doing some good stuff.

Russell:  Yeah, yeah, I like Hairbrained, I like the guys you know a lot … I think that they’re doing a lot for the industry and trying to bring things together a little bit, bring a little camaraderie in and you know that’s one of the things that makes the industry so great is the camaraderie between stylists, if you can get past the ones with the ego and get to the others, I mean you can have some really great true deep friendships and the sharing that goes on you know it’s really wonderful because there’s nothing that anyone has…there’s nothing that I can experience that someone hasn’t already experienced before me.

Anthony:  Yeah.

Russell: So that if I’m going through something I say “Hey Anthony, I got this issue with this assistant, what do you think?”  And you can say “Dude I had that exact same thing happen to me last year and this is how I handled it and this is how I would do it differently.”  A wealth of knowledge for the people that aren’t afraid to ask.

Anthony:  Most definitely.

Russell:  And it’s so easy to get, you just have to go ask for it.

Anthony:  Yeah, that’s one thing I have learnt in the last 18 months is if you ask, people are willing to share and are happy to.  The only time we get any sort of resistance for anything like that, I guess from more local salons and local hairdressers where they still have this mentality that you’re going to steal something from them…

Russell:  Right.

Anthony: … you know and you know that they’re not, they don’t want to build…and it’s a pity because it would be lovely to have that…+ that network, a local network build up, I feel, and it’s just…

Russell:  Yeah, I agree.

Anthony:  …yeah, it’s…and I don’t know if you experienced the same thing where you are that they just…we’re all in the same business, like you said, we all have the same problems, the chances are we could help each other if we could just put our little egos aside and do it.

Russell:  Yeah, yeah.  I think maybe some of it is fear of being exposed, because I have a salon and I’m running it and I have no idea what I’m doing, I have an idea what I think I want to do but you know it’s kind of like I’m doing the best that I can and so there’s a certain fear that someone’s going to be able to pull back the curtain and expose “Aha! Got you, you don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”  And you’re going to say “No, I don’t.” So…

Anthony:  Yeah that happens every day when I got to wait to cut hair.

Russell:  …you know so it’s, which is tough…

Anthony:  That was one of the things that we were discussing at the magazine was that unlike most people  I entered in this business… my mother was a hairdresser, her aunt was a hairdresser so like you, it’s been a family thing, and I entered this business, not so much because I had any passion for doing hair, it’s because I like the business side of it, so for me it’s always been about the business, which is probably why I sucked at hair for so long, and…and now…

Russell:  Not until you decided it was a necessity did you learn, right?

Anthony:  Pretty much you know, I got to the point…I’d already owned salons, I had staff, ah you know I’m humble, you know I’m not the best hair cutter in that salon and chances are I’m still not probably the best hair cutter I’ll ever have in my salon but I’m getting better and it’s…you know I just wish we’d had yeah, more camaraderie and the ability to share within the community, I probably would have got to the realization that I have a lot sooner, and had people there to help me because I know there’s been some really great hairdressers pass through this area and it would have been great to have learned from them, so yeah.

Russell:  Yeah, that reminds me of I’ve always been …like since my father was in the business and my father knew a lot of people and he was very well respected in business for his technical ability, he had a lot of friends that I knew just from he was my dad, so they were very open and nice to me and so I never really saw much of the shunned side of things until much later when I started to have some success, but I mean I was just kind of the gloomiest and I would just go and ask anybody for help.  And there’s a time when I was in beauty school, I had started doing hair for about a year…just playing around and working in dad’s salon illegally, but I’ll deny it if it ever comes to light again, but you know, I didn’t have a licence and I was just cutting my friends’ hair and stuff like that and he was teaching me and I went to beauty school and when I was getting close to graduating Trevor Sormy was doing a class in Atlanta, you know and Atlanta is 350 miles, 400 miles away, so I hopped in the car Saturday after work, I drove all night, I got there…early early, I went and had breakfast and at 6:00 o’clock I’m at the hotel where the show was at and I’m walking the hotel, looking for the prep room, and sure enough, there’s the prep room, I walk in and people are just getting set up and there’s Trevor and I said “Hey Trevor, how you doing?”  He said “Hey, how are you?”  I said “I’m here to help, anything you need you tell me, I’m here to help you with your hair, I’m your right hand you got.”

He says “Oh great, well come on over here, this is what I want you to do.”

And I sat down and started making these little gel curls that he would make these wig hair pieces out of and I just sat there for hours making these gel curls and then when he had the model and he was putting them on and he’s looking at it and he’d say “So what do you think of that?”  And I’d kind of look at it and I wouldn’t say much, he goes “No, wait, what’s your opinion?”  And I said “I think it needs a little over here”, he goes “I think you’re right”.

So then he’d add some there and I’m thinking “Oh shit, Trevor Sorbie just asked me my opinion, oh wow!” And I was nobody, I was a kid that was excited and I showed up and I asked “Hey, need any help?  I’m here to help.”  It wasn’t like “Oh when are you going to pay me to assist and drive my ass all the way down to Atlanta?”  No, it was I’m going to go and I’m going to…of course I didn’t have a ticket for the show but since I was helping I snuck in the back and got to watch the show from the backstage cause I…I helped, I worked for that ticket.  But it was a great experience.  And then when I you know, left Kentucky and ended up going to New York City and work there, it was because I’d had such a great experience with…Trevor and Vivian McKinder who was always was very very nice to me as well, and so when I went up to John Dellaria’s “Hey John, what’s going on?” And he said “Hey why don’t you come work in New York?”  “You got it”, and that’s…you just go and put yourself in play, that’s a hard thing to do is put yourself in play and it’s that fear of rejection but I was too stupid to realize and I just went and did it anyway.

Anthony:  Yeah, I think you either have to be…

Russell:  stupid…go ahead I’m sorry.

Anthony:  I think you either have to be like that…I think it is, half the battle is showing up and yeah, the other half is just making sure you do and put yourself in play and I think it’s…maybe that’s the benefit of age now, I just don’t care you know, they can reject me all they want, I’ll just keep putting myself out there because I no longer care anymore what anybody thinks or says, I’m going to do what I want to do, and I do, and it’s just opened up an entire new world to me and it’s like wow, I didn’t have that maturity 20 years ago to do that but I do now and I’m glad I do.

Russell:  Yeah, I think that you know just a certain amount of fearlessness that comes with age or you don’t give a shit anymore, just bulldog through it you know.  I think that that’s a beautiful thing, you’re a beautiful man Anthony, a beautiful man, look at you.

Anthony:  Thank you, thank you Russell.

Russell:  Ah just barrelling through…

Anthony: Yes, which is the same thing I do when I started this podcast, I had no idea what I was doing, I just went and bought a shit load of equipment and decided I’m going to start a podcast…

Russell:  And how’s…how’s that going?

Anthony:  It’s going good, and we have…

Russell:  How’s your podcast going?

Anthony:  We had a bit of a slump over Easter, I basically didn’t do anything,  and it’s been great and I’m putting out, hopefully some useful content for people, I’m alternating that with blog posts, so I’m always putting out something there to share, I’m very big on giving as much as I can back to the industry now and whatever I can to help and share with people, which you should know I’ve pretty much done through the Hair Maeven forum anything I can share and help people with I’m always glad to, and this is just the new format, it’s…I’m a terrible writer, I hate to sit down at a keyboard and have to write something, I’m really…it takes me a long long time to get any content out, where being a hairdresser we’re taught, so having a podcast like this I can sit and talk and talk and talk and talk and I can produce wonderful content without any problem whatsoever.  Any plans to release some new videos?

Russell: Yeah, I think that there’s Hair Mentor gig…I’m trying to par it down to about 12 classes and I think that I’m going to release that as an online course and as a DVD set, you know a set of…six DVDs or something because not everybody is going to learn it online and if I go to a trade show I can’t sell an online membership, I have to have something physical to sell and I think that there’s something to be said like for me, I mean maybe I’m just old but I like the idea of going and getting a physical DVD, so I have the information and I can keep it, whereas if it’s online, shit I’ve lost stuff online, you lose pictures and stuff online and where has it gone?  I don’t know, can’t get it again.

I produce a podcast once a fortnight. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast in iTunes.

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Welcome to episode 4 of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast.

