Helping Hairdressers Succeed: The Evolution of Salon Republic
The conversation with our host @loveerictaylor continues, as Eric shares what's changed since the first Salon Republic 25 years ago, where he sees the industry going, and the keys to success for indie hairdressers.
The conversation with our host @loveerictaylor continues, as Eric shares what’s changed since the first Salon Republic 25 years ago, where he sees the industry going, and the keys to success for indie hairdressers.
Donovan (00: 00)
Well, let's go on to the evolution of Salon Republic. What are some aspects of Salon Republic that are the same since opening that first Studio City salon and what are different?
The Hair Game (00: 12)
So the essence of it is the same. It's giving a beauty professional an opportunity to work on their own terms. And it's our belief that when a beauty professional is able to work on their own terms that they're happier and more successful. And we've seen it over and over again, thousands and thousands of beauty professionals. At this point, I think we've got about 3,000 beauty professionals.
⁓ I've known so many, we still have beauty professionals who have been in the salon since the very beginning, 25 years, and I still know them well, I know them personally. And I've seen their journeys. So the essence is still the same. ⁓ They have an opportunity to create their own environment without kind of the big financial burden and commitment of.
of signing a big lease and dealing with a landlord over five, 10 years and then having to employ people and becoming a business manager versus a hairstylist who likes to do hair for his or her clients. ⁓ The differences are, I think we build our salons much better now. There's no doubt about it. mean,
A lot of the things that nobody sees, the things that are in the walls, the things that are in the utility room, whether it's making sure we have enough water, hot water, so that nobody ever runs out of hot water. It seems like such a basic thing, and it kind of is a basic thing, but it requires such a complicated, sophisticated solution in order to make sure it happens all the time.
The same goes for air conditioning. Air conditioning is difficult where I mean air conditioning is difficult here in my office, you know, every day it's a little bit too cold, a little bit too hot, you know, it's just kind of the nature of it. But we've gotten so much better over the years. We've gotten better at having great managers at the front who care about the needs of the BD professionals.
We've ⁓ added a lot of things to our salons that our beauty professionals care about, value a great deal, things like our beauty supply. We carry about 100 brands, ⁓ both on site and through special order. So salonry public beauty professional doesn't need to drive 20 minutes down the road in LA traffic.
to go to a Cosmoprofor salon-centric because we have the products right down the hall. And our managers will check them out right at the reception desk there. We've gotten better at making sure that the right products are in the salon at the right time when people need them. We've added things like towel service. ⁓ And you know, by the way, yeah.
Donovan (03: 17)
Yeah, was gonna ask you about that one. When
did towel service become an amenity in Salon Republic and why? Like what was the… Where did that start?
The Hair Game (03: 26)
Yeah,
so when I was working at the front desk, I worked at the front desk of Studio City Salon for a couple years. Right in the beginning, I was the only employee for those couple years. And again, 80 hours a week. I mean, I'm seeing the hairstylists coming in, those hairstylists that come in at 7 a.m. I'm seeing those hairstylists leaving at 10 p.m. I got to know them extremely well.
got to hear about their needs, hear about like pain points of, of, know, how they work behind the chair and doing towels is one of those things where, you know, in, in independent salon, ⁓ the hairdressers have to do their own towels. And so that sucks, right? Nobody wants to do their own towels. And so from the beginning, I'm like, okay, how can I get to the point where
⁓ I can provide an environment where they don't have to do towels, whether that's somebody coming in, you know, and providing towels or somebody internal, you know, on site providing towels. And so it wasn't until, let's see, it wasn't until my second location in 2014, which was in Beverly Hills, actually one alleyway south of the Beverly Hills boundary.
