Could your salon be a lifeline? With 'Shear Haven' ambassador, Liz McKeon

One in four women and one in six men will experience some kind of domestic abuse in their lifetime. One person who feels that we are uniquely placed in the salon industry to help people through this is my guest today, Liz McKeon. Liz is a salon business expert. She's the founder of the International Salon Business School. I'm very pleased to welcome her onto the show. All on Build Your Salon. Liz, welcome to the Build Your Salon podcast. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. It feels like we should have had you on a very long time ago, but this is my problem, my mistake, because I had no idea, firstly, that this amazing program was out there and that you were behind it until it was pushed onto my radar. So it's great to finally have you on. But before we jump into talking about this very serious, very important issue, I wanted to just introduce you to the audience in case they've been living under a rock for the last 20 years and don't know who you are. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey into the salon industry and what you do? Yeah, so my name is Liz McKeon and my business title is Salon Business Expert and I mainly specialize in salon turnaround and absolutely love what I do. And prior to doing that, I had a long history in retail and business ownership. And then, you know, you work away in your salon and your spa, don't you? And you just do your best. And I was getting to that stage that I was getting, you know, just trying to move on. And one day my business development manager just randomly out of the blue said, she was counting my stock and she just said one day, Liz, I wish you just teach, tell everybody else to do what you do. My life would be so much easier to her, but does everybody not do what I do? And she said, no, Liz, nobody runs a salon the way you do. And I thought, right, OK, that would be something different, different to do and always up for a challenge. And yeah, I left salon work and trained as a business coach because I thought I'd be too bossy. You know, what's this skill? So then I thought I better train as a coach so I'm not too bossy with people. And then people started asking me to work in groups and then I trained as a trainer. So I now have this very unique and privileged career where I work with business owners on a very regular basis, having a look at their business and helping them.

And I always feel my unique position is not what I think somebody else should be doing, but to figure out what they want to achieve with their business and help them grow their business from where it's at to where they'd like it to be. And that could be anybody from working, you know, somebody working out of their box room at home, right through to the large multinationals. So I do quite a lot of work and travel quite a bit. And yeah, I'm just, yeah, my love for the industry just keeps growing. Fantastic. It's a really unique industry in that kind of way. I think people fall in love with it forever, don't they? And I think it'd be a really difficult one to try and get out of. And then I'm talking to you specifically today about Shearhaven. Now, Shearhaven, you tell us, what is Shearhaven? Where's it come from? So to explain Shearhaven in its context around my involvement with it, if I hate bringing us all back to COVID, but I need to. So during COVID, I live in Ireland, and we had very strict lockdowns here. And so far as one point we weren't allowed to go any further than two kilometres. And like most of the people I had noticed on my news feeds or my social media feeds, you know, business owners that I might know or would have worked with putting out posts saying, you know, if you need any help, just give me a call. If you need me to call the authorities for you, just ask me for eye shadow, such and such a number. And I had been kind of spotting this during the months, but not taking too much notice of it. And then sadly, I saw a post up one day. And it's dreadful, isn't it? Like we work so closely with our clients. We, you know, we just sort of such a personal relationship. But one Saturday morning, I saw a really sad post up that a salon owner that I had worked with had put up a picture of a customer of hers. And I'm not saying this now to distress anybody on a life support machine. And unfortunately, and she said, you know, this this lady had five children. She had been coming to my salon all the time. And, you know, now she's in this situation and it's not looking good. And maybe if my salon had been open, this wouldn't have happened. So I was observing this sort of thing. And I remember clearly it was saying it was Valentine's Day and I was ready for bed at 12 o'clock or something. In the day because we couldn't go anywhere, do anything.

