Ep. 426 • Building Salon Republic: Eric Taylor's Story

[Music] Hey Hairgamer's, this is Donovan, your producer of the Hairgamer podcast, and we have a special episode today where we are turning the tables. We have Eric Taylor as a guest today, and the day that this episode is dropping is the 25th anniversary of Salano Public. Yes, how about that? I don't really like having the tables turned. Well, I like turning the tables. I don't like the tables turned on me. Yeah, well don't worry, I won't make the questions too difficult. Well, you know, I won't grill you too hard. But anyway, you are the editor, so now you're the host and the editor, you have you hold all the cards. Complete utter control. And you know, and this is, you know, this is kind of looking behind the curtain. This is my first time, you know, showing, I think showing my face probably on the YouTube side of it. So people get to see, I mean, if people follow Salano Public, they probably see me on the Instagram here there. But yes, this is the the mysterious Donovan that he references throughout the episodes. The list there's no Donovan, but they don't know all of Donovan. So it's nice that you're on here and they get to see your face. And before we go, before you get to turn the tables on me, I'd like the listeners to know that Donovan has a very special voice. Oh, I know it's one of those things that people don't know about Donovan. But you're, I mean, you are, were a professional singer, right? Yeah, yep, yep. I sang for, performed professionally for about seven years on cruise ships around the US doing a cappella. So yeah, that's why your voice is so silky. Well, you know, I've learned a few things over the years. So maybe you'll indulge us in just a quick tune before the end of the episode, just run or not there. We'll see what happens. Okay, so now you can turn the tables back. Great. Well, I want to start with just give us a brief history of you yourself, Eric Taylor. So people know a little bit more about you. Start with where you're from and your background, basically leading up to Salon Republic. What is Eric Taylor, pre-Salon Republic? Eric Taylor, pre-Salon Republic. I am from Dallas, Texas. My, my dad is first, first, first generation Italian from New York City. And my mom is kind of from the sticks and in the country side of Texas. And as poor as poor can get. And my, my dad also raised very, very, modestly. And he found his way to Dallas with this company that he was working 4,000 years ago and met my mom. And I popped out and I popped out as Eric DeJachamo because my dad, like I said, is Italian. So I was born Eric DeJachamo. DeJachamo is a very common Italian name. If you ever care to figure it out, you can, if you Google search DeJachamo, there's 5 trillion DeJachamos in Italy. And it's loosely translated to of James. D means of and Jachamo's like loosely James. So kind of like Jameson would be an actual, you know, translation maybe. But it's a very difficult name to live with in English speaking countries, English speaking cultures because it's, it's got a space in it, DI, space, capital G, I, A, so growing up. I had teachers call me Dewakamoli. I had, you know, the other kids called me some very, you know, derivations, ridiculous derivations of DeJachamo. I'm sure they're much worse than than Duquac-Amoly. Exactly. There was DeJachstrap. There was De This and De That. And so it's very difficult name to live with. And my, so my parents encouraged me strongly to change the name to something simpler between high school and college, which is kind of a natural inflection point in one's life. You know, you go off into a different kind of environment with different people. So it's easy to change your name then. And that's what I did. Taylor, where did it come from? You know, it was, I just kind of picked it out of a hat to tell you the truth. I mean, I wish I, I need to develop some story out of thin air. I should ask Chatt GBT to come out with a good story for me. There really isn't a very good story. I just thought that it, I liked the way it sounded and felt and wrote and looked and everything. And I chose it. So it's kind of my adopted last name. It's my legally, it's my real last name. And, you know, I exist in the world as Eric Taylor, you know, ever since 18 years old. I'm almost 50 now. And however, my pre 18 year old friends and networks, they still call me, they actually really leaned into calling me DiJockem, after I changed it, of course. So, so I'm still called the Jocstrap and still called the Wachemoli with a certain percentage of my friends. Yeah. So let's see, I'm from Dallas and I grew up in a household where both of my parents were pretty productive people. So my dad owned a real estate business, a very small real estate business. He's never had any employees. He always did everything himself solo. He had his office there in the house. And he, let's see, it is peak. He had five warehouses that he had bought. And he was running these warehouses himself. And very interestingly, you know, with all the benefit of hindsight, you know, being a business person now for the last many years. And I really credit him for recognizing his own limitations. He had his, his strengths were that he was pretty pragmatic. I think he had really good judgment. He knew what would work. He looked at a building here, a building there, and he chose the one that would work. And he was good at making it appealing so a tenant can come in. Oftentimes, his tenants were things like auto repair tenants or like a storage company that would store, you know, like boxes or something. It's very unsexy all of it, but very practical. And but his limitations were that he had very low tolerance for pressure or, you know, things that he didn't like. You know, he would get in these, these conflicts with the tenants. Let's say they stop paying rent or let's say they screwed up. They would damage the building and take advantage of things. And he would get very upset. And he he he lacked kind of that tolerance that's necessary when you're dealing with other humans who sometimes do things that piss you off and cost you money and cost you time in English. And so I think if he ever