Stylist Soul Tribe Conversations

046 - The Visionary Behind Salon Republic: How Eric Taylor Revolutionized Salon Studios

September 11, 2024 • Lisa Huff

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In this episode of Stylist Soul Tribe Conversations, I sit down with Eric Taylor, founder and CEO of Salon Republic and host of The Hair Game podcast. Eric shares his incredible journey from his early days in college to becoming a key player in the salon studio concept, a revolutionary business model that has changed the beauty industry.

Eric talks about the entrepreneurial influences of his creative mom and entrepreneurial dad, explaining how their contrasting approaches to business helped shape his unique mindset. He also opens up about his early fascination with the beauty industry, sparked by conversations with salon owners and his barber, which eventually led to the creation of Salon Republic.

We dive deep into the challenges Eric faced while building his first location in Studio City, Los Angeles—everything from negotiating bad leases to managing construction—and how he ultimately built a thriving business model that allows beauty professionals to flourish in their own independent spaces. Eric also shares valuable insights into the importance of balancing creativity and practicality, both in business and in life.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How Eric combined creativity and entrepreneurship to build Salon Republic
  • The origins of the salon studio model and how it has evolved
  • The practical business lessons Eric learned along the way, from leases to salon management
  • Why maintaining a close connection with beauty professionals is key to long-term salon success
  • The story behind The Hair Game podcast and how it keeps Eric connected to the pulse of the industry

Whether you're a salon owner, stylist, or aspiring entrepreneur, this conversation is packed with inspiration and actionable insights. Tune in for an incredible conversation with one of the beauty industry's true visionaries!

Connect with Eric:

Listen to The Hair Game Podcast:
The Hair Game on Apple Podcasts
The Hair Game on Spotify

Sign up for Mindset to Magic: https://stylistsoultribe.mykajabi.com/mindset-to-magic-sales-page

Connect with Lisa Huff

Hi, friends. Welcome back to Stylist Old Tribe Conversations. I am here today with Eric Taylor, founder and CEO of Salon Republic and host of the Hair Game podcast. We connected for the first time a couple weeks ago when I was on the Hair Game with Eric. So now we're going to flip the script and I'm going to get to know him a little bit better. Eric, thank you so much for joining me yet again. How are you doing? My pleasure being here, much more uncomfortable being the one that has to answer the questions. I like being able to fire off the questions and have you answer them. Yes. You did such a great job at that when we talked, but the whole time I wanted to just be like, okay wait a second. I need to know more about you and what you have going on. And I'm sure you do this before you get on with anybody. When you're about to record, you do a little Google, you do a little research. Like how do I properly introduce him? I've heard of Salon Republic always and forever since I joined beauty school. So I'm curious to hear when your story started. I've obviously seen your face. I've seen your name at like hair shows, things like that, but I've never really looked into what exactly it is you had going on. And my goodness, you have quite the umpires that we were talking before we hit record. And I was like, what have you, has your day been up to? And he's just like administrative shit. Like it's just been, the bigger and bigger this gets, the more I have to do that. Yeah. But it really is pretty massive. So can we just go all the way back? Sorry to turn this totally on you and your story, but I just want to dissect you and get to know you. Can we do that? It is not massive, although I appreciate the compliment, but I'll go into it. Let's see all the way back to the beginning. So I was a normal kid. I was. Athletic. I played baseball. I went to college. I studied economics in college because I thought that would give me the best chance of having a decent chance of getting a job when I left college. I, I was in college at the end of the 1990s. And this was in the. com thing that it was raging, the. com, everything was. com the stock market was going absolutely nuts. Like you might think it's doing well now it was nothing compared to, when the internet first came out and everybody was like, Oh my gosh, this internet's going to change the world. So a lot of my friends were graduating from college and they were going off to work for these. com companies who are paying them oodles of money because their stocks were so high, but they were working 80, 90 hours a week. And I remember thinking. I don't think I really want to ever work 90, 100 hours a week. How many hours are in a week? Including Steve? That's a good question. How many work hours in it? There's 40 work hours, traditional work hours in a week's 40. So it's eight hours a day, five days a week. Monday through Friday, that's your traditional work week. So if you're working 80 hours, you're working typically that involves working over the weekend. And so in certain industries finance and legal, if you're going to be a lawyer, if you're a young lawyer, you're in, you're at like a big firm, you're working a lot more than 40 hours. I don't know if you're quite working 80 hours these days, depends on what business you're in. That kind of is what was happening at the time. And everybody was trying to get these big jobs. One of my friends went to, he was getting, he had graduated and he went to