And I was bored and I was watching TV. And that evening there was nothing on TV and I was just scrolling through LinkedIn. And I found this link. I have no idea how to this training about domestic violence called Sharehaven. And I thought, well, sure, I'll do that. So the training took about 20 minutes and it just hit the spot. And I have personal experience of having to literally flee from my life. And go into hiding for several months. And it was a long time ago. But I think when I watched the training, it brought me back to the terror of that. And I thought, well, you know, I can only go two kilometers today. And if I was in that situation today, I would be like the woman on the life support machine. I would be dead because two kilometers just would not have been far enough or safe enough. So I did my training and it was hosted at the time on the Barbicide platform. And a couple of days later, then I got a little certificate, which I have in my office framed. And the idea with the certificate then is that you photograph it and put it up on your on your social media so that the brand of Sharehaven starts to become more recognized. So about a week later, remember that for the first time in all our lives, we were getting our heads around digital training. You and I talked today. All of all of a sudden, everybody knew how to use Zoom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were so foreign to us at the time. So I thought, well, everybody is doing online training. This was 20 minutes. So the next week on my newsletter, I sent out I sent out the details about Sharehaven and just that I did this life, this training over the weekend. And you're all doing so much training online. It takes 20 minutes. You might just save a life. You know, maybe ask your team, put this on the list. So I did that. I didn't hear anything from anybody, didn't hear anything from Sharehaven. And I still thought, no, there has to be a little bit more that I could do. So eventually I got in touch with a lady called Suzanne Post, who is the founder of Sharehaven. She's based in Nashville in Tennessee. And again, another survivor, domestic violence survivor, a salon owner.

And she started Sharehaven training. And she was, you know, originally just going from salon to salon in Nashville, teaching the training. Then she connected up with the YWCA. Then they put their video training together and then Barbicide hosted it. So that was a breakthrough with Barbicide. So I got in touch with Suzanne and with the YWCA. And then we decided that I could then become the UK and Irish ambassador for Sharehaven. But interestingly enough, they had been wondering on Valentine, you know, the week after Valentine's Day, by 4000 people in the UK randomly downloaded the training and 500 people in Ireland. So four and a half thousand people actually downloaded the training as a result of my newsletter, which I was completely oblivious to. So in July 2021, then I officially became the UK and Irish ambassador for the program. Superb and well done. A couple of things that I want to just mop up very quickly is this is a 20 minute training with a test at the end, isn't it? So even though we don't have huge weeks of lockdown to go through online courses, you don't need weeks and weeks of time to do this. And the other thing that I want to make really, really clear is the training is also free, isn't it? There's no no cost attached to it at all. So you go through the training video, you do your test at the end and then you get to download your certificate to show your support. So there really is no excuse. And the other thing I really want to emphasize is we have a huge chunk of our listeners here on Build Your Salon hairdressers. There's also beauty therapists. And we also have a lot of people who carry out barbering services for people that identify as male. And I said right at the head of the show, one in six men will also experience domestic abuse and domestic violence at some time in their lives. So this isn't just for people who are carrying out intimate services in that lovely, fluffy, stereotypically female way. It's also affecting affecting men as well, isn't it? Well, on the barbering, the barbering part of the industry is very critical to this because they get a lot of child victims in their chairs.

So for the barbering sector to take the training is is quite important. And also a lot of perpetrators are in the barber chairs as well. So, yeah. And I think the other dimension I'd like to bring to people is lots of people who listen to the podcast are employers and have teams. And when I was doing my homework for this episode, 75 percent of people experiencing domestic violence or abuse are targeted at work. So they're either getting abusive phone calls or text messages or emails. So even if you don't want to do it because you want to necessarily look after your clients, though, I've got no idea why you wouldn't. You need to be looking after your teams as well. So I'd really like to emphasize that dimension to this. If I may, can you just talk a little bit about the impact in your personal experience? I don't want to go into the details of your personal experience, but what kind of impact does domestic abuse and domestic violence have? It's an interesting one because prior to it happening to me, I would have just had a very, you know, practical, useless opinion on it, really, which is just like when somebody does something, do you get up and leave? Like the common sense would tell you, get up and leave. But the thing about coercive behavior, it doesn't have to be physical. It could be emotional. It could be sexual. It could be financial. It could be, you know, it could be around food and hunger across so many, so many different ways of impacting on you. And I think this is where the training is really useful insofar as it explains what coercive behavior is. Most people will take seven attempts to get away. So leaving is not as easy and as straightforward. It's very hard to leave if you have nowhere to go. It's very hard to leave if you have no money. And bullies by their nature, when you stand up to them, will raise the ante, won't they? So, you know, when you leave, you're going for a harder time than if than if you stay. So it's not as straightforward as it would appear from the outside. And also, I think the main thing about coercive behavior is people were that, you know, that person wears you down.

