How to Open a Hair Salon: What Six Owners Learned

To open a hair salon, decide first whether you want to own a team or just your own book, then build experience somewhere well run, choose your model, price the space, and know the weekly number that keeps the doors open before you sign a lease. Most guides stop at licenses and paperwork. This one is built from interviews I recorded with owners who have opened salons over five decades: Scott Buchanan, Wendy McCown, Becky Dobbs of Elleven Salon, Shelly Malizola of Allure Designs, Greg Chavez of Salon Kreed, and the educator Vivienne Mackinder. Every quote is their own words from the recordings.

1. Decide if you want a salon or a chair of your own

This is the question every owner here came back to. Being a busy stylist and owning a salon are different jobs. Wendy McCown opened her salon at 22, owned it for 27 years, and stopped doing hair 10 to 15 years in because the business needed all of her. She frames the choice like this:

"Do I want to spend my time with just clients where I can charge and, you know, and then go home and not worry about the other stuff? Or do I want to spend my time, you know, growing a group of people with me? It's a whole another skill set."

Wendy McCown

Vivienne Mackinder is blunt about the cost of the second option:

"It's very difficult to be an entrepreneur. You never leave your business."

Vivienne Mackinder

If what you want is freedom and your own hours, a suite or a booth may get you there with far less risk. If what you want is to build something bigger than your own chair, keep reading. See also booth rent vs commission.

2. Get experience somewhere well run first

None of these owners opened straight out of school. Becky Dobbs worked about 12 years behind the chair before opening. Shelly Malizola was licensed at 18 and opened at 25. Wendy worked in a salon for several years before she opened at 22. Scott spent four years as an apprentice before he bought his first salon.

Wendy's advice is to pick a place with structure, whether that is a successful independent stylist you can learn from or a salon with real leadership. You are not just learning hair there. You are watching how a front desk, a schedule and a team are run, which is the part school does not teach.

3. Choose your model: commission, booth rent, or studios

Wendy ran a W2 commission salon for decades, then sold it and opened private studios that independent stylists rent from her. She has seen both sides. In a commission salon, the owner handles everything and stylists can still earn well. But not everyone wants that, and some want to set their own hours.

Look at your market before you choose. When Greg Chavez opened Salon Kreed in Colorado Springs, friends pushed him partly because there were not many commission salons there. A gap in the market is a reason. So is the kind of stylist you want to attract: newer stylists usually need the training and structure of commission, while established ones with a book often prefer to rent.

4. Be careful with partners

Partnerships show up in almost every one of these stories, and they went both ways.

Shelly Malizola opened Allure with two partners, both about 20 years older than her, who brought wisdom she did not have yet. They eventually retired, she bought them out slowly, and she has owned it on her own since 2008. Greg Chavez went into his first salon, 14 hairdressers, with a friend, and owned it for four years.

Becky Dobbs had the harder version. She opened her first salon in 1985 with two partners, and it closed around 1992 when they no longer wanted to run it. A later partnership was not a good fit at all, and she opened Elleven on her own. Her advice:

"I thought I trusted a couple of times a long time ago, but I really should have followed my gut. But I didn't."

Becky Dobbs, Elleven Salon

Before you sign anything with a partner, write down who owns what, who decides what, and what happens if one of you wants out. That conversation is easier before the money is spent.

5. Price your own opening, line by line

We do not publish an average cost to open a salon, because the honest range is enormous and it is driven by things specific to you: the city, the size of the space, and how much the space needs to be rebuilt. Here is one real example instead:

"I went to my uncle and I asked him if he could lend me money. It was $40,000, I think it was."

Scott Buchanan

That bought a 450 square foot, five-chair salon he was already working in. His uncle said yes, and Scott remembers the terms exactly: with interest, because there was no free money in his family.

