Scissors Make Cents: Business, Ethics & Empowerment Essentials for Running a Hair Salon that Thrives

By Kelly Cahen

Choose to be the person, the small business owner, and the professional you want to be, putting your best out into the world and expecting nothing but the best back. Is this entitlement? Hell no. It's grit. It's hustling. It's working hard with a dedicated focus on systems, strategy, and your life goals. You can have goals, or you can achieve them. What are you going to do with yours?

 

Salon owner and award-winning stylist Kelly Cahen is at the top of her game, and in Scissors Make Cents, she shares the behind the chair secrets she wishes she had known at the start. Scissors Make Cents: Business, Ethics & Empowerment Essentials for Running a Hair Salon that Thrives is a hands-on, detail-oriented guide to what it takes not only to run a hair salon business with integrity and joy, but to find great success in doing so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Davro Press
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781734452471

Kelly Cahen

Kelly Cahen has been recognized both locally and nationally as a powerhouse hairstylist and business owner. Her work has included professional athletes, models, and television stars, and her Richmond, Virginia salon, 1213 Hair Studio, is well-known for its impeccable customer service, clean modern design, and dynamically talented team. Her travels through Europe at the London and Ireland Wella Institutes improved her skills, allowing her to push the boundaries of hair, and in 2012, Kelly was named a “Master of Beauty” by the Empire Beauty System and Nick Arrojo. With a specialty in multi-dimensional color, hair extensions, and small business coaching for salon owners, Kelly has a vision for individualizing your look and your entrepreneurial pursuits with an impeccable attention to detail.

Book preview

Introduction

When my salon, 1213 Hair Studio, first opened in 2009, I wanted a business that combined everything I loved from all my previous experiences into a place where I myself would want to work—all while excluding the things that I didn’t like. I loved a laid-back, neighborhood vibe, but it needed to be matched with the amazing customer service and professionalism of a spa-like experience. And I wanted my clients to feel known and seen, not like transactions, customer in, customer out, like some business-focused salons. I was a busy stylist with my own clientele and was incredibly successful on my own. Add in my love for crunching numbers and solving problems, and running my own salon seemed so obvious. Where could I go wrong?

I had zero business sense but was going to figure it out as I went. No problem, right? I had four chairs total, one for me and three ready to staff. My goal was to simply hire stylists who were exactly like my vision of myself. They needed to be hard workers, genuine, passionate about their craft, and work with the highest amount of integrity. In my head, I would never have to enforce rules because I was going to hire people who thought just like I did.

Sure, these days, my team inspires me every day, and the business is a well-oiled system even when I’m not on-site at my Richmond, Virginia salon. When I travel to teach a training class or work a destination wedding, a bridal magazine photoshoot, or a national beauty pageant, I know all is largely well. But early on, there were checkpoints—employees who took advantage of my hands-off approach, staff who called me out for being unfair with enforcing requirements, and amazing stylists who left because what I claimed as my vision wasn’t actually what was happening day to day. There were nights of absolute exhaustion from trying to manage every little thing imperfectly. I tried to always wear a brave, confident face but at times felt utterly devastated by the time I crawled into bed. But that brief stint of survival mode turned into self-awareness and growth mode, where I knew that not only I could do this but that I could do this incredibly well if I just figured out the right answers for my business.

Not every day was a bad day, and not every employee was a bad employee. Some had both good and bad qualities, but you know what? I learned that about myself too. No matter what was thrown at me, I always looked ahead for what was considered more—next steps, growth opportunities, and new tricks to my balancing act.

In 2011, desperate for some inspiration and motivation, I traveled to New York for a class with celebrity hairstylist Nick Arrojo. During that class, as he spoke about himself and his journey, there were so many parts that reminded me of myself. In front of me was a very smart hairstylist who once had a dream, very little money, and a lot of passion. He started his salon with the exact same budget I did and had built a multi-million-dollar empire as well as a household name from his time on the TV show What Not to Wear. When we broke for lunch, I walked over to a high-end paper store and bought the best card my money could buy. I wrote to him exactly how much hearing his story impacted me and how badly I needed that inspiration to go home and continue fighting for my dream. I let him know that I would be entering the contest he mentioned, Empire Beauty School’s Master of Beauty competition, and that he should look for my name.

