One day last week our cute FedEx driver brought us an envelope containing a copy of Short Cuts ( a consumer magazine.)  It seemed an odd thing to be FedExed, so I gave the mag to my client and asked her to flip through and see if she could figure out why this was sent to us.

It took some time, because this is almost at the end of the magazine, but she found the reason.

In their Salon Directory, there were two salons reviewed.  Gary Manuel in Seattle, and little old us.

I only have one question.

Who the hell told them we were “warm?”

You may have noticed that we have been doing a bit of freshening up at the salon this spring.  New shampoo chairs, a new color processing zone and a streamlining of the retail space have all been completed.

If you thought we were done, you were wrong!

The large back wall that is currently covered in multi-colored squares is getting a mural.

Thanks to Rea, a School of The Arts student (who is also our client) we will be getting some lovely original art.  It will probably take the whole summer to finish and I will keep you posted of the progress.  If she’s in the salon working on it when you are there, feel free to say hello!

So far we are in the development stage.  We talked about what kind of items spoke to us and what would work for our customers.  She came back with a few rough ideas.  Here is the one that we selected as our launchpad.

I became a hairdresser in the late 1980s.  It was the era of the spiral perm.  As a new hairdresser, I had no clients, therefore I had plenty of time to spend four hours perming long hair.  I was good at it.  I was creative and thorough.  (These happen to be the same things that make me a good colorist.)

So the nineties came and brought with them the flat iron.  It’s a lovely tool.  But enough, already!  Step away from your flat iron!  You think a perm is damaging?  I have seem hair beat to hell by flat iron abuse!

Every once in a while I will mention that I have a perm client on the books and people look at me like I have grown an additional head and say ” People still get perms?”

Yes, Virginia.  People still get perms.  Some people have such crappy hair that it needs the boost a perm can give it.  Some people just like not looking like Morticia Adams.

Here is this week’s before and after.

We get new clients all the time.  It’s great.  Some fresh meat perspective for the salon is always welcome.

Since we have a big online presence, it’s where the new clients find us if they weren’t referred by a current client.

Today’s new client is a bit of a transient, having lived in Pasadena for the past few months.  She’s a singer/actress/dancer, so I began by asking her all the questions I ask performers:

Do you have a head shot that we need to match? (No.)

What image are you selling? (Wholesome.)

What are you auditioning for next? (Leaving for India tomorrow with her brother who is also a singer.)

So we took her “I live in LA” hair and made it less blonde and more “I don’t color my hair, I have just spent time on the beach.”

She’s a cutie-patootie.  Her brother is 18 and she has been traveling with him here and there as his career winds its way around the world.

We talked about family and how silly 18 year old boys are and how they think they are so smart and so grown up.

As we are just finishing up, I ask her if she or her brother have a website and if I googled them would anything come up.

She says: You probably know him.

I think: I don’t really know many Indian/Italian 18 year old boy singers.

She says: His name is Sanjaya.

You can watch their audition video here.

You may recognize this client (although I do try to get just people’s hair and not their faces for blog publication!) from a previous post.

When we first met her, she was recovering from an abruptly ended relationship and was ready to be re-invented.  We cut some hair and introduced her to Elumen and she hasn’t looked back since.

I have been pondering her transformation as a chicken and egg quandary.  Has she become confident and self assured because of her great hair, or was she always that way and that’s why she wants great hair?

If people continually comment on how great your hair is, I would think it would have to help with the self-esteem.

Either way, she’s fabulous and life is good.

Ever wonder what your favorite stylists do on their days off?

Sunday Carrie was back at the Harmon Building shaving heads for the St. Baldrick’s fund raiser for childhood cancer research.

Click here to see the pictures taken by (Azarra client) Leslie Bernard.

The Azarra staff will be Dining Out For Life next Thursday, April 24.  If you want to join us, we’ll be at the Crown Bar on Sixth Avenue around 6:30 or so.

If you need a list of other places to go, check this out.