So by the time something dreadful happens, well, in my case, I hardly knew my own name by that time. So you're a shell of yourself and you are generally cut off from from your family and from your friends, which is what makes this training so critical because you're safe in the salon. And actually, I really want to emphasize that point in the research that I did. It apparently, on average, takes individuals 50 incidents of abuse before they start to reach out for effective help. So even before that first attempt at leaving, there's a whole history. There's a whole catalog of things that might have been building. Yes. Yes. Yeah. What is it? What is it you think that makes us particularly uniquely placed to offer help? Well, I think I think you've already named some of it. First of all, it's the relationship that we have with our clients. And prior to getting involved with Sharehaven in the nature of my work, I had come across this a few times where, for example, I might be working with a salon owner in their office or something. This happened to me twice or three times where somebody would come in into the owner and say, would you mind taking a look at my client? It looks like she's getting all the patient. She would describe it. And I'm sitting there and I'm saying to myself, no, no, that's not all the patient. Somebody has yanked the hair out of that person's head. That's what that is. So I'd come across it that way. Another time I used to work with a salon owner outside London and I would the range that we had is that I would work with her one day a month and she had a cabin in her garden in the salon garden. And that's where we would work. And I started to observe this man at the back garden literally all day, every day. And this older and actually more mature therapist in between clients, she was running out to speak to this man. And at lunchtime, he would be waiting for her. And at lunchtime, he would after lunchtime, he would bring her back. And so I would observe her in the day, maybe seven or eight times plus lunch going out to this man. And I said to the owner one day, do you mind me asking you what's going on there?

And she said, oh, that's so and so and that's that's her husband. He's crazy about her. And he just, you know, misses her so much during the day and he takes her to lunch. And I thinking, OK, just say nothing today, Liz. Go away and think about this. And what I decided that day was if I come back the next month and that's still happening, then I have to explain to the owner that it's not exactly what's happening. And it was a complete and total revelation to her when I explained what what exactly was going on. And I could see out of the corner of my eye because I knew the therapist and I could see her. She was walking down the garden that that her body language and in her face, I could see the fear. And yet he was standing there and, you know, waving at all the other therapists, waving in at the owners, though he was the great fellow. And yeah, completely terrorizing her at work. So I have come across those sorts of situations a few times in my work. Another time I went to work with with this. It was a business owner that I met maybe twice or three times in the past and just happened to turn up on a day where there had been some sort of, you know, incident. And I had to help her and her child escape her house and we had to call the police and get a borrowing order. And that man subsequently ended up in jail. So in the course of my work, I have come across it quite a bit. But I think you've hit the nail on the head as business owners. We have a responsibility to our teams as well, haven't we, to keep them safe. So that's that's where the training, I think, really helps. But I think the relationship that we have with our clients is just so special. And because we've on a different note to physically handle our clients, you can see bruising, you can see all these things. And, you know, if there's a pattern to us, yeah, then we do see it. But that relationship is so important, isn't it? Because, you know, your clients, we hear not just the bad news, but we hear all the good news and the weddings and the babies and the and the divorces and the engagements and the affairs and the everything. So we go on a very, very, very special journey.