In this episode:

This weeks episode I am interviewed by my friend and fellow salon owner Steve Winder. We are talking about websites and how they can be the most valuable marketing tool for your salon business. The interview is a  little older and we discuss things that are now common place like facebook graph search and google+. QR codes gets a mention and while they can still be useful tools, research has shown that just over 3% of smartphone users will actually scan a code, so they haven’t turned into the marketing gem they promised to be. Apart from that everything else in the podcast still remains true.

Your website is very important part of your over all marketing strategy. It is no longer about having a brochure style website but one that is interactive, allowing you to capture possible client details, keep current clients informed with salon happenings, integrate with social media to maximise the exposure of your salon and increase your business.

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• THESIS THEME – Great theme but can be a little complex for beginners to use. I would suggest either ink or elegant themes below.
• CRAZY DOMAINS – Most cost effective place to register your domain name. Often offering names from as little as $3
• HOSTGATOR – Best choice for hosting with excellent customer service.
• WORDPRESS – Totally free CMS framework to build you website.
• INKTHEMES – My themes of choice.
• ELEGANT THEMES – If inkthemes doesn’t have what I want.

I aim to produce a podcast once a fortnight. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast in iTunes.

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I am so incredibly thankful to those who have recently gone into my listing in iTunes to provide a five-star rating and a written review of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast. Leaving a 5 star rating and/or a written review can be so valuable to helping others within our industry find my podcast.

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Welcome to episode 3 of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast.

In this episode:

Hi everyone it’s anthony presotto here and I would like to welcome you back to my business insider podcast, or if this is your first time here thanks for joining us.

I’ve been delayed getting this podcast out because it has been a super busy and super exciting couple of weeks with SO MAGAZINE. We have caught up with some really interesting hairstylist and business owners in Brisbaneand then I flew to Sydney for the day to interview another Salon Owner. And I am still doing 3 and a half days a week behind the chair, so by the end of two weeks I was pretty much wrecked. So this podcast is short and sweet!

Positioning should be part of your initial vision process, where you decide what your space in your local market is. Something that came through very strongly with the people we interviewed the last couple of weeks was they all had very unique positions in their respective marketplaces and used it to their full advantage. I guess it is their point of  difference.

Now I don’t mean stuff like coffee in bone china being an up market salon and such. These were very unique positions that laser focused their markets. There was Jules Tognini from AKA Togninis and their shit hair cuts. Now thats actually an acronym for super hot individual talent. It was meant to appeal to a specific demographic within the area that the salon is located. And it did and still does. If you were that young or young at heart type of person the chances are your their ideal client, looking for something fun funky and maybe a little edgy.

The other stand out was Dario Chicco from Voi in Sydney, now in a city that caters for fashionistas, and gliterati, you know the type the blondorexic full on blowout crowd, you have Dario, doing his wash and wear hair sculpting. No colouring, not a blow-dry brush in site and not even a retail range for sale. His core philosophy is that a cut should do all the work and minimal product is needed to style the hair. A polar opposite to almost all salons in his city I would say.

Actually I want to talk a bit more about Dario, the man is simply amazing, his salon is on the 7th floor of a building, like I said he doesn’t retail products. Doesn’t perform any colour service. And his hair is finished with a finger dry, or combed into place and left to dry naturally.

His boutique salon has an understated elegance. His business hours are 10 am to 6pm or so, he works from Wedneday to Saturday  and takes two hours for lunch! And he is booked up! Infact compared to many stylists he makes more money before lunch than they do in a whole day. Sticking to his core philosophy he has positioned himself in a unique place in his market and  has enabled him to focus on a very specific and obviously profitable niche.

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• AKA Tognini
• Dario Chicco – Voi Salon
• SO Magazine

I produce a podcast once a fortnight. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast in iTunes.

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I Appreciate your iTunes reviews!

I am so incredibly thankful to those who have recently gone into my listing in iTunes to provide a five-star rating and a written review of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast. Leaving a 5 star rating and/or a written review can be so valuable to helping others within our industry find my podcast.

The post S1 E3 Positioning Your Salon Business appeared first on Anthony Presotto.

 

Welcome to episode 2 of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast.

In this episode:

I talk to salon owner, fellow business coach and The Fantastic Hairdresser in Australia Steve Winder. Steve shares some of his personal journey in the industry and how he came to Australia and what he is doing here now. Steve has been in the business for 35 years. The Fantastic business man that he is, Steve took his salon from opening to $2 million in turnover within 9 years. I also ask Steve what was the pivitol thing in making his salon business a success. In this episode I also explain why I changed the name of my podcast.

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• Steve Wynder
• Hair Biz Secrets
• Fantastic Hairdresser Australia
• SO Magazine

Transcript:

Anthony: Hi everybody and welcome back to the second episode. This is Business Insider and you may have noticed we had a slight change of name since the last episode. That’s because we were advised by a company with a similar program within the same industry that they have been using the name first and they didn’t like us using it. So, to keep things simple, I’ve changed the name of the Podcast to Business Insider and I think that gives us a little bit more scope on what we can talk about than Profit or Perish.

So, I have my friend Steve Winder with us today. Steve is a hairdresser from the UK who now resides here in Australia and we’re going to talk a little bit today about the program Steve is involved with called Fantastic Hairdresser and a little bit about Steve’s history.

So, Steve tell us a little bit about you personally because we want to get to know you and then give us an overview of your business.

Steve: I can say, well I have quite a long story but essentially I started hairdressing in 1980 and did a full apprenticeship for 3 years. Then I became a busy stylist and I now worked on the salon floor for a salon group over in the UK. I suddenly then became the manager and teaching hairdressing skills, colouring and communications skills. Along that journey I started to enter different types of competitions and actually became very successful with those. One, for example, is the L’Oreal colouring student of the year. That then led me onto becoming an educator up at L’Oreal and I run a course called the Complete Hairdresser. This was essentially a course which we taught hairdressers things they may have missed along the way. So, whether it be hair-up; it might have been a particular hair cut; it might have been just finishing skills. That is did for about 4 years and then I moved on from there and was asked to become, which was not sort of trendy now very trendy then, the UK perm ambassador for L’Oreal along with a guy called Guy Kremer. That I did for a couple of years and we went around salons and booked hotels and did demonstrations on perming and just trying to teach people different ways to perm hair. That was really good fun.

On the way I became a judge for a National Hair Federation and started judging competitions for those because the salon group that I was working for was very active and the salon owner Simon Harris from Headlines who was very active in that sort of arena. So, being a manager and a trainer educator within the salon and doing the stuff in London, I sort of went on to doing things there. Then after that, after doing shows and the expo in London and the things, I went on then to leave the salon that I was with and open my own salon. So, I grew tat salon from one salon to five but not all at the same time. I had done essentially three salons at one time but I’ve actually had five salons. When we had the three salons, we were employing over 60 add staff. That was very interesting because when you go from a very small salon and then into a much bigger salon and then the dynamics change when you have so many people, you find yourself being pulled off the shop floor. So, I have learnt a lot of things about that. I’ve also learnt a lot of things about controlling money and I’ve also had some major issues with that in the early days, and to be honest, all the way through. It has never been plain sighted and that’s one of the reasons that I have so much experience because I can speak from having a very successful salon and I can also speak from having one that didn’t work at all. So, that gives you a lot of, sort of background if you like.

Then I got involved with the Department of Trade and Industry in the UK in a study called ‘Work life balance’ where we looked at could we get team of people together and have things like working mothers and women returning to work and be flexible with their hours so that they could still look after the kids, they could have the school holidays off, go to different arrangements between school holidays and term times and allow employees to make domestic commitments as well social engagements. So, we tried this plan and we planned out. We have put a lot of things in place and that worked very successfully and was documented in the Trade and Industry; they have like a book there on me and they sort of a special on us, so you can read all about that in there. So, essentially I suppose that then led me onto, because of some of the training that I have had, working with a Fantastic Hairdresser and then becoming, though involved with Fantastic Hairdresser, to actually start doing some of the courses along with Alan Austin-Smith. It was probably that journey that then led me to immigrating to Australia.

Anthony: Awesome, that is a diverse background you have there.

Steve: Yeah, it is diverse. I have condensed it a little bit there because I’ve had quite a journey; a very interesting one that maybe we could share with one of these because I think there are a lot of things that people could learn from my successes and also some of my mistakes; because I’ve made some big mistakes as well.

Anthony: Well, that’s what we are all about here at Business Insider; is sharing experiences that people who are in our industry can learn from our mistakes and our successes. So, could you, maybe, just quickly share something pivotal that you could attribute to your success?