on Pico Boulevard, some of our listeners might remember. And I worked at that front desk for two years. And then I had an office in that salon for another couple of years. But it wasn't until that salon that we offered towel service. And that was a big deal to offer towel service. I didn't recognize how much it was going to cost. I just did it. And then I had to figure out, you know, how much it costs and then
how to pay for it because there's this magical thing about towels. I should probably give a name to it. Maybe somebody in the laundry service industry has a name for it. But if you buy a package of 10 towels and then put them in the towel room, the 10 towels becomes five towels within a week. Just magically. It's like…
Donovan (05: 45)
Yeah
The Hair Game (05: 49)
It's like the opposite of rabbits, you know how like the jokes where rabbits reproduce really fast. Towels, I don't know, what do you call it? Deproduce really fast. It's like they vanish into thin air. And, you know, I think there's a landfill somewhere in Los Angeles with maybe 3 million black towels that I've purchased over the last 20 years. But, ⁓
Donovan (05: 58)
Yeah.
The Hair Game (06: 15)
you know, constantly buying towels to replenish. ⁓ So, you know, we did that and then I figured out how to make it work. I did it first and then figured out how to make it work. ⁓ And then with the beauty supply, mean, that's really the big one ⁓ because that actually requires, like we have a team of people, a merch team of people who, you know, support that effort. And I,
I always knew I wanted to do it, but it's almost an entirely separate business that you need to figure out. ⁓ So I like had to write a business plan just to see if it would actually work. A business plan for myself, you know, just to kind of pressure test the idea. Ultimately, it wasn't until I met John Mailey, and for those listeners in Southern California who are at least, let's call it,
40 years old, know, maybe 40 years old or older, will remember Maileys. Maileys was the number one distributor with physical stores and with the reps who would go out into the field, you know, in this market. And John Mailey was the son of the guy who founded Maileys. And I met John Mailey through a friend around 2000, somewhere in the 2000 teens.
And he and I, I asked him a lot of questions. He and I had, bought him a lot of lunches and he had sold mailies to L'Oreal when L'Oreal created Salon Centric. For those of you who don't know, Salon Centric is owned by L'Oreal. And ⁓ which is really funny because sometimes, ⁓ like once one of our beauty professionals told me that they wanted to support a small business. So they were going to.
buy from L'Oreal and I'm like, I'm sorry, they're gonna buy from Saloncentric and I'm like, you know, Saloncentric is like the largest beauty company in the world. Like it is the opposite of a small business. ⁓ But John sold his mailies to L'Oreal and they created Saloncentric and so all the Saloncentrics out there in Southern California, many of those were formerly mailies. So he helped me kind of.
Donovan (08: 21)
You
The Hair Game (08: 41)
figure out how to make it work, putting products into our salons. ⁓ And then in short order, I met ⁓ Sam LaCurcie who started Cosmoprof. And it's really funny because all of these people were kind of like from the San Fernando Valley, kind of Conejo Valley area, just north of Los Angeles. And by the way, Redken was started here as well in Woodland Hills area, so I'm told.
Sebastian was started here, Pravana was started here. Like this has been the center of kind of the modern beauty world for a long, long time. And I didn't really know that, but I just started meeting kind of these legends. So Sam LeCurcie, a competitor of John Mayley, he started helping me ⁓ conceive of how to offer products in the salon. So long story short,
These guys introduced me to other guys and I was able to to open our first beauty supply store and ⁓ I think I did it in the Beverly Hills locations circa 2015 so now Nearly all of our locations have it not all of them, know We they need to be big enough the salon needs to be large enough needs to have enough beauty professionals in it to support, you know having
We have maybe a thousand SKUs on the shelf, you know, or probably more. ⁓ So you need enough people there to ⁓ buy the product or else it doesn't make any sense. So that was that. Those are the two big ones. ⁓ Tell service, products. ⁓ You know, we now are pretty hands-on with marketing support. You know, for those listeners, Donovan.
