From Hedge Funds to Haircuts: AI Secrets and Salon Systems with Braden Weinstock

If you think running a successful salon is just about the services you offer, you are already behind, my darlings. Today we're talking to Braden Weinstock, who's part owner of eFox Hair in California, lifting the lid on how systems, strategy, and AI are reshaping what it means to be a smart salon owner. Let's get him on the show, shall we? All on Build Your Salon Hey Braden, how are you? Doing great. Good to see you Phil. Thanks for having me. Good to get you on here after a fashion. We had a little bit of chaos listeners, a bit of chaos over timings, but we're all in the same room now and that's the main thing. So, why don't you introduce yourself to my wonderful Build Your Salon podcast listeners and let them know who you are and where you're from. Yes, thanks Phil. Well, my name is Braden Weinstock. I'm co-founder and co-owner of eFox Hair, a top 1% salon in Los Angeles. It's been open for 15 years, but I've also had a parallel career in business and finance. I worked at the world's biggest hedge fund for Ray Dalio and I helped build a billion dollar startup. And everything I've done in my career has brought me today to starting Pretty Data, an AI business partner for salons. Something that does what our booking systems don't do, but everything that I've done to help make my business partner the creative successful. Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit and get it into a bit of a timeline because there's a lot of stuff there. So, what came first? Where were you first? Were you hedge fund scary finance person first or were you salon business owner? Where are we? No, no, no, no. First, I was just a dude snowboarding with my friend. I grew up in LA and we've been friends since 17 years old. He used to do my hair and ultimately I graduated college and did some management consulting, which was pretty boring. You make power points. And I was like, how do I actually do something that has purpose and something that had purpose for me was going into the salon every day and seeing him do his craft and watching people walk out with a smile on their face and the joy that comes from that. And he wanted to start a small business to be able to ultimately run us along the way he thought it should be run, but also to build a life for himself and his young family. And he really needed a business partner to help him with all the stuff that was, you know, not behind the chair, but really behind the back office. And that was me. And I just wanted to help him be successful. And I loved it so much.

After the first year I went back to business school, I ended up getting recruited into the hedge fund and then doing all the other startup stuff, but I never stopped working in the salon. I mean, I'm constantly involved in that. And ultimately COVID changed my perspective on the industry. And what I decided was I wanted to take those business goals I've been building in corporate America and really bring them to the table to the salon industry in order for salon owners and stylists to be able to earn a living wage and have sustainable profits. So eFox now has been open how long? 15 years. 15 years. Wow. Well done. And then you mentioned how COVID had kind of shifted perspectives for you. How so? What difference did that make? Well, I think for all of us in the beauty services industry, it's not just hair, obviously, it's hair, nails, makeup, massage, anything that is really a service and beauty experience. We couldn't make money. We got shut down randomly. We didn't know when we were going to open. When we did open, we couldn't service the number of clients we wanted to. Our systems weren't up to date to be able to handle the kinds of difficulties, everything from email communications to bookings appropriately. And then on top of it, when we were closed, I saw a lot of people leaving the industry. And, you know, if you can't work, you can't make money. We had some people who didn't want to go into people's homes because they were scared or they had like a kid or a grandparent at home and they didn't want to put them at risk. And so they started shifting careers. And that made it really difficult for salons when they did reopen to hire. And ultimately, if you don't have people working and they can't service enough clients and you are trying to make sure you make payroll, that is ultimately like a death wish. Or not a death wish, but, you know, it's a nail in the coffin. And so many salons were closing down that friends were calling me, asking me for my operational expertise on how they can keep their business alive. And I just kept handling all these calls and seeing all these pains. And I realized something's broken here. And this is an industry that affects millions of people and they should be able to have a way to run these businesses better the way we had found a successful formula. And that's what inspired me to try to focus my attention in that direction.