had an employee, he probably would have been a nightmare to work for. And so he had the self-awareness to his great credit to keep things relatively simple. And so he never hired anybody. And what that meant was that my brother and I growing up were his de facto free labor. And so he would have my brother and I doing whatever we would, you know, let's say a tenant and stiffed him and left, you know, a space and with a bunch of garbage in it. And he would send my brother and I over to the space or bring my brother and I to the space. And it was our job to clean out, you know, this large warehouse. And I thought that was going in a different direction that he was going to send you and your brother out to like, you know, collect like strong men. Go break some of the ankles or kneecaps. Well, he 100% would have done that if we were if we if he thought that we might be slightly capable of it. But given our given our youth and and in the diminutive physical stature, we wouldn't have been very good at it. So what we were good at it, you know, let's say 10 years old up to 16, 17 years old, we were good at sweeping a warehouse and cleaning up the garbage and doing all sorts of other things that were just necessary. And that was part of growing up. And, you know, I remember my parents, we had a yard and there was there were lots of hedges and everything and it was my brothers and I in my responsibility to to do the yard. And, you know, if there was a Saturday where my friends were going off and playing, it didn't matter that that I wanted to go do that. I had to trim the hedges and the hedgerow was really long and it would take me probably two days straight. And so, you know, I would spend the weekend doing hedges when all my friends didn't have to do shit like that. You know, they could go off and play. And so, you know, it's I don't want to give the impression that this was like a tremendous adversity because obviously you know, people deal with much more adverse things, but it was more adversity than my friends had. That's for sure. I definitely, you know, there was some character building in there because my parents didn't f-around with a lot of this stuff. It's like, I had to do it, it didn't matter. You know, Texas, it's 115 degrees, you know, during the day. And they didn't tell me when to do it. I just had to do it. So then I would complain at noon as I'm out there, you know, taking care of these things. And they would say like, well, if you don't like to do it in 115 degree heat, then wake up earlier, you know, it's that kind of thing, dummy. And so there was a lot of things like that that I grew up with that I think were a little different than the other kids that I went to school with. My parents did well enough to send me to school. That was, it was a private school. It was a Catholic school. My high school was all boys. We had a few suits and stuff. And there was discipline involved there, you know. You couldn't f-around. And if you have to round, your quality of life went south fast, you know. So it's like you just learned that it was not your best interest to f-around. So you might as well sit down and learn this calculus bullshit or else your life was going to go south fast, you know. Because nobody wants to learn that stuff. But you just, you figured out, you know. So my mom was also a highly productive person. She was born so poor. I don't even think they had any month, like zero money. Not even the little money, it's like zero money. It's like they killed their own food, kind of, you know, poor. Like my granddad, my mom's dad built their own house, like physically built it from start to finish. Foundation all the way up. There were gaps in the boards that make the walls. And so when the wind would blow at night and blow, it would blow right through the gaps in the walls. And there was, there was like, in some part, in one part of the house, she tells us there was a dirt floor. And they would, you know, they didn't have beds. And so they would sleep on the ground. And I think they eventually got a, one of those things, like a furnace, like a little fireplace, kind of contained thing. So that it wouldn't, you know, catch the house on fire and burn it. And so that was how poor she grew up. And so my mom was, my mom was no bullshit. Yeah. Like she has no patience for kind of the luxuries of modern life. You know, she's in her 80s now, right? So that gives you some context. But she has, she has no tolerance for any kind of complaining about anything that people complain about. No, excuse that you could come up with would compare to how she, how she was raised. So yeah, you didn't have a leg to stand on when it came to that. Nothing. Are you kidding me? No. She, so this was the environment that she was born in. And she had ambitions greater than those kind of around her. She went to a school with like eight people in it, you know, I mean, it's practically little house in the prairie stuff. You know, obviously not that long ago, but that was kind of the environment. Country sort of stuff in the, in the sticks in Texas. And my granddad was the kind of person who did everything himself. And, you know, he would go and buy cattle and, you know, like raise the cattle and then get them bigger and then try to sell them for more and like grow crops and stuff. So it's pretty little house in the prairie. So but she had greater ambitions. She, she wanted to go to a bigger city, which was Dallas. So she eventually got a desk job somewhere and then and that was horrible. And there was, you know, think, you know, like oftentimes employees weren't treated very well, especially women employees weren't treated very well back then. So she wanted to get a better job. She eventually became a flight attendant at Braniff for those old enough on listening to the pod. You might remember Braniff, that seems like a thousand years ago now. But so she wore those kind of poochie outfits, you know, in the fifties and sixties. And to become a flight attendant was kind of a big deal, especially from for somebody, you know, in the sticks because all of a sudden you're, you're getting paid to fly around the world. You're going overseas. You're going to