How We Got Here.
Life comes full circle. A kid who grew up in a salon ends up building the marketing company that industry never had.
I grew up in a salon.
One of my parents was a hair stylist in Long Beach, California, and I spent more hours in that salon than I can count. Spinning in the dryer chair. Sweeping up hair to feel useful. Finding ways to entertain myself between appointments.
It was boring and it was fun, often in the same afternoon. What I did not notice at the time was how much I was absorbing: the rhythm of a book, the regulars, the difference between a busy day and a good one.
Life brought me back. This time I was paying attention.
At 19 I was consulting as an IT specialist, and one of my clients was a hair extension company. The operation pulled me in immediately. It felt close to where I came from. They ended up being one of my first marketing clients.
I took them from a basic site and phone orders to selling online on an e-commerce platform I built, then from in-person education classes to a full course online. We worked trade shows and traveled the country. That stretch is where I really learned this industry: how owners think, how stylists build a book, and where the money actually comes from.
Trade shows, education days, shoots and launches. Over a decade consulting off and on for this extension business.
Marketing to beauty professionals got me thinking.
This industry runs on creativity, fashion, expression and art , and almost nobody was marketing to it that way. The salons I met kept hiring the same kind of help: a generalist who had never spent a day behind a chair, running the playbook they ran for dentists and restaurants.
A few months later the budget was gone and nothing had changed. So they’d stop, go back to walk-ins and referrals, and decide marketing doesn’t work for salons. That was never it. Nobody was doing marketing for salons. They were doing marketing, and pointing it at one.
“There’s no other industry like this one. It didn’t need better marketing. It needed its own.”
By 2017 I was done watching it happen from the sidelines.
Four years consulting for the extension brand had given me something most marketers never get: a front-row seat to how these businesses actually run. The hours. The margins. What a full book is worth, and what it costs when a chair sits empty.
I was ready to stop bringing that to one company and start bringing it to the industry. Salon Boss started family-run, and it has stayed that way.
Coming out of COVID, I rebuilt the whole thing around results.
The first five years were mostly individual stylists and small salons. Then salon suites came asking how to fill units, med spas needed patient acquisition, and beauty brands needed e-commerce that actually converted. Same industry, same gap, different shape.
Taking a break during COVID forced the question of what Salon Boss was really for. I rebuilt the offer around the answer: a defined set of services, priced in the open, judged on whether they actually produce results for the businesses running them. That is the version of Salon Boss you get today.
Then the way people find a salon started changing again.
Clients stopped only typing into Google. They started asking ChatGPT, and getting one answer back instead of ten links. Ranking on page one stopped being the finish line. The job became making a salon the answer, not one of the results. That is a different craft, and most agencies are still selling the old one.
The bigger shift happened on our side of the desk. Instead of renting the same tools every other agency rents, we build our own software, which puts capability in reach of salons that never had access to it before.
Commissioned piece by piece, software like that runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars. We build it once and run it for everyone, so we’re able to offer this level of marketing at a price most beauty businesses can actually afford.
Today, Salon Boss serves 200+ beauty businesses across every segment of the industry.
Beauty businesses served
Services, all for beauty
Beauty industry focus
Websites, SEO, AI search, advertising, social media, branding, content production, reputation management, citations and more , but only for beauty. That’s not a limitation. It’s the reason we’re good at it.