So the things that you're talking about operationally then, did you have those things in place in eFox before COVID came along or was that kind of a hard lesson for you guys too? It's a little bit of both. I mean, there was really, I don't know about other people's experience, but there was nothing like we'd ever experienced with COVID, right? But we had already had successful operational processes and tools and practices in place that allowed us to be able to make it through COVID. So for example, we always keep a cash cushion. We do a monthly P&L review. We have benchmarks on what our P&L should look like so that we know what is good and what is not. Our occupation or utilization. We have pricing models that we use to be able to make sure that we're always profitable in every service that we provide. We had good communication tools set up and we had these kinds of capabilities. There was no playbook for figuring out like when the governor was going to let us do services. But because we had these other things in place, we could focus our attention to communicating effectively to our client base. We were familiar with how to use our booking system in order to be able to give the cushion or be able to book mornings for elderly people when they wanted to come in and have a private session that they felt safe with. And because we had those types of things, we were able to respond quickly. We were able to generate revenue. We were able to retain our stylists. And as a result, we were able to stay alive. So the kind of systems and processes you're talking about there, I'm very lucky in that I get to see inside lots and lots of businesses, all different sizes and shapes and different parts of this amazing industry. And what you're describing isn't common at any level. It isn't common in certainly in solo businesses, not in small team stuff, but even in big multiples, you're talking about things that just aren't in place. So was that driven by, did you identify that as a need pre-COVID I'm talking? So did you identify that as a need in the business? Is that what was holding the business back? Or is it just that you're an operations geek and love that kind of thing and wanted to bring that to the business? Yeah, I think it's a combination of both. So pre-COVID, look, I had two goals.

I wanted to be able to help somebody that I love, who I saw as an amazing, amazing artist, be able to run a successful business where he could focus on his craft and deliver great client service. And ultimately be able to support a family, like truly at my heart, that's what it's about. And I think that's what it's about for most artists. The second was selfishly, we just wanted to go on a snowboarding trip every year, man. And so to do that, you had to be able to like take a week off from work. And to do that, you have to recruit great people and you got to be able to guide them to be successful and you got to be able to, you know, make sure your financials are in a healthy place. And I think my background in management consulting, background in finance showed and being a generally operational geek showed me that as we were building this company, we needed to put those things in place. And so I kept building things, you know, so I'll give you a small example. Pretty quickly, like within the first year, we realized many of our stylists really didn't know how to hit their magic number. They would say, I want to make 50,000. Okay. But what's your average ticket? How many clients are seeing a day? What does that translate into, into your revenue based off your commission? And from there, what is one actionable thing you can do every month? Just one to make that be a little bit better and hit your goal. And so we built like a little template where every month we pull some numbers, we put them into a Google doc and we just said, okay, here are your numbers. And here's one action this month I want you to focus on. I want you to take your rebookings from 30 to 35%. And the only thing you need to do is walk that person to the front and ask them to rebook. And just being able to have something as simple as that to sit down and give guidance to somebody helps them be able to achieve their goals, helps them feel like the salon is there to support them. And that's as little of an operational improvement that you can make that can actually increase revenue, staff retention, and ultimately profitability. And so building those over time. So I've already mentioned that I think what you're doing is kind of unique and I don't really see that enough in salon businesses, but is that because it's not on our radar?

Are we saying that salon owners aren't capable of doing those things without a braid and in their back pocket? Or is it that we have an unwillingness? Is there a fear around that? Why am I not seeing those kinds of things being put in place more, do you think? It's a great question. Well, first off, I think everybody's fully capable of doing this. You know, when my business partner, Eric, and I started, he didn't know how to go through QuickBooks and read a P&L. And I'm very proud now that he can go through that just as fast as I can. So there's no question in my mind that whether you're, you know, a creative or business person, you can understand the basics of your numbers. I think there's kind of a few things I've observed. I think there are people who have a natural inclination to this and want to learn it. They just haven't been helped to learn those things so that they can do it. They need that support. They need that guidance. And actually, that's one of the things I love about your podcast is you give so much sound advice, practical, tactical things for people to run a healthy business. And that education enables them. I think the second thing is when you're behind the chair all day and you're focused on that client experience and doing your craft and then dealing with staff and then just trying to get all the bills out. So it's just frankly hard to have the time to go home or to carve out a day a week to try to sit and put your time and attention towards these things. The times where I see businesses that are, you know, hitting a decade and they're profitable and thriving or I talk to salon owners over time who have built a successful business. They figured this out. They've learned how to focus on these parts of the business because they realize that they're always behind the chair. They're working in the business and not on the business and they'll never have a way out and they'll never be able to deliver a team that can can really thrive. And that's that's that's my opinion on the topic. And that's actually my passion that brought me to what I'm doing today, which is to to help enable those types of things to be possible in salons. I also don't think to be fair and in general, I don't think the booking systems are really serving business as well. I think they do a small part of things, you know, but to be honest, I've never seen a booking system that really, truly serves the salon owner.