And Marissa, our VP of marketing at Salon Republic, they go out into the world, they go into the salons and ⁓ they help teach our members, our beauty professionals, how to market themselves, know, set up Google My Business accounts. They give advice on their Instagram accounts and stuff like that. Because a lot of people just, they don't have that.
self-awareness to recognize what they're not doing right. so, you know, providing that marketing effort is something that we've been, we've been offering for many, many years. And then kind of as an evolution of that whole concept, we started the podcast and the podcast was started. This is so meta, right? This is like talking about the podcast on the podcast. ⁓ so the podcast came about
Donovan (11: 18)
It is meta.
The Hair Game (11: 26)
I was talking to one of our high profile hairstylists and you know, we were BSing about this or that and I remember thinking to myself, my God, how many people in the industry would love to hear what I'm talking to this guy about right now? Like this guy is well known by everybody and he's giving, he's telling me all these things. like behind the scenes. It's, you know, it's like super valuable and
And I walked, I literally walked out of a studio, walking back to the front of the salon, thinking like, how do I, how do I take that conversation, record it and for everybody's benefit. Like that's amazing. Like if I could do that, you know, I could help everybody. And, and I was thinking, initially I was thinking, you know, just for salon Republic, ⁓ hairstylists or, or facialists or beauty professionals. But then of course it's like.
Well, you know, if, if the industry, if anybody in the industry could hear it, like they're going to take advantage of it. They could benefit from that enormously as well. And that was right around when the podcast platform, the whole idea of a podcast was kind of gaining in popularity and Donovan, you might know better than I, but I think podcasts had. Like kind of an origin moment well before it became popular.
you know, maybe 2010, 2005 even, something like that, because the technology is not terribly sophisticated, but it wasn't until around the 20 teens that it really became popular. Is that right?
Donovan (13: 09)
Yeah, that's about right. that's originally, I mean, lot of people, I know if they think about it or wonder why it's actually called a podcast. It was because they began with popularity with people listening to them on their iPods, know, back in like where you said the mid-2000s. That's where the actual name came from. So, yeah.
The Hair Game (13: 22)
⁓
No idea.
That's really interesting that, and that's an Apple brand, right? So it's actually, I mean, that brand has kind of become the default general term for the whole genre of content. That's so interesting.
Donovan (13: 31)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
yeah.
So where do you see the hair industry going in general in the future and how salon republic kind of fits into that?
The Hair Game (13: 53)
So I find it pretty interesting that the hair industry continues to ⁓ have the same essential qualities to it. I call it the evolution of a beauty professional. They go to school, they get a license, they leave school, they go into a salon environment that offers a tremendous amount of support, but not a tremendous amount of money, right?
And because the salon needs to get paid for all the support that it's offering, you know, that makes sense. ⁓ Commissioned salons, for example. ⁓ And then those beauty professionals who do well in that environment, you know, they build a book of business and because a haircut, for example, or a hair color service is not a commodity, it's a very subjective thing. And, and one hairstylist doesn't do the same. It doesn't do a haircut the same as another hairstylist.
a client finds a hairstylist they like and trust and they stick with them. And so that happens. And then the hairstylist can become more independent of that kind of high, high level of support. and they can, they can go into their own environment. you know, booth rental, for example, and then historically before the studio option, ⁓ the only other place to go.
once you want more than a booth rental salon is to get your own storefront. And so, you know, that, that can be good. That could be horrible, you know, ⁓ depending on, you know, the individual who you are, what you like spending your time doing, how much money you have, you know, how much tolerance for, ⁓ stress and all that. and, and of course we play in between the booth rental salon and then the storefront salon. You know, we, we provide.
kind of the best benefits of a commission salon and a booth room salon, while getting rid of the worst parts of having your own storefront. And so we're just another option kind of with the options out there. And I think it's really great for the industry that there are all these options out there because so many people are different. And even throughout their careers.
You know, they can have one period in their career where they really like one kind of salon and then they evolve or maybe their lifestyle changes or their desires change and then maybe they like another kind of salon more. And you can go in between these types of salons all you want. And then all the way up to, you can go into the corporate salon world if you want. You you can go work for Wella, you know, as a this or a that.