Hawaii. You're going to these extremely exotic places that many people in the environment from the environment that my mom was from never expected to experience. And so she was able to kind of get herself, you know, raise herself to the level where she was having these experiences. And so she met my dad as he was traveling for work on a flight after a flight. And they settled in Dallas and then had my brother and I. So raising, getting raised in this household, oh, sorry. So my mom became an artist. So she, she stopped being a flight attendant because the hours were insane. You know, you'd be at a town for 10 days or whatever and then back home for like one day and then at a town for another week. So she stopped doing that. And she thought of something that she could do while raising my brother and I in the house. And she became an artist. She became an oil painter and her name is Francis Di Jocomo. She's, she has a presence online, although it's kind of a primitive presence online. But she's, she was rather successful. Still, still paints and sells her paintings for quite a bit of money. She's done a good number of portraits for famous people, you know, not necessarily paintings just of famous people, but famous people have commissioned her to paint them. A lot of, a lot of athletes, Jim Brown from the old days, Emmett Smith, Dallas Cowboy, Roger Stobock, Noyland Ryan is a famous baseball player. She got commissioned to paint a Warren Berger who was a Supreme Court justice. She painted the King of Mongolia and a number of people. She became a painter for some kind of big, I guess you would call it a patron, a patron family, some big money kind of families in the South who paid her to paint portraits of them. And she's painted a lot of landscapes and things like that. So rather successful, I mean, like, you know, to actually make money as an artist, like a, like that kind of an artist where you're painting like things that people don't have to buy. That's hard, you know. And I think she did that. She was able to do that primarily because of some of the things that I heard, you know, her talking about at dinner time, growing up, which are things like it matters, the subject matter that she paints is like she can't, she can't paint whatever she wants. You know, if she wants to actually sell the painting, she needs to paint something that people want to buy, you know, and it sounds very obvious. But many artists are, you know, they think that, you know, they should be able to just paint whatever, you know, comes into their inspiration and they, and that somebody should buy it. And they should have, she, they should be able to make money doing that. And my mom kind of balances practicality with the skill of the art and, and probably selling 20 paintings a year, you know, and these are, these are pretty expensive paintings. So, you know, I grew up learning these lessons on my dad, kind of that very unsexy reality of a warehouse of the warehouse business. And then the rather more exciting reality of the art business with all of its kind of artistry and creativity combined with kind of the pragmatic nature of it, you know, having to paint things that people actually want to buy. And I grew up thinking that I wanted to do something on my own too. My brother, who's four years older, had, I think, the same philosophy, although he and I are quite a bit different, he also wanted to do his own thing. So he became an architect. And that was kind of his way of combining the desire to do something creative with the desire to, and the expectation that one should be able to make a living doing this creative thing. And so when I graduated, I went to college, I was pretty athletic, you know, and by the way, I did pretty well in school. I, you know, was smart enough to kind of-- Would you major in? I majored well in high school, it was whatever, and then in college, it was business. So I was, I first started in marketing. And you know, in college, you can kind of start with. with one thing and then change it if you want. I started with marketing and through the first year of marketing classes, I was like, yeah, you know, this isn't that interesting to me. And then as I'm talking to the teachers, they're kind of outlining what life after college looks like for somebody who majored in marketing. And I'm like, I don't really like that idea very much. And it just seemed like a frickin life long grind kind of like like low paid and under appreciated and kind of that kind of a thing. And I was like, I don't think this is good. So I'm going to go over here to this business thing because I think it's more practical. And then I can kind of cram something creative into the practicality of business. And I think I'd learned already a lot about both, you know, a creative endeavor as well as a business endeavor just with my parents being around. But I did the whole business thing. So it was horrible. I hated school. I mean, I was good enough at it. I was fine. My grades were pretty good. But I hated it. And so there is a lot of tenacity that comes with, you know, hating something and doing it well. Yeah. So, but I was also, I had this major part of my life that was sports. And so, and before I got to college, my favorite sport was volleyball, but it wasn't terribly popular. I played for the state boys, Texas state boys team called, it was called Tejas. And so I was really good at volleyball. But the kind of the main sport that I was doing was baseball. And I was achieving some things in baseball. And so when it came to college time, my parents are like, you know, you should be able to get a scholarship in college for baseball. And I was like, okay, if you think so. And so they worked pretty hard to get me a scholarship. I went to Pepperdion in Malibu. I applied to schools all up and down the West Coast. I was tired of Texas weather. It was just so got awful. You know, I joke that there's two weeks per year where the weather is good in Texas. And it's like once in the spring and once in the fall. And that's still the truth. And by the way, like, you know, you wanna talk about global warming or not. It was 115 in the summertime, you know, in the mid 90s, just like