LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Salon owner on her career journey

My name is Sam Devine. I'm 27 years old and I am a salon owner. My story of becoming a hairstylist was pretty interesting. I had been cutting hair all throughout high school and all of my friends were playing and just having a good time. I never actually thought about it as a career path because it was never brought up to me that it could be a career path.

I'm reading this article and I was just like, "You've got to be kidding me! Somebody is charging 800 for a haircut? That's crazy!" And she's doing every celebrity, and she was just incredible. So, I went home and I did a lot of research. I found out that she was not the only one and that, you know, she wasn't like a fluke situation. I decided right then and there, I was like, "I want to, that's what I want to do! Like, that's definitely what I want to do."

So, I'm at my salon in this small town in New Jersey and I'm talking with my stylist. I was like, "Hey, like, this is what I want to do. I have no idea where to begin." And she was like, "You have to go to Vidal Sassoon, hands down." When you become a hairstylist, you have a couple of different options. You can open your own salon, which some people choose to do. You can go and work as, depending on what state you work in because every state has different laws, but a lot of states allow booth renting, which means that you will come into a salon location. They'll have stations set up and you pay rent, essentially a monthly rent for a station.

Or you can work in a salon that's commission-based, which means you're part of a team, you're part of a culture, you're part of the entire business. When you're just starting out in the industry, you're gonna have to essentially earn your way for a little while. You're gonna have to prove yourself. If you would have asked me a month before I decided that this was what I was going to do, I would have told you you were crazy. I would never open a salon.

I knew absolutely nothing about running a business or how to start a business or anything related to business other than showing up at work, doing my clients, and you know, collecting a paycheck. So, for me, it was a lot. It was a lot of new learning. But luckily, I do love to read and I love to learn new things. Google was my best friend. I googled absolutely everything, endlessly looked up, absorbed anything I could read about opening a new business, whether it was a hair salon or not, just figuring out, you know, what that entailed.

My responsibilities on any given day are going to be getting to the salon, making sure that everything is ready to run smoothly. So, making sure that the schedule is correct, making sure that we're fully staffed, taking care of the bills, making sure that, you know, payroll is run and payroll is processed, and working on my own clients for a good portion of the day.