The Barber Story
It only makes sense that I would start the showcase series by talking about my personal area of experience. But before I talk about The Barber Story, I want to explain the concept that allowed The Barber Story to exist.
I believe in creating plans and goals for your life. If you don’t know where it is that you want to go, how do you ever expect to show up?
1 year goals create a realistic goal that can be used as a stepping stone that can lead you to your 3 year goal.
3 year goals create a direction that you can guide your decisions that allow you to steer your personal intuition, and can be a major milestone necessary to complete your 5 year goals.
5 year goals are where you want to see yourself with the accomplishments in their infancy that will create the lifestyle you hope to have in your 10 year plans.
10 year plans are the answer to the age old interview question, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” This is the lifestyle you want to work your life towards. It might be having a few extra zeroes in your bank account, or it might be about having an outlet for your creative potential. Hell, it could simply be having the ability to live in your van so you can travel across America as a nomad. This is the personal quest you choose for all of your pursuits, both personally and professionally. The answer will be uniquely individual to the person answering the question, but that’s one of the beauties of America, you can choose who and what you want to be.
Freedom of choice wasn't something I felt in my first decade of entering the workforce. Graduating at 16 with a 3.8 gpa, I decided to immediately go into the workforce instead of going to a traditional university. My father had taught me that getting experience in the real world was just as valuable to an employer as a diploma, so I would work in positions until I got bored, and would teach myself a skill that would make myself more valuable. Over the next 10 years, I ran the full gamut. Customer Service, Technical Support, Customer Retention, Staffing Analytics / Workforce Management, Project Development, Quality Assurance, Help Desk Operator, Team Leadership, Management Leadership. My LinkedIn profile is well rounded, which is especially funny when you consider that my current industry doesn’t care at all about LinkedIn.
After 10 years of following a company’s definition of success, I found myself in a deep state of depression. Every day, my commute was 20 minutes of fantasizing about how I wanted to leave my car running in a closed garage while I took a nap behind the steering wheel. Eventually, those thoughts transitioned away from suicidal thoughts and moved into suicidal ideation.
Then I got the news that woke me up. I was on the phone with my mom when she asked me, “Did you hear Robin Williams killed himself today?” All I could do was stare out the back patio window. This was a guy who made me smile as a kid, as well as millions of other people, and if this guy who brings so much joy to so many people can’t find a reason to stick around, I’m fucked. The next day I went to my boss and told him I needed to make a change in my life.
I reverse engineered aspects of what I could potentially be successful in from what I hated in my past career and what my personal goals were for the career overhaul I would choose to invest my time into.
I’ve worked in contact centers for a decade, and I HATE being tied to a phone.
I hate single serving friends. I want to do something where I can build real relationships.
I want to be responsible for creating something that is better than the existing version.
I would love to include photography as an aspect of my career.
I want to be in an industry where I can be my own boss.
I want to find an industry that will grow along with the city
After three weeks of researching different industries, I came to the conclusion that I could either cut hair or be a photographer. I defined my success in the hair industry as being a shop owner and educator, and photography was defined as a contracted photojournalist. I figured that it was a more pragmatic decision to go with hair, because I would eventually need to incorporate photography on a regular basis to showcase my portfolio work.
In March, 2015, I created TheBarberStory.com. It was an incredibly basic blog, but it was a way that I could share with my friends and family the experience I was about to get myself into. I didn’t know anything about the hair industry. I had never cut hair before in my entire life. On top of that, I personally had only been getting 2 haircuts a year because I had never cared about styling it. I wanted to demonstrate that if you are determined to reach your aspirations, and you welcome failure as an opportunity to learn, you can reach your goals. I enrolled in a Paul Mitchell barber program, and on April 21st, I started my first day of school.
Just because it started happy, doesn’t mean it stayed that way. I was still struggling with depression on a regular basis. I had just filed bankruptcy following a divorce, and I was pretty sure I had made a wrong decision for my life because of constant struggle with a new skillset.
But I stuck with it, and eventually, I found that I wasn’t terrible at making videos and advertisements for school projects, so I kept dealing with all of the other failures until they started becoming the occasional success. And right when I started to feel like I could balance without the training wheels, I graduated.