In its full capacity. And because of that, I don't think it's easy. You know, if I have to get a quick answer from from my booking system, I have to run three to four reports that show up as PDFs. I got to go find that number and figure out what to do with it and put an Excel spreadsheet and then do an analysis on it. If it takes me 20, 30 minutes to do that, the tools aren't serving our needs. Hmm. I wonder whether there's an argument, though. I'm not going to, you know, throw my love behind salon software companies, because I think a lot of them have been letting us down for a really long time. I think there's some I think there's some moves to make things better out there. But I do wonder whether it's because no one's asking, you know, no one's asking for the software to do these things. So therefore they haven't felt the need or seen the business case for building those functions in. Because if people aren't asking for stuff to be accessible and easy, then why would you push programmers to to build out something? It's almost like we need to be asking the questions. And it's certainly something, for example, with salon memberships, the first part of my training is always to start nagging your software company, because the more people that ask, the more likely it is to be built in as a future feature. But if we don't ask the questions, they don't know there's a need there. So I wonder I wonder whether there is something around them just responding to what we're asking for. Anyway, that's all we can. Let's get let's get a salon software person on here and grill them about that one day. That would be awesome. I'd love to. I don't mean they'd need a drink. So I guess my next question then is if we're getting to the stage where Evox is doing well, I'm assuming, you know, to be around through COVID and out the other side, 15 year history, we've got to be doing something right. We've got the operations and systems side right. You're going snowboarding and throwing yourself off mountains for a week a year. So at what stage then do you decide then, OK, that's not going to be enough for me. It's now going to be I want to help other salon businesses. Or was that always part of the plan that you would start to extrapolate that and turn that into a business of its own? Where's the decision making there? It was COVID. It was COVID. It was when. So I have a friend. Excuse me. I've known her since she was an apprentice in Los Angeles. And she, you know, rose up the ranks. She moved to New York. She, you know, she was featured in The New York Times as like one of the best wedding stylists in New York City.

She started her own salon. She was thriving. I mean, she's just like crushing it. And when I was in New York, I was, you know, visiting her for my hair. And every time I went in, she'd ask me to help her with something. Right. Whether it's in the booking system, an operation strategy, metrics or financials. And then right before COVID, she had bought a salon in New Jersey. And it was a bigger salon. And COVID hit. It was incredibly painful for her. And she called me asking for some help. And I, it just broke my heart to see the experience that she was having, trying to figure out how to get this thing to work. And granted, COVID was a unique time. But under the hood, what I looked at was most salons aren't earning a healthy profit. I think the average in the industry is around 6%. And in the US, your average stylist earns anywhere from 28 to 36% on average, less than the average American, by and large, about $17 an hour, which is like a McDonald's wage. And it's been flat for over a decade. And so I looked at that and I said, that's not a living wage. And our staff earns more than double that. And then I started looking into the numbers and I saw enrollment at beauty schools is down. Beauty schools are closing. And I started talking to a few more owners and they're like, I can't recruit. I can't keep a profit. I can't pay them more. My costs keep going up. And every time I had this conversation, I kept looking at this problem. I said, well, we're kind of gotten past these problems in our salon. These are solvable problems, but something is broken here. And because I'd had some level of success in my corporate career, and I had this unique ability to translate those things into the salon world, I thought I have a responsibility. I have a purpose in life where I can make this better. You know? And for me, that's the fulfillment of deciding to turn my attention to it. I didn't actually ever intend to do this. In a beautiful world, I would actually be a professor.

