A look at the different perspectives on the challenges professionals face today and how we're working to tackle them.
Have you ever wondered why an industry, deemed essential and centered on meeting the basic hair care needs of our communities, faces such high attrition rates—nearly 80% within two years of entry? Why is it that so many clients still struggle to trust their personal service providers? And why is it that, despite our efforts, we keep, as a whole industry, circling back to the same questions generation after generation?
Why does our industry so often fall short of supporting those who dedicate their lives to it? Why is “retirement” in our field often defined by the phrase, “when my hands fall off”? Why is it acceptable for those who serve their communities with care and dedication to be worn down by a system that takes advantage of their compassion and desire to help others feel better?
Why are there still so many who can’t cut curly hair, or who struggle with short, layered styles? Why do salons remain segregated? Why are product companies held responsible for education, and why is quality education so hard to access—either too expensive or too irrelevant to be of real use? And why, after all this time, are newly graduated stylists still asking whether they should go into business for themselves right out of school?
These are questions we’ve been asking for generations, and while I see progress—salon owners who genuinely care about their staff, their clients, and their craft—our industry remains fragile. It takes grit and determination to make it past those first two years and into the next phase of your career.
I applaud those of you who have succeeded in building your own businesses, who create wealth for your teams and satisfaction for your guests. I see you, and I’m here to help shed some light on why our industry is still so vulnerable and what I believe are the best practices to heal the relationship between commerce and community through the personal service trade of a Wholehearted Community Hairdresser.
The New Salon Professionals
A Wholehearted Community Hairdresser is a professional committed to the tenacious pursuit of technical, personal, and professional excellence. These, in balance, should be the areas of focus for new metrics that together create a new generation of hair professionals—equipped to serve, savvy in microeconomics, and driven by a purpose to make a meaningful difference in their guests' lives through the thoughtful living of their own.
It's about intentionally igniting a desire in others to walk toward self-actualization, no matter how daunting that journey may be. This is my humble suggestion to the industry as the next standard for character development, skill refinement, and assessment.
I believe that if hair professionals had been positioned correctly from the beginning—understanding their true purpose and place in the community—we would see much lower attrition rates. And I wonder if many of those lost to the industry likely represented the missing voices needed to create a fortified, sustainable tapestry with the ability to hold us all together and develop compassionate relationships through active listening, storytelling and self-awareness– and in this way, strengthen the character and accountability of any community.
It isn’t about diversity. It is about inclusivity.
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If there is a 100% fair-skinned, silky-haired demographic with similar values and income levels, is diversity a need? No, but inclusivity is, because within that group there is diversity of something, and that will need its own space to breathe and be, and we are an industry that promises to hold space for those we care about. If one is running a salon, one would do well to care about those surrounding the location of their business because that is good business, and no matter one’s political affiliation or ACE score, one would do well to place their business within a community of people they vibe with so as to actually want to help them, otherwise face the local business and industry attrition rate: 3-5 years for business owners.
It’s heartbreaking how often I’ve heard prospective stylists say they couldn’t find a place where they fit in. Why is that? Why don’t they see inclusivity in representation or openness in perspective? Why is there such a glaring gap in education of what the consumer really wants, their unspoken needs and what is being actually taught at the licensing level? And why is no one talking about how we are going to create the missing curriculum and subsequently train the trainers who will begin the very big task of providing the universal mandatory skill updates for all professionals in order to bring the industry collectively forward?
I have been working on the solution to these and many more common industry problems for over a decade and in the last 3 years through the development of my onboarding process, The Salon Residency Program for training professionals how to see the people and serve the people from a place of love and concern. It provides them with close personal, professional and technical mentorship while they work to become the trusted advocates and artistic masters whose own personal journey informs their “why” behind the chair, because that is exactly how I became a successful solopreneur.
Who is responsible for the wellbeing of our industry?
Now is the time to show what it would look like when we position and prepare the human first before giving them the tools of the trade. They must be taught the new metrics that matter to the success of the individual, the organizations and the communities they serve.