And it's so cool that there's so many different options for hairstylists. As far as what I see in the industry, I see kind of a cyclical nature to what's going on. ⁓ And this is not new. I think this has been happening for a long time and it continues to happen. ⁓ Where, you know, a hairstylist will go from school to commission to booth rental to studio, sometimes go to…
⁓ a storefront and then the storefront creates ⁓ good beauty professionals who then and within that storefront those good beauty professionals might go to Booth rental and then their own studio and then those people who want to take more risk and do and you know manage employees and you know be more like business has spent more of their time doing business they can then go out and do a storefront.
which then builds hairstylists who then go into booth rental and then go into studio and then da, da, da, da. And so there is a cyclical nature to it, which is pretty awesome. And I think it's good for the health of the industry to have all these different kinds of environments. I think if I was to, I think the real answer to your question as far as where things are going is,
We are obviously in a digital world right now. And a lot of our industry is driven by client behavior, client desire, not just what we want. And client behavior and what clients want to do is they want the convenience of being able to go onto their phones and book ⁓ an appointment. You know, at 10 o'clock at night when they are getting ready for bed, they look in the mirror and they're like, ⁓ you know,
my roots are too big or I don't like this color anymore or my hair's too long or whatever else. ⁓ I think that's a tremendous benefit to our industry. ⁓ As long as the beauty professionals recognize it and are willing to adapt to it. I think that that's happening to a large degree, but it's not happening completely. I still know hairstylists who…
don't wanna have a Google account. Or maybe I should say it this way. They wanna have a Google account, but they don't wanna put in the 20 minutes to get a Google account, to become discoverable. There's the convenience of booking with an existing client, then there's also what the business world calls the new client funnel. And if you imagine just a funnel like in your kitchen, it's got a big opening at the top and a little opening at the bottom.
The definition is a bunch of people might enter the funnel at the top. Those are people who might find you on Instagram or something. And then they're gonna start kind of discovering who you are. They're gonna look at your content. That's going down the funnel. And then there's a smaller ⁓ group of people who are going to actually get to the bottom of the funnel. Those actually become clients in your chair. So the top of the funnel has changed.
significantly in the last 10 years. Clients want to see, even if they hear word of mouth and word of mouth I think is still number one, know, human to human word of mouth, even if, but even if they hear that, you know, Jane is a great hairstylist ⁓ from their best friend, they're going to look up Jane online. They're going to look up Jane on Google to see where she works.
They're going to see the pictures that Jane has put on there. They're going to see Jane's Instagram account or TikTok or whatever, Facebook. And they're going to see Jane's digital presence. And no longer is it enough for one's best friend to recommend Jane to book with Jane. Now Jane needs to have a digital presence. And it doesn't need to…
You know, require five hours a week from Jane, you know, let's call it an hour a day. You know, Jane just needs to kind of stay. She needs to create that presence and then kind of maintain it generally, you know, maybe one hour a week or something just to throw out, you know, some general notion of what it, what it should take. You know, it might take a couple hours to set up your social media and you your Google, Google presence and then.
you know, once a month ⁓ you replace old photos with new photos on your Google account or something like that. Things like that are extremely important now. And some people still like to kind of fight against that, you know? And I think it's at their peril. And it may not, I find that the way that it works in our industry is for a lot of things too, in the service industry.
You've got a lot of clients, but if you don't, and everything's going fine, but if you don't have some kind of digital presence out there, your clients inevitably trickle away. Maybe they move, you know, maybe they no longer need that service, you know, for natural reasons, your clients, ⁓ you know, kind of trickle away. So you have to have any service industry person, especially beauty industry, it's more important than ever. This is the big change.
that we're seeing right now, they have to have, they have to be mindful of their presence online because they're gonna need new clients coming in.
