The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful

Several weeks ago I read an email from Modern Salon challenging their followers and fellow hairstylists to keep a month long journal of their life behind the chair.  I kept thinking about this email and the thought of keeping a "work journal", if you will.  Good Gracious, every stylist KNOWS that what we deal with on a daily basis is worthy of its own reality show and we also know that when the last client is out of our chair and the last little bit of hair is swept up off the floor, the last thing we want to do is go home and talk about our day!  What we really want to do is lay on the couch in a semi-vegetative state and hope that by staying still enough, our significant other and/or children won't notice we are there.  And lets face it, would our husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends/wives realllly understand (or care) about our daily battles and victories?  NO!  So with all of this in mind, a blog was born!  My Inner Hairstylist; The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful! 

WELCOME!!

This is a blog dedicated to stylists.  It will be one third daily journal, one third how-to's with technique/process/formulation of clients that sit in my chair, and one third pity party for my professional defeats and struggles (ok, maybe not quite one third pity party, but you get my drift).  We all have stylists that we look up too.  Our favorite celebrity stylists, the super successful social media stylist with 300k followers.  I may not have celebrities as clients, nor a huge following, but one thing that we do have in common is good days and bad days. Days where the hair Gods were with us and we created head after head of Pinterest-worthy hair, and then days where everything just falls apart.  This blog is a place for all of that!

So to start us off, I will share a bit of my background and struggles that got me to where I am today.  I have been a stylist for 12 years.  5 years ago after I have my son, I decided to quit the salon I was working for and go into booth rental.  A year after that, I decided to become a Suite Owner.  After the birth of my daughter, I came back to work after maternity leave and my books were DEAD!  D-E-A-D!  Silently panicking, I was worried about what I was going to do.  I knew that there were a lot of new color techniques that I honestly couldn't create.  People were starting to ask for them and my response was "that's not possible" (cringe!!!!!!)  So during this time of super humility and the reality that my business might be failing, I decide to begin learning new color techniques.  I joined new stylist forums that changed the way I was doing color and opened my eyes to a whole new world of products that I had never taken the time to educate myself on.  Out of this, I learned the art of Balayage and if I have branded myself as a specialist in anything related to hair, its Balayage and lucky for me, that is what clients want!! 

Fast forward to now, my service sales are up 55% over what they were at this time last year.  That is GROWTH!! Of FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT (holy cow)!  This growth didn't come free, though!  It came at a price of hundreds (more likely thousands) of dollars in education, TONS of new tools and products and just as many screw ups.   You can't master something until you have screwed it up...Over. And. Over. Again!

So this is where I stand today.  Hoping to help other stylists along the way, sharing my weaknesses, my strengths and my knowledge!  ENJOY