If the fallout rate is like 76% or something in the first 2 years, how is this not the schools fault for not properly preparing them? When the schools realized the miss and it was called to attention, why was the shift toward independent contracting awareness and education to chase away the symptoms and profit on the unsuspecting instead of trying for solutions to the substandard, antiquated, off-target education and dead end career pathways available to todays professional recruit? Isn’t it their job to protect the entry to industry? That is why licensing standards exist in the first place, right? Maybe not and with the new legislation sweeping the nation and the drop in required hours to license, these organizations will be held accountable to very little.
A licensing school’s #1 goal must be to provide the learner with the most up to date industry information and best practices needed to develop the skills to surpass the statistics and add value to the community and local salons industry through their own unique career pathway...isn’t that the promise we were all given?
I could be wrong, but I ran the numbers for the schools and at the lowest assessed costs. Compared to running a mid-level salon, there is a significant profit margin in education. I get that it’s an investment and people are willing to pay for it, but what I am saying is that they possess the resources to fund the research if they ever chose to continually assess and manipulate their curriculums in alignment with the community needs. The schools cannot teach what they do not know. They won’t know what they won’t question.
Enough. It must stop, but how? How else can we figure out how to create consistently excellent service providers??
This industry is being held in place by old “beauty” school standards and the most essential service-haircutting- hasn’t been updated to make it user friendly and inclusive.
The brands in charge of education are largely international and do not always see things the same way and we need them to find the shift. We need to get on the same page. The manufacturers, the schools, and the stylists.
Feed the Need
We need a new Common Language. This common language must be inclusive, logical, generic and simple.
We need a new set of Best Business Practices prioritizing the personal, professional and technical development of the workforce.
We need new Collaborative Efforts with the Product Manufacturers to help them develop the training curriculums that accompany the products we need to do our jobs well and they need us to use and promote for their own benefit.
We need to close the loop and secure the industry for the future.
Bring the Future
I believe in a world where the product companies would harken back to the original efforts of the likes of Walker and Harper, who both created products for people in their community and based on their feedback, became scalable successes. The community helped inform the training, the business and the product development. All together, they were able to create generational wealth for women who were most often unemployed, servants or slaves. When they all worked together, everyone won. Though, still admittedly segregated and one note, the idea was correct.
We can build the industry anew. But it is no longer the product manufacturers who are able to translate the needs of the community. Due to the largeness of the world and multitude of lifestyles and communities, these international companies are finding their feedback from the whole and are limited in their ability to create specific, regional education. This work is for the local community hairdressers and salon owners to collect and escalate upwards through the regional educators to help inform, but often…there is no one there. And this is where we can insert ourselves...the Wholehearted Community Hairdresser. The one who knows what the people in their world want and need. This is the real work of the Wholehearted Hairdresser who is empowered as an industry and client advocate.
The Common Language Of Hair:
Note: I am hoping we can just start to be open to agreeing on some things...we'll start with big categories, I'll explain in detail later.)
Fact 1: We can teach every level of hair stylist the ability to be to perform basic hair and scalp maintenance for any combination of the main client variables…Hairiables?...No? Fine.
They Main Variables are:
The Texture
The Curl Presentation
The Head Shape
The Density
The Lifestyle
The Style Preference
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send any kind of client through the door in most any reputable salon and especially in urban centers and their suburbs, and not have a single person blink an eye at the amount or height or state of their hair when they seek help and advocacy. Instead, we often hear stories where they were met with fear, judgement and unrealistic and expensive beauty targets. It doesn’t matter what the client's hair looks like. You are a hairdresser, are you not? Your job is to figure it out and not it make it their fault their hair grew out of their heads that way.
Our school's job is to help figure out the bigger industry/product education collaboration and locally supported connections as well as the supply houses. They touch the manufacturers, they are ethically responsible for vetting the educational and ingredient content to support the local businesses and their communities.
That is why we need that common language. When we’re all speaking the same language, then the business owners can better collaborate and build supportive business solutions and networks with more depth then chatting and charcuterie boards, but that is not what is happening right now. Right now, it seems like the schools create bad employees, insufficient solopreneurs and all prospective 100K earning business owners (Except for, of course, the graduates with resources to invest, but even then…) most fail. That is the data.