his doctor. And he was having trouble with one of his eyes was like shutting and the doctor is if you don't start getting more sleep, then you're going to lose your eyesight. And I remember him telling me this and I'm like, that's the last thing I want to do. I was born in a family with a creative mom. Who is a, an oil painter. And I, she started as a flight attendant, but I was so young. It didn't really matter by the time I was whatever, five years old and conscious of what was happening around me. She had turned into an oil painter full time. And she actually made a living painting portraits of people. And that's incredible. Yeah, it's rare. It's such a romantic idea to be an artist and to be able to create every day and, these beautiful images and stuff and just be able to, you have an inspiration and you can put it on a canvas and then somebody's willing to pay you for that. Make a real living too. Yeah. And that's the dream of so many creatives. So many people in our industry, obviously at creatives. And I grew up at watching this and she was very successful at it. My dad was the opposite. He had a very small real estate business. He never had any employees. He owned a couple of warehouses. I think his peak, he had four warehouses and it was very unsexy. But it, paid the bills, right? For the house entrepreneurial. It sounds like, yeah, it was very entrepreneurial. It was very entrepreneurial because he had to do everything and maybe not so creative, a little bit of creativity. There's always creativity if you're doing everything yourself, but entrepreneurial definitely from the standpoint of. He literally had to do everything. And so he didn't really have the type of personality to hire employees and stuff. And I don't think he wanted to grow the business necessarily, but he wanted to get it to the point where it was, it really was stable for the family and. Bringing in a good income. And so I had both of these influences growing up. And to me, it wasn't strange at all that my mom had, she took a bedroom in the house. And she painted out of that bedroom and that my dad had an office in the house and they were both there full time in the house. They never went anywhere. They never, there was never a paycheck, that either of them got. And I remember there being better times and worse times, depending on if my dad. had a tenant in one of the warehouses or not, depending on whether my mom's art sold or not. There was a tremendous, one of the things I remember about my mom's art business was as much as it was art and as much as it was creative and she got paid for being creative, it wasn't pure creativity. That she was getting paid for. She couldn't wake up with this idea of a big yellow splotch and she could put it on the canvas and then immediately sell it. There was a practicality to what she was creating on the canvas. She had a couple of galleries and those galleries would give her direction. They would say. We have clients who like this analyze what's selling right now, right? There's a business element to the creativity of art and and there's so many corollaries here to, to the industry that we're in and the beauty industry, but it's creativity within boundaries of what the consumer wants. So she, and she was very flexible when it came to creating various. Types of art around summertime, sometimes a gallery would want her to create a Christmas oriented or a holiday oriented, art piece and they wanted, people who looked a certain way, they wanted certain things around and they wanted, Jesus to to have a certain image. Yeah. And maybe that wasn't the image that my mom had of Jesus. we're Christian. Yeah. But she's okay, I'll paint. Jesus to look like that. No problem. Yeah. So she was very flexible. And I think that. Resulted in, in her being financially successful with it. So fast forwarding, did she ever real quick and then I'd love for you to fast forward, but did she ever start resenting that or she always had a really good relationship and mindset around that, never resented any of it. I think she, she was very balanced with her philosophy or perspective that the art. was a balance between her creativity and what people were actually willing to pay for. And making people happy. I feel like in our industry, that's almost like where you find that joy. You're sure you don't have full creative freedom, but you have the ability to like, make someone happy and provide what they were looking for. So go ahead and fast forward. Sorry, I have a check with that. No, a hundred percent. And that's the correlation that I referred to before you, in order for something to be to make you a living, versus a hobby. I think it's really important to talk about the differences between those two things. You can love what you do as you. You're when you're making a living, but there, you have to balance it with what the customer's willing to pay for. If it's a hobby, you can do whatever the hell you want. All so I, this was my mindset as I was growing up with these two people, my parents. And so it was never really my Expectation that I was going to go get a job. I think through college, going back to what I was witnessing as some of my older friends who are graduating before me found themselves. You know schlepping around an office and all that stuff. I the last thing I wanted to do was that yeah So I started looking very early at what I could be doing probably halfway through sophomore junior year. I started looking around it what Am I going to be doing after school? Because, when you're in school, the, you're, you've got a place to be, you've got a place to sleep, they feed you, it's all done. And I knew that there was going to come a time where I was going to get. kicked out of there and I