Salon Culture: What Six Owners Do to Keep a Team

Salon culture is the set of habits that decide whether good stylists stay. It is the schedule, how new people are trained, what is written down as the standard, and whether the owner listens before changing things. Most articles on salon culture stop at "communicate more." This one is built from long-form interviews I recorded with salon owners and educators: Wendy McCown, Shelly Malizola of Allure Designs, Greg Chavez of Salon Kreed, Becky Dobbs of Elleven Salon, Scott Buchanan, Lensi White, and Vivienne Mackinder. Every quote below is their own words, taken from the recordings.

1. Ask the team before you fix the team

Shelly Malizola has owned Allure Designs in Libertyville, Illinois for 28 years. When her retail sales hit the lowest point in the life of the business, she did not start with a new commission plan or a sales contest.

"The first thing I did was I surveyed all of them and asked, do you like retailing? What do you enjoy about it? What do you not enjoy about it?"

Shelly Malizola, Allure Designs

What she found was not a team that disliked selling. It was things she had been missing as the leader. She also found her staff were afraid to tell her what they really thought, so she had a team member go around and ask instead, then met with everyone one on one. The team got a vote on which product lines to carry, and testers were set out so they could try them first. Her retail in the first quarter of 2024 was up almost 30 percent, and she credits the conversations more than the new systems.

The lesson for any owner: your team will not tell you the truth in a staff meeting. Ask privately, or through someone they trust, before you decide what is wrong.

2. Manage the system, not the person

Scott Buchanan opened his first salon in New York, a 450 square foot room with five chairs, and grew the company to five locations and 220 people. At that size he learned he could not be in every conversation, so he stopped trying to manage people at all.

"You don't manage people. That's when they leave. But I lead people and I manage the system."

Scott Buchanan

His point is that stylists take correction personally, so he corrects the system instead. There is a system for answering the phone, for greeting a guest, for the shampoo, and when something goes wrong the conversation is about which step was missed, not about who someone is. The team helps build the systems too. If the salon needs a dress code, the meeting does not end without one, but the team decides what it looks like.

He gives every new hire one test for any decision they are unsure about:

"does it create a triple win? Is it good for the guest? Is it good for the team and is it good for the company or me?"

Scott Buchanan

3. Let the team redesign the schedule

Wendy McCown opened her salon at 22 and owned it for 27 years. It was a W2 commission salon with 16 stylists. In 2012, at a team meeting about how to make the salon better, stylists who were starting families asked to work less. Her answer became the salon's whole model.

Over six months to a year, the team stepped down from four and a half days to four, then three and a half, then three. Prices went up at each step. The stylists alternated weeks: Monday, Wednesday and Friday one week, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday the next, which gave everyone a three-day weekend every other week. Anyone who wanted extra days could take them when a chair was free. Most did not.

"our little tagline was make more work less"

Wendy McCown

It worked because of two things she was careful about. The stylists kept taking classes, so the higher prices had something behind them, and they explained every increase to clients rather than springing it on them. Double booking during color processing time kept the short days full. Lensi White, who trained under Wendy, says she did better on three days than she had on five, and by the fifth day on the old schedule her feet and back were hurting.

You do not have to copy the three-day week. The culture lesson is that the schedule is the culture. A team that helped design its own week has a reason to stay that a raise down the street does not match.

4. Train side by side, and show them the ladder

Greg Chavez opened his first salon in 1986, at 24. At Salon Kreed in Colorado Springs, new stylists go through a four to six month associate program, working with different educators across color, cutting and extensions.

"I think that's the best education is hands-on."

Greg Chavez, Salon Kreed

He sees the gap getting wider. Stylists who came through school during COVID did not get their hands on enough hair, and more of today's education is on video. Lensi White trains the same way in her own studio: her assistant works next to her, shampooing, then applying color, then styling, and recently the two of them cut one men's haircut together, each taking a side.

Vivienne Mackinder, the educator and former artistic director for Vidal Sassoon, puts the reason simply:

"when you learn the technique, you're learning a system. And when you learn it well, and practice it and practice it and practice it, the confidence will increase."

Vivienne Mackinder

Confidence is a culture issue. A stylist who freezes when a client brings in a short haircut photo is a stylist thinking about leaving.

Becky Dobbs, who owns Elleven Salon in Huntsville, Alabama, adds two things. Her associates rotate between different senior stylists, so they see more than one way to tone or cut. And when training ends, there is a visible ladder. Each level has its own targets for client retention, number of clients and retail, and moving up means higher prices, higher commission and more say over when you work. At the top there are paths to training others or becoming a shareholder. One of her shareholders started at the front desk.

Her advice for building the first version of that ladder is practical: look at your top stylist, and ask what she does differently from someone who started six months ago. Those differences are your levels.

5. Make education pay for itself

Every owner here treats ongoing education as non-negotiable. The question is how to afford it. Shelly Malizola's answer won her salon an award for its education program: she turned Allure Designs into an education center.