And if I go back to COVID, I think the biggest thing that came out of COVID for me at the end of 2020 was so many hairstylists and people in the hair sector particularly said to me, They said, I'll never just say I'm just a hairdresser again. I never do. I'm so much more than a hairdresser. And I was just like, why did it take a pandemic for you to understand how important you are in your clients' lives? So I think I think we're in a very privileged, strange, positive, positive way. Great relationship with with with our clients and they trust you and they know you only, you know, want them to look really well. And, you know, but apart from that, I think, you know, your clients know that you want the very best for them as well. I think you're right. I think it's I think part of it is because it's a longer term relationship. So we're in a position to see patterns and we're also in a position to see changes in our clients and changes in their attitudes and their behavior. And what we do so brilliantly is we build very intimate relationships very quickly so I can see how we are perfectly placed on a slightly gloomy note. I want to to kind of shoot out of the water one of my preconceived ideas. And I thought that domestic violence and domestic abuse was something that was being dealt with and it was something that was decreasing. We have a domestic violence commissioner here in England and Wales. And on their website, it said that since 2016, incidents of domestic abuse and domestic violence have doubled here in England and Wales. So this isn't something that's going away. And unfortunately, prosecutions are actually waning. We're actually getting less prosecutions. So this is something that's pointedly important. And a lot of that increase has been put down to lockdown intensifying relationships and putting families under particular stress and pressure that then followed by cost of living crisis affecting so many people. It's a bit of a pressure cooker as far as the family situation is concerned. So as far as I don't want to preempt the training because my call to action today is that everybody does this training. I really can't think of an excuse as to as to why you wouldn't. But what kinds of things would people be looking out for in their clients? So you talked about some of the physical signs. What else might people be seeing? I think all the signs of stress and those sorts of signs and I think perpetrators hanging around outside.

And I've spoken about the actual team member, but it but it could be the same perpetrators bringing them in and the physical side. And sometimes, you know, it's not what's said, but what isn't said, an over reliance. And I also think, you know, an over reliance on that relationship in a positive way. And, you know, I think in our industry, we're in a very unique position insofar as we physically handle our clients. And I think we have a higher level of intuition than most other people. And I really do think, yeah, it comes from that caring connection that comes so naturally to all of us that perhaps people in other industries don't have. But I think we have a high level of intuition and we know if something isn't right with somebody. And I think we're also well aware, you know, not to ask questions, but to position ourselves on here if you need me. Like nobody in my bank or supermarket is going to say that to me, are they? No, no, not at all. Yeah. And and again, not to preempt the training, but what what what can we do? What can we offer a client in that situation? So when I launched this in 2021, I was well, I was nervous about coming out about my own my own background. But I was also nervous that, you know, all the business owners that I know would say this, what are you talking about? Like, you know, we don't have that. I've never seen that. You know, find something else that there is a need for. I was really worried that I was just aware of it because of my background. But anybody I met, no matter who I met, all said to me, the overriding feedback that I got was, yes, we have had clients down through the years or yes, I've had somebody on my team. And there's one therapist I know that, and this is going to sound awful, said, you know, Liz, I've had a client for over 20 years. And and he her husband has actually cut off some of her fingers and she still can't leave. And she said, I didn't know what to say.