After school, I knew that I needed to readjust my 3 year goals based on what I had learned in school. Barbershop and Salon cultures are incredibly different, learn them both. Understanding what it is to work as a hairstylist was a new lesson, and trusting in my own abilities was going to prove to be a new learning curve without the security of my training wheels.
I got my first job working at Barbiere DeVino in Old Boise. The owner of the shop had spent his career in kitchens and bands, and I had mine in organizational skills. I told him that I wanted to get out of the relationship what I was willing to put in, so I was put on the LLC as a partner and I began investing into the shop. I ran our marketing campaigns, built a website, made promo videos for social media, all knowing it was going to help me in the long run. That first year I was responsible for a marketing campaign that got Barbiere Devino to place 3rd in the 2016 Best of Boise.
After about a year of working in the shop, I was told that The Barber Story had become a conflict of interest, and that I would no longer be cutting out of that shop anymore.
It came out of nowhere, fired from my first job. I reached out to a friend in the industry, and she recommended I work at a salon where I could lease a chair. It seemed like the best option, as it would allow me to learn the other side of the industry and start managing the brand of my blog as an actual business entity.
I began working at Muse Salon as the resident barber. I had my own room, I was leasing a station instead of being paid commission for services I performed in their chair. It also meant I would need to buy an actual barber chair and all the details of my own miniature barbershop.
I spent that next year learning a lot about managing backbar, online booking, creating a website people enjoy visiting, and customer experience. The best part of it was my market research was consistently coming back to me and giving me realtime feedback on the changes I made to the website to make their overall experience simplified.
Eventually, I got bored working by myself. I missed the hustle and bustle of a busy barbershop, and I had been asking my buddy, Jimbo, to come work at my salon so we could start a pseudo shop. I had talked to the salon owner, and she had been onboard with the change to her salon, but when she quoted our rent, I started looking at other options. When I found a spot on the bench large enough for a 4 chair barbershop, I jumped at the opportunity to get into my first lease. It was in November 2017 that we moved into our own location. The Barber Story was now a brick and mortar barbershop.
The shop decor was pretty minimal, we wanted to feel out the space before we committed to any aesthetic. Once Chase came on board, we found the thing that connected all of us together. Video games and nerdy shit. Barbershops are supposed to get you excited about nostalgia, so we decided to give you that feeling you already love as a culture inside the shop. As the years progressed, the decor filled in more and more, and our clients loved what we were doing.
It was unreal, we had placed 3rd in the Boise Weekly Best of Boise competition in our first two years open. I knew that if I wanted to transform the shop into something the community needed, I would need to visit other communities, specifically ones in the markets that people were moving from. I wanted to find what larger cities were already doing with their barbershop culture, and bring back some pieces with me. I visited shops in Salt Lake, Portland, Seattle, even worked at a shop in Boulder, CO for a few days, all to see what the shop needed to turn into.
After a branding overhaul, the creation of a new menu board and shop mascot, we were ready to have our grand opening ceremony, 2 and a half years after we originally opened. We wanted a Friday the 13th party, so we scheduled the event for March 13th, 2020.
March 11th, a global pandemic is announced.
We still had our grand opening, keeping the food truck on the far side of the parking lot. We also opted to not advertise. We didn’t need a ton of people to celebrate, we needed people who wanted to show up and a camera. One week later, we closed up for what we thought would be a 2 week voluntary quarantine.
We didn’t come back to work for 2 months.
After coming up with a return to work strategy, we came back and embraced the shifted reality. We dropped a small amount of business, but not enough to stop us from moving forward. In fact, 2020 was the year we moved up to 2nd place in the Best of Boise.
I had one goal with opening The Barber Story. Open a place that I can have fun with my friends doing things we enjoy doing. There’s nothing fake about it, we have fun cutting hair because we are surrounded with people we enjoy all doing things we have fun with.
Goals will shift and transform as you move into your new space, but keeping your eyes set on your 10 year goals will make sure you can maintain the ability to compare your decisions to the opportunities they created.
In December, I’ll hit five years of actively working in established shops/salons, which is the milestone I need prior to applying for my educator license.
That will be a new story whenever that door opens.
-Chris