I just love teaching people. If anything I could do, it'd be to do with something like what you're doing and share wisdom, which is born out of my own pain. But I saw the pain of really good, hardworking people really just not getting their fair share. And I thought we can do something about that. And what does that something look like then? So how is that crystallizing into what you're doing? Yeah, that's a great question. So to be honest, for about the first year, I just started going out and talking to those lawns, trying to ask them about their problems, their struggles. And I really started thinking three main things businesses need to keep staff and grow profits. And what I ultimately saw is that the things that I did as that operational and finance business partner behind the creative are the things that made the difference. And so essentially, I think every salon owner needs that business partner. And at the same time, I started to see changes with AI. And every salon owner I talked to kept telling me their booking system wasn't solving all of their problems. They were jumping between different tools. They were trying to figure out these different things. And I realized that there's another opportunity for us to build essentially a digital brain, an AI business partner that can write your emails, run your sequence, target your customers, run your ads, do the analytical reports, but also bring in competitive intelligence so you can see what your competitors are doing, what their prices are, to be able to identify potential people to hire across either the beauty schools or across different markets when people are like moving to a new city and try to try to find a hold. And all of those operational pieces can actually give leverage to an owner, you know, so that when they're sitting down and trying to write an email, they should really just be talking to their phone. AI should write it, set up the email sequence to go in the next few days and send it. Or if you're trying to do prices, you should be able to ask what your competitors prices are, ask what your profit number should be, and then it reached into your accounting system, get that data, and then show you a new price list and estimate how much more revenue you would make.

And all of these things we've been able to do because there's a Brayden in the background. You know, Eric just sends me an email or text message and he goes, Hey, Brayden, can you write this marketing email? Can you set this up and do this? And in the background, he goes back to the chair or goes back to the team and he goes back to a training and he teaches a class every Wednesday. But I do. And every salon owner needs a digital version of that. And I think with AI, we can bring that to their fingertips and we can do it in a way where they can not only automate the process, but they can save themselves time and make more money out of it. So how do you see that working for salon owners that already have some resistance around software, AI and technology? How are we going to get them to the stage where that digital Brayden feels like something they want to access and work with? What's the challenge and how are you going to overcome that? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I definitely see this, right? Like technology isn't always easy to use and it can be scary. That's definitely a real thing. I think so. Look, the company and the venture I'm trying to build is called Pretty Data. And Pretty Data starts with the word pretty because it's just like we want everybody who comes into our nail, beauty, hair, makeup or spa or barbershop is they want to feel good. It should be easy to use. And I think one of the elements of that is it should have a lot less clicking. And you should be either talking or chatting with essentially an AI tool and it does work for you. It should make your life feel easier, like you have an assistant. I think that's the first thing that makes it a lot easier to use. I think the second thing is, ultimately, we need to recognize that this technology is not going to go anywhere. It's going to be a fundamental part of your life, whether you like it or not. And if you don't use it, just like if you went from, you know, riding a horse to getting a car, you will go slower than other people and your business will suffer.

Right. And so I know that doesn't feel good, but it will be a very real practical reality soon. And so if we can make it easy for you to use something and then when you use it, you see that it immediately saves you time or makes you more money. I think it helps to open up the opportunity for people to say, how can I use this? And the easiest thing is to hear that other people have used it, too, and it works. There will always be some people who don't feel comfortable with it. And so I think one of the things we're aiming to do is hire people from in the industry to be able to provide support to people. Right. I mean, if you get on the phone or you're chatting online. How many of you have like, you know, been chatting with your booking system, talking to somebody in a foreign country, didn't understand what it's like to have to like go order color or get extensions or the, you know, right now the big worry about tariffs with extensions and not understanding the terminology. I think one of the ways you solve that is by having customer support that has been there, too. And so those are the things I think we need to be able to do to make the industry both educated, capable and easy to utilize these tools. I think you've hit on a few really important points there. I think this is going to sound like some tough love now, my darlings, and I do apologize. But I think ultimately, when we see big advances in innovation and technology, what we also see is an acceleration of processes that are already happening. And I know we've we've spoken about this separately, but there are in most markets too many sound on businesses out there. There just are. And that's making it really hard for everyone to make a really good living. And I think what we're in the middle of is a period of adjustment where some of those salon businesses aren't going to make it. And I wish it was easy as saying those who have the highest standards of service and who do the best haircuts and the best beauty treatments are the ones that are going to make it. But we all know the industry doesn't work that way. And and the stylists that get busy aren't always the best at haircuts, but they're the ones that we enjoy the visit with the most or dare I say it, you know, and I've employed teams and it shouldn't be this way.