Steve: Yeah, I think one of the things that happened to me many years ago was that can you imagine coming to work one Monday morning, and I had quite a large desk, and I was sitting down at my desk; I had one of those old fashioned desk with the green leather top sort of gold emboss. I sat there one morning and I was just doing some paperwork and there was a knock on the door. I said, “Hi, come in,” and one of the team came in and followed by a cue of eight behind her and they all handed their notice in one by one.

Anthony: Wow!

Steve: Yeah, I had a team of, including me there were ten and eight of them handed their notice in. Essentially, the reason I was doing that was I have bought into that business; I have taken over that business from somebody else and what they have done is that they have decided they would open a salon down the road. The actual contract of employment was doctored so  there wasn’t a radius clause and literally they opened a salon about 500m down the road. So, when people say to me, they panicked and they say, “Oh my God, I just had a team member leave.” To me you just want to try eight leaving at the same time and getting through that. But we did get through it. Two things that I’ve learnt from that; one was that when I took the business over we changed the colour house so that, in a way, put me in control because I’ve worked with L’Oreal so closely and I knew L’Oreal inside out. So, I got to know all the clients because I was changing them from the colour house they were before over to L’Oreal. So, straight away that gave me a little bit of control over the business because at that time we didn’t really had this management systems that we have in place now, but that still worked. So, we did that.

The other thing that I have learnt was that it’s so important to have an ongoing recruitment plan.  So, don’t try and recruit when you need someone. Recruit all the time so that you always have a list. So, if anyone ever leaves you could just pick up the phone and you have already interviewed somebody that you already like and you can get them to start the following day.

Anthony: That is an absolute genius piece of advice.

Steve: What I’ve always encourage people to do is to make sure that you have an ongoing recruitment plan because you never ever know what’s coming around the corner and there is a sound line of being in that position where your whole team walked out. I wish I had a list then because it took me several months to pull everything around; obviously I lost clients but we did have a lot of the clients come back again because they love the way their hair was coloured. But we did full time had a situation where we just couldn’t accommodate because I was so busy and my stylist, Amanda, was so busy that we just couldn’t take on that number of clients until we’ve built up again.

Anthony: For sure. Now, do you have a quote Steve that you could share with us that sums up your business philosophy and how have you applied it to your life?

Steve: Yeah, I think very much I follow the Fantastic Hairdresser rule of thumb and that is 50% of what you do as a hairdresser, well in actual fact in any job, has nothing to do with your job. So, 50% of the Fantastic Hairdresser has nothing to do with tint bowl, brushes; it is to do with the other stuff; it is to do with how you are as a person and how you communicate with your clients and colleagues. So, that’s one of the things I think for me is a golden rule I always stick to.

Anthony: Brilliant, absolutely brilliant advice. So, you’ve talked a bit about Fantastic Hairdresser. Tell us a little bit more about Fantastic Hairdresser in Australian which is what brought you to Australia?

Steve: Okay, it started as I was saying earlier, that I was working alongside Alan Austin-Smith on courses and there is a particular course called the Fantastic Hairdresser Academy and being the Fantastic Ambassador. So, we were working on that program and I used to take part of the group because we only had about 30 in the group.  So, Alan would do a talk with the guys explaining some of the concepts and then I would take the other group into another room and then break down the more technical stuff and just work with them in regards to communication skills and some of the things that we’re teaching. Because essentially, what we were doing was making key people in salons fantastic ambassadors for the salon, so we would deliver the training to them in a way that we would train them to deliver the training, if that makes sense.

Anthony: Yeah, sure.

Steve: So, they could go back into the salon and try in the team. So, it was a fantastic course and it still goes on. It’s a two year course but it is looking at the concept and also the way that they deliver it to the team so that they can get the team excited and stuff.

Any way the Fantastic Hairdresser grew very quickly and we entered into the academy in London in Chiswick and it has done exceptionally well. We opened a small hairdressing salon and an actual academy. So we had business school and a hairdressing salon and we run business courses and training and also 100% hairdresser days in that business centre.

Now, I’ve spoken to Alan; Alan and I go back a long way and we’re very close friends and Fantastic Hairdresser is obviously Alan’s baby. But I said to Alan, look I’m think of moving to Australia. I really want to take the Fantastic Hairdresser to Australia. Bless him; he said to me, “Well, if there is anyone that is going to do it, you’re probably the person to do it and take it over to Australia.” I know what he thinks of the Fantastic Hairdresser and how much that is a part of his life and so I was very honoured to get the Fantastic Hairdresser in Australia off to a really good start. So, once we got that then myself, my wife and kids, we moved over to Australia which was what? Not quite 2 years ago at the time of this recording. So, about 18 months, 19 months and that’s when I met you in time.

Anthony: Yes, I remember getting, I think it was a Facebook message from you saying, “Hey, I’m coming.”

Steve: That’s right.

Anthony: Is there any work there? I was like, “Yeah, sure, not a problem.” Luck had it that you moved within like 10km from where I lived. We met up and of course we had a lot of things grow since then. We’ve had the salon success club house which we do with two other business coaches. We now produce an international magazine that is still delivered digitally online. We just have so much stuff going on.

Steve: Yeah, tons of stuff. I mean, really I look at my journey and our journey moving to Australia. The minute I got to Australia I was doing some business coaching. I was coaching someone in Brisbane, in actually the west end of Brisbane and then became partner in that salon.  They then eventually sold that and I moved up to the sunshine coast; just really a lot more of a lifestyle decision. Then I bought a salon up in the sunshine coast which I now work in because I ill wanted to work in the hairdressing industry, you know, doing hair. So, we opened that and that has gone very well and as you say, we created the So magazine which is now classed as one of the world’s top hairdressing magazines. We have a lot of testimonials from some just incredible people talking about our magazine which I’m just so touched by. So that in itself and two salons and a magazine and the club house and So TV, and it’s not even 2 years yet.

Anthony: It has only been 18 months. That’s incredible. What’s going to happen in five? For everyone listening you can find the magazine at somagazine.com.au. I’ll put links in the show notes that you could just go there and click and go straight to the magazine.

Now, the Fantastic Hairdresser in Australia also has a product that people can buy if they’re in Australia or anywhere in the world. It’s a video series that I have had a little bit of a chance to look at and I think it is absolutely fantastic. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Steve: Yeah, sure. We used to run a training seminar that, again, went over a year and that was called the Fantastic Salon. The Fantastic Salon then turned into a book. So, we have five books; the Fantastic Hairdresser; we have the Fantastic Boss; we have the Fantastic Salon; we have Fantastic; and we have also created a product called Fantastic Hairdresser in a Box. We found that when we spoke to salon owners and deliver this training to them, the problem is that most salon owners don’t seem to have the time to prepare for a training session so they can deliver this stuff into the salon. So, Alan came up with a concept that was all about creating training sessions; so it was actually 20 training sessions on there so well enough ready for 2 years.  There are 20 training sessions in there where there is a topic and a DVD. So, you could put the DVD in and you can watch the DVD and then that will deliver a message and also a question. Then you, as a salon owner or a manager, can then, literally, take a back seat and just deliver this training by playing a DVD, round them to watch it and then just asking them, “Well, what do you think guys?” There are exercises and things. So, there is really strong foundation for a fantastic training session/staff meeting rather than the typical staff meeting which is to get everybody together and bark at them.

Anthony: It is very hard for salon owners usually time pressed to create a training or meeting resource like that. So, having something like that that is pre-done that can do you for 2 years is just invaluable.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the greatest thing of the way this has been designed is that you could wrap it around your own business. So, although it is the Fantastic Hairdresser training and delivering, it is the whole concept. The very clever thing about this that you just drop into what you already do. So, you could have staff meeting, and say for example, there might be issues in the salon where someone is not growing their column, well in the training box there is one called ‘Build your column’ and that just takes you through the steps of how to build your column. So, then as a salon owner, if you having such an issue in the salon then you could bring that into training session and get a good team discussion going; get ideas on how to build your column. There are loads of ideas in there that have to do with that and there are team exercises. So, what you’re doing is when they come away from that meeting, they’re lazed at focused and that’s the real key thing which is about getting everybody firing in the same direction.

