The following post was found by a friend on Craigslist in the “Jobs Wanted” section.
I’ll offer my rebuttals in red, but start out by saying that so much here is what is wrong with hairdressing schools and their sugar-coating of the industry.

In a weird way, I wish our salons were the way she describes. It reads like I run a very tight ship based on fear and intimidation, and there is something appealing about that (joking).

Finally, if you ask anyone, they will tell you my motto is to hire nice. We always hire nice. You can teach anyone to do hair but you can’t teach an asshole to be nice. The way she describes my staff is simply not possible unless you suck and they all decide they hate you immediately.

Enjoy!

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It was a Facebook status that was read by hundreds and hundreds about a person left unnamed, a jab thrown at a very famous owner and platform artist who apparently was not doing so well in his business lately. We all knew who the subject was.

I am very protective of the people that have the courage to try to build something great in any business but especially the hair business because I know how hard it is. There is an incredible amount of competition and talent fighting for the same market, and for someone to be able to rise above what the other 99% of salon owners are ever able to carve out for themselves is incredible in itself. It’s fucking tough out there.

I have just a few things I consider when I think about who I look up to in the hair business. The main one is if you built your business by hiring people with a book, a choice every salon owner makes at some point. For me, it’s important that someone is furthering the industry by developing talent. It’s a process of giving back while building culture and identity. And the salon owners that do this can look in the mirror and feel good about themselves for not hurting another business in any way than by competing for clients. Most salon owners are competing for established staff instead, and it’s often under-handed.

So back to the question. Yes, I would happily take advice from someone who was struggling, because they generally know what put them in that bad position and they have tried many different ideas on their path as an owner. I could fill a book with all the reasons I have struggled or the poor choices I have made. In fact, the things that worked would be a very short list. But for those of us who have a bit of scale, our poor choices get noticed more. And often we are gossiped about, whispered about and the industry rumour mill gleefully grinds on. Just like in the salon, dead people often bitch about busy people. And salon owners who lack courage bitch about those who do if they are in the same city.

Our business is nothing like any other, and it can’t be built by a theory or a mathematical equation. We are in the people business and nothing happens if you don’t have happy people pushing themselves to greater things every day. I’ve seen business “experts” talk about numbers and commissions that are so low they are laughable, that would never work in the real world. But the experts are usually people with nothing actually on the line every day in the business.

As I wrote earlier, this business is hard, maybe the hardest. Nothing is really learned from successes, it’s mostly learned from failures. And I’d much rather learn from people who have fallen and gotten back up than someone who has never truly stood up in the first place.

A short video of a mainstage presentation we did at the ABA last year.

Ted Gibson became my third big mentor as a salon owner, and he gave me a different perspective from Robert and Nick. I carried myself differently and I viewed my role as a hairstylist in a different way. And I began to command a much higher price for my services and I became even busier.

I am lucky to have spent time with these people as well as some of the most celebrated and famous stylists in the world and I take inspiration from too many to name here. But for the last several years I’ve been thinking more about the people who helped me in the beginning so I’m going to honour him here, and I will totally understand if you stop reading at this point.

I started working for a company called Axis in Vancouver in 1995, owned by a man named Foster Eastman. When I got there the company was in full swing with 2 large, beautiful and busy locations. The team of around 35 was young, cool and skilled and it was the most fashionable salon in the city, where stylists would often trying to outdress each other.

I didn’t see much of Foster as he tended to spend most of his time at a different location, still doing a couple of days a week on the floor. The manager and Artistic Director was a woman named Gina Derry. She was charismatic and a fantastic haircutter. I was instantly drawn to her. There was also an amazing team at the top of this company and I learned from many of them, including an incredible stylist with impeccable taste name Mo Mukhtar. He was kind of an asshole at times ( to be fair, I was a bit of an idiot back then) but I watched his worked and always strived to figure out why his work was incredible while most others was only great.

But it was Gina who taught me how to cut hair and who I wanted to be around and who I would do anything for. Once, at her request, I tied her shoe for her while she was foiling. Once I dropped her car off to be detailed. She was one of those people who you wanted to be in her good graces.

But I never saw much of Foster, and when I did, he was often short with me and I didn’t think he liked me much. I know I didn’t really like him.

In 1997 quite a few stylists including most of the education and creative team started to leave Axis, which now had 3 locations, and Gina was moving to Minneapolis to work full time for Aveda. Axis, like many larger salons, had experienced it’s share of staff turnover and a lot of talented people had left over the years, but this time it was different in that it was 3 of the 5 core people in the company. And there is a weird thing that sometimes happens when people leave a salon; they try to burn it down. So when those key people left a lot of other people left with them. Foster was not the best person to be around at the time.

Back then I just thought he was being a huge asshole, but I understood things later once I experienced what it feels like to be an owner and feel like your entire world is crumbling. When people you trusted and were nothing but good to for some reason try to hurt you. My own experiences have been nowhere near as dramatic and awful as what they were at Axis at the time, but I am now able to at least empathize.

I left the salon for different reasons in 1998 and opened my first salon with my soon-to-be wife Liz and I started to learn from her. I was an arrogant asshole, the typical rockstar stylist while Liz was much more caring and had deeper relationships with her clientele. She wasn’t going to marry me unless I evolved so she taught me about being nice and it might have been my most important life lesson. I’m still an asshole but much less so. I hope.

For the first year of salon ownership, my ego and lack of perspective had me looking back at my time with Axis and Foster with a less than positive opinion. And then we started hiring and training staff and I found myself trying to build the same thing I had just left.

At the time, I had viewed Gina as my biggest mentor, and I still do to a degree, but it finally occurred to me that Foster was the one who had hired her and empowered her to succeed in the role. I loved the culture of that salon and the fact that we were rebels, all unlicensed and not caring about what other salons were doing and I realized that came from the top. I loved the salons themselves, they were stunning. But all I saw was the result of a man’s hard work and dedication over the years, I didn’t see the struggle and the work he put in to get to owning the salons I was working in so I didn’t appreciate it at the time. But now I was able to see how special a company Foster had created and the work he had put in.

Liz and I ended up opening 3 salons and I think it’s because Axis had 3 salons. Foster trail-blazed the concept of an accelerated academy system and paved the way for me and others to do the same. When he started his product company, it told me that I could survive without a relationship with a major brand, and we did to much success with Product. Everything I have accomplished was because he took a chance on me and gave me my start. He trained me by hiring and training other people to train me. He put me on stages, which put me in a position to be recruited by Aveda. Which then put me in a position for a lot of other good things to happen.

Foster is a true original and was my biggest inspiration and mentor, it just took me a while to figure it out. I’ve had a couple of conversations with him over the years, and I think maybe he is cool with me. And I like to think that maybe he’s a little proud. We all want our “parents” to be proud of us.

Sometimes our reality is tainted by emotion and our inability to empathize. I had to walk in a man’s shoes to understand how incredible he was and the amazing impact he has had on an entire city of hairdressers and salon owners. They say you have to go away in order to be appreciated, I myself get a lot of love in the USA and not as much at home, so I think it’s important that we honour the people who took us in when we were nothing and had nothing to offer but maybe a bit of potential. The people who put us on the path and allowed us to see possibilities we maybe hadn’t considered. And if you haven’t, maybe go find that person and thank them.

Here is my latest video, seen on American Salon magazine.
I truly believe pre-booking is everything. But you can’t ask for a pre-book or anything else until you are providing a great service and doing great hair.

Enjoy!

My latest video blog for American Salon Magazine!

The majority of salon owners realize that there is no value to their salon when they go to sell their business.
If you create an exit strategy well in advance you may actually make some money, and your business will improve even if you don’t ever sell it.

http://www.americansalon.com/better-business/michael-levine-exit-strategy

My good friend Russel Mayes contacted me a few months ago to see if I would present at a hair show he was putting on called HairPooloza. One of his employees, Nick Huynh was walking his broken down motorcycle on the side of the road in Orange County when he was struck by a drunk driver, who then ran. It sent him 25 feet through the air. He had just taken off his helmet.

This weekend, my wife and business partner Liz Abreu and I flew down for the event to benefit Nick. Some of the biggest names in the industry had agreed to perform on stage, and some equally big names sat in the audience and watched. I was surrounded by amazing, giving hairstylists and had a temporary break from the shitty side of salon ownership I have to deal with from time to time. I was back home for about 14 hours before being covered in it. Again.

I get a call this morning from my operations manager stating that an employee had quit without notice. She said she was not into hairdressing anymore, didn’t have a job to go to and just wanted a break. She was a keyholder and a person in a position of trust so we would need to find someone else to fill that role.