Build your own number from these lines:

• Lease, deposit and any key money for the space.
• Build-out: plumbing for shampoo bowls, electrical, lighting, flooring, ventilation if you do chemical services. This is usually the line that surprises people.
• Equipment: stations, chairs, shampoo bowls, dryers, color bar, washer and dryer.
• Opening inventory of backbar and retail product.
• Licenses and insurance: most states require a salon establishment license in addition to each stylist's license. Check your state board. See what salon insurance you actually need.
• Software, signage, website and opening marketing.
• Working capital: enough to cover payroll and rent for the months before the books fill.

Two ways owners here cut the bill. Becky and her partners did their own build-out, with their husbands tearing out and rebuilding, so they did not need a contractor. And Shelly warns against over-buying product on day one:

"It's a lot of cash sitting on the shelf if we don't have the right things on the shelf."

Shelly Malizola, Allure Designs

6. Know your weekly number before you sign

Scott was a strong stylist with a big clientele, but he did not know the business side. His cousin taught him to read a spreadsheet, and he came away with one number he could hold in his head: $7,000 a week, and he would be OK.

That is the number to find for your own salon. Add up rent, payroll, product, software, insurance, loan payments and your own pay, divide by the weeks in a year, and you have what the salon has to bring in every week. If your chairs cannot produce that, the space is wrong, the rent is wrong, or the timing is wrong. Our salon business plan guide walks through the full version, and how much salon owners actually make shows where the money goes.

Then keep using the plan. Shelly Malizola, who now coaches other owners, put the common mistake this way on a panel at a 2024 salon summit in Denver:

"So often, you know, we never even look at that plan after the business opens."

Shelly Malizola, Allure Designs

7. Expect the first year to be about systems

The surprise in the first year is rarely the hair. It is everything around it. Becky remembers what hit her when she opened:

"from payroll to taxes, to hiring, to working behind the chair full time was another eye opening learning experience."

Becky Dobbs, Elleven Salon

Lensi White, who opened her own studio after 16 years at Wendy's salon, says the thing she wished she had built sooner was a written daily task sheet, because hourly help does not know what to do without one. And make sure anyone you bring on is fully trained before they cut a client's hair. Greg Chavez, on his third salon, is honest about the weight of it:

"But I think it's not always glamorous. You wake up with it and you go to bed with it."

Greg Chavez, Salon Kreed

More on building a team that holds together in salon culture: what six owners do to keep a team.

8. Grow when you outgrow, not before

Scott outgrew his 450 square feet in about a year and moved four doors down into 750, which he called a castle by comparison, with room for a small spa. His second location came from a conversation with a client whose husband was in the coffee business. Growth followed demand, one step at a time, until he had five locations. His advice for the moment you feel stuck on whether to take the next step:

"If I would have thought about every step of the way, I wouldn't be halfway to where I was."

Scott Buchanan

9. Plan your exit before you open

Wendy opened at 22 and says she spent her early years trying to get the salon as high as it could go, without thinking about how she would land it. She did land it, and sold the salon, but her advice to new owners is to think about the landing before takeoff.

Becky Dobbs offers one way to build that in from the start: shareholders. One of her shareholders started at the front desk, and she points out that a salon coordinator who runs the front can own a share without doing hair at all. It gives your best people a stake, and it gives you a gradual way out. She is also realistic about selling outright: unless a buyer is adding a second or third location, a sale usually means you keep working there for a while, because you are part of what they are buying.

The checklist

1. Decide: a team, or your own book in a suite or booth.
2. Work somewhere well run, and study how it is run.
3. Choose commission, booth rent or studios, based on your market.
4. Put any partnership in writing, including how someone exits.
5. Price your space line by line, including build-out and working capital.
6. Find your weekly break-even number before you sign the lease.
7. Get the establishment license and insurance your state requires.
8. Pick a name you can grow into. See salon name ideas and the checks to run.
9. Write the daily task sheet and the training plan before your first hire.
10. Start marketing before the doors open. See grand opening ideas.
11. Decide how you will eventually step back or sell.