Anthony: That’s exactly right. It does sound fantastic and I’m excited to go back and look at it then. Thank you for being on the show today Steve and sharing your story and sharing about Fantastic Hairdresser in Australia. For everyone listening, in the show notes I’ll have links to Steve’s pages and the Fantastic Hairdresser so you could go there and you could grab yourself the Fantastic Salon in a Box.

Steve: Yeah, Fantastic Hairdresser in a Box.

Anthony: Ah, Fantastic Hairdresser in a Box. Okay Steve, thank you very much and we’ll talk to you soon.

Steve: Thanks Anthony, good speech as ever mate. Cheers.

Anthony: Bye.

I produce a podcast once a fortnight. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast in iTunes.

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I am so incredibly thankful to those who have recently gone into my listing in iTunes to provide a five-star rating and a written review of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast. Leaving a 5 star rating and/or a written review can be so valuable to helping others within our industry find my podcast.

The post S1 E2 Becoming A Fantastic Hairdresser appeared first on Anthony Presotto.

 

Welcome to episode 1 of Anthony Presotto’s Business Insider Podcast.

In this episode:

Today I was fortunate enough to interview Michael Levine, salon and school owner about a recent blog post that has gone viral. I don’t use the term lightly. Michael’s post an hour before the interview had 3000 Facebook shares and 14000 reads, by the time the interview was finished that had jumped to 4000 shares and 17000 reads. As of writing these show notes that has hit 5000 shares on Facebook! The blog post Michael has written examines what it takes to be successful in the hair industry from both the owners and employees points of view. I recommend reading the post and listening to the podcast. Michael shares insights to the industry as someone who has been a trainee, master stylist, salon owner, platform artist and school owner.

Websites mentioned in this episode:

• You can find Michael Levines Blog Post Here
• Michael’s product company
• Michael Levine Salons
• Vancouver Hair Academy
• Hairbrained
• Salon Video Training Tutorials

Book Mentioned in this episode:

Not only is the name of this book the inspirational quote Michael gave us but it also comes as a highly recommended read from him too.

CLICK HERE TO BUY THE BOOK

We endeavour to produce a podcast once a fortnight. So check back soon. You can also subscribe to my podcast on iTunes.

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Transcript:

A.Presotto:    Hi everybody! This is Anthony Presotto and this is the Profit or Perish podcast developed to take your salon business to the next level.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in an industry veteran or new salon owner ready to start new doors for the first time. This podcast provides entertaining and informative information to help you take your salon from surviving to thriving.

Today, I have the opportunity to upsell and [00:00:42] Michael Levine from Canada and we discussed his blog post How to Survive and Thrive as a Hairstylist and Salon Owner which to date has 4,000 Facebook shares and about 17,000 reads.

So, I’ll let Michael take it away and tell you a bit about himself and his purpose. Hi Michael, welcome to profit or perish podcast. How are you?

M.Levine:    I’m doing great Anthony. How are you?

A.Presotto:    Fantastic. I’m doing well too. I just like to say thank you for coming on the podcast. You’re my first interviewee and the first podcast of our launched.

M.Levine:    Well, it’s an honor and a pleasure and that’s really really cool that I’m going to be the first one. I hope I don’t sink the ship before it gets going.

A.Presotto:    I’m sure you won’t. That’s always my fear doing the podcast, how bad can I make it. So, for people who really don’t know you, I’m sure there might be a couple, can you tell us a bit about yourself? How you entered into hairdressing and the company that Michael Levine Salon group?

M.Levine:    Yes, that’s the general kind of company as a whole. That’s the brand behind the brands. Most of us got into hair for a lot of the same reasons and of course what we realize once we’re in is it wasn’t quite exactly as what we imagined it would be.

But basically, I was at my hairdresser’s one day. I think I was probably maybe 20 or 22, maybe a little older. I find myself hanging around this salon. I would take a bus about an hour to go get my haircut.

And one day, I just sort of click, I was coming in and hanging around even if I wasn’t getting my haircut. And one day it just so registered that this guy seem to have the greatest life.

All day long people were coming in and women were coming in and giving him a kiss and inviting him to parties and bringing him coffee. He does hair and listens to cool music and it just clicked. I said, “Wow this is what I want to do. This sounds like the greatest life a guy can have.” So that’s when I went to hairdressing school.

That was kind of why I got to it.  I wasn’t passionate about hair any way other than my own hair. And I was sort of wear of hair. I definitely was aware of noticing people’s hair as obsessed on my own. But I didn’t really think of it as a career or anything like that or it didn’t even register as a job. Once it kind of click, it was like wow, this could be it.

For me, I was a guitar player and I wanted to be rock star. I kind of thought that the hairdresser thing has a little bit of that rock star element. So I went to hairdressing school.

A.Presotto:    Your family comes from a family of restaurateur?

M.Levine:    Yes, my father was a restaurateur. He was a pioneer in my city for food. He started sort of the first chain of pizza places and then he started getting into more gourmet food. He started to be at the local wine societies.

The Vancouver Wine Festivals, the largest wine festivals. It’s certainly the largest in North America. My dad, he was the founder and the chairperson for the first 10 years of that. I have sort of experience, a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit growing up for sure.

A.Presotto:    Obviously, hair is a very different career from that.

M.Levine:    There are some parallels certainly in the restaurant industry and salon industry. I think I didn’t realize that necessarily at the beginning of my career. I didn’t really recognize those similarities until I opened my first, maybe my second salon, probably my second one.

Yes, there’s actually a lot of similarities and I had grown up in a restaurant industry. My father was out of restaurants by the time I was probably 13.

He’d actually with very, very bad recession here and he had fallen into bankruptcy during the recession. I got my first job in a restaurant. I started working in McDonald’s when I was 13 years old. I worked in restaurants from the time I was 13 until I went to hairdressing school.

I kind of worked my way up from the lowest of the low on a totem pole into running a catering department at a hotel.  I just been doing it for 10 years and working in the service industry before I ever picked up scissors.

A.Presotto:    Now, you’ve expanded from being a salon owner into a school owner. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

M.Levine:    Okay, I’ll sort of give you a little brief rundown of the progression of our company. Basically, I went to hairdressing school, became a hairdresser, realized that what hairdressing school had taught me was very, very little. I graduated hairdressing school thinking I was good. That’s the line they told us during school.

I graduated and gotten into the real world and spent about a year working at a salon. Now, unfortunately, it’s a little easier to get a job with as guy than it is with a girl.

That time I was kind of cute and they chopped me on the floor right away. I spent a year absolutely faking everything. I graduated hairdressing school without ever having put a foil on hair. I had no idea how to cut hair other than a little of lady bubble cut. You know what I’m talking about. That’s set the blow out?

That’s what I had to do is I faked it for about a year before I thought, “Gosh I have no clue what I’m doing.” It’s causing me stress and I suck at it. I don’t want to go through this industry sucking. I want to be good. So I quit that job and I got a job as an apprentice at a very, very happening salon.

It’s one of this kind of right place at the right time sort of salon situations where this salon was blowing up and I walked in right at the exact moment that somebody like me could take advantage of that. I just fell into this really, really cool culture.

I worked at the salon company for a couple, well 3 years. And about a year and a half into it the woman who I considered my mentor got a job offer with corporate Aveda to move to Minneapolis and subsequently move to New York. So, Aveda’s asking me to take her place in Western Canada as an educator.

At this point, I’ve really been only doing hair for 18 months. So I’m certainly not qualified for the job, but again, I was a fairly decent speaker. Years of working in the service industry, I had a degree of confidence in my ability to convey a message. Aveda they spent a lot of time flying me back and forth from Minneapolis to Vancouver.

I sort of lived there about anywhere between 8 and 12 weeks a year for a couple of years doing training under some of the best hairdressers in the world. And it really, really accelerated my career, accelerated my skill set and I was sort of around some of the best hairdressers.

Some of the famous hairdressers in the world today were the people that were training me when I was at Aveda 17 years ago, before they were sort of really well known.

One day, I have one of these situations where I was dating one of the girls at the salon and I had a situation where the salon owner was acting like a complete jerk. Am I allowed to swear?

A.Presotto:    Oh, sure.

M.Levine:    I’ll try to keep to minimum but sometimes things slip out. The salon owner was acting like a complete jerk. He was kind of going a little bit about bananas on everybody and myself included as well as the girl I was dating. He had her on tears and been yelling at her for something. He humiliated me in front of a client one day.