I finished that class feeling renewed. I walked up to him for a photo, handed him my card, and headed home thinking, What the heck did I just commit to? I had told him I was entering. Why had I done that? I didn’t want to actually try for this contest! I had every fear and self-doubt running through me and thought there would be no way in hell I would win. It was a year-long process. But that commitment I wrote in the card was the very reason I decided I had to do it. I told him I would, so I had to. No matter what, I always keep my word.

The prize was big, and I can remember having one of those If I won the lottery talks with my son about what we would do with the winnings. He, of course, just wanted to go to Harry Potter World in Florida. I won’t go into all the details of the contest, but I am happy to say that my son got to go to Harry Potter World. I beat out over five hundred stylists across the United States, and as part of my winnings, I got to attend all of the ARROJO brand education courses, which were captivating to me. I signed up to be an ambassador salon for his brand, meaning I retailed his product line and fully submerged myself into his salon culture and brand.

Of all of the classes I attended, though, the most impactful for me as a business owner was one called The Success Symposium. I was the driest sponge soaking up all the knowledge. The information was completely overwhelming and scary for a small business like mine—because while I had my four chairs, he had well over fifty—but while the knowledge in that class was superior to anything I had ever learned about running a business, it also had the potential to run me out of business if I had run home and applied it all at the same time. My business model was small. My team was small. Slightly different rules needed to apply.

I remember Nick saying, manage your past and grow your future. My systems were imperfect, and my stylists were used to a certain environment. Running back after that class like a tornado and changing everything everyone knew could have been a natural disaster! Rapid change would be jarring—especially if I didn’t consider my business’s specific needs and how we were and are unique.

That’s why I am writing this guide. I am a small business, but a very successful one. I have had year-over-year growth every single year and have expanded from four chairs to eight, doubling my employees. There are many, many business classes out there, often run by huge product corporations, and the information offered is often golden. Learn everything you can. Knowledge from those classes shaped my salon, but I’ve applied my own personal tweaks to focus every choice on my smaller business. This guide is intended to help the busy stylist with a dream to run a successful salon, taking away so many of the questions, doubts, and possible missteps of the process. It’s intended for the new salon owner who still has so many queries about the how and the what and the why. But more than anything else, this guide is a reminder that not only is there a way to be a great success, but there’s also a way to be lucrative while operating with the highest levels of integrity—and finding true happiness and self-fulfillment while doing it.

New salons go wrong when popular hairstylists have the sudden thought that their success as a stylist in someone else’s shop can easily translate to running their own business. Folks, easy is never a word that pops up when you’re starting your own business. Let’s make that clear from the start.

Yes, many stylists have the potential to run a successful salon, but if they have no business sense or self-awareness, they end up running a great idea into the ground because they don't know what they're doing. Train your hands. Train your brain. Train your eye. Be a good damn person, and you can run a great damn salon—with smooth processes and a meticulous attention to detail to make it all happen.

Systems

Iknew how to be professional and how to be an awesome stylist, so the rest of owning a business would come easily, right? Nope. I couldn’t have been more wrong with that one.

Very quickly on, I realized how idealistic and ignorant this mindset was. Pieces of it came through in every aspect of my business. People arrived to work at different times. We all wore different clothing. Some did a thorough consultation with every client, while others simply assumed their client wanted the same thing each visit. If the phone rang, the greeting was different depending on who answered the phone. Some people would stay until every towel was folded and surface wiped, and some would finish their last client and leave, not caring about what they left behind.

The more I addressed, the more issues I found. The good employees would start doing what the bad employees were doing because they were getting away with it. Determined to make the salon a happy place to work as well as the best salon for our clients, back then I worked morning and night, every single day. I would spend Sundays coming in to deep clean, so it was ready for the upcoming week. It was a cycle. Work hard with motivation, become exhausted, cry my eyes out, repeat. I became hostage to