was going to have to actually do this myself. And how's I going to pay for that? So I started thinking of that thinking of that way earlier than my friends. And I remember having distinct conversations with my friends where they were going off to do whatever. I went to school in at Pepperdine in Malibu. Malibu obviously is right by the ocean, beautiful waves. I, when I stopped playing baseball, I started surfing a lot. So I would be surfing with my friends and. They had zero anticipation for what was going to happen after graduation. So I knew I was a little bit different in that way. So what did I think of? I thought of various businesses that were interesting to me. And and one of them was the salon business was the salon industry was. You remember what sparked that initial interest in the industry specifically? It was my barber. He was, I guess he was a hairstylist. Technically I was probably, he probably had 20 percent men clients, but and his name was Rick and I remember just. I got to know Rick, of course, like we, like all clients get to know their hairdressers, if they keep going back. And I was always very interested in kind of the artistry that all the hairdressers in the salon employed and what they do along with just the practical nature of so many people, just about everybody having to get their hair cut. Yeah, and we'll always have to, yeah. Always having to get their haircut unless they want to look horrible and do it themselves, which most people don't do. It seems like a safe route to go. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought, boy, this is really great. I feel like it combines My experience growing up, there's artistry and there's a, there's a business practicality to it and it all just made sense to me. So I heading towards graduation and college, I. I more and more, I was paying attention to salons wherever I was, whether it was in Malibu or when I was visiting my parents in Dallas or, and I started going into salons and it seems brash now, but I remember asking to talk to the owner or the manager or whatever, and. And then I would just ask them questions and, half of them said they don't have time and half of them said, sure, why, what do you want to talk to me about? And so I would spend whatever, 20 minutes asking them questions and I would introduce myself as being like, I'm in school and I'm curious about different. And yeah, can I ask this, ask you some questions? So I just learned that way. And then and then, so I finally graduate and I thought, okay, I really think that this is something I'd like to, learn a little bit more about, and then maybe was there a close runner up outside of the beauty industry or not really? Was there something else that really had your attention? Not really. I looked at other things, but there was not really a fit personally like I remember vaguely looking at dry cleaning, and like I had zero interest in that. I think I talked to a dry cleaning guy, like my dry cleaning guy once. Okay. And I asked him some questions and he answered them and I immediately thought to myself, Oh my God, this is a horrible, I'd shoot myself if I had to open a dry cleaning business. Okay. So you had the clarity you were looking for. Yeah. There was a, okay. I talked to a guy who ran a car wash in Malibu, and this guy, it was a great deal for him because he was the only car wash in Malibu. I think they say that's one of the most profitable industries you can get into, right? It is one of the most prof it is a very profitable industry because there's also recurring revenue. Yes. But there's a lot of He's been breaking bad vibes. Yeah, exactly. There's also a lot of things that didn't interest me about it for obvious reasons, like it's Who really wants to be a car washer, but so I didn't put much time into that. I, there might've been a couple others, but I can't think of them. So I just gravitated towards the salon industry and, but I didn't really know how I was going to really be in it. And then I graduated and I moved from Malibu back into my parents house. I'm maybe the early boomerang generation happening there. I had a girlfriend in Dallas. And so I naturally, it was like, I'll move in with my parents. I'll be with my girlfriend. So right about when I did that, her hairdresser in Dallas moved to one of the first salon studios in the country. Okay, interesting. What year was this? 1998. Okay. So the guy, okay she knew that I was going around town bothering salon owners. Yeah, you're hyper aware of the salon space right now. I was hyper aware and I was talking a lot about it. To her. Yeah. And she was probably, she was entertaining me, but probably thinking, not really sure where he's going with this because he's not a hairstylist. And so her hairstylist moved to one of the first salon studios and it was about 10, 000 feet, 10, 000 square feet. So it was big. And it was five minutes from my parents house. She told me about it, she called me on the landline, this is how far back we're going. She called me on her, cause she was living, she graduated, she moved in with her parents too, which was right down the street from my house. So she calls me on the landline and she said, my hairstylist just moved to the coolest salon, she has her own space. And everybody there has their own space. And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? And she said, it's here. Good. Check it out. So I want to say I'm losing. I've lost details because we're going back so far, but I may have actually gotten in the car that second and driven down there. That's how close it was. And I was otherwise, what was I doing with my time? I was working for my dad on the side, which was not a full time gig. And I don't even think he was paying me, but I