Across the country, hair salons are seeing demand for their services grow. And while beauty professionals may have amazing skills as far as their craft, what almost none of them have been taught is how to run the business that craft depends on.
It’s a costly gap. Salons and barbershops now cite workforce shortages as one of their biggest obstacles. Salons with the strongest hiring and retention rates are often those that invest in education and training for their employees. Surprisingly few actually do. Today's stylists are looking for ways to grow in their careers, and too many are not finding those opportunities.
Of course, stylists receive plenty of training before they ever get behind a chair. For most people, a haircut might last an hour, but for the stylist holding the scissors, it represents years of training. That technical education rarely includes something just as critical, however: how to run a business.
I've spent years as a hair stylist in Los Angeles, and I learned that lesson the hard way. I quickly found out that a hairdresser is often also a marketer, a bookkeeper, and even the CEO of a small company. Yet the professional beauty industry still trains stylists almost entirely on technique.
Stylists in traditional salons need business skills to build and keep a clientele. The need is even more acute among the many stylists today who operate as independent entrepreneurs.
Nearly half of hairstylists and cosmetologists are self-employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They run one-chair studios, rent booths, or build their own brands on social media. That freedom requires navigating decisions about pricing, marketing, budgeting, and growth with little formal guidance.
Pumping out 27 TikToks a day might work for some people, but it's not a viable promotional strategy.
A stylist can graduate fully qualified to transform someone's hair and still have no idea how to price a service, understand a profit-and-loss statement, or decide whether renting a booth beats taking a commission chair. Schools teach the craft of styling hair as a rigorous discipline, then leave the business side of the job to instinct.
Some educators here in Los Angeles have started to close that gap. Santa Monica College, for example, runs a salon business program whose faculty are working salon owners. It focuses on helping students build an actual plan for growth rather than just passing an exam. Savvy Beauty Academy, meanwhile, integrates salon management and entrepreneurship into its cosmetology curriculum rather than bolting them on at the end. Still, programs like these remain rare, especially outside of major metro areas like Los Angeles.
Even more, very few of them are designed to fit into a busy hairdresser’s life. Many programs assume hairdressers can commit to a fixed schedule, a multi-week or months-long commitment, and the kind of uninterrupted attention that a fully booked column rarely allows.
A stylist who is genuinely curious about pricing or retention will still skip the Tuesday-night webinar when it collides with a late client or a kid who needs picking up from soccer practice. Business education that works for stylists has to fit the rhythm of the job and their busy lives.
The most useful version is short and available on demand, so a lesson can fit into the 20 minutes between a color process and the next blowout rather than demanding a free evening that rarely comes.
It connects to the very real decisions already in front of hairdressers, such as the price increase they're nervous to announce or the slow month they are struggling to explain, rather than dealing in abstract theory. And it matches where stylists actually are in both their lives and their careers.
Of course, none of this means the industry should care less about the craft itself. That artistry is, of course, still the reason clients return to their favorite hairdressers. But artistry is also now the price of entry, not a guarantee of a lasting career. A stylist who does beautiful work but can't make the math work will quickly burn out or close up shop, and the industry loses talent it spent years training.
The beauty industry has spent decades perfecting how it teaches technique, and it does that very well. Now it should give the business side the same respect and structure, intentionally developing those skills rather than expecting stylists to figure it out as they go.
Paula Peralta is a Los Angeles-based curly hair stylist, Artistic Director for John Paul Mitchell Systems, and Founding Ambassador for LumariPRO.