I was like, “Screw it, let’s quit. Let’s open our own salon.” We were in one of these situations that probably a little bit later. It’s one of these situations where I was very, very arrogant. I’d become very successful. I still probably suck as a hairdresser but I certainly didn’t think so at the time.

My wife and I found a grubby little spot in a pretty girl’s neighborhood. But it looks like it might be up and coming. We opened a salon on the 3rd floor of this building right above a night club in a place in Vancouver called Gastown. It’s a pretty edgy area, pretty funky. We opened this salon and it absolutely blew up really, really quickly.

I was working a lot with Aveda still so Aveda, at the time, this is pre-Lauder Aveda. They were really supportive of their salons and because I was their Western Canadian educator, I was sort of more in demand educators on the West Coast, all the Aveda stores were sending me every client. Any time somebody walked in, they were sending them to me. My career just took off and the salon just absolutely exploded.

We went from a two chair salon and then a year later we opened a five chair salon about a block from the first one. Three years after that, we opened – we’ve gone from 600 square feet to 2000 square feet. Yes, we opened this really big salon and then things sort of snowballed at that point. That was it. That was the progression.

Sorry, I skipped the whole point of the question you asked me. So what ended up happening, we never hired people with a clientele. My wife and I were busy hair dressers and we bring somebody in here and there. Nobody lasted, nobody survived with us more than 6 months. And finally this guy came from Nova Scotia and I considered him.

He’s like family to me now. A guy came in from Nova Scotia. He is a wonderful stylist. He became a very good friend of ours. He joined our team and then we sort of started hiring assistants and we would teach the assistants how to do hair based on my trainings with Aveda and what I have been teaching for this company that I worked at previous to my own salon.

I sort of developed my own education system. I would teach this kids how to do hair and then we would give them a chair and then we hire somebody else and eventually we had like 12 people. And we never hired anybody with a book.

So we grown up to 12 people and I’m still getting a fair amount of support from Aveda. I have a totally crazy super long scandalous story where Aveda absolutely effed me over.

I’m happy to talk about that. It’s a really long story. It’s probably not that interesting. Anyways, we opened up this big salon. We started taking off and we became a little bit the toast of the town and we’re still running this very tight apprenticeship.

I’ll tell you, I don’t know how it is in Australia but in Vancouver, when they say they have apprentices, they don’t really have apprentices. They just once in a while come over and show you how I do a haircut.

We had a system. We’re marking people. They had to bring in a certain number of models. There was a given curriculum that they have to follow that they have to go through the curriculum twice, minimum twice before they would get a chair.

Around this time in British Columbia, we became deregulated. I believe Australia is deregulated. Right?

A.Presotto:    What do you mean by deregulated?

M.Levine:    We don’t have licensing to be a hairdresser.

A.Presotto:    No. We don’t have licensing. Other salons get license and either you do hairdressing apprenticeship or trying to get a school depending on which way you decide to go and you get a certificate. That’s how you’re a hairdresser.

M.Levine:    You know what, in Vancouver, in British Columbia, you can buy scissors and then you’re a hairdresser. That’s how it goes here.

A.Presotto:    That looks like some of the hairdressers here actually as well.

M.Levine:    That is why I don’t agree with regulation in any way because it doesn’t matter, regulation or not, 90 percent of hairdressers suck anyways. Hundred percent of them suck right out of school and at the beginning.

But anyway, we didn’t have regulations so all of a sudden it freed us to be able to create hairdressers on our own terms and give them chairs without ever having to waste our time training them for a licensing exam. So, I’ll skip, I opened a bunch of salons and I think we opened 8 salons over the course of this existence.

Eventually, I decided I wanted to get paid for teaching people, teaching these. I was coming in on my time off teaching these people how to do hair and I was probably having maybe 25 percent retention rate of this staff. We weren’t charging people for the education.

I remember the one that really killed me. I had basically lost 6 months of my life because I trained these 4 girls and every one of them quit. But after I had trained them, after I spent all this energy on them, and then they all left.

Well, I thought that’s like 6 months of my life just completely gone. First of all, if I’m spending my time teaching somebody and creating aha moments for people and teaching somebody how to hold scissors, eventually helping them to actually very decent hair dressers, I get emotionally attached to these guys and it was a little bit heart breaking. I was losing sleep over it.

I thought forget this. I want to get paid for this. I want to take my emotion out of it. I want to make it a business arrangement.  I’d still care about these people. I’ll absolutely love them perhaps but they’re free to do whatever they wanted. They have no obligation to me. I’m not going to have the obligation to hire them either.

We went about the process of opening a hairdressing school. And that itself was a huge pain the butt.  But, we got the thing opened and it’s taken off and it’s done extremely as well. And that’s where I am today.

A.Presotto:    That’s fantastic. I must say your curriculum must be something spectacular because I’ve seen photos of work you should produce. You happen to do a photo shoot or portfolio work?

M.Levine:    Yes, that’s what I was doing all day today. I was in the studio. We have our own photo studio offsite. I used to have a salon called Tow and it’s about 3500 square feet. We had a portion of the upstairs we turned it into a photo studio so any time anybody want to do a shoot. We would do it there.

And because my school, part of my curriculum is an editorial day we were using it. And then, when I close that salon – I close salons like I change underwear. When we closed that salon and opened a different one. We didn’t have rooms for studios.

I had to get a free standing studio which I absolutely love.  I just had electrician in there the other day doing some work. Yes, there’s a portion during our program where we – I think it’s around 4 and 1/2 or 5 month mark of the program where we do a lecture on editorial, how to create successful editorial. I tell them what my expectations are for their photo-shoot. And then they coordinate models, wardrobes, make up.

They get one day in the salon to create a mood board and another day to prep hair extensions if that’s what they’re going to use. They come in and spend a day in the studio with their models and we did that today. We shot 6 models. And then what’s really cool in that part of the program is once I get the lighting the way they want it, then I hand them the camera. So anytime you see an image from my school, that’s been shot by the students.

A.Presotto:    How awesome is that.

M.Levine:    We want to take the mystery out of it because obviously I got a professional studio and I got some good gear and I got nice camera. But ultimately, we all know, none of that stuff is super, super necessary to get started. You can do a lot with one light and a decent SLR. You can get a decent SLR for pretty cheap nowadays. We want to take the mystery out of it and just get these guys really excited and say, “Wow, I can do this.” Especially nowadays, nobody’s held a proper camera.

They look at the back of this thing, they don’t known to stick their eye on the view finder. It’s really kind of fun. You should see these guys today. For some of them, they never held a camera like this and within 5 minutes they’re directing the models to getting the looks they want. I just walk away. Once I see they were able to frame the way I think I can work with them in post-production, I walk away and let them do their thing unless they need help and it’s really empowering for these guys.  So, that’s cool.

A.Presotto:    That is really amazing experience. Considering, I kind of understand why most of them wouldn’t know how to use between compact cameras which I don’t think have view finder anymore which I don’t think anybody buys anymore because the smartphones takes all of the photos required for Instagram and everything else. It’s a different beast entirely.

I see the work that comes to some of the schools here after 9 months and I see what your students do obviously after 4 or 5 months in the editorial work, it’s like night and day.

M.Levine:    Really?

A.Presotto:    I would be ashamed to look some of the works that comes out of here after students pay for 9 months of education.

M.Levine:    As much as that’s flattering, you’re only seeing the best stuff.

A.Presotto:    I only get to see the stuff which I assume would be the best the schools put out here. And if it’s not, they really need a lot of work on their marketing.

M.Levine:    I’m only showing you the best of the best. You’re about 75 percent of the staff you’ll never see. I do understand. I mean even today there’s a couple things that turned out really brilliantly. There’s a couple probably won’t make their way on my Facebook page.

A.Presotto:    Judicious editing.

M.Levine:    Yes exactly.

A.Presotto:    Okay, now, I’d like you to share an inspirational success quote that sort of guided you at the moment if you would do that for us, Michael.

M.Levine:    This is one that I always come back to. Like most salon owners, we’re in a constant state of flux. The one that I absolutely love, it’s the name of a book actually. I have the book and it’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

I absolutely believe this to my core that what got you here is only going to get you here. You got to change and adapt and adjust and constantly adjusting. Yes, that’s one that I sort of always think about. What that allows me to do. It’s weird.

I’m extremely lazy and people are always surprised when I say that. But I am; I’m a really lazy person. Ever since I had children, I’m a lot less involved in running my company. I mean I run things from behind the scenes but half my staff never see me. I work behind the chair I think 14 hours a week.