Thanks to Exit133 I see we are having a meeting so they can give us the scoop:

Pacific Paving Project Open House

Remember the paving project on Pacific Avenue? Well, as the date approaches, more details are emerging. The City of Tacoma is hosting an open house on Thursday, April 10, to provide details of the upcoming project. The project team will share the preliminary plans and schedule for the project, which runs on Pacific Avenue between South 17th and South 25th streets and South 25th Street from Pacific Avenue to C Street. Sidewalks and curb and gutter will also be repaired where needed.

Construction is slated to start in the summer of 2008 – after the Tall Ships Festival – and is scheduled to be complete by the end of fall 2008. No construction work will take place during the Tall Ships Festival.

Details
Thursday, April 10 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Greater Tacoma Convention Center lobby
1500 Broadway
For more information about the open house or the Pacific Avenue improvement project, visit www.cityoftacoma.org/PacAve.

Carrie emailed me today that our landlord, Fred Roberson, had just come into the salon to tell us that we would be losing our much beloved parking spaces in the alley.  I immediately began thinking of how we would handle this and asked her for the details.

Her response?

“April Fools!”

Man, I hate that!  I have been walking around all day with a thin veneer of disbelief applied to everything I read or hear.  I will be glad when it is over, and so will the people at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium.

Help me understand why people enjoy this kind of thing!

Get Some Hairapy - the blog has evolved to become a beast with three heads.

Because of who I am and my interests and areas of expertise, there have been three areas of focus for this blog.

1. The book: Advice on happiness
2. The salon: Your own personal chair at Azarra Salon
3. The business: Advice for small salon owners

I have pondered the idea of splitting the segments into their own blogs, but I just don’t think I have it in me to manage three blogs!

I think that most readers would agree that the one thing that is different is the business segment. The rest of the content is really appropriate for a general audience.

To that end, I have made a new blog called, surprisingly enough, Small Salons. This way I can still get the information to the people who need it without cluttering up the main blog content for those people who have no interest in salon management.

If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to share.  And feel free to join in the discussions on either blog.

Wednesday March 26 Evening Magazine will be re-running the video they shot in the salon last year.  There is some nice footage of the salon (check out Jonathan’s blonde hair!) and even though the footage was shot in High Definition, I thought they did a very nice job of not making me look too old or too fat.  (Thank you, cameraman!)  Other than the little nit-picky things we all hate about watching ourselves on video, I was very happy with how it turned out.  If you are in the Seattle area, watch it when it airs.  If you miss it, check back here on Thursday and I will link to the online version.  (Watch it here.)

About Evening Magazine

“Evening Magazine” remains a local favorite highlighting the people, places and events that make the Northwest so special. The long-running program has provided a window on the Northwest for more than 3,000 “evenings” since its premiere in the summer of 1986. John Curley is the show’s host.

Program Times

You can watch Evening Magazine on KING 5 in Seattle Monday through Friday at 7 p.m., with replays at 3 a.m.You can also see Evening Magazine on Northwest Cable News from Monday through Friday at 9 p.m.

The show delivers a local perspective with unique and compelling stories. Take for example the recent stories of Tulk-la Massey, a Seattle-born boy growing up as a lama-in-training at a Tibetan Monastery and Boise’s Sally Maughan, raising orphaned bear cubs in her backyard. We follow Seattle’s Dick McPherson as he donates his kidney to a complete stranger, and Bainbridge Island’s Jerilyn Brusseau who’s helping clear land mines in Vietnam. We’ve recently taken you to Hong Kong, Scotland, Ireland and Thailand and “Evening Magazine” made history when we brought you “Alaska: Like You’ve Never Seen It Before”, the first local series broadcast in High-Definition television.

“Maggie,” our Kenmore Air Seaplane, allows us to expand our daily destinations to a 300 mile radius. Once a week John Curley flies off to spectacular locations such as the New Dungeness Lighthouse, where you can be a caretaker, or Jones Island in the San Juans where deer eat right out of your hand.

“Evening Magazine” is the highest-rated locally-produced show in the country and its team has been honored with numerous regional Emmy Awards. “Evening Magazine” is a program like no other for a region like no other. “Evening Magazine” airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. on KING 5. Mark Erskine is the program’s Executive Producer.

Ah, small business ownership.  The Great American Dream.

I talk people out of it all the time.

The biggest reason?  There is less money in it than you think.

The next biggest?  It is more work than you think.

The next?  Just because you are a good hairdresser doesn’t mean you will be a good business owner.

Here is an article for you that gives you some myths and realities about small business ownership.

(excerpt)

Myth #1 - Life is easier when you’re your own boss and you own the business.
Reality - Nope. Not a chance. You become the face of your company. Anything that goes wrong, or that doesn’t go perfectly right is 100 percent your fault. You have to fix it. If one of your employees drives your $45,000 delivery truck across a newly poured concrete driveway and cracks it to pieces, you get to pay for it. If your credit manager mistakenly writes down the wrong lien date on the legal paperwork, you get to eat the loss. If you screw up on your taxes, you don’t get to blame anyone else. If someone claims they got sick at your restaurant, I hope you have insurance and a good attorney. You get to pay both of those bills, too.

Here is another with reasons to not be an entrepreneur.

(excerpt)

8. Lack Of Reward Begats Lower Motivation - When running your own business, there really is no telling when you will be rewarded or even how you will be rewarded. You may hope for a bigger bank balance or aspire to develop an industry leading product, but that can’t happen without motivation and drive. Becoming an entrepreneur essentially means taking risks in hope of receiving reward, but without ever really knowing when the reward will come. If that’s something you can’t deal with, then starting your own business is not the ideal choice.

Yes.  I know that some people have huge success with their own salon.  But the truth of the matter is that most salons make little or no profit other than the income the working hairdresser/owner generates.  You can read more about this topic in  The E-Myth.

What is the E-Myth?

The “E-Myth,” or Entrepreneurial Myth, is the flawed assumption that people who are expert at a certain technical skill will therefore be successful running a business of that kind.

• “I want to be my own boss”
• “I want to make more money”
• “I want to have have more time to enjoy my life”

Most small business owners assume that owning their own business will deliver on these goals.

It’s a common misconception that because someone understands the nuts-and-bolts technical work, they will similarly understand how a business providing that sort of product or service should function.

If you are hell bent on the idea of going into business for yourself, please do yourself a favor and spend a good year researching the industry and deciding what you will do to be different and to stand out in a crowded marketplace.  Don’t do it because you think the salon owner you are working for is getting rich off of your hard work (chances are they aren’t.)

Here is an article with a very basic checklist for first time business owners.

Here is an article about determining startup costs.

The last thing the world needs is just another salon.

If you haven’t seen Split Ends, you need to catch it on the Style Network (watch some clips here).

The premise? Take two hairdressers from wildly different salons and make them swap for a few days. Sample comments? “There’s no assistant? Does that mean I have to do my own shampoos? But I’ll get my rings dirty!” I watched all of the first season and came away with an interesting observation. Unlike other “fish out of water” shows (The Simple Life, etc.) what makes this interesting is that hairdressers are often “pleasers” by nature. If you throw them in a strange environment, they might piss and moan for a bit, but they will more than likely do their best to adjust and fit in.

This is the only salon-based reality show on which our salon would be willing to appear. Yesterday we were trying to convince Jonathan to audition. If you are interested in spending a week working in a salon that differs greatly from yours, click on over here to get the info on how to audition.

Yes, they are going to dig up Pacific Avenue. Again.

Apparently no one checked the soil upon which we built a road and a light rail.

The Tribune has a story with all the details, but here is the schedule: Start digging after the Tall Ships event, finish in November.

We have never been so thankful for our rear building parking and entrance. While the construction will make things unpleasant, it will not cripple us in the same way it would if we only had access from Pacific Avenue.