it's 115 in the summertime now, you know, and so it was just horrible. And as a high schooler, I'm watching Baywatch. You know, David Hasselhoff is running down the beach with Pam Anderson. And I'm like, that's what I wanna do. You know, like F this ridiculously horrible, you know, too cold, too hot weather of Texas. And so my dream was to go to California. And so I applied to a bunch of schools up and down the coast in California. And the idea was to use baseball to get to, you know, to get the best situation in college. And eventually Pepperdine took me. And they actually had the best baseball team, which is kind of ironic. So a lot of the worst baseball teams didn't have any interest in me. So that just like, what does that tell you about life? You just gotta turn over a lot of stones, you know? And it's, I realized that my dad put a lot of work in behind the scenes of actually calling the coaches and stuff. And we would jump on the plane to go meet the baseball coaches when they were playing like local schools, like UT or something like that. We would fly down to Austin. And so eventually that worked. And I got a scholarship to Pepperdine to play baseball. And by the time I got there, though, oh, they just won the NCAA championship. So it was like kind of a big deal. Yeah, it was big deal. And so I got there. And by the time I got there, I had hurt myself. So senior year in high school, I was a pitcher and I developed a tendonitis issue in my rotator cuff and my right arm and right shoulder. And so it made it painful to actually do anything. So I got there and I was kind of a, I was like a loser recruit. I was like the worst. Oh no. You know, they spent money and effort on me to recruit me. But as is the nature of sports, sometimes you get hurt. And so I showed up and I was useless. And so I played for one year. I threw in three games, one inning per game. I did fine for each inning. But it would take me weeks to get my arm to the point where I could actually lift the arm above my head because the inflammation would come in and all that. So I spent the whole first year pretty much in physical therapy. And it was just like nobody, no freshmen in college, all of a sudden living on the beach, Pam Anderson and David Hasselhoff, just like right over there on the beach. And like I'm in physical therapy every day. Like that was not my idea of how to do it. So I quit and never looked back on athletics. I started surfing. But basically I just got really interested in making sure that I was going to find something that I really liked doing. And then making sure that after I graduated from college in Malibu, California, that my lifestyle wasn't going to plummet. Because lifestyle's pretty damn good in college when things are getting paid for. And I had this underlying anxiety of, oh shit, I'm going to graduate in two years. And what the hell am I going to do? And I was watching some of my older friends get out, get jobs, some of them like their jobs, some of them didn't like their jobs and stuff. So I became very interested in looking at different businesses. And I really wanted to start my own business. Well that leads me perfectly into my next question before the inception of Salano Public. Did you start or want to start any other businesses before Salano Public? So I looked at a whole bunch of different things. It's kind of like, before you get married to a girl or boy, you want to kick the tires on a few and figure out what's compatible and all that. And I think that was the case for businesses as well. I mean, I had that-- I knew I was going to be kind of dumb, 22 years old, coming out of college. You don't know anything. It's like everyone talks about hair school. How you don't know anything when you come out of hair school. It's kind of the same with college. You don't really know anything. They teach you a lot of theoretical things. But a lot of it is kind of difficult to really figure out where the value is in the real world. And all the soft skills that are necessary. But I looked at-- I don't remember a lot of the details. But I mean, the salon business was one of the businesses I was looking at. And the reason that I happened upon it was because I was pretty close to my barber. He was a hairstylist, really. But he had a few guy clients. And I was pretty close to him. I'd been going to him in Dallas for years. And he did my family. It's probably a typical family situation where he did my mom for years. And so my dad just, by default, went to him. And then the kids by default went to him. So I was going to him. And in the college years, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, all right, so there's 12 other people here in the salon. Like, how does this work? You have to-- I'm going to pay $50 for my haircut. Do you have to kick $25 to the salon or how does it work? And it was kind of a traditional booth rental salon. And I'm like, interesting. So you pay $250 a week to work here. And there's 12 other people. And there's the owner over there. She's sitting at the front desk. And it was a very typical setup. And I'd just gone to him for so many years that I just picked his brain for so long-- I mean, probably 10 years. From the time that I first started kind of being observant about what was going on in that salon. And it was nice that I was able to go to the same salon because I was able to see changes over time and all that. Hey, hair gamers. Are you a hairstylist, Barbara, or salon owner looking to level up? Associated hair professionals has you covered. For only $17 a month, a HP membership gives you all the business tools for success, including no nonsense liability insurance, career tools, exclusive discounts, and much more. Shaping hair is your passion. Growing your career is ours. Head to associatedhairprofessionals.com and join today for just $17 a month. And so-- So that was, and I generally liked the nature of the creativity of the hair industry, the people who are in the hair industry obviously are creative people. And I often kind of say that my nightmare would have been becoming like an insurance salesman. And then I have to apologize to any insurance salesman who would like to listen to our hair podcasts, which I assume there are none. But I just in case there might be one, I want to apologize to him. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. My nightmare was becoming an insurance salesman and doing something like excruciatingly boring that I would have no interest in. And the opposite of that and my mind was the salon business like, God, it's kind of fun. People are creative and cool. And, you know, they enjoy their clients and there's like this vanity aspect in a good way, not a bad way. You know, where people are made beautiful and there's like joy and satisfaction that comes from that. You know, they leave better and happier and more satisfied than when they came in. And, you know, how powerful is that? That's amazing. Like that the warehouse business doesn't have that, you know, the insurance business doesn't have that or whatever other kind of nondescript, you know, bullshit business jobs are out there. And so I had my eye on it probably from before I consciously thought about it. And then kind of fast forwarding to when I graduated from school, I was dating a girl in Dallas when I graduated. And I moved back in with my parents and her and so I started going around town looking at salons. And I was trying to do a trying to learn more, you know, because I didn't feel like I was I knew enough to open my own salon. So I started going around to salons and I would walk in and to just random salons. And of course the one that I had been going to for so many years, I'd gotten to know the owner and you know, I learned some there. And I would walk in other salons and be like, you know, just like the talk to the owner. And so a few of them were willing to sit down and talk to me. And most of them looked at me like I was insane. Like, why are you here? Why do you care? You know, are you going to ask me for money or something? And then my really the inflection point was when my girlfriend's hairstylist moved to one of the first studio based salons. And my girlfriend, her name is Emily. Emily went and got her hair done by her hairstylist in her private studio for the first time. And Emily, you know, left the she had a great time. She left the salon. She was, she had graduated and was living at her parents' house, which was right down the street from my parents' house, which is very, very convenient and cheap. And she would get on the landline because we're talking about 1998. And she would call me and I would say, and she would, and she told me about this, you know, new environment that her hairstylist went to and how amazing it was, how happy she was, how she had her, you know, she painted the walls, her favorite color of whatever. And she was playing her favorite music and had pictures of her kids up, you know, all over. And she was controlling her own schedule and she sold products, Emily and Emily bought the products and she's like, she's, I've never seen her so happy. And I'm known her for all these years. And so I thought, oh my God, that's so interesting. And it was literally five minutes from my parents' house. So I jumped in the car and drove down there and I walked in the salon and, and, and ten feet in the salon, I looked around and I'm like, oh my God, this is for me. Like I know exactly what they're doing here and I think I know exactly why they're doing it. And Guy walks up to me, his name is Keith and he asked if I needed help and I said, I lied to him right out of the gate. I said, I'm looking for a haircut. And so he walked me around, introduced me to a few people. Nobody could see me because they're busy. But I got their information and then by the time we kind of made our way back to the front of the salon, I'm like, so here's the, here's the real deal. You know, I just graduated from college and like I really like the salon industry and I'm not a hairstylist, but I really like it here and do you mind if I just hang around with you? I'll roll around with you and you don't have to pay me. I'm living with my parents. I don't have any expenses and so I did that for about a year and he was my mentor. So within that year, I learned a lot of things. I learned what, I learned how to make a hairstylist happy and successful. Well, I should say this way. I learned what, what makes hairstylists happy and successful. And I learned that, you know, them having control over their environment without a lot of the, you know, difficult things related to going out to a storefront and opening, you know, your own thousand square foot salon and putting in stations and things like that. I learned just how great them having control of their own spaces. And I learned how, you know, all of their personality and creativity, you know, could shine and they can service their clients better and they can have a better quality of life and make more money. And how developed was the concept like where they did they have individual built-out studios or like how far along in the studio, sweet model was it at that point. So this was 1999 and it was pretty well developed. Now it, so Keith, my mentor, put up his first salon, I believe about 10 years before that. He was a barber by trade and he had the ambition to open his own barber shops, which he did in Lubbock, Texas or Amorillo, Texas. And I think he got up to five barber shops. And you know, small barber shops with five, six, seven, maybe 10 people max. And he said that his life became, it went from servicing his clients and the things that he was good at and like doing to constant conflict, dispute resolution, you know, between the barbers and the shop or the hairstylist because it wasn't just barber. He had a hairstylist in there too. Constant conflict, mayhem, difficulty, people, they mad at each other and things like that. And he's like, okay, so I wanted this. I wanted to have my own, my own shop, but I didn't realize that I was going to go from doing the thing that I liked to doing a bunch of stuff I hate. And so he's like, but you can't just like not do it anymore. And like when you do this, you commit to something for a long period of time. So he's like, I'm going to try to put barriers between, you know, the beauty professionals. And so it started with, I don't even remember