But if you've got a male stylist, generally they get busier quicker than a female stylist, even though she does a better job and it shouldn't be that way. But it is. And I feel I kind of fear that the getting to grips with technology and particularly AI, it's that's going to be one of the things that separates out those that make it and those that don't. And so my call to arms, my dears, is that this is part of your job now is to get to grips with this stuff. But in the meantime, of course, we've got to we've got to fill in the gaps a bit, which is certainly where I see part of my job. So so how should people be bringing technology in and bringing AI into their businesses in the short term until until we can all have a Braden in our pockets? Well, well, if having a Braden in your pocket is interesting, please, you know, go to pretty data dot co. You can join the get early access program and talk to me and learn more and I'll show you. And, you know, there's there's opportunities for you to get on the ground floor of learning how to use it. Well, there are a few things, though, that we're doing today in our business. The first thing we do is we use, you know, ChatGPT regularly. I literally had a session with Eric where we sat down. We did a screen share. We opened up ChatGPT and we just started doing it together. And I said, type stuff in, talk to it, ask it questions. And then as it started to respond to him, he'd be like, well, what is this and how do you do this and how do I solve this? And so I think just starting to play around and learn about it. Then we said, OK, we need to write an email about a pricing update. Right. So I'm big on price updates. I think at a fundamental level, there's really only two ways to make more money, cut more hair or raise prices. And if you cut more hair without raising prices, you're losing money to inflation. So you're just working more and making less. Right. Your costs go up every year, about three to four percent. So every year you're just losing money if you don't raise prices.

If you had a, you know, $50 haircut five years ago, just think about it. Would $50 pay your rent today? No, your rent's probably 70 bucks. So you need to charge more money or you're making less. So we update prices at least every year. And I love your philosophy about like targeted changes or little changes throughout the year. So we sent a little email. And so this time we just said, OK, go to ChatGPT and tell it you want to write an email and give it an idea of like what kind of tone. Hey, I want to write a fun, light and polite email to let clients know there's going to be a quick price adjustment. Great. Pop that into your tool and send it out. You know, the second thing is if you're on Instagram and you're trying to come up with stuff. One of the things is I ask ChatGPT for ideas and then it gives me a little quote or I'll say, here's an idea for an image. It doesn't have to produce the final result. What it does is it helps me start the idea of what am I going to do today? I don't know about you, but I see so many people just like another picture of nails or another picture of a hair. OK, that's fine because there's something going out and that may be better than nothing. But what is that really compelling somebody to do? Right. What are they? What value are they getting? What message are they learning? Not much. So ChatGPT can be helpful with those ideas. Then I go to Canva and Canva's got some nice AI tools that help me just create that thing. Right. And again, it's not that it's going to give you the finished product right away. It's that it skips the process of me sitting there and trying to figure out what can I do. Right. And then the other area that I think it's helpful is in data analysis. So if you're like me and you find going to QuickBooks or Xero or going to your booking system and getting all the numbers really confusing and trying to figure out what to do. I personally like pretty dangerous with a spreadsheet. So I always put it into a spreadsheet. But then I have to do a whole analysis and that takes a lot of time. What you can also do is grab a little bit of that data. You can throw it into like a ChatGPT and you can say, answer this question. And it can actually do some of that data organization or data analysis. So I might say, OK, well, what happens if all my prices are 10 percent more? OK. Now, if I have some data and a quick analysis in a tool, I don't have to spend all the time figuring out how to use Excel to do that.