Downtown Tacoma businesses win bid to postpone rebuilding of Pacific Avenue

JASON HAGEY; jason.hagey@thenewstribune.com

Published: March 17th, 2008 01:00 AM | Updated: March 17th, 2008 04:44 AM

Score one for the merchants. After hearing from downtown business owners, the City of Tacoma has decided to delay its plan to shore up sinking Pacific Avenue until after Tall Ships Tacoma 2008.Once the ships – and throngs of expected visitors – leave town, work will begin, possibly as early as July 8 but more likely the following Monday, July 14, said Dan Seabrands, a Tacoma public works engineers. The $2.6 million repair of the substructure between South 17th and South 25th streets is expected to be finished by about mid-November, before the heart of the holiday shopping season, Seabrands said.

Read the rest of the story here.

We all know there is business advice available on the internet, but for many of us, we don’t know where to begin looking for the answers.  I found a publication put together by Hewlett Packard that is a collection of advice from online business writers.  Not only is the publication full of good advice, it is a great list of experts (full of links to their websites where you can get even more help!)  I am a big believer in taking advantage of all the free information you can find.

It is always easier to travel the road if you have tales and tips from those that have gone before.

A Letter from the Publisher of Small Business Trends
Welcome to our first—but not last—eBook featuring tips and advice learned from 100 savvy readers.
It was humbling to see the breadth and quality of these reader-contributed pointers. The knowledge of many is far greater than the knowledge of one. No matter how much one person might know, it pales when compared to the wisdom of those who live and breathe the need to go out and get and retain customers every day in order to put food on the table.
I’m reminded of the narrow margin for error under which most small businesses operate. As one reader said, “Market or die! When you’re a small business owner, if you don’t succeed at marketing, your business literally could die.”
And small businesses have to make everything count. As George Langan, CEO of eXpresso (www.expressocorp.com) told me, “When you’re on a tight startup budget, you can’t afford a $2,000-a-month marketing mistake.”
Throughout the submitted tips, I noticed three themes over and over:

1. Simple and inexpensive tools are more popular than complex or pricey approaches.

“Duh!” you might be thinking. “Isn’t it obvious that entrepreneurs and small businesses, being on tight budgets, would favor low-cost approaches?” Well, yes and no. What was surprising is just how many of the tips cost literally nothing but your time. A large proportion of others, such as those that focused on using business cards or blogging, can be done for hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. So don’t be tempted to throw up your hands and say “I can’t afford marketing.” You can.

2. Authenticity, friendliness and relationships matter.

When you count your customers in the single or double digits, as opposed to the thousands or hundreds of thousands, relationships tend to matter much more deeply. The importance of smiling and being friendly was brought up again and again. Doing something nice for others and being yourself were common themes. Most small businesses are NOT about mass marketing campaigns. Instead, we rely on attracting and retaining a relatively small number of customers to be successful. A solo consultant or small Web design firm may have as few as five or six regular customers. For small businesses, investing in relationship building goes a long way.

3. Creative online marketing plays a key role.

We drew tips from those who are active online, so on the one hand you might think that the results would naturally be skewed toward online marketing. And to a degree I suppose that’s true. But I was surprised by the sophistication of the online marketing—especially on limited budgets. Some of the online approaches are very detailed and go far beyond the plain-vanilla “create a nice Web site” type of advice. A number of the small-business marketing techniques represented in this document get into advanced online marketing, including social media marketing.

Read (or print and save) the entire publication here.

The Small Business Administration has come a long way since I first looked to them for help when I started my salon.  Now they are all about the internet and there are LOADS of resources and TONS of information there.  Not a bad place to start if you are in the “Should I open my own salon?” stage of planning.

There is a great article at Small Biz Trends that breaks down what is available and where to find it online.

Remember, there is no reason to feel alone when starting a business.  You are not the first one to do it and there is no shame in taking advice and assistance from people who have blazed the trail before you.  Save yourself some headaches and read up before you jump in, or use their resources to re-focus if your existing business has drifted off course.

