How Karen Kaminski Turned 1 Salon Suite Into 3 Businesses

START HERE

Meet Karen Kaminski.

Karen Kaminski graduated high school in 1987 and told her dad she wanted to go to beauty school. He said absolutely not. “Go to college, get a degree.”

So she did. Karen went to college and had her kids, then she went ahead and got her nail tech license anyway. But it wasn’t about pasting on acrylics. She had a vision. Which is exactly what she told her dad.

“I told him I don’t want to work in the salon. I want to own the salon.”

Driven and already successful, Karen didn’t wait long before she bought one… AND HATED IT!

She pivoted, moved on to manage the nail department at a bigger salon, and hated that even more, because the ceiling was the same either way. There were only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a week, and only one Karen. She was overworked and underpaid.

Then a water heater went out.

“All of a sudden I’m paying the 2 girls that were with me, I’m paying rent, I’m paying the power bills. There was nothing left for me at the end of the day.”

As a single mom, she needed more income, so she took a 100% commission sales job with CosmoProf (a wholesale beauty supplier) and spent the next stretch of her career with a front-row seat to how salon owners were succeeding or failing. And it’s how she saw the next wave coming before the rest of the market.

Salon suites. Individual rented rooms instead of chairs in one big shop.

Pennsylvania didn’t have booth renting yet, so when the first national brand opened 2 locations in Pittsburgh, Karen already knew what was coming.

She opened Allure Salon Group in Wilkes-Barre in January 2017, built outside the franchise system, on her own name and her own lease. By 2018 people were calling to ask how she’d done it. She never advertised the help, but word of mouth turned it into a consulting business anyway.

“I’m not a program, I’m a results person. I’m not selling you a course on how to do it. If you hire me, you’re getting a salon suite unless you quit.”

Today she runs 3 businesses: Allure Salon Group, Allure’s consulting practice, and an AI arm she built for her own facilities first. All 3 work together, each one helping the others grow and succeed.

Here’s what she learned getting there, with the help of the Growth Boardroom.

Every business Karen ever worked in had a number sitting on top of it, and she found that number every time. As a nail tech it was hours, as a salon owner it was overhead (where one broken water heater ate the whole month), and in sales it was the size of her territory.

That territory was doing $800K to $900K in annual sales on a strong commission structure, so while the ceiling was high, it was still there.

Then she tried something every owner does when they start getting close to the limit. Hiring her way out.

“I made the big mistake of hiring more people. Well, hiring more people cost me more money. It didn’t make me more money.”

She was on the right track, she just hadn’t found the right formula… But she was about to.

That’s the Chair Ceiling.

Anything you price by the hour, the chair, or the room has a hard number sitting on top of it. You can work harder underneath that number, but you can’t usually work past it. If you want to raise the roof, you often have to change what you sell.

The lesson: If you can name the exact thing that caps your revenue, you already know what your next business needs to look like.

Karen’s tenants are great at hair, nails, and lashes, but most of them aren’t that great at running a business…

“[A lot of them] didn’t even know how to write out a check when they first came in.”

A lot of her tenants also have NO idea how far their business extends.

“They think their business is their space. They don’t realize their business is everything they do besides what they actually are personally touching a person.”

Once competition flooded her market, Karen stopped selling “just” salon space and started selling the thing her tenants were missing: business acumen.

“You can’t just offer a nice space anymore. You have to be able to help these tenants become better business owners to keep them in your space.”

Same square footage, different product.

The lesson: The thing your customers are worst at is the thing they’ll pay you most to fix.

Sometimes, the people you’re trying so hard to empower can still act like children.

“When everybody’s doing great, they’re all owners. But when things start to go sideways, they become employees that you have to manage.”

At 5 locations, managing that became its own full time job.

And the friction goes deeper than difficult tenants. While Karen was building locations 2 and 3, a contractor walked off with close to $400K in deposits and her name was already on the leases! Don’t worry, she figured it out. Because that’s what owners do.

People buy into Karen’s model expecting it to run itself, when what you’re really buying is a people business with a lease attached. That’s true for most businesses. Owners can’t just put up the cash and walk away. Whether it’s a salon or an HVAC repair shop, you absolutely have to do the work.

It’ll be worth it, but it’s still work.

The lesson: Every business is a people business wearing a mask. Don’t be fooled by something playing dress-up.

Until about 2 years ago, Karen was cleaning all 5 of her facilities herself, running the tours, and handling every maintenance request that came in. She’d done it that way for a decade, because that’s what you do.

And to be fair, it is what you do… just not forever.

“When I took a step back, I’m like, wait a second. I can make X doing a consulting call, and then have somebody else do that.”

Imagine a piece of paper with a big, bold line down the middle in permanent marker. On one side sits the work only you can do, the discovery call and the relationship behind it. On the other side sits the work anyone trained can do. Changing the lightbulb is on the wrong side of that line, and so is scrubbing the floor, and so is most of what’s currently eating your Tuesday.

Try this today: Open last week’s calendar and write down every task you actually touched. Put a checkmark next to the ones that genuinely required you. Whatever’s left without a checkmark is your first hire, your first SOP, or your first thing to automate.

Karen and her son sat through a session on AI at a Contrarian event, and he walked out of it with an idea...

“He was like, mom, this could do everything.”

So they decided to make their own business an AI playground and start systemizing what they couldn’t manage directly.

With the help of her son, Karen started slowly putting agents on the website and the social channels. It’s how they ended up catching the people browsing salon suites at 11:30 at night.

Deploying a small amount of AI helped their own inbound grow from 3 or 4 leads in a 2-week window to 14 in the same amount of time.

Then they packaged it and offered it to the facility owners she consults for.

“AI is like having a flywheel now. It actually connects everything.”

Karen spun up another branch of Allure and started selling a system she’d originally built for herself. Which is exactly the kind of thinking we love in our programs.

The lesson: The best product you’ll ever sell is the one you built because you needed it.

Near the end of our call, we asked Karen what she’d tell an owner who’s in the thick of it right now.

“It’s all normal. I was having one of those days yesterday where I’m like, when does it get to the point where the checkbook is just flowing and there’s no stress of moving money back and forth. Business ownership is not for the weak. But what you’re going through is completely normal.”

10 years in, 5 locations, 20+ builds, and dozens of problems later, Karen still has days like yours.

But we don’t choose ownership because it’s easy. We choose it because it’s worth it.

- The Contrarian team

P.S. Naval Ravikant likes to say the real measure of intelligence is whether you’re getting what you want out of life.

And the same thing should apply to your business.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a pretty smart cookie. So let us ask you: are you getting what you want out of your business? Or are you up to your armpits in work, with no clear idea how to get back to your life?

That’s exactly why Codie wrote Own or Be Owned. So you could take control of your business and make it run without you.

Don’t be dumb. Come to the free event → Click HERE to get what you want!

See you there, smartypants.

FROM THE COMMUNITY

Buying businesses is hard. That’s why we love celebrating our members when they make progress. Here are some wins:

Want to join our groups of thousands of smart business builders and buyers?

Get access to our live expert calls (and so much more) when you join our Contrarian Academy or Growth Boardroom.