"So I host classes throughout the year and we'll let other stylists come in and pay a fee and it helps offset the costs for the classes that my team is also taking."

Shelly Malizola, Allure Designs

She also keeps in-house specialists teaching men's precision cutting and curly hair, and trains her team on body positioning so they last longer behind the chair. Wendy McCown, now renting studios to independent stylists, lets the renters pick the class topics and brings in her own accountant to teach the business side. Greg Chavez hosts hair jams that bring stylists from different salons together, and brings in outside educators.

Greg's reason for all of it is a good one to put on the wall:

"I've always believed once you think you know it all, then you fall behind."

Greg Chavez, Salon Kreed

6. Write the standard down as a task list

Culture is what happens when you are not in the room. Lensi White learned that the hard way after she opened her own space.

"you can be paying somebody per hour, but They don't know what to do"

Lensi White

Her fix is a written task list for the day, started early and changed often. At Wendy's salon, nobody went home until the closing list was done. Lensi's other rule is that the first client of the day, the middle client and the last client all get the same experience, which only happens when the standard is written somewhere instead of living in the owner's head. Some of her standards are small and specific: no food in the salon, because a client who walks into the smell of pizza does not feel like she is somewhere luxurious.

If your culture only exists when you are standing on the floor, it is not a culture yet. Write the five things that must happen every day, and post them.

7. Want them to win more than you do

Asked for the one piece of advice she would give a new owner, Wendy McCown said you have to want everyone on the team to win more than you want to win yourself. Her way of putting it to her staff was that the salon does not make money, the stylists do, and the owner does not win until they win.

Greg Chavez named his salon for the same idea. Kreed is spelled with a K but means creed, a set of shared beliefs, and he calls building that kind of team the hardest part of ownership:

"trying to create a culture that wants to lift each other up and help each other in the industry"

Greg Chavez, Salon Kreed

Becky Dobbs gives the same answer when asked for her single piece of advice to owners:

"value your people, put value in your people, create a culture that they want to be a part of."

Becky Dobbs, Elleven Salon

She also says the opposite is fine. Someone who does not fit the culture can go, because keeping them is more stressful than the gap they leave. Greg holds the line on standards too. When his own daughter, a colorist, wanted in, he told her she had to apply like anyone else.

8. Why good stylists still leave

Pay comes up, but it was not the first thing these owners named. Two other forces did.

Stagnation. Vivienne Mackinder describes what happens when the work becomes a loop:

"there's a point where no one thrives in repetition, because it just becomes dull."

Vivienne Mackinder

A stylist who is learning something new every quarter is not bored. That is the real return on the education budget.

The pull of going independent. Social media makes working alone look easy. Greg Chavez, who says there are not many commission salons in Colorado Springs, has watched what happens next:

"a lot of them get out on their own. And then they find that it's not as easy. And so sometimes they end up coming back."

Greg Chavez, Salon Kreed

You cannot stop a stylist who is set on going independent, and Wendy and Lensi would both tell you the right ones should. What you can do is be the salon they come back to, or the one that taught them so well they send clients your way. That is also why we market individual stylists, not just the salon. Read more in why good stylists quit.

How to write a salon mission statement your team will use

A mission statement only matters if it changes what someone does on a Tuesday. Most salon mission statements fail that test because they describe a feeling ("we are passionate about beauty") instead of a behavior. Use this test on every line: could a new hire act on it on her first day?

1. Start from your systems, not your values. Look at what you actually do: your schedule, your training, your daily list. The mission statement should describe those.
2. Write three to five sentences, each a behavior. "Every new stylist trains side by side with a senior stylist for four months" is a mission line. "We value growth" is not.
3. Include one line about the team, not just clients. Wendy's make-more-work-less line was a promise to her staff, not to her clients.
4. Ask the team to mark it up. The same way Shelly surveyed her staff before fixing retail, let them say which lines are not true yet.
5. Check it twice a year. If a line is no longer true, change the line or change the salon.

Scott Buchanan draws a useful line here between values and systems. Values can stay put for years. The systems that carry them out should not, because what works for five people breaks at twenty:

"a value might be, but a system to run something has to change as the company changes."

Scott Buchanan

So keep the mission statement to the values, and keep the task list and training plan as the parts you rewrite as you grow.

The short version

• Ask your team privately before you fix anything.
• Correct the system, not the person.
• Treat the schedule as part of the culture, and let the team help design it.
• Train hands-on, side by side, for months, then show them the levels above.
• Let outside stylists pay for your team's education.
• Write the daily standard down, so it holds when you are not there.
• Keep everyone learning. Boredom loses more stylists than pay.

The full conversations are on the blog: Wendy McCown and Lensi White, Shelly Malizola, Greg Chavez, Becky Dobbs and Vivienne Mackinder.