the details, but it started with probably like a curtain or something. Yeah. And then he eventually, he started putting like walls, like actually, you know, studs and drywall and everything. He started putting walls in between the stations. And he realized that the more freedom and independence and the more of, you know, kind of their own space that he could give to the beauty professionals, the more they thrived and the fewer conflicts there were. And so he was doing this across his, his locations and pretty much did it with all of them. And then he's like, okay, but you know, the shops were not really created to do this. I think I can, I can build a purpose built facility where people have their own space. It's not rocket science. And they'll have a little more space and like the dimensions of the area will be better. And I can put in like plumbing and stuff. And so he did that. And he put his, he opened the first studio salon in Amarillo, Texas and I want to say it was like 1989, 1988 or something. He went into a grocery store, a former grocery store that had failed. And I think it was a big space. I think it was 15,000 square feet or 20,000 square feet in Amarillo, Texas. I mean, you can imagine, you know, we have 20,000. We have 20, we have a 26,000 square foot salon with salon republiac right now. But that's in Beverly Hills, California. I mean, there's, you know, tens of thousands of beauty professionals within just a couple miles there. In Marillo, Texas doesn't have anywhere near that many people. And so to build such a large salon of a new kind. I mean, God, the ball, I'm not gonna say that. The risk that he took was crazy, but it worked. So he built a beauty supply in the front part of it. Similar to the beauty supplies that we have at Salonri Public, it's all so much larger, and built studios within the rest of the space. And it was very successful and people loved it. So he ran it for a couple of years, and then he's like, I'm going to the big city. So he moves to Dallas, and he put up his first location, and I think 89 or 90, 1990. And so by the time I met him, I think he had built maybe four locations. And he was doing well. He liked what he was doing, the beauty professionals loved their studios, and everything was awesome. And so I, well, I shouldn't say everything. Obviously, the normal conflicts that you have in business, but it just seemed to be a model that the customer, the beauty professional, enjoyed so much and the clients. The clients to have that one-on-one time with their hairstylist versus what you get and kind of a traditional open salon, the clients loved it so much more. And it was so obvious to me. So I was like, I told him after some period of time, rolling around with him, unpaid. I was like, Keith, I think I want to do this. I'm not going to do this here in Dallas because I would be competing with you. But I think I'm going to, I'd like to put up my own salon and somewhere else, and I think I want to do it in Los Angeles because I know LA I've been there for four years during school. And so I, as I like to say, dumped the girlfriend and I moved out because I was still dating Emily. - Thanks Emily. - Emily later get married. - Peace. - Thanks Emily, bye. - Bye. So Emily wanted, no, Emily was great. She wanted to get married and I was like 22, 23. She was the same, we were babies. - Yeah. - And I had no income. I was like, how do we get married with no income? You know, this isn't like the 1940s. You know, all of her friends are getting married and like these ridiculous things that are at like, one of her best girlfriends got this huge engagement ring and showed it to me. And I'm like, you know, okay, so what Johnny didn't buy that ring. You know, Johnny, Johnny got out of college three minutes ago and she's like, well, Johnny's parents bought the ring and I'm like, that's just embarrassing. Like, you know, you're not even a, and Johnny's not even an adult yet. I'm not an adult, you're not an adult. It's, we're too young to get married. And so, you know, we need to build a little bit of a foundation in our lives and then we get married. Not that I wanna, you know, break up or whatever, but and I'm like, so I really wanna, I really wanna put up my first salon and I think it would be great. And I think Los Angeles would be the place and she's like, well, I'm not going to LA unless you engage me. And I'm like, well, I'm not gonna engage you until we spend more time together, you know, a couple more years. So, and I'm gonna be in LA. So, LA's awesome. You know, she had been visiting me for a few years, but you know, and I understood her, her perspective on that totally, but we were not seeing eye to eye on it. So, so that was it for Emily, by E. So then I went out to, then I went out to LA and took me about a year to year and a half to put up the first laundry public. And that was in Studio City, which is just north of Los Angeles. How did you choose that first location? I remember exact locations that I was looking for. I probably had five locations kind of right up to the end before I was gonna sign a lease and make a commitment on one. And I remember the exact locations. To this day when I drive by one of them, you know, inevitably, if somebody's in the car, I pointed out to them. My wife knows exactly which okay, because I pointed out to her 15 times, 30 times, which locations I was looking at. The Studio City location, I think I thought had the right mix of everything. Great area, you know, high incomes, free parking, nice parking, convenient parking, decent price on the space. So I didn't have the charge to be professionals too much. You know, enough Windows studios, you know, to make people happy who felt like they had to have Windows, all those things. And that's really what it boils down to. And it's kind of the same today, you know, 25 years later, not really sure much of that has changed. You know, maybe as Ebton float a little bit here and there, but the essence of it is still the same. And so that space, we're 25 years in that space. And it's still a good space. It's been improved over the years by the landlords. And unfortunately, the space, the shopping center traded several times