I just never I never know what to say, because the obvious thing to say is get up and go. But she said, I just never knew what to say. So she would have been one of several people who just said to me, having watched the training, I now know what to say and not say. So I think it gives us a better sense of empowerment about what coercive behaviour is and how we listen. We're not to judge like we do. You know, when this training is not about telling anybody what to do, it's not trying to fix the situation. It's just to say recognise it, listen, and if possible, have the numbers for the authorities or the local refuge there so that if somebody does say, I need to go, we're not fixing the situation. We're completely way out of our depths in that. But there there's the details. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, perfect. OK. And just to re-emphasise, we're talking about 20 minutes of your time that could make an enormous difference to someone's long term welfare. And so how do people sign up for the training? How do they find out more? The training is on my website, which is literally just my name, LizMcKeown.com, or the Shearhaven website, which is Shearhaven.org. Perfect. I'm going to put your links and the link to Shearhaven underneath the description for this video as well. And just to re-emphasise, I can't think of an excuse why anybody would not want to go through this training. Before we say goodbye to you, Liz, I've always got three questions, which I fire away. You didn't tell me, Liz. No, I don't warn anybody, though, actually, I think people are starting to tweak now because they'll have listened to old episodes. What's the best thing about working in the salon industry? Well, for me, it's just I'm never bored. So it's kind of a variety that it brings you. That probably came out the wrong way. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it's a plus that I never I never get bored. Yeah. And I think every day is a school day. There's always more to learn. Yeah. I just love it. Yeah. And what's the best piece of advice that you've ever received? Best piece of advice I've ever in relation to work?

In relation to anything you like. Well, yeah. In relation to anything I like. Right. OK, this is nothing to do with work. The best piece of advice I ever got was in relation was going to sound really weird, but it's always stuck in my mind. So don't waste 10 minutes. We never waste 10 minutes waiting on dead man's shoes. So in relation to, you know, inheriting money or wills or anything like that. A very wise person said to me once, just carve out your own career, make your own life and never, never waste five minutes waiting on dead. I'm dead. Never waste five minutes minutes waiting on dead man's shoes. And, you know, we very often in response to that question, we get the same stuff said to us again and again. I don't think I've ever heard that one before. It's a completely unique answer, Liz. Well done. And final question. Final question. If you were speaking. I'm unique in a good way. Well, you know, it's great to have some variety. I'm pleased you took the time to explain it because I was clueless. But I think you're absolutely right, actually. And the reverse of that is I always say to my mother, just spend it. Spend a lot. We don't need your money. Enjoy it. Get rid of the whole lot. Yeah. You know, as long as there's as long as there's enough to put your ashes in a jam jar, I would love to hear that you spent the rest. It would be so much more pleasure, wouldn't it? Absolutely. The final question. If you were speaking to someone at the very beginning of their salon career and you could pass on one piece of advice to them, what would that be? It would be never say yes if you want to say no. Oh, OK. Never say yes if you want to say no. And I think because of our caring nature and our giving nature, which is what makes people really successful in this industry. If I used to look back, you know, down through the years where, you know, we, of course, we make mistakes and we have to learn from our mistakes. But the biggest mistakes I made where I beat myself up even more was where I said yes to things where my gut instinct was saying no was saying no. And I didn't like to say no. And I didn't like to upset somebody by saying no. But inside was screaming and that's not a good idea.

Don't do it. So I think learn to say no. Hmm. That's an amazing skill to be passing on to someone how to say no. And what I've learned over the years is actually a very early no rarely offends. It's when it's when you kind of say yes when you really mean no or you kind of put it off and put it off until a no becomes apparent. That's when people get upset. You say no straight away. People are rarely offended. And then you've got it off your chest and you're not worrying about it. Yeah. So I wish I would have. I wish I would have learned that a lot sooner. Wonderful. Liz, it's been an absolute pleasure to finally get you onto the Build Your Salon podcast. I'll be posting those links in the description. And until we speak again, take care. Phil, thank you so much. And I really appreciate the opportunity. And it's been wonderful to meet you. You're very welcome. So there we have it. My interview with Liz talking about a hugely important issue, domestic abuse and domestic violence. Take the training 20 minutes. It doesn't cost you a single penny. There's really no excuse not to. And I would also love some of our academic establishments to be brave and start building this into the curriculum. Just half of one of your theory lessons given over to this and made mandatory for all of our students could make an enormous difference over time. Just seven short days until the next episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. If you know someone who would like to feature as a guest on a future episode, please reach out Phil at BuildYourSalon.com. I would love to hear from you anyway. Also reach out with your questions for next week's Q&A episode. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon.