37-year-old’s hair salon brings in over $1 million a yr—how she did it with no bachelor’s diploma

As a tattoo artist put the ending touches on her ink — her son’s identify, Elijah, scrawled throughout her left shoulder — he made small speak with Lee (who goes by her center identify professionally) and her buddy.

The artist complimented her buddy’s haircut, which Lee had given her with a pair of kitchen scissors simply hours earlier. 

“He mentioned, ‘The place’s your salon?’ and I informed him I did not work at one, that I simply did hair for enjoyable,” Lee, 37, recollects. “And I am going to always remember, he mentioned, ‘Nicely, you would possibly wish to rethink what you are doing for a residing. It is clear you could have a present.'” 

The unsolicited recommendation gave Lee, then 20, pause. She beloved doing her buddies’ hair and experimenting with new hairstyles on her curly locks however thought-about it extra of a interest than a vocation. 

It was 2007, two years after Lee graduated from highschool and one yr after she dropped out of Monmouth Faculty in Monmouth, Illinois, after discovering out she was pregnant. 

Within the months main as much as Elijah’s beginning, Lee moved right into a small condominium in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois, and located a customer support job she beloved at Maui Jim, a sun shades firm. She educated and bought promoted to be an accounting clerk inside her first yr on the firm.

“Math all the time got here straightforward to me, and I assumed, by working in finance, I might by no means be poor once more,” says Lee. 

However one thing was lacking in her company profession. “I craved the inventive freedom I felt doing hair,” she provides. “I suppose I simply wanted encouragement from a stranger to go for it.”

She determined to modify careers on the drive dwelling. “I had no clue if it could work out, however I knew I’d remorse not attempting,” she says. 

By all measures, the danger has paid off: Lee owns Flourish Curls Salon in Arlington, Texas, a enterprise that introduced in $1.1 million in income final yr, based on monetary paperwork reviewed by CNBC Make It.

After deducting