to new landlords. And every time it trades, it trades at a much higher price. And that means the property taxes and the expenses go up for us, you know, along the way. So that's just the nature of it. But in the beginning, I, you know, I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing. I had the benefit of having Keith as a mentor. He answered a lot of questions for me. He guided me, you know, as much as he could. But I still just did so many things wrong. So many ridiculous things, you know, that you don't know what you don't know, right? Yeah. And so kind of one of my favorite anecdotes was when, so we're building it out. And actually, I'm going to start with an earlier one. So I chose a contractor. And the contract that I signed with the contractor wasn't very good because I didn't know what I was doing. And so there were, there were weeks of time when I wouldn't see one worker in the space. And so we opened late, you know, which upset people and cost me money I didn't have and all that. And, and then kind of closer to that opening date, I had bought styling chairs and shampoo bowls and shampoo chairs, all that kind of stuff. And I had contracted with the company to ship these things to the space. And, and this lawn space was on the second floor right on Venturable Vard, a very busy street. And so the truck arrives one morning with all the stuff in it. And I'm there ready to go, you know, ready to, to, you know, tell them where to put the boxes. And the dude rolls up on the street and he's like, all right, here you go. And he basically just, you know, opens up the tail of this enormous 18 wheeler. And he's like, and he's like, all right, you know, have at it. And I'm like, have it what? And he's like, well, these are your boxes. And, you know, you take them out and take them where you take them. And I'm like, what do you mean? It's just me. And there's like, I think they're like 80 boxes or something. And each one was fucking heavy, right? Like a styling chair, you know, it's like metal, a base, you know, a pump, it weighs like, I don't know, 75, 80 pounds. And he's like, no, you have to take it. And so it's just like, nobody told me that. Like, I just assumed that somebody was going to take all the boxes into the salon. And so I think it took me five, six hours. And I swear to God to this day, I think my back problems came from that one incident where I had to carry every single, but I didn't even have a dolly. I was going to ask if you even had a dolly, no, I didn't have a dolly. I didn't even get a dolly. Oh, no, no, you didn't have it. Well, he wanted to go, he wanted to leave. Like he, he's not going to sit there for five hours. So he helped me take the boxes out of the truck. Okay. And he was pissed off about it only because he realized that if he didn't help me take them out of the truck and put them on the sidewalk on Venturo Boulevard, that he was going to be there all day. And he had other things. He had to go pick up, right? So he helped me put them, we basically stacked them along Venturo Boulevard, probably eight feet high. These boxes stacked on each other. All the way down, maybe a hundred feet along Venturo Boulevard. And with the traffic rolling by, fast and everything, it was just such a good example of how stupid you can be. When you do things like this, and college doesn't teach you shit like this. You only learn stuff like this, when you do it. And it's like street smarts, right? Versus books, I think book smarts, bullshit, like useless practically. And so anyway, I eventually got everything done. But that was just a good example. And I probably have another hundred examples. of stuff just like that. Well, I was gonna ask you about a Salon or public horror story since we always do hair horror stories. It looks like we got to it a little early, but that's okay. We gave him a little early taste. Yeah, that was a pretty good one. That's probably a good one, yeah. I was talking on noodle on, I mean, we have plenty. Oh my God. Yeah. So they're starting to flood in. So I got others if you want to. So how long before you felt like it was working at the studio city location, enough to the point where you were ready to expand? It worked immediately. Pretty much worked immediately. Now, in the process of getting the thing from conception to open, you know, that process is extremely uncomfortable and it's still uncomfortable. You know, we have 41 locations now. 25 years in, we have about 80 employees, 70 employees, and we have, you know, construction team and, you know, we have people who know what to do. Obviously, I don't have to do all those ridiculous things like I just described, but I still have tremendous concern, worry and anxiety for every new opening that we have. So back then, it was almost like the ignorance was a little bit of bliss because while I was very worried, you know, that it wasn't going to work, that this new concept wasn't going to be accepted, I didn't just, I didn't know just how many things I had to worry about. So there's, you know, it can be rather excruciating that process like internally. So I remember early on, I think my attorney told me that it was a stupid idea. You're, I don't know. Yeah, no, yeah, my accountant said something akin to, why would you do that? The city of Los Angeles who had to grant my permit, you know, construction documents and give me the right to open business, you know, as it works. You know, in any kind of sophisticated society, like you've got to develop plans and spend a lot of money, it takes a lot of time and then you send them to the city and then you need approval. And so the city took forever and I didn't have enough money to wait forever and then they came back to me and they're like, nah, no, you can't do this. I don't know what you mean. Why not? Why not? Like I have a lease. I have to pay rent for 20 years. I'm, you know, I'm bound to this responsibility. And by the way, I think I had a cash for like three months, you know, I didn't have any margin of error, you know? And so it was this horrible process you're making me, you're reminding me of all, you're making me remember all these horrible things. And as the story was told to me by