was going to these warehouses and sweeping them and, doing. A lot of manual labor type of stuff. So I went to the salon and I walked in and it immediately made sense to me. Immediately made sense. Does that location still exist or no? It still exists. Yes, it still exists. Yeah, it's still right down the street from my parents house. Incredible. Yeah, I had the opportunity to actually take it I, I had the opportunity, we were talking to the landlord, and we were, we, in order to make it a Salon Republic, but we couldn't come to terms on the economics of the rent and I think I did a good job of not letting nostalgia I was gonna say, that probably was hard to turn away, but that really does show the business smarts, because if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, yeah. Whether it was part. I don't want to. Yeah. I'm not going to pay. I'm not going to have it cost me money to have it just because that was the origin. And frankly I thought that the landlord was gonna negotiate with me, but he didn't, he ended up renting it to another. Salon business. And I, I don't know how well they're doing there. I haven't actually been there in a long time, but anyway, so when I was there that first time the original guy who conceived of the salon studio concept was there. He was the owner of the salon. At the time he was probably in his sixties. He was a barber from, I think Amarillo, Texas, a small town. And his story is very interesting. He started as a barber, and he was he was raised in a poor family and this was his way to make a living. And he became a barber and he was good at it, but he was very interested in running the salon as well. So he opened up, I think he had five barbershops. And complained that he was spending all of his time taking care of the personalities, the conflicts of the personalities within the salons, the drama that we all know about. And he found himself spending all of his time doing that. And he didn't want to do that. So he sold those five locations. Oh no. This is what happened. So he, I haven't told the story in a while. So he, in one of his locations, He put partitions. He put Where my brain went when you were saying that is almost reminds me of like kids at school having to put up their folders when they're taking tests. Okay, there's so much drama. Don't look at each other. Don't talk to each other. It really does sound like that's how it came to be. That's how it came to be. So he put some I don't know if they were curtains. I think eventually he built drywall. Partitions in between the stations and all of a sudden with each person with kind of their own space, no longer were stepping on each other's toes and the relationships improved and he thought, wow, I think I'm onto something here. So he sold those five locations. And he opened up the first salon studio concept as we know it today. And that was in Amarillo, Texas. And this was probably in the late eighties. And he actually took over an old grocery store and it was a large location. Grocery stores are much larger than salons, even salons and publics but he took over one and the rent was very cheap and he figured, okay, I can probably do this. And so he did that and it was successful. He built studios for the beauty professionals, and then he built a beauty supply in the front. It was actually a large beauty supply. It's like as large as maybe a salon center. Yeah, why not? It makes so much sense once you hear it. Yeah. That was possible back then and it was possible in Texas because the were cheap and stuff. He did it. It was successful. And he set his eyes on the big city of Dallas, which was probably three, three hours away drive. And so I think he shut down or closed or sold. He probably sold that one unit to somebody in Amarillo and he moved to Dallas and opened up a number of salons. And with the studio concept didn't do the, didn't do the product for some reason, having product there is a whole different business. You need people, you need multiple people there to facilitate the point of sale, to, merchandise. Every salon Republic has that, correct? Almost everyone. Yeah. I think out of I think we've got 27 locations or so right now. And I think maybe 24, something like that in some locations, it just doesn't make sense because there's not enough people and you have, it has to be big enough to justify. having all that inventory. Generate that whole business. Yeah. Yeah. But in most of them we do have it now. Amazing. Okay. So he moves to Dallas, he puts up a few locations and then, and one of them was the one that I walked in that one day that was five minutes away from my parents house. It's just if you think about, I'll stop right here and just wax nostalgic about how life Takes its turns. Yeah. It's just that there's, it's not really coincidence. It's not really ironic. It's just the way that things happen. And if I had not been dating that girl, if I had not moved home after college, if I had not, if I had not gone to college in California. Had not had the hyper awareness way more than anybody else your age was having at that time. That's true. And then probably based off of just my fear of. Being out on the street, all those little things point you in the direction. And here I am 24 years later in this business in California, of course I had to break up the girlfriend in order to move from Dallas to California to start salon Republic. But Here I am and it's wild stuff and I think back at a few of these instances where something very easily could have taken me in a different direction. Very easily. Totally. And my life would be completely different. Industry would be completely different I think is fair to say, yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Okay quick version