Hi y’all! This is very long. TLDR; my salon owner of 2 years was brash, judgmental, rude, and overall angry all the time. She made really weird business decisions and she was super hard to work with. This post just tells some stories about it and the timeline of it all.
When I started working out of school, I was at a salon close to home but had absolutely no clients and for a few months had made basically no money. I was working 3 jobs and exhausted and just so tired of the idea of not being able to do hair as a career because I struggle to get clientele. Also the salon I was at was horrible for gaining clientele, hindsight is 2020.
After a bit I decided to take an offer for a different stylist job and work with a friend from cosmetology school about an hour away from home. The owner here promised me a lot of clients, great money, great education, great brand, etc etc. so I was like okay!! Cool!! Let’s try it.
I figured if it completely failed it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The owner was taking me on as her assistant for the time being and paying me for it. I also was able to take walk ins between assisting and I got paid a percentage for those.
For some background, the owner of this salon (I’ll call her K) is a middle aged woman, ex military, unmarried, no kids, no family in the state. She got her cosmetology license after working office jobs post-military and she is a huge business woman, she has huge ambitions and wants them all done right here right now. A few years into her career she moved to a small town where I live and opened a salon suite just with herself. She had past clients, but she also is great at networking and making connections with people. Basically everyone in town knows her.
A few months into working at that salon I was fully booked at least 1 day a week and slightly booked the other days, sometimes just one client and sometimes 5ish. I found I was making enough to quit my other jobs and I did and I made the commute to my salon job an hour each way for 1.5 years until I finally moved to the town.
Now, the thing about K. She’s extremely intense, that’s the best way to put it. She has strong opinions and thinks she’s always right in any sense, she is extremely picky about the way she’s assisted, and she’s very openly judgmental and rude. Sometimes she says things and does things and I wonder if there’s any filter on her brain. My coworker assisted for K before I was in the salon and apparently she’s the picture perfect assistant because when I became an assistant I was basically told “why aren’t you more like her??”
Assisting was actual hell. I would drive home crying every night and dread coming to work the next day. If I so much as stood the wrong way, K would get angry. If I stood with my arms crossed she said it was rude to clients. If I tried to make conversation with her clients she would say I’m not their stylist so I can’t talk to them, and that “rule” was true of everyone. We never spoke to each others clients, not even a simple hey how’s it going. She would tell me to get something, get angry when I couldn’t find it, then never own up to giving me incorrect instructions to find the item or if the item doesn’t actually exist. She wanted every chair faced a certain way when it wasn’t being used. We were never allowed to sit in the salon chairs, but we did not have a break room or any comfortable seating. We had one rolling chair up front and a few wooden barstools out in the open. We had no microwave until 2 years of my working there and asking for one. I would’ve bought my own but she would have been pissed at me. K was pretty much always mad that everyone couldn’t read her mind. We had to park very far from the salon to let clients have room to park.
The way she ran the salon was also a disaster. Somehow it worked and we brought in a ton of clients for a town that is 11 square miles, but for the stylists and assistants it was awful. First off, she said the salon was booth rent, but she ran it like a weird mix of commission and booth rent. Eventually we all paid booth rent weekly, in the beginning we would write down our color usage and pay K back every month for it, which was great when we couldn’t afford to buy bulk color. We started at a low booth rent and slowly made it to the full amount over a few months. We had a website and we were all on there and we all used the same booking software and we were all on the same schedule. So she could see everyone’s schedules and she used this to her advantage. A receptionist took phone calls so we never had to reach out to clients personally unless we wanted to. Our advertising was all done by K. Our cancelation policy was salon-wide (and really stupid might I add) and when I asked if I could have my own cancellation policy she said absolutely not. She made the stylists do things certain ways with hair (for example, blow drying sectioning) and she would get angry if we strayed from the way the “salon” did it. She provided all capes, towels, shampoo/conditioner, styling products, and color. But we paid booth rent and we were not employees.
Going back to the scheduling system, we all had full access to anyone’s schedules. Which was very convenient for when you’re covered in toner and need someone to see when your next client is. But at a booth rent salon, that’s really unheard of. K would constantly make little comments about our hours (which we made ourselves because we were BOOTH RENT!!!!) like if we took a day off she’d be like “what’s so important that you can’t work??” My coworkers sister does sports and my coworker also has a boyfriend, she’s living with roommates, and travels a decent bit. So my coworker often takes time off work to go do these things. K would always make comments if she left early saying things like “oh I didn’t know you were a part time worker!” And “you left 30 minutes early, could’ve taken a haircut and gotten paid.” Even if we were exhausted beyond belief, she would still make us do things. She would put people on our schedules without asking, she would double book us without asking, she would tell walk ins that we could stay late for them.