I do hair in two of my salons. I was saying to my students today that my students see me more than my staff does. That’s probably a recipe for disaster moving forward. I’m going to have to make some adjustments there. The fact that I’m really, really dynamic, now I think I used to be really, really rigid when I first started out.

But now, I sort of learned that to be an entrepreneur you’ve got to be dynamic and you don’t have to resist and fight. Sometimes go with the flow and if there’s sort of change in the horizon, embrace it and try to take advantage of it rather than trying to paddle up stream. I think I’ve spent a lot of time paddling up stream.

Even now, I just had some bullshit happening in the last 12 months of my salon ownership has absolutely sucked. I’ve lost 5 master stylists out of one location. But just in one location.

I lost literally about $45,000 a month in revenue. That’s enough to absolutely destroy most businesses certainly most smaller ones. For me it’s just, “Okay what am I going to do here?” Because I know, if I just rebuild a bunch of people and fill in those voids, I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels. It’s one step forward two steps back all the time.

I got to change my approach. Now, I don’t know what that approach is but I’ve got a couple of ideas.

A.Presotto:    Fantastic. Well, you’ve answered the questions I was going to ask you. Could you talk about stumbling blocks and how you overcome it? Obviously, in the last 12 months it’s been a major stumbling block. I just say for most salons be a dead block.

M.Levine:    Absolutely, but as every owner will tell you I’ve got so many friends and owners, I don’t know your situations but I guarantee you if you’ve had absolutely difficult adversities in your salon ownership, who knows, are you going through one right now?

A.Presotto:    No, I’m not. Actually, at the moment I now have what I call lifestyle salon or salon on a downsize. I got rid some of my staffs. I have a chair renter. I limit my hours at work.

M.Levine:    That’s exactly why you don’t have problems.

A.Presotto:    We do. As salon owners, I think we all experience similar things on various levels depending on the size of your business.

M.Levine:    I’ve seen, actually, they come in full circle. Remember when I was saying that story about how my former employer was acting like a complete asshole and going crazy? He had a massive walk out and at the time I wasn’t maybe as empathetic as I maybe am today. Most hairdressers, I don’t know, maybe I have few people on my team, I think I have a few people in my team who truly care and who do hope things go really, really well for me. That makes it sound like my team is like really horrible, they’re not. They’re awesome. But there’s probably more people who, there’s a few people who care more than others.

My old employer was just going through absolute bullshit. His situation is probably way worse than my last year. What happened with his, and this, we see this all the time in our industry.

I don’t understand this but whenever somebody leaves, and I shouldn’t say whenever but it happens a lot, it’s far too often. When somebody leaves salon for some reason, they want to burn it down when they leave. And they want everybody else to kind of, I don’t know why this happens, “But the sale is so much better over here, you should come with me.” For some reason, they really want to stick it to the guy.

I’m sure you’ve seen this happen. I’ve seen it happen quite a few times. This is what was happening to this guy. This guy, maybe he didn’t pay quite as much as he could but I certainly don’t have the same views on salary that I did at that time now that I’m an owner. Maybe there are certain aspects that he could have improved but he is just a person trying to get along and building beautiful salons and giving people an opportunity.

And then, he gave somebody an amazing opportunity and she absolutely screwed him over and tried to destroy his business for some reason when he thought they’ve left on really good terms. We were kind of in the middle of that. I am really sympathetic to what he was going through at the time. He was probably going absolutely nuts thinking his business was crumbling and it kind of was. Now, I’m much more understanding of it.

But, yes, I’ve been going through some craziness where you’ll get somebody who will say to you, “I’m totally on-board. Let’s do this.” And then months later the person’s, “I’m leaving to go to this.” I had one not long ago that absolutely broke my heart. It’s a girl I put a lot of energy in. I didn’t expect her to be with me forever. But I sent her to Sassoon’s 4 fucking months ago. All expenses paid and it’s like if this is in your head, don’t put your hand out.

For me, I get offered things all the time. You wouldn’t believe the things that I turned down. The trips that I get turned down for people who want to do business with me. I will not take anything from somebody unless I intend on doing business with them or unless I currently do business with them. First of all, I think it’s disgusting to try to lead somebody on and take advantage of things.

I know for me, somebody can take me on the most amazing trip and put me on the greatest education in the world. That’s not going to sway my opinion in any way whether I want to do business with them.

For me, I put my hand back in my pocket and I’m not interested in taking from you. I’d come on my own dime and evaluate things. Or if I’m actually legitimately interested then yes, you can take care of me. But if I’m not interested, I absolutely won’t take advantage of things.

I guess I expect people to have a similar moral outlet. Like this person who took off, like I love this girl. I created a job for her. You know what I hope none of my employees because I’ll be all [00:27:23]. She was getting paid a pretty ddecent salary probably more than she should have for the work she’s doing. She did some nice and really good things.

For me, if I’d taken that trip, I’d be like, I’m going to delay doing my thing and give this person a year of my life. I have a bit of moral compass that says if you’re going to give me something, you’re going to get a certain amount of time out of me. I’m not really big on contracts or anything like that. But I may have to go on that route one day like if I send you off an education, you’re going to have to give me this amount of years. You’re going to pay this back.

I want to believe the best in people and I want to believe that people kind of part of what I’m doing too. Being a salon owner can be very very thankless existence and hairdressers don’t know until they walk into those shoes.

I can safely say there’s not a hairdresser or most hairdressers, I’ve done most things that most hairdressers have done in this point in my life. I’ve been a platform artist. I’ve been a disgruntled employee. I’ve been a junior stylist trying to claw his way up. I’ve been the master stylist who is top earner in the room feeling underappreciated and under paid. I’ve sort of done it all. Man, nothing puts in perspective like once you open your own salon and started having employees.

A.Presotto:    That’s definitely right. Having tried apprentice over the years and my current chair renter is an ex-employee that left on good terms to open a salon last just over a year. She decided she wants to be a salon owner anymore.

M.Levine:    No, it’s amazing how quickly people forget. I don’t know if it’s just the world we’re living in today. I don’t like to sound like a cranky old bastard.  Kids these days. People have always been saying ‘kids these days’.

Salon ownership, you’re dealing with –I have a whole thing with salon ownership and employees. It’s really an interesting problem that the entire industry has. And it’s something that we create as an industry, that we’re creating these problems for ourselves. The issue is the most successful hairdressers are the ones that take control of their own lives. Success is based on – it’s 100% based on your choice and how much you go out make things happen for yourself.

As an owner, we shouldn’t really be surprised when our top people turn around one day and want to do their own thing because their success is based on being entrepreneurial basically. It’s their business they’re building behind that chair.

We reward them in one way and all of these things. But at the same time, it shouldn’t really come as a huge shock when they do turn around and say, “Well, I want to do my own thing.”

Especially for all of us owners, we did the same thing. We all want to do our own thing at some point. We all at some point looked at our pay check and said, “I’m bringing in double what I’m getting here. This dude has taken half my money and I want to do my own thing.” We quickly learn but if you’ve got children, you can’t tell a teenager they have to learn it for themselves.

I think most hairdressers are like precautious teenagers with a bit of success. They have to learn these things for themselves. I know for me once I open my salon, I had few employees, I went out of my way to go find my old employer hanging around in front of his salon, until he was leaving one night. He probably thought I was going to do a drive by.

He came out and I got out of my car and I walked over to him and I just laid on a big apology. And I just said “I had no idea. I didn’t understand anything of what was going on back then. I see things so differently now and I just want to thank you for everything you did for me and I apologize for everything I did. You know, as a shitty employee that probably really hurt your feelings.” And at the time I don’t know if you really cared, he was still probably like “Well, screw you”.

But, today, I think we’ve talked and we’re actually, you know, we hugged and these things but it’s profound. Like once you wear the salon owner hat, I don’t know that I would recommend to too many people.

A.Presotto:    I don’t. I tried to discourage anybody I can for being a salon owner. It takes a very special person to want to be a salon owner. The realities of it are so far from what an employee sees.

M.Levine:    Yup.

A.Presotto:    And that now leads us to the main reason for this podcast is you wrote a blog post on the loose.

M.Levine:    Yes.

A.Presotto:    How to survive and thrive as a salon owner and hairstylist. Now you’ve had over 3,000 Facebook shares and 4,000 now.

M.Levine:    It just came up today. I don’t know what happened today but I know it. And now I think 16,000 views and 4,000 shares on Facebook.