Pull your hot rollers out from under the sink and go watch another great How To video on StyleBell.  (The same place that brought you “how to curl your hair with a flat iron.”)

We have been seeing lots more curl and movement in finished hair lately.  Really.  You don’t need to flatten your hair anymore to be hip and cool.  Sexy glamor is back.  Think Brigitte Bardot.  And think about using a heat protecting product while you are at it.  Just your luck, we happen to sell such a thing in the salon!  Ask your hairdresser for a demo.

I just read a story (with pictures) written by a young woman about her devastating salon visit and her oath to never visit a male hairdressser again.  Objectively I can say that a.) she is percieveing her end result differenly than most of us would and b.) the gender of the hairdresser had nothing to do with what happened.

I want you to read it because it will help you understand that what you see and what the client sees are often different.

This client states that she only wants a maximum of 2″ cut from the bottom.  She also makes it a point during the cut to chat about past cuts that had gone awry where she ended up too short.  When you have a client in your chair that is giving you these signals, please heed them!  Hairdressers have a reputation for being scissor happy and for wanting to chop off long hair.  Please do your best to listen to the client and when they give specific requests, please grant them.  If you think the client needs more length removed, explain what you think and why and then let them make an informed choice.  My favorite technique is to turn them around and use a hand mirror to view the back of their hair.  I show them where the cape can be seen through the hair and suggest that the hair might look thicker if we trimmed it up to that point.  It is often effective.  (I know that to us their is no difference between a “cut” and a “trim” but to many clients there is.  Try to pick up on their cues.)

When they say 2″, I grab my old-school plastic comb from the back of the drawer (you know, the one you used in beauty school that has the inch markings on it) and I show them 2″.  Then, using the comb as a guide, I cut 2″ off the bottom and show them the hair I removed.  Next I ask them if that is OK.  Now we can proceed with the rest of the haircut and the client can relax.

When you meet a client who has already had bad salon experiences, handle them gently.  Talk them through the process so that they feel that they are being heard.

Anyone disagree?

These photos are from America’s Top Model.

In my two decades of doing hair, I have been to many a hair show. I have attended, assisted and presented. In these capacities, I have been a witness to many crying models. This morning I read a post from someone who’s experience as a hair model did not meet her expectations. Depending on your perspective, you will find it either sad or funny. You can read it here.

If you are a civilian (not a professional paid model that has been hired for the show) here are some things you need to know:

Prepare to be bored. Bring a book or a video game. There is a ton of down time during show prep.

For example, here’s the time line for the even I am doing on Sunday (and it is a tiny event!)

11:00 Model Call
4:00 - 6:30 Stage Presentation

7 1/2 hours is a long time to sit and have nothing to do. The hairdressers will be busy and can’t entertain you. Plan wisely.

You must be open to anything. Yes, you heard me. Anything. Don’t walk in and say “You can do anything as long as you leave the length.” or “I just want my highlights touched up!” The person doing your hair is there to demonstrate a specific technique for the audience. What you want is of little importance. A kind Guest Artist will consult with you first and if you aren’t open to what they have in mind, they will ask you to leave. Not all are so kind. And that is why some models end up in tears. You might spend the next two months getting your hair back to the way you like it, but the Artist has moved on and forgotten you even exist.

I know this sounds harsh. But better you listen to me now than end up crying in the model room later.

The comment section is open for any heart-wrenching (or hilarious) stories you would like to share.

If there is one thing that makes you look like you know what you are doing, it is a spiffy logo.  A salon logo should be designed to help customers get a feel for what the salon is like.  Potential customers should have an idea what they are in for long before they step inside.  Your logo is a HUGE part of that branding.

Logo creation can be intimidating.  I understand.  But you still have to do it.  If you don’t have a client in the graphics world who can help you, there are other (affordable!) options.

Click over to Small Business Trends to see the process from start to finish.