Donovan (22: 48)
So that kind of leads into my next question regarding hairdresser success. So you've obviously seen countless hairdressers succeed and unfortunately fail ⁓ in the salon. So what are the most important things in order to be successful as an independent hairstylist?
The Hair Game (23: 07)
So this is one of my favorite questions and I don't ask it of all of our guests, but I ask it of many of our guests. And actually the last interview that I did, which will be coming out at a certain point, I did explicitly ask that question. I think, you know, I've done how many Donovan? 440 or so episodes, conversations.
Donovan (23: 30)
Pretty close.
The Hair Game (23: 32)
So I kind of boil it down to, I suspected you were gonna ask this question, so I thought about it in advance. And I boil it down to kind of the following idea. And that is to put yourself in your client's shoes to get a realistic perspective of what it's like to be your client. And…
all the different elements of that. So, starts off with finding you online. What does a potential new client see about you when they go online? And, you it's a little bit of a mental exercise to completely ⁓ role play this, right? Because you have to get out of yourself. You're no longer, let's say I'm a hairdresser. ⁓ I'm no longer Eric Taylor hairdresser.
I am John Doe client, right? So I would go onto Google and I would type in Eric Taylor, hairstylist, Los Angeles, right? And I would see what comes up. And is it like 14 different Eric Taylors within, you know, a two mile radius? ⁓ Are there no Eric Taylors? Do I come up on page 854 on Google? ⁓
You know, does my Instagram come up? Does Google have me indexed as being a business nearby? You know, what is it like? And then let's say that Eric Taylor hairdresser is searchable online, you know, pretty well, let's say. And I come up on the first page and ⁓ there's not too many confusing things, you know, in the first five spots on Google.
And so somebody is able to find me, John Doe Klein is able to find me pretty easily. And he clicks through to Eric Taylor hairdresser, Google my business account. What does he see on there? Does he see reviews? How many reviews? Good reviews, bad reviews? What kind of pictures? Has Eric Taylor hairdresser uploaded pictures to Google? ⁓ And if he has, ⁓
What do those pictures look like? Are they from eight years ago? Like, do they look sepia tone? Are they so old? know? Does it show, ⁓ you know, with, you know, my client from 15 years ago with stripper stripes? You know, or does it show somebody, you know, with a recent picture of great work that I did? And really take a hard third person look.
at what people out there that are going on the internet, what are they seeing about myself, Eric Taylor, hairdresser? And it's a very uncomfortable thing to do because you might see vulnerabilities. I think most people would probably say right out of the gate, oh my God, I'm never gonna do that because I'm gonna see horrible things about myself. I might see bad.
Yelp reviews or whatever, I'm not on Yelp. Yelp shadow banned me because I was paying for it, now I'm not paying for it. And now I have to worry about why I'm not on Yelp, know, things like that. But like, it's really important if you care about your business and you you want to increase your income, increase your quality of life to do these kinds of things. Okay, so that's the first one. ⁓ You know, what is it like to find yourself online? And then think about what it's like to book with you.
What kind of booking setup do you have? Do you have online booking? If you do, go onto it through a browser that doesn't have the cookies set up so it knows that it's you. Go on there and try to see what a client sees. ⁓ Again, what do the pictures look like? Are there any reviews? ⁓ Or do you not have online booking? So you're just kind of one of those annoying hairstylists who like still
requires like a phone conversation to book. The reality today is that clients are used to doing everything on their phone whenever they want to. Middle of the night to get a steak delivered, you can do it. And that's what the clients expect. So if you're requiring your client to do a bunch of annoying, inconvenient, offline,
things between the hours of 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. only, then that's probably going to make it a lot harder for you to fill that new client funnel. And then just think through the rest of that interaction with the client. What's it like to have an appointment with you? Do you show up early? Do you have your station ready? Is your studio clean?