I don't have to go look up inflation rates. I don't have to do a whole set of projections. It can give me a ballpark direction. And the goal there is that these little playing around exercises of AI tools take you from having to do a one hour task. That's big and scary to being able to get it done in 10 minutes and be 75 percent of the way to I think I have an idea of what's going on or what I'm going to do. Whether it's write the email, get a post or do the financial analysis to make sure I'm profitable. I think there's some brilliant use cases in there. And yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying. And some of those use cases are just a joy. I think that I think my kind of message to people around these things is you're not going to break anything by playing with ChatGPT. You're not going to break the Internet. Nothing's going to shift in your business because you're having a conversation with a server somewhere. It's just, you know, have some fun with it, relax into it. And the more the more context you can give it, the better. And I'm a big fan. And what I'm experimenting with in my own business at the moment is giving it the big picture of what it is we're trying to achieve this quarter or this year so that it can see how these things are kind of feeding in. And it's got some decent ideas to thresh out there. Can I throw an idea? Can I throw an idea on that? Yeah, of course. So two things. One is, I tell Eric, so Eric, he had three kids under the age of five. He was under the age of 40 and he fell down at the salon one day and we learned he had a grade three brain tumor. And he went through chemo and radiation. He had brain surgery and he couldn't work for a year. And it was one of the most difficult things we've ever had to deal with. And we did the same amount of revenue. We didn't lose any staff and he didn't work for a year.

And it was the first time in 20 years he had not been pretty much working every day. And I think a lot of us feel that way. But he learned for a moment that maybe there's a different way. And prior to this, we had been thinking about opening more salons. And after this, we actually changed tax and we decided the opposite, which was we didn't want to open more salons. He just wanted to work less. So he works three days a week. And one of the things about that is now he's got, you know, a half a day every week where he just sits and does office work. Right. And I've asked him to dedicate just 30 minutes to using ChatGPT once a week for something. Just to practice, if you make it and I always ask him to do it in the morning before he does all the other stuff. So he has like a little bit of play time. And these are little tactical things that you think might not matter, but they actually have a big impact. If you dedicate just 30 minutes a week on one day, I'm just going to play with this. It will have a tremendous effect on your ability to utilize these tools. And what's really cool about that is you can create like projects in GPT. So we have a project that's just like eFox Finance. And so you can drop files and then you can have different chats asks and you can store those. So it's compounding over time. We have one that's eFox Instagram, eFox Marketing. And create those little projects that have a history of information so you can go back to it and keep learning, keep playing with it. And I think that's one suggestion I would share with everybody to be able to play with these kinds of topics and get involved with it. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I love a GPT project. It keeps everything organized for me. It was a joy when that was released as a feature. I must admit, though, I've been really enjoying some of the image stuff that's coming out of GPT now. Now that we've got Sora to play with, I have to say nearly everything you see on my socials now has been created in Sora. Just the quality of the output now and literally Canva now is just text overlays.

That's all I do with it. Everything else is is in there. The other thing I would say when you're talking about playing with data on the simple level, and we gave this as an example in last week's episode, the stuff that's built into Google Sheets now on Gemini is is really helpful. So I did a quick walkthrough in last week's episode, and I'll try and remember to put the link in the description. But we're just using it for stock control because stock control is something that most salon software does really, really badly. And then just ask Gemini. It's like, show me the stock. Show me the stuff that I need to order to get everything up to minimum stock levels. And can you draft me the email that I need to send to my supplier? Yeah. And we can do all of that inside sheets now. So it's yeah, it's not there's a world of AI out there just waiting to be played with. But play and have that that playful approach with it, because like I said, nothing's going to break. Yeah. So what's next for you then? So we've got pretty data, which do we have a date when we're going to be getting that in people's hands when we're going to be making some money off that for you? And what does that timescale look like? Yeah. So so right now, pretty data is in a private release. We're working with a national franchise in the United States who is using it. And so to your point earlier, look, if you're not using it, I'll tell you who is the franchises. Right. And they make up about 25 to 30 percent of the industry. And so if they're doing it, they're they're going to be making more money than others. And that's going to squeeze everybody else. So you've got to get involved in trying to utilize these tools. So we're working with them in a private way. We have a few private salons who are using it as well. We have them as early testers and they're playing around and giving us feedback with it. We'll slowly be letting a few more come on and utilize some of these tools. One of the things we have that's unique is we have the largest pricing database in the world. So we have more than a quarter million salons. I can literally find your neighbor and tell you what their prices are instantly and up to date and send you price alerts. And we're doing, you know, financial analysis to be able to to guide you and write emails or generate a website for you. That's like mobile friendly, standard, easy to use. No more messing around with Wix. Really just something simple. And that works. And so I just encourage people to go to our website. You can you can message me.