A.Presotto:    My goodness.

M.Levine:    It’s crazy. I don’t know what happened today. Biggest day of the blog was today and yesterday. And I know somebody important must have shared this thing.

A.Presotto:    That is fantastic. So what prompted it?

M.Levine:    Basically, like I’m a big talker and because of my school. I go and I give lectures on success. I’m a frustrated person so I see – you know I’ve got some really really successful hair dressers working for me and some that aren’t too successful. And I see the things that the people who are successful do and I mean for everybody in my company they’ve all sort of an apprentice under me at some point. Some have listened to me, some haven’t.

So I have this really crap here of losing these people and if you talk to me a year ago, I was fine. I was ready to open another salon like I’m opening another school right now. But I was ready to open another salon and I was feeling pretty good about things. And after I lost the first guy, I was like “Screw him”.

You know what? We actually made more money when he was gone because the first two didn’t affect us but eventually what ends up happening, is you refer those people’s clients to somebody and that person leaves and this happened to us where we lost, where people we referred to three different hair dressers who all left. And eventually the client is going to be like “I’m out of here”.

So our numbers are absolutely dwindled this year. It’s been a brutal year numbers wise. So, you know I look at my banking and all of these stuffs and I’m dealing with this non sense and I’m losing sleep because people in their really early 20’s are affecting my life in a really negative way which it shouldn’t be that way.

I just started hammering out this blog post based on some of my thoughts and some of my kind of ‘screw you’s’ and I’ve edited it a couple of times  and out of couple of things and exchange a couple of things because it’s a bit worthy. But yes, I put this thing out and for some reason I just absolutely kind of, as soon as I put the link of it just started to taken off.

A.Presotto:    Well, it is bit of a long post but it’s definitely worth the read. And I’ll put a link back to the blog post itself so that listeners can read it in the post-show notes. It’s just amazing. It really cuts through a lot of the crap that we hear in this industry and tells us how it is.

M.Levine:    Well I’m glad.

A.Presotto:    Which I think a lot people are really scared to do. They liked to tell others as it is. It’s not like you in here completely bashing anybody either, you just put in very simply your thoughts.

M.Levine:    Yeah. And you know what, whether people cared to believe or to agree with it, most people will find a few things in there that they absolutely disagree with and I’ve seen a lot of comments where people will say I agree with everything but this.

You know, that’s cool and I’m not saying I’m the end all and be all of, I’m just saying what I’ve observed and I’ve been a pretty successful salon owner. When you say financially, you know I’m not driving the car of my dreams and I have to live 45 minutes away from where my salons are so I can afford a house. I live in a very expensive city but you know a lot of people will say “Gosh! You have four salons and you got to be rich.” And I was like “No man”.

I do the salon thing mostly because I really got off an opening slide. I get off from designing hair salons and giving people jobs and turning people in the industry. But yes, I wouldn’t say, I would say that the post was more based on what I’ve seen and what I experienced as an owner and I think part of it was a little bit of a shout out for the owners that try to do things right.

I get a lot of people commenting on my blog who were saying, “Thank you so much for writing this, I needed this, this is really inspirational right at the exact the right time I needed it.”

There’s a lot of people out there who try to do things in an ethical way. You know one of the things that I really touched on in the blog for me, as salon owners is don’t raid other salons for your staff. It’s just a really shitty thing to do and your success is now coming at the expense of somebody else and that somebody else is somebody as me.

I could have great expense and personal, not just expense but emotional expense and I love people. I wouldn’t teach people if I didn’t love them. I’d lose so much money and time and energy on people because we don’t hire people at the clientele. We hire them straight out of school every one of them, and we give them a chair and we develop them.

We put them in weekly classes and all these things so by the time they start to build up a book then you got some asshole salon owner down the block who’s trying to lure away your staff when I’m the one who has taken all of the risk and putting all of the energy and they want to rip the rewards. Well, fuck you!

That’s my feeling and maybe you could sleep at night but I’m not because you’re affecting my livelihood. And you know, I got children and I’m trying to take care of people and I’m trying to do things in an ethical way.

I know I could sleep at night knowing there’s not a single salon owner in my city that could say a single bad thing about me that I directly done. They’ll probably say all sorts of bad things about me if they’ve ever met me or maybe they’ve heard something bad about me. But there’s not a single person that I will have one direct interaction with me that they’ll say what’s negative or that I affected their business in a negative way because I just don’t get involved in those things and especially I’ve never have.

But now that I have school, I’m not interested in making enemies of people. I’ve got a friend of mine who owns a couple of salons and chair rentals salons. He’s doing big big booming business and he’s got one of my formers and maybe a couple of my formers, I’m not sure, and I don’t really care. But a hundred percent of this dude’s success comes from the misfortune of somebody else, right? Because when you own a big chair rental salon, all you care about is getting your chairs rented out.

Well, those people are coming from somewhere and they’re trying to bring their book with them. So not only is that company losing a stylist, they’re also losing their book because they’re expected to be bringing a book to a chair rental salon and I just, I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.

And it’s my, the road that I take is probably a much slower road and I know businesses war and all those things and I’ve read plenty of business books where it’s, you know, there’s a really great one called “The Forty-Eight Loss of Power” which is basically it’s really self-serving and do things for yourself and screw everybody else. And I just, I’m not really interested being that way.

As an owner or as a person, I just kind of want to do my own thing and march my own drummer and which is also why I’m fearless with saying this thing because it’s kind cool because I’m in a position of where basically every product company wants to do business with me and if I say something and we’ll talk about Luxa Beauty later on. If I say something bad about the company that I currently buy color from, it’s like I got four more companies that are trying to out beat each other to give me a cheaper discount you know of what’s other salons pay. So I’m not too worried, I can afford to be a little fearless now with what I say.

A.Presotto:    Most definitely. I find that as well.  I have one company that supplies me and another company remember wanting me and it’s like well neither of them really impress me but I am happy with where I am. And it’s good to have that there. It gives you a sense of security not being tied up to a company.

M.Levine:    Yes. You know this because you and I have been talking for years about this.

A.Presotto:    Since the beginning maybe which was 2005 2006.

M.Levine:    Yes. Talking about product and stuff like that. Because I was a big Aveda guy and Aveda threaten to sue me a couple of times. Aveda did some silliness to me. And I probably was involved in it as well. I actually saw the Canadian distributor of Aveda one day.

And I did say to them, I’m so not one hundred percent sure what I did wrong but I did actually find them and I apologize for whatever I did to cause my end of the breakdown of our relationship because there’s two sides for everything.

Anyways, when I saw what Aveda was doing as a brand, the first thing I did was I start my own product company. I said I don’t want to deal with a bunch of sales rep trying to get my business. So we started our own products company.

I think we are on our third different name of that product. But it started to become something and we actually move a fair amount to get it in our salon and now it’s in my schools which is kind of neat because that’s all my students get to work with is my product. And it’s kind of cool because I’m kind of writing my own ticket maybe one day salons will carry my brand.

A.Presotto:    That’s fantastic. I’ve been along as you developed your products. Currently, your current product company name is ‘Product’ which I think is absolute brlliant.

M.Levine:    Well thank you.

A.Presotto:    When you first launched it, I was discussing with my brother whose stylist as well. And we just loved the name. We thought it was a sheer genius.

M.Levine:    Yes, productforhair.com.

A.Presotto:    I’ll put a link to that into the show notes as well so that anybody within the area can get in touched with you about that.

Now, something really interesting has happening these past few days in the hair industry. That’s Luxa Beauty. What are your thoughts on it Michael?

M.Levine:    I truly don’t care. Were you behind the chair way back when we all kind of kicked off?

A.Presotto:    No, I came along just after that.

M.Levine:    Okay, Behind the Chair used to actually have a really active forum. For anybody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about behindthechair.com. Before they were corporate shells and before their forum was so heavily moderated, it used to be a hot bed of awesome activity. It is very much like hair brand is and hair brand is fantastic. It was kind of free for all.

There was some amazing arguments. You can still go back in the back log and read a lot of all those old debates. I was probably the loudest, probably the obnoxious people on there. A bunch of us got kicked off for same things eventually. I’m pretty sure Russell got kicked off.

Because as Behind the Chair became more about advertising dollars, they didn’t want people bad mouthing. Even back then and this is probably over 10 years ago, I’ve been calling the diversion thing a lie right from the beginning.

So I’ve never believed in diversion in any way I think it’s absolute bull shit. The only thing believed in diversion is there’s only two companies I believed actually are diverted. That’s Aveda and Bundle and Bumble. The only reason I believe those guys are because I’ve been on the receiving end of their distribution. It’s extremely tight.

But anybody who sold product in a showroom kind of warehouse sort of thing. You can’t tell me that that product is, that they truly care about diversion. They wouldn’t sell it the way that they do. Even if it’s being diverted, that’s certainly not trying to tape things up because my feeling is they just think sales are sales.

This Luxa Beauty comes along and for those who don’t know, it’s a front for BSG which is Beauty Systems Group in North America. Are they out of your way too?

A.Presotto:    No, they’re not.

M.Levine:    Okay, well, these guys are incredibly powerful. As I recall, I’m not even sure were they going to be Regis or Regis was going to buy them, something like that.

A.Presotto:    Something like that, yes.

M.Levine:    There’s a lot of money here. These guys have distribution rights in North America for most, gosh, I would say all of the major brands, certainly all the brands that are owned by drugstore brands.

One drug store brand started buying up professional hair care that’s when the diversion story stopped holding any water because it’s kind of hard to imagine that Procter and Gamble or L’Oreal or Estee Lauder or Shiseido truly care about where their product is being sold. It’s kind of hard to imagine that they would.

A.Presotto:    As long as it’s being sold.

M.Levine:    As long as it’s being sold because somebody like Procter and Gamble that they’re so diverse. Probably 98% of their business is coming through drug stores anyways and certainly far exceeding professional hair care. It’d be hard to imagine that they would really care if they increase their sales by selling to drug stores whether they’re selling so much product anyways. I just don’t buy it.

So, I wrote a thing today on Facebook. I write too much. I should probably do more things but I write too much. I like writing. I think what ended up happening, the way this whole thing started was there probably was a legitimate degree of diversion 20 years ago or 15 years ago.

When Aveda got sold to Estee Lauder and then Aveda started opening their own lifestyle stores where now all of a sudden it’s the first publicized thing where selling professional product outside of the salon which is hairdressers always gone about. It’s got to be sold on a salon.

Aveda was the first one to sort of change that. I think Aveda really quickly realized, “Hey you know what there’s a little bit of resistant. People are upset we’ve closed a few accounts and lost few accounts but ultimately didn’t hurt our bottom line. We’re selling more product through our store.”

And because the stores are owned by the distributors or by corporate Aveda, they’re cutting out the middle man. So they’re selling it at retail pricing but they’re not purchasing it for wholesale the way a salon is. They should be making a lot more money than a salon makes on that same product. So then Aveda did this and Bumble does it.  Obviously Bumble is an Estee Lauder company as well. Bumble does this as well by going into Sephora. They buy past salon as well.

I think that these other guys who are all owned by Procter and Gamble and Shiseido and L’Oreal are like, “Hey wait a minute. We don’t even have to lie about this anymore because the ship hairdressers are not actually going to do anything about this.” Aveda sales haven’t been hurt. Bumble sales hasn’t been hurt.

They’ve seen that there is no downside to doing this. They can reach the market that they want. The hairdressers aren’t going to do anything about it. So, that’s kind of where I think this has come about.

Now, for me I don’t care. I use Wella Color. I like Wella color. I’m at a belief that it’s the hairdressers that make the product. As a hairdresser, I could go into the grocery store and purchase boxes of colors and probably get pretty good results out of what I get them from the grocery stores. I don’t really believe that professional hair color is all that different.

I think they’re all of in the same universe. We did business with who we choose to do business with. I would say there are a lot of people who are terrified of using different color line because they’ve not been really educated to trust their own abilities as a hairdresser. That’s really what I a lot of these companies want. They want you to think that you can’t live without Gold Well color. You can’t live without this which is insane to me.

A.Presotto:    I think that’s tremendously true. I feel the same way. I can get the same results with whatever I want, maybe not quite as good.

M.Levine:    You have to learn with experience about a certain shade.

A.Presotto:    Butt the end of the day, I think it’s soap is soap. If I go and start telling my clients like the girl on Facebook who washes her hair with baking soda and that was the greatest thing. My clients would probably adapt that.

    If I didn’t tell them [00:50:04] moment if next I decide to become [00:50:07] Salon. That Lance uses that product, they would buy that.

And at the end of the day, no matter how many of these companies open up online and sell, I really don’t think it makes a big difference to the majority of salons because I think majority of salons are poor retailers. They talk tie much of their education and belief into the company. And the salons that are good retailers that it might hurt or we smile enough to move on to something else.

M.Levine:    I would totally agree. To be honest, I don’t think any of those brands [00:50:41] have been doing some good things lately. Is Paul Mitchell on there? I didn’t see them actually.

A.Presotto:    I don’t know. I just got my passport today so I have to go and have a look. But I got a feeling they might be.

M.Levine:    Yes, I guess anything that BSG distribute. Yes, because I don’t carry any of those brands. Yes, I do use Wella color but I’m assuming they’re not going to be selling Wella color. But what my prediction is that they’re going to play everything above board and do exactly what they say they’re going to do for the first few months. Maybe the first six months. And then we’re going to start to see sales happening.

This is my feeling that all of a sudden the pricing between wholesale and retail in that line is going to start to blur. I think they’ll ending up doing some clearance sales and things like that. I fully expect that consumers will be able to start buying certain things.

Not everything but there will be enough sorts of things that are on discount. That they’ll be able to buy things that at more or less wholesale pricing based on sales and things like that.

Then the other thing we all know, every one of our clients has hairdressers that knows somebody who used to be a hairdresser that maintains a hairdressing license so they can buy wholesale product.

A.Presotto:    Exactly.

M.Levine:    Those people will all get, “Do you want my password?” This is going to happen. There is really going to be very, very little control here and I don’t think the companies care to be honest. Because they know that they’re going to sell more products.

Somebody had written a post on Facebook where they had said something like, “We need to wise up because salons aren’t retail well enough and salons are only accounting for 20% of retail sales.”

If these companies are finding retail sales outside the salon well that’s where the problem is in the first place. They’re not supposed to be looking for retail sales outside the salon. These are supposed to be salon retail products as far as for the consumer.

If they’re saying, “We’re getting 80% of, we’re only selling 20 percent of products through salons,” it’s like well that’s not the salon’s problem that you have gone outside of the salon. And then found that the grass is greener over there. Well, don’t expect the hairdressers to support you through this.

I really hope that salons will wise up and get behind products that are not owned by these big companies. I don’t want to bad mouth the big companies, hey you know what, they see where money is to be made so they get into it of course. Why not?

I would never fault those guys for doing it. But the hairdressers that believe once a product has been sold to one of these companies, it’s the beginning of the end as far as being a salon only product. We’ve now seen it. The proof is there.

If I was looking to carrying a brand and I didn’t find that productforhair.com appeal to me then I would probably be looking at like at Kevin Murphy or Davines or something.

Also understand, when those guys sell which they probably will at some point, be ready to jump shift. I really, really struggle with the idea of getting clients hooked on something though. We carry Oribe in our salon and we carry our own brand. I really, really struggle. I’ll be dropping Oribe at some point I’m sure very, very soon because I use a product company as means to an end. I don’t want to get my clients to hook on something because I know I’m going to drop it at some point.

I don’t know. I would recommend people do their own brand actually. That’s what I would do.

A.Presotto:    I think what hairdressers tend to forget is that the business they’re in is hair and it’s skills and services we offer. And if you tie your branding to a company, at some way along the line. You’re going to be very disappointed.

M.Levine:    Absolutely.

A.Presotto:    If you tie your branding to yourself, you’ve got nobody to disappoint you but you.

M.Levine:    That’s true. I think if I was. I really do like the Aveda model. And it’s weird because I have a love-hate relationship with them. But if I was to tie my brand to something, it would probably be Aveda again.

And mostly because I think first of all, Aveda’s salon tend to do good numbers and if you just kind of do whatever they tell you to do you’ll be okay. If you’re not overly entrepreneurial yourself and you’re okay with, “Yes I want to own a salon but I don’t want to do too much thinking for myself.” That type of model is probably a really good one as well.

I still do kind of, I don’t know very often, “I think gosh I think I’m going to get Aveda salon again one day.” Who knows? My wife likes using Aveda. So, we’ll see.

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