It was about 2 hours before I realized I had a new blocker in instagram and an opening for friends on Facebook. Sure enough this now former stylist was no longer my friend or follower. And she had listed a new salon as her place of employment, about 1200 yards away. A chair rental salon.

Now I have my opinions on most chair rental salon owners, I’ve written about it in another blog post so I won’t rehash it here. And I also understand why someone would want to go into rental. Most people didn’t get into hair to work a 9-5 with two 15 minute coffee breaks and a 30 minute lunch. And most successful stylists will have a degree of entrepreneurial spirit, in that their success is based on their hard work and hustle. A good employee-based salon will try to bridge the gap and allow their busier stylists some freedom while helping them to achieve more success, usually more than they would have on their own. It’s why high-end commission stylists usually charge more than high-end rental stylists.

And then there are the people who simply don’t want to be a part of a team or be told when to come to work or how to dress or behave while at work. And I understand these people too. These ones are much harder to appeal to as an owner. They will usually dig deep and tolerate the ownership and the salon rules just long enough to build a big enough clientele so that they can leave, and attempt to take that clientele with them to the new salon.

This post is for salon clients and maybe for commission or TBP stylists in the hope that maybe they will understand the unending bullshit that a salon owner goes through.  And it’s also for those salon owners, because each one of them will read this and nod their heads. And a few will probably write me to write me thanking me for writing down exactly how they feel.

When a stylist leaves the salon ethically, they give the owner 2 weeks notice and the owner will either decide to keep them on for their notice or pay them out their severance and have the person leave. I tend to pay out the severance because in order to have someone work out their notice, they would not be able to solicit their clients, which puts awkward pressure on everyone. If a stylist is going to another salon, it’s best to simply let them go and wish them luck. The arrangement we have with our staff is that we, the salon get first contact with the clients. We can do this because we never hire anyone with a clientele.

We will inform the client that their stylist has left and offer another stylist. If the client accepts, then great, we’ve retained them. If the client asks where the stylist has gone, we gladly tell them. This scenario has happened exactly once in 18 years of ownership. And we retained a fair number of those clients.

The usual way someone quits the salon is not so nice and polite. The first thing anyone will tell you if you are going to leave a salon is that you have to get your client list. Now there are lots of ways to do this, and of course social media sure helps. But often these people will directly raid the salon’s database. And it’s really easy if you have a key to the salon. Just show up 15 minutes before everyone every day for a little while and chip away at your list. Enter them in your phone while you are at the desk and before long you have your entire list.

Now once a stylist has that list, the gloves tend to come off. The stylist will reach out to their entire clientele, usually while still an employee of the salon. And very often they will have primed their clients while in the salon, badmouthing the salon here and there and making the clients believe the owner is an asshole or that the place is falling apart or that everyone is unhappy. It’s never positive, because you have to try to get the client to your side so the transition is easier for the stylist.

This is why in a perfect world, the salon should get first contact. The salon won’t badmouth an employee. It makes the salon look bad and it’s not professional. The salon will make an offer and be honest and upfront to let the client make an unbiased and informed decision. The stylist will almost never do this.

But beyond this, the really shitty part of the situation is that an owner will have spent as much as the last month being lied to by the stylist, while the only real asset the salon has is being stolen. Smiling to your face while stealing from you. Understand that a salon has almost no value outside of the client list. A salon without a client list is simply a room full of used furniture, and the proof of this is shown by how few salon owners have sold their salons for even the value of that furniture. Most owners have to simply close up their salons and walk away. In fact I’ve just done a video blog for American Salon Online on this exact subject. It should be out soon.

Now the stylist will say that clients aren’t the salon’s property and the clients have the right to make whatever choice they want. And that is true, which is why my salons have this conversation in an ethical and honest way. But ask that same stylist if they took that information openly in front of the salons owners and managers. They didn’t and they never do. That simple act of secrecy speaks to their awareness of the crime. And after stealing from you they will say it was nothing personal.

Even worse, it is all but guaranteed that one or two people in the salon knew that this was going on. Maybe even several. People on your staff allowing co-workers to steal from their place of employment, making their own salon weaker and hurting their own reputations. And this is extremely common. If it was a bank, the thief would be doing it in secret. If it was a store, the merchandise would be stolen carefully and the thief would be too fearful to let a co-worker know. But for some reason it seems to be different in the salon. Someone always knows something and chooses to not let the owner know.