the person building in safety in 1999, an attorney for the city had a, like woke up in the middle of the night, all of us and concerned that this, that I was trying to do something illegitimate. And woke up in the morning and said, we're not going to allow this. And so they came back to us and said, no, you can't, you can't do this. And so that led to a process of, I don't know how long it felt like a year, it wasn't a year, it's probably a month and a half, where we had to go back and forth and promise this and do that. We had to make changes to the, to the inside of the salon and all sorts of things that, you know, cost more money and took more time and, you know, it kind of reminds me of some of, like the business principles that sometimes you hear people talking about, you know, there's Murphy's Law, right? You know, Murphy's Law. What's Murphy's Law? I'm going to, I'm going to turn the tables on you. Do you remember that one? Wasn't it Murphy's Law? Like, isn't that anything that can happen will happen? Or something along those lines? That's right. So anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So you ever heard of Schultz's Law? No, I'm not familiar with Schultz. Schultz's Law says that Murphy was an optimist. Nice. All right. So, so that was, I learned that one pretty early on and my mentor Keith, that was his favorite thing. That was his favorite thing. And, you know, so, you know, you learn pretty fast that, you know, you do what you can to ensure that things go right. And then you, at the same time, prepare yourself for when things go wrong. And I didn't, I didn't do that early on, you know, but that's, that's a really important part of like navigating the world. And, and so, anyway, that, there were those challenges, you know, when we opened, but, so yeah, everybody said that it wouldn't work. People like advisors were like, no, that's dumb and never work. I remember one of the first hairstyles that came in, yeah, I mean, she came in and she was like, you're never going to get 45 hairdressers to work next to each other. And I'm like, okay, well, thank you. Thanks for the advice. Bye. So, so she, she chose not to, to take a studio. But, but I, after we opened, it became very, very clear, very fast that it was going to be great. And I think out of the 40 studios, we still have 40 studios there, out of the 40 studios, I think I'd, 20 people had taken studios and they were, they were good people and they were, they had good businesses and one of them had some high profile people and, you know, like celebrities and stuff. And I thought, oh my God, this is awesome. So awesome. So I worked the front desk for about, let's see, two years, two or three years, you know, I was 80 hours a work, 80 hours a week in the salon. I didn't have enough money to lay all the flooring for the studios. So as people rented studios, I had to like run to Home Depot and buy whatever floor was on sale, you know, within my, you know, price range, which was zero. And then I would throw the floor in the back of my car. My car would like go low writing down the street to the salon and then I would carry all the tile, you know, up one by one, 20 trips into the salon and then I would lay the floor. And I didn't know how to lay the floor, but I learned and because I didn't have the money to pay anybody. I had cleaned the bathroom myself. I did everything myself for the first year and then slowly but surely I was able to get enough money to pay for a janitorial service, you know, to pay for, you know, I met a handyman, this guy, oh, Rafael. So Rafael was my first handyman. He was a kid who was involved in the gangs in Kenoko Park. And I met him through his dad who worked for the general contractor that I'd used and his dad was worried about his kid and I hired his kid as a handyman. And so Rafael, he was a good kid. You know, for all the time that I knew Rafael, he was a good kid. When he left to go home, he was not such a good kid, you know, he was banging, I guess they call it, you know, he was running around with his crew doing bad things. And I remember there was a point where I actually offered him a full-time job, even though it kind of would have eaten into like the profit that the Salam was making. I offered him a full-time job because I felt like having the accountability of showing up on time and kind of exposing him to a healthier way of life would be good for him and kind of keep him out of trouble. And he turned it down. And then I, and he felt, I think he felt ashamed that he turned it down, that he chose that path, you know, the fork in the road, so to speak. You know, you don't, somebody like him doesn't get a lot of opportunities like that. I was trying to give it to him. And he turned it down and I think he was a little shamed and he didn't want to come back and do any work on the side for me. And I heard that things didn't go well for him after that. So, but the time that I knew him, he was a good kid and he was a hard worker and he was good to his daughter and stuff like that. So you know, I remember things like that. Being in the salon 80 hours a week, you see a lot of things. There was, we had a hairdresser who was down in the parking garage blowing cocaine while his client was, you know, being, was getting processed in his studio and her scalp started burning and, you know, she, she ran down the hallway. and a bunch of other hairdressers and I ran over there and rinsed her out and took care of her. And then I went down into the parking garage to find the hairstylist doing cocaine in his car and kicked him out of the salon. You know, there are things like that. I mean, there have been there have been wild things happen. So I'll just stop there, I think. Yeah. Those are many, many stories that I'm sure you've heard throughout the implication. You want anything. All right, so that's pretty good. I think we're going to stop right there. We're going to make this a two-parter because we got a lot more to cover. So, uh, yes. I got a two-parter. You are important enough Eric to become a two-parter episode. Congratulations. So yeah, we'll, uh, we'll come back next week to finish up our conversation. Look forward to that. [Music]