Like just all of it, what is it like to have an appointment with you? Are you scatterbrained? Are you on the phone with somebody for 10 minutes and you make your client wait outside while you finish your conversation with somebody? Or are you ready to go? Are you oftentimes in a bad mood and then kind of subject your client to that bad mood that you're in because something.
you know, annoying happened to you before? ⁓ Or do you recognize that you're a professional and you need to put aside any annoying things that may have just happened and you're now on stage to some degree and you need to kind of perform, you know, because you're getting paid for it. ⁓ You know, part of being a professional. ⁓ Things like…
Does your client, when you look at your client again experiencing what it's like to have an appointment with you, ⁓ are you letting your client know through your communication, through your body language that you genuinely care about their hair problems? You know, are you asking them? So maybe not say, are you having any problems? But say like, what is the most annoying thing about your hair?
And then that's going to force them to think of that one little thing, you know, how their hair kind of flips up all annoyingly in the back, you know, kind of ruining the shape that they like, you know, they may not be thinking about it when they're sitting there as a client, you know, but ⁓ just asking that question is going to give your client the sense that you as a hairdresser, ⁓ the hair professional for
John Doe client cares a great deal about John's hair. ⁓ you know, are, Eric Taylor hairstylist is fully bought in to that role of being my hair professional. Those are the types of things that clients, they may not consciously think about them, but they definitely feel.
whether the hairdresser has them on autopilot or if they are sitting there and they really care about the experience that the client has, not just there in the salon, but between appointments. Is it easy to style? Is it hard to style? Are they struggling with the type of products they're using? Too moisturizing, too drying.
You know, too heavy of a product, too light of a product, too much frizz, you know, where are the problems? Very rarely do I hear a client, and by the way, I get all this just talking to the general public, which I do a lot. Very rarely is somebody like, my God, I love my hair and it's amazing. I don't have any problems with it. I'm not sure I've ever heard that before. There are always things.
that people don't like about their hair. And these are opportunities, these are not nuisances, but these are opportunities for Eric Taylor, a hairstylist, to let the client know that he cares a great deal about the client's hair and he can solve those problems. That builds loyalty and trust between hairstylist and client ⁓ that fills books. That fills books. ⁓
Okay, so then back to this exercise of putting yourself in client shoes. What's it like to rebook with you? You know, are you, do you work two days a week from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then the other day of the week you work from, you know, 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. And like, what's it like to rebook with you? Does it take three weeks, you know, to get into you? Does it take two months? ⁓
Are you bi-coastal so like you're hardly ever available? You know, what's it like? Is it a good experience? You know, I think that that right there is the best answer I can give. Kind of distilling down everything that I've learned from all the conversations, you know, whether on the podcast or, you know, at Salon Republic with all of our beauty professionals. To lead a beauty professional towards
having a great business.
Donovan (33: 39)
Yeah, and I think I've, from hearing you talk about that client experience in that type of way, it's interesting to think about it in the sense that we have a lot of beauty professionals, independent hairdressers, that are very good at hairstyling and terrible at business.
Or might be vice versa. They might be an okay hairdresser, but they're very good at business. hearing you describe all that kind of makes me realize that you have much more of the…
client's journey that is important when you're an independent hairdresser. Every aspect of that journey is very important. As opposed to say for example with your if you're in a traditional commission salon, they're bringing you the clientele so you don't have to worry as much about trying to bring them in. Not anymore. Sure.
The Hair Game (34: 33)
Not always anymore. I mean, it hasn't really been like that for a while, but yes,
in more cases, it is the salon's responsibility to bring you clients, but I've been hearing for the longest time that the client, that salon still basically says to the commission hairstylist, look, you gotta get your own clients. But the booking and everything, yes, of course, that might be more of it.
Donovan (34: 55)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But yeah, so that
The Hair Game (35: 02)
but as an independent, you have more control over it. So when you're in a commission salon, like there's gonna be something, I hear this all the time, know, the receptionist never shows up on time or the manor, her manor at the front desk is horrible and my clients keep complaining because she's kind of a bitch and she doesn't remember to do the right things or whatever, you know, and.
Donovan (35: 05)
Mm-hmm.
The Hair Game (35: 29)
all those complaints when you're independent, you have control over all those things. You can choose the booking app you want. You can treat your clients the way you want. And all that's very important.
Donovan (35: 32)
Mm-hmm.
And I think that's why we see the ability of hairdressers being able to be successful, even if they're not the best in one of those things, they have the control over the other aspect that allows them to still be successful.
The Hair Game (35: 54)
totally. And
that's a great point really quick and I'll hit on that. I know we're kind of wrapping up, but ⁓ there's countless thousands. There's, mean, there's, would say thousands just within our own salon, know, probably a million successful hairdressers around ⁓ the country who aren't gonna be good at all of these things that I named, but they're good at enough of them.
that their clients can overlook the one or two that they're not great at. I know hairdressers who are extremely successful who never show up to the salon on time, never. It's just their clients value so much some other part of the experience. Maybe it's the quality of the service, the technical quality of the service, the color or whatever.
Donovan (36: 34)
Yep.
The Hair Game (36: 48)
to overlook having to wait 15 minutes at the beginning of every ⁓ appointment, right? So yeah, I mean, this is not like you have to have all these things dialed in 100 % to be able to make a living, absolutely not. But these are the things that ⁓ you have control over that affect whether you're successful or not.
Donovan (37: 14)
Alright, well, ⁓ as you always do when wrapping things up, any last words for the community?
The Hair Game (37: 21)
I think that, you know, my last words are that I wish that all of our listeners would have the confidence to push themselves into areas that might feel uncomfortable. Because that's really where satisfaction, yes, that's where growth comes from. I think everybody knows that. But more importantly, that's where satisfaction comes from. know, satisfaction with ourselves and, you know, enjoyment of our lives and everything.
It really comes from pushing yourself a little bit. You know, you don't have to push yourself a lot. You don't have to push yourself off the cliff, but push yourself a little bit into, you know, an uncomfortable place, something you feel uncomfortable doing, but you recognize it as having value. You know, right just today, start doing that thing. You know, for example, you know, a big one sounds simple, but not so many people don't do it. Start putting your face on your Instagram account.
And it doesn't need to be every other post, but you know, one out of 10, you know, put yourself on there, just a selfie. could be very simple. And your clients and potential clients will appreciate that tremendously. It's important for people to see you out there, you know, with, your digital presence, because if they don't see your face, they don't know who you are. and it's going to be uncomfortable for them.
to book with you for the first time or you your smiling face and your dimples are going to remind the client who hasn't been back to you in eight months, it's going to remind them about you and they're more likely to come back to you. you know, do those little, that's just one example, but there's so many and each of us, we have our own. I certainly have my own. And of course, after getting off this thing, after I'm preaching like this, I'm going to start doing, I'm going to do one thing uncomfortable.
But that's what I wish for all the listeners. I wish that you do one uncomfortable thing every so often because you're not gonna regret it. You're really gonna benefit from it and enjoy it. And then one last thing is that how much I appreciate you listeners for spending the time listening to all of these episodes. Donovan and I have been doing this for eight.
and half or so, eight years and a few months, ⁓ and 440 or so episodes. And I think I speak for you too, Donovan, when I say how much we appreciate that people continue to listen. I said in the beginning that we're gonna keep doing it as long as people are listening and you guys keep listening. And so as long as you keep listening, we're gonna keep doing it. ⁓ But it's very heartfelt when I think about
the time that you spend with us. And I just want you to know how much we appreciate that.
Donovan (40: 23)
Absolutely, indeed. Well, this has been great and congratulations to you and Solana Public for 25 years. That's fantastic. It's amazing. Absolutely.
The Hair Game (40: 33)
Thank you. It's been
a lot of fun, a lot of fun.