The schools pump out one note service providers with a license and then God’s speed.. and then there is that atrocious industry attrition rate...
We can do better
We can prove that as business owners we know our community the best. I don’t need a product line to tell me how to do anything except to follow the manufacturer’s directions when necessary. Everything else we can figure out and then dive further into it. A school has a mighty power to transform a community and that is exactly what we intend to do as entire organization.
With the success of the Salon Residency Program to develop wholehearted hairdressers with the power to transform their own lives and the lives of others through the amazing world of beauty, we have extracted the most comprehensive, condensed and concise curriculum available to bring any stylist at any level up to speed with the best, modern, locally inspired, business practices to create Inclusive Salon Spaces that harness the power of their local community to craft an organic recruitment funnel that feeds the local talent into a local success within their local community. It’s an American Dream–A local American Dream.
In truth, I have been developing this way of being in this industry my whole career, but it took putting analytical, loving, feeling, brave, real world hair designers through it a dozen times and after 3 years of shuffling and rewriting the training program, we now have Contextual Salon Education™.
The Best Practices for Creating Wholehearted Hairdressers, Inclusive Salon Spaces and Generational Wealth. We are committed to continuously researching and developing every part of the salon industry to be able to speak from a place of deep understanding and recommend at large what is in the best interest of the workforce, for they hold the keys to happiness of the communities and isn’t that in everyone’s best interest?
This information belongs in the schools and each of us were due this positioning and perspective to be able to do what we came here to do, help people feel better about themselves through a personal wellness industry and your education most likely give you that regardless of the price tag. It did not give you what you needed to be of service to your local community and you have fought your way this far and I want you to know that I see you, that super tough journey and I am sorry they made it so unnecessarily tough. I want to offer you the apology this industry may never give to you and a promise to make it better by first trying to find a way to support those stylists who have been hardworking and neglected.
The Rise of the Wholehearted Hairdresser
Left Coast Salon is a pilot social enterprise ecosystem for the world as I believe it can be. Meaning, we are about to show the new business model and subsequent career pathways for hair professionals with accompanying brand generic personal, professional and technical education curricula to create Wholehearted Hairdressers in any community.
Becoming a Wholehearted Hairdresser isn’t for everyone. It requires a deep empathy for the unseen, unheard, and underserved. You can’t turn a blind eye to the disparities in representation within the personal wellness space. Our industry has a serious responsibility to show up in a way that prioritizes needs before creating the supply.
Inclusive hair isn’t about making every texture and curl pattern look like an Instagram photo. It’s about helping people care for and maintain their hair in a way that brings them closer to their truest outward representation. It’s not about achieving a pre-produced outcome dictated by product manufacturers using all their well-made products and techniques. It’s about seeing people as they are, helping them walk toward self-acceptance, and creating a customized look, routine, and vibe just for them. Sometimes that involves color adjustment, lots of products and lengthy style times, but it always involves basic haircuts and hair care.
For too long, clients have struggled to find advocates in the beauty and wellness space because we’ve been trained to do either outdated techniques that are not inclusive or what are shown by the major manufacturers shaped through marketing that has more to do with hitting a look rather than meeting each client's individual needs.
The only way to develop a Wholehearted Community Hairdresser professional training program is to go back to the beginning and start differently, start intentionally. Instead of letting social media or any other beauty standards dictate the looks and then pigeonholing hairdressers into mass-producing techniques to achieve those looks, we must start by actually looking directly at the people brave enough to sit in our chairs and ask, “How can I help you?” Then listen and become the detective to figure out why they are there, sitting in your chair because, if one cannot see them, one doesn't deserve the right to serve them.
Only when we take the time to build strong personal, professional and technical platforms—by bringing hair professionals through an updated education system that teaches these valuable skill sets will we begin to see a true shift in the overall client experience, workforce satisfaction and sustainability of our local industry.
At least I think so. What do you think?
Kristina
CEO and Founder of Left Coast Salon
Creator of Contextual Salon Education™
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