I'll literally jump on a call, show you stuff or I would love to hear what people would love for this to do for them. It works with your booking system. So it doesn't matter what booking system you use. We have the ability to connect to them and they can just join the early access program and chat with me about it. One of the benefits is obviously if you're early access, you end up getting a discount, but you get the opportunity to tell us what you want. So right now, my intention is fully focused on that. And then just making sure that eFox is healthy and happy. I have a philosophy that really a salon is a platform to support artists. Right. And like I said, that spans whether or not you're doing aesthetics or whether you're doing nails or whether you're doing hair. You want to do your craft, deliver a great client experience, and you want to be able to make a profit doing it. And if you can make sure those three things are happening, you're successful. And so our job is to make sure as salon owners that our platform is enabling our team to do that. And so I focus on that and then I focus on this. And that's pretty much what I spend my time doing these days. And then once in a while, I'm lucky enough to get out to dinner with my wife. Fantastic. Do you see, just as a kind of aside, while you were talking there about the salon owner, do you see a role for some of these tools and for AI in the hands of team members too, or is it purely the business owners role? Absolutely. For everybody. I mean, so let's take two examples. So let's say you're an owner. And one of the things I do with everyone every year is we do like a review. How much money do you want to make? What's your magic number? What do we got to do to get you there? Well, we can guide a artist on how to reach that number. So for example, I've seen some, you know, I told you about how we put in place this Google Doc and we do the performance review every month. But it's not like a grading you thing. It's more about coaching you on how to get your goals met. And so you can imagine getting a report every week that says you hit your goal, you're over your goal. Here's one thing you can do better. Right. And you can imagine them being able to go in and set their own targets and play around with those numbers and see what it would take for them to get there.

And making that just a simple and easy conversation. What do I have to do if I want to make $100,000? Right. Or, hey, I'm at level three. I want to get to level four. And you have those, you know, standards inside the system. So we can actually say, here's what you need to do over the next three months to get there. So you can actually help enable staff. The other is on content creation. Look, some people love it. Most of us, I noticed, don't love it, to be honest. You know, you deliver a great client experience and then you have to say, OK, cool. Now, can you just stand over here and I want to take a picture of you and do all this stuff? Right. But there's more ways that I can say, have you thought about doing this or what do you want your brand to be? Or like, how could you put a message out there? And I think I can, in the pocket of the stylist, help them figure out how they want to shape their career and their brand. We are not the kind of salon where everybody has to be great at one thing. We let them figure out what their specialty is going to be and in support and enable them to do that. And I think that's true. And nails, for example, I see some people, they just crush it with acrylic. Some are like really big on paint. I see makeup artists. Some who focus on, you know, different types of skin tones or whatever. And there's almost like a conversational business coach that can help a young artist figure out where they might want to go in their career. And you'll be surprised. Right. We had. So we're in L.A., we deal with a lot of Hollywood. When people join our salon at a beauty school, a lot of them will say, I want to go do Hollywood and we'll get them a gig and they'll go out and they'll work on a set or go do a show. And they come back and they're like, actually, I don't want to do that. You know what I might want to do? I might want to like do a wedding because I can get like a really big gig, do a really fun trip on a weekend and in the week work like two days a week on my standout client base. And so just being able to learn about what your career path is and how you're going to shape that is another way I think artists should be using it. Superb. OK, so you've mentioned Pretty Data. Give us the give us the web address again so that people can keep in touch with you.