of it, but how did you go from this being an idea, the seed was planted, to getting your license? Did you work for a while? How did you secure your first location? Where, what did that journey look like? Alright I met the guy who developed the concept, and I told him that I want, I wanted to Work for him for free. Okay. Okay. And so he became my mentor. I worked for him for about a year for free in Dallas. What kind of work did you do? I did just like salon management work. I was at the front of the salon. I said hi to the clients when they came in. If they were looking for Janice, their hairstylist, I let them know where Janice was. If the bathrooms needed cleaning, I cleaned the bathrooms. If the air conditioner went out in one part of the salon, I made sure that it got fixed. Were you also sweeping the warehouse for your dad at the same time or did you stop that? I think I probably stopped that at that time. Some overlap maybe, okay. Maybe some overlap, yeah. So I, I spent a lot of my time in the salon and I saw. What makes hairdressers tick, what makes them happy, what makes them successful, what the clients liked. I saw what they liked about having their own space so much more yet being around so many other beauty professionals. I saw friendships. Get made. I saw some drama, but then you know how to resolve it in a good, healthy way. Yeah, I, that's what I did and that's liter, literally what I'm still doing today, when I say, what is your day been up to? It's that of course it's some idiosyncratic changes. I mean that we, I am essentially a salon manager. Still now I, I have, I do it through others now, but yeah. But I still have basic conversations with salon managers where I talk about, the philosophies of making a hairdresser happy and successful. I like, how do you do that? And these are the things you have to do. And some of these things are against human nature. They, when, give me an example of one of those. When one of our beauty professionals gets mad at us because the the water heater went down and she's having to rinse her clients in cold water and the product isn't coming out as easily. And she gets really mad at the salon manager. The salon manager can't have that very human reaction of defending herself personally and getting very mad and back. Yeah. There's a, there's customer service. You have to recognize. Why the beauty professionals pissed off and totally understand it. Totally get it. She's running her business. She has to make money and her clients mad at her, she's in between a rock and a hard place reaction. Yeah. And so you have to recognize that there's empathy there and then do everything you can to let her know that we recognize the issue and doing everything we can to fix the issue ASAP. And then actually. do everything we can to fix the issue ASAP. And so that, that's one example. How did you come across your first location? Like, how did that come to be? After about a year, I moved out to California. I broke up with a girlfriend, moved out to California and started looking around for a space. I had a general idea of what I wanted to do. There were no such salons in California at the time. This was in 1999. Okay. And I drove around. A ridiculous number of miles looking for spaces. I knew Los Angeles pretty well because I'd been here since 94. And I I, eventually it came down to, let's call it three or four locations that I thought would work really well and settled on one. And it was, the process of negotiating a lease with A landlord, most of the landlords these days, especially in a city like Los Angeles, are institutional landlords. These are monster businesses that are backed by monster pension funds and these things, and they operate like a monster institutional company does. And so it takes a long time. And I think it took me probably a year to just get the lease that, that was the first location was in studio city, California. We still have it. Today. Many of the beauty professionals that I rented to 24 years ago are still in the salon today. Yeah. And so I have a lot of feelings, about that salon, a lot of memories, obviously, but. So it took about a year to get the lease and then took about six months to build out the space. So for that year and a half, I was eating, crackers and living in the cheapest, literally the cheapest apartment I could find. Assuming you were a hairstylist by this point. Yes or no? No. Okay. I've never had my beauty license. I don't know why I assumed that you did. Just you saying people, the industry being creative, I would assume that was the creative outlet for you. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. But you've been in a salon, like you said, for so long, that it Yeah. Do you think you could do a decent head of hair? Absolutely not. No. No chance. Absolutely. Okay. I've. I've been in so many classes. I've paid attention, even to both cutting and coloring, but I absolutely will tell you that if, and I've had, we, we do a lot of education. So we have mannequin heads all around the office and stuff. And of course, for years I've taken shears cause we have shears around there. I've taken shears and. Cut the mannequin, but I, if I tried on a human, it would not look good. There's no way. You have no business doing that. It's not legal. Yeah. Okay. Do you own any of the properties or do you lease all of them? We own one property and that was, that's the Denver location that I bought with a small business loan in 2010 after the the mortgage crisis happened. This was a subprime mortgage office, Coldwell Bankers, something like that. And the bank took it back. And sold it to me and it was very, it was very cheap. I was going to say it was very cheap until I had to make it a salon and then it got very