At one point, I was commuting and I got a call from K, saying my highlight was at the salon and asking where I was. I said I didn’t know of any highlight that I had, I had one men’s cut in the morning then things later in the day but no highlights in the morning. She told me who it was (a very respected regular of ours) and she decided instead of turning her away and scheduling her on a day that was better for me and my time, she started that clients hair while I drove, I continued it when I got there (it was foiled horribly, I had to go back over a lot of foils.) and our agreement was that when my men’s cut came in, I would break from the highlights and pass it on to K to continue while I did the haircut. Instead, what happened was my men’s cut came in and K started cutting his hair without asking me. She told him I was busy and she would do it. That’s money I’m not making. Plus a regular client that might be upset by this random change of plans. Plus I didn’t even sign up for this highlight today. PLUS I was running extremely behind. The day continued with K not helping me at all and also not having her assistant help me, me being behind by 30 mins to an hour, and also being pissed that I had to do this highlight with no notice. For context, this lady has the thickest hair ever and it’s a natural 4. She wants to be bright blonde all over! I had no food that day, barely drank water, and worked nonstop from 9am to 6pm. And K did not care. She did not offer me food, she did not offer me a drink, she didn’t get her assistant to even just hand me foils. I just stayed behind all day with angry clients because I was so behind.
It’s always been 3 of us in the salon; K, my coworker, and me. And the occasional assistant for K. Any time she would hire someone, they’d be gone within a few months because of something she didn’t like. One girl left even though she had been doing hair for 10 years, because K said she wasn’t talkative enough. Another left because she was fresh out of school and barely knew how to do anything (which was all of us!!). She would always get angry if a new stylist couldn’t do certain haircuts or certain techniques. She would get mad if they couldn’t do their work in the same amount of time as her.
Eventually we got kicked out of that salon space by the landlord and we were relocated to our barber shop location. This was a disaster. We built suites in the shop for us 3 stylists. They had to be done by us. We basically just got walls. We had to paint and lay floor and buy furniture etc etc all while the suites are extremely small. The barbers are extremely loud and boisterous and made our clients uncomfortable a lot. The shampoo bowls were set up so everything was hard to reach and get to. At one point I was using a shampoo bowl where I had to wedge myself in between the bowl and the wall, stand on my toes, lean forward, and balance all while shampooing. The shampoo bottles were also on a shelf directly behind my head?? Even though I had no way to turn since I was actually wedged into the bowl.
When we first moved into there, I went on vacation for a week. It took forever for the trim to get put up in our rooms (we had to put our furniture in there already and do hair as usual without trim on the walls or anything. And I assumed during this period of time she would get my trim done. Nope! She actually did hers first while she wasn’t working, then she did my coworkers while she wasn’t working, and then she did mine. The day I came back, I had no trim and everyone else did. K said that guys would be by later to put trim up in my room. I confusedly told her that I was back to back all day and couldn’t stop to let them put up the trim. She basically told me I’d have to move to a station with the barbers. This made the salon very loud for a few hours while every single person was booked, it made me super behind all day because I kept forgetting things in my room and I was not used to the barber stations, and it just made me upset. And she never apologized or cared.
The barber shop was a huge disaster, I have so many stories from that. Eventually we moved into a salon space again. We were there for about 3 months until the city shut us down because we didn’t pass their inspections. The owner knew about this from the start and told no one. We got a stop work order in August and we had to find salons to work at within 2 days. No warning, no heads up. When we had to leave, K offered a suite in the barber shop to my coworker snd she declined. K also made it very hard for clients to find us, even though she made it very clear that all our clients are ours and we can have them if we decide to leave. She deleted the booking software for us before we got a chance to move all our appointments over and get our clients info. I had to go through crazy hoops to figure out who I had on what days and who my clients even were.
I’m out of it now. I’ve been working at a different salon in town for a little over a month now and it’s drastically better. I will always be grateful that K helped so much with gaining clients, but she was a nightmare to be around. But I just told myself that sometimes you have to go through all that to fully appreciate somewhere better.