Yeah. Pretty Data dot co CEO. And I'm also on Instagram. My handle is Salon Boss B because I'm Braden. And if you just mess with me directly, like, yeah, I'll jump on the phone. I'll give advice. No sales. Just tell you about how we do commissions, how we set up our reports, how we support people, hiring tactics, things like that. I've been doing just little salon advice for people as well, because I love giving back. I think people should should ultimately build a collaborative community and I get something out of it, too. Right. I get the fulfillment. I get to learn what people are struggling with. OK, I'm going to finish with our three quick fire questions, which actually they're not very quick fire at all, because normally I'm intrigued and want to know more. Best piece of advice you've ever received. Run towards the fear. Run towards the fear. Run towards the fear. Oh, my goodness. Who gave you that? It was actually it was a good friend of mine. It was a good friend of mine. He. Yeah, he. I was fine. There were some things I didn't. I was I struggled early in life. You know, I came from an immigrant family. I didn't get to college till I was 22 years old, just like many of us. You know, my life wasn't always easy. And I got the advice that I needed to run towards the fear to overcome the things that I was scared of in order to. The dreams I had and the person I wanted to be lived on the other side of the fear and so run towards it. And if somebody wanted to follow in your footsteps, what advice would you leave behind for them? You are worthy. Believe it. And finally, what's the best thing about working with the salon industry? It never ceases to amaze me, the just imagination of what beautiful craft somebody can make to watch somebody, whether it's hair or nails or, you know, spa experience. And then someone leaves and that client is transformed. You just literally see it in their face or they're floating when they walk out. I think that feeling that you can give another person is just so profound and rewarding.

I mean, what a gift to have the ability to give that to somebody else. You're so right. It's an amazing industry in that way. But also, that's where the frustration for me comes from is that inspiration and creativity. I'm like, just take one percent of that and put it into your marketing. We'd be really flying somewhere. You know, we can be so amazing and so impressive and so creative over here. Let's just take a little bit of that over there as well. And then we wouldn't. I guess that's a better answer to your question. Number two is like if you wanted to follow more of my footsteps or you wanted to to to me, I think the thing that I do different or the thing that I do well is I'm just always learning. I'm just always trying. I'm just willing to always put the time in. My mom told me when I was a kid, it took Edison 42 tries to make the light bulb. That means he failed 41 times, but he didn't view failure as a negative thing. He said, no, I just learned 41 ways not to make the light bulb. And if I didn't if I didn't do those 41, I never would have gotten to 42. It's about disconnecting the meaning around that whole failure word, I guess. It's actually why I really some of the stuff that I do in my free time, I'm actually choosing stuff I'm deliberately really suck at because I think, you know, there's that kind of humility that comes from just being really bad at something like gardening. For goodness sake, you know, so much stuff dies, but there's always next season, there's always next year. And if you can have that slightly lighter approach to failure, I think, and bring that into the business, too. And like I said, you know, the world's not going to spin out of orbit because your Instagram post sucks. I mean, just try it, play with it, have fun with it. I think it felt like a color project if you get the. So Eric, when I when I was like 18, Eric turned my hair orange. Not on purpose. And, you know, next day it's like, OK, I'll just die it again and we'll fix it. Look, we've all mixed the color wrong and it came out. You just fixed it. How do you know not to do that the next time? Because you got it wrong once.

It's OK. Nope. Like you said, no blood, no tears. We'll be fine. No blood, no vomit. My parenting skills coming out there. Yes. Wonderful. It's been amazing talking to you today, Braden. I'm so pleased that we could get you onto the podcast. And I'm sure we're going to be inviting you back again in the future. Thank you. And I have so much appreciation and respect for what you're doing. I mean, the the insights, the advice, it is so spot on. I've benefited and implemented many of your things in my salon as well. So thank you so much. So there we have it. My conversation with Braden. What an inspiration and such a wonderful guy to talk to about just how some of the stuff that we really need to get to grips with is absolutely within our grasp. And I can't wait to hear how you're implementing AI and tech in the future in your business. Please reach out and let me know what I've missed today. And maybe you've got some questions that you'd like to ask Braden. I'm sure we're going to be getting him back on the show again. My email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. Phil at build your salon dot com. You know, I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Also reach out if you would like to be a guest on a future episode of the build your salon podcast. It would be wonderful to be sharing your success story with my amazing audience to just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. And until then, take care.