expensive because building a salon is very expensive. But we still have it to this day and it's a freestanding building across from a great mall and and a good area of North Denver. And it's great. So what was year one when you opened the first one in Studio City? What year was that? December 1st, 2000. And when was the second location? Did you know right away we're moving or did you did it take some time? No, it's, it was like, I hate to use cliches, but I'm gonna use one, whatever. It was like building the airplane as I'm flying it. Okay. W all businesses are, yeah. Yeah. It was like. As much as I'd worked at, my mentor's location, I'd never actually gotten it off the ground, from zero to open. So all of a sudden I'm managing the construction people. They're ripping me off. They're taking forever. I didn't know any protections. And I had a lease on the property. With the landlord and they just kick me around. I think back now, we've gotten rid of a lot of the bad elements of that first lease. But, the, I call real estate and construction blood sports. Separately, they're absolute blood sports. And the people who do better are the ones who have been doing it a long time and just know what to do. Yeah. And the ones who don't know what to do, just get kicked around. Yeah. And abused. Yeah. And I, that was a hundred percent me. I had a lease that was so bad. I remember having to pay the landlord these ridiculous amounts of money for like administrative fees and this and that. And like every time the landlord made an improvement to the space or to the center, like I got a bill for it and I was like, wait a second, this is your building, but you didn't know any better, right? I didn't know any better. I had an attorney. Okay. But even, there's good attorneys and bad attorneys, just like good hairstylist and bad hairstylist. And this attorney was She was not adept in this type of a deal. I made a bad choice of choosing an attorney who wasn't adept at a real estate retail lease. Anyway, learning lessons. And then with construction, I hired the cheapest bid. And I got what I paid for and I ended up paying for it for years after that. But all the learning lessons so we got the salon open though. We opened in good shape. I was the only employee for that salon for two, two years or so, two and a half years. I worked at the front desk. I cleaned the bathrooms. I did. Yeah. I laid the floor for some of those early studios because I didn't have enough money to hire the contractor to lay the floors. And I thought to myself having some personalization to the studio was part of what I was offering our hairstylists who were coming in. I think that's very attractive. Yeah. Yeah. So if somebody wanted a wood floor, Then I'm going to put in a wood floor and it's I'm going to put in a wood floor. I'm not paying somebody else to put in a wood floor. And I've never put in a wood floor. So I'm going to Home Depot and ask them how do I put in a wood floor. And so I ended up putting in a wood floor and it ends up looking good. But I was easily, and maybe this is the ironic thing, I was easily working 80 hours a week. Going back to me being all, I don't want to work 80 hours a week. But when you have your own business, you gotta do things the way you have to do them, right? I wanted to ask you this in the beginning, when you were, you're an excellent storyteller, let me say, when you were painting the picture, no pun intended, of your mom's career and your dad's career, I wanted to ask you if you had a say at this very moment, which one would you say you replicate more right now? Right now. Yeah. I would, it's a very good question that is impossible to answer. Okay. I would say if I had to choose one, cause I don't want to shy away from it. I would probably shit. No I would probably say my mom just because she balanced them out so well. And because. Because my dad didn't want to grow his business, I would say for those two reasons but there's certainly, there's so many things about what I find myself being pretty good at. Definitely my mom isn't so good at, and my dad is good at, so very much a blend. When did the podcast first release? Podcast released in 2017, August of 2017. So what is that? Seven years ago this month. Wow. Wow. That's incredible. And you've been doing weekly episodes or more often than that? I have not missed a week in six and a half years. Wow. That's amazing. That's amazing. So would you say it's fair to say that's like a big portion? I know you said administrative stuff. How would you say you're spending majority of your time right now? Yeah. So before we started recording, I was telling Lisa that I am spending a tremendous amount of that, that my kind of daily is a tremendous amount of administrative bullshit. Yeah. That involves accountants and attorneys and. Things that are, like business structure and how do you, and, decisions around certain laws and regulations, then we need to decide how we're going to do this or that. And, or things like, The LA County is requiring this particular thing and it, and we need to decide how we're going to comply with that thing, and it's of course always extremely expensive, never makes any sense. And you never have any choice because it's like LA County says you have to jump through this hoop. You have to jump through this hoop. There's no choice. There's no arguing. So unfortunately a lot of my time is spent on stuff like that. The and I would say, I say a lot. So what is a lot? A lot's probably 60 percent of my time is spent on that. 40 percent of my time is spent on like direct salon related things, whether it's like going to the salon. And I try to go to the salons as much as I can. It, frankly, I have to go to the salons psychologically because