Full disclosure, I left a salon once in a disgraceful way. I’m ashamed of what I did. I was an asshole and anything that happens to me as an owner is probably karmically deserved. But I had also once told this owner about staff that were conspiring and instead of treating me anonymously he outed me to my co-workers and to this day there are still people who won’t speak to me. We were also not allowed to disclose where former staff had went so he couldn’t be trusted to be honest with clients. There are a lot of salon owners like this, and you sometimes have to do shitty things in these situations. But I understand his behaviours now that I’m an owner and I do my best to learn from them.

I chose to own an employee salon because I want things done a certain way and I myself have high standards of service. I’m old fashioned and I like a degree of formality to service even if we are covered in tattoos and play loud music.

I chose to develop my own talent because I wanted my team to have common knowledge and work their way up through my company. No egos because nobody is above cleaning the bathroom.

I chose not to hire from the competition because I want to be able to hold my head high knowing I never hurt another business by luring their staff.

My choices, and I will accept everything that goes along with them. But people like me are a dying breed, maybe even a dinosaur in concept. I’ve watched several salons like mine either go rental or downsize and stop hiring new talent. There used to be lots of salons to apprentice with, now there are a lot less. And most of them either left the business with nothing after all their years of hard work. If I sound like I’m being melodramatic, I apologize. But I wanted to shed some light on what we go through as salon owners, how and why an incredible experience that will go down as a career highlight like HairPooloza is completely smothered by something as small as someone quitting. It’s because it’s much bigger than just someone quitting. If it was just that, salon owners would sleep better. It’s happened to me 150 times and it still feels exactly the same each time. People say I take things too personally, and I shouldn’t. I hope you can have some perspective as to why we take it personally.

Oh, and my new friend Nick in Orange County? He’s permanently lost the use of his arm. The driver was caught because the VIN from inside the door was actually embedded in Nicks clothing. We raised a nice amount of money to help fund training for a new career. But more importantly, we all got together to show that we care about each other.

Retail is not about selling.

I hope you like this video. Share with your friends if you do please!

Have a great day!

A couple of months ago my friend Russel Mayes contacted me and asked me if I wanted to appear at a hair show/ benefit he was putting on for a hairdresser friend of his named Nick Huynh, who was hit by a drunk driver and lost the use of his arm. Nick apparently didn’t have a lot of support elsewhere to get started on a new career and Russel wanted to help him with a bit of money and a show of moral support from the hair industry.

Russel is a good friend and I like to hang out with him whenever I can so of course I agreed. Now I’m an OK stylist but my area is more in coaching now, but given the people he had lined up for this thing it was an honour to stand on the same stage with them.

Here is a lineup of the talent that has volunteered their time, and a brief bio that doesn’t do any of them justice.

Allison Daza– This lady is simply a brilliant colourist. She is an educator with Davines and one of the most creative yet tasteful colourists as well as lovely people I have met in the industry.

Andrew Does Hair– Highly respected men’s specialist and industry educator, Andrew has a massive cult-like following in social media because he works hard, produces great imagery and video and keeps it very real.

Brig Van Osten– Brig came in to fame as the winner of the strongest season of Shear Genius. Brig is a fearless and gifted artist as well as a super cool person with infectious energy.

Douglas McCoy– Old school Bumble guy now working closely with R+Co. A video maker and photographer as well, his House of Pop salon was famous before the doors even opened. That’s how cool Douglas is.

Gerard Scarpaci– Brilliant cutter and educator originally with Sassoons, then JPMS, then Aveda and the long-time education director at Arrojo in New York. Oh yeah, also the co-owner of Hairbrained.

Michael Levine– Stylist, owner, writer photographer and educator. I run a large salon company and 2 academies with my wife.

Robert Cromeans– Robert has been kind of quiet for a while but is renowned for his hair shows and for helping to launch the careers of some of the industry’s most famous faces. The long-time creative director of Paul Mitchell, Robert has inspired an entire generation of stylists, myself included, to greater things.

Russel Mayes– Fantastic educator and one of the most flawless haircutters I have ever seen. Technical perfection and now a highly regarded hairdressing videographer

Wormatron– Badass barber from American Barbershop. I don’t know him personally but have followed his IG for a while and he is awesome.

This is going to be such a cool event, a once in a lifetime gathering of talent. You can still get tickets, which are ridiculously under-priced at $65 here:
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/hair-pooloza-a-benefit-for-nick-huynh-tickets-16606253752

One night only, Sunday July 19th from 6-9pm
Encore Theatre and Club
690 El Camino Real
Tustin CA 92780