if I don't I end up sitting in an office all day long, and I literally, I lose sight of what we actually do. I feel that. I still go to the salon a couple days a week for the same reason. Cause yeah, you really do start to lose your mind going into this tunnel into your computer forever. Yeah. 100 percent 100 percent because, emails beget more emails when you and so if you're not careful, I could absolutely spend a hundred percent of my time just responding to emails. Yeah. And never sign. And they would never end. And they'll never end. Yeah. Yeah. And so I have to go to the salons because and, talk to people, whether it's, our manager or the beauty professionals I know, or maybe some new beauty professionals I don't yet know and check in with them, make sure that we're doing everything that we can and their experience is going and all that stuff. I have to do that just to remind myself of what it is. We actually do because there's certain elements of business that are pretty standard, no matter what the business is. And a lot of this stuff that I was talking about before, whether it's regulations or attorneys or, Taxation or the the accounting code requires certain things. And yeah, it doesn't matter what business you're in, you have to do all that shit. It's just it's really just based on laws and, legal requirements. Yeah. And I have to constantly remind me. Remind myself what we actually do, which is, build as good a possible salon environment as we can so that our beauty professionals can be happy and successful. And so the, I still do all the floor plans for the salons. Of course we have an architect and her team that that actually executes, a lot of the stages of that, but I'm still in there. I just sent an email last night at eight o'clock. I'm in my office. We're opening a new location and I was going through and the email was probably 20 bullet points of what to change. Let's add a sidelight window here. Let's move the door of this studio. Cause you have that experience and like you said, you've talked with those beauty pros for so long, you know what they need and what they want and what they're seeking out. That's right. The technical people call it institutional knowledge. I have that institutional, some people call it tribal knowledge, actually, if you want to bring it down in formality, some people got tribal knowledge and stuff like that is pretty important. But I tried to always kind of pressure test some of my assumptions because after these 24, 25 years I'm not quite as close to every specific thing that is happening in the salons anymore. So for example, yesterday, I sent a text to one of our regional managers and I said, Hey, is it still, is it true or untrue? That people like this more than that, like our hairstylist, like this more than that. And so I got a response and of course it's never black and white, of course, do you also feel like doing the podcast though? You do have your, finger on the pulse of everything as well. Yeah. That's one of the great benefits of doing the podcast. And I've said this. I say this internally a lot. I guess I don't say it on the podcast a lot, but cause a lot of people ask why we do it. One of the things that I get personally from the podcast is I get to ask a lot of questions in depth to somebody who's been successful in the salon industry and has certain amounts of knowledge and whatever she is focused on in the salon industry. There's so many different things. I get. I get behind the chair hairstylists. I get influencers who are now educators. I get executives at product brands, I get all the different little things and I get feedback basically, which becomes a podcast. And that's not the number one reason I do it, but it's absolutely a an ancillary thing that I get. To keep going. Yeah, incredible. Okay, I could continue asking you questions and pick your brain. I would love to zoom in on so many of those things, but I think there's no way that we could, and we didn't even touch the Schultz law or any of that, so maybe we need to do another one one day because we had, and he just started scratching the surface of some talking points we could go into, but I knew I was curious. I was so curious that I knew that was going to take up a majority of time, so we'll leave it there. That for now, but Eric, maybe we'll have you on again another day in the future because I have enjoyed this very much, and I mean it, you are an excellent storyteller, so thank you for painting that incredible picture, and I think it's really inspiring, and what I really like to I think when people are attracted to me for coaching, it's just the idea of Taking an idea, like you said, that, that just popped in your head that existed, all the synchronicities that can, tend to play out, which could be fate, which could be whatever and bringing that fully to life. I just find it fascinating, the same way you love to interview beauty pros, I just love to pick people's brains that have done successful things and what they've learned along the way, so thank you, I really appreciate it. So yeah, every single week, you guys can catch Eric on the Hair Game podcast, talking to Anyone under the sun in the beauty industry, safe to say, yeah. Amazing. Anything else they can do to stay in touch? I know you have a lot of locations in California, where else is Salon Republic at? We are in Texas, California, Washington State, Colorado. And soon to be in two new states. Soon to be announced, but I'm lover Taylor on Instagram salon Republic is salon Republic on Instagram. The hair game podcast is the hair game podcast on Instagram and yeah, that's about it. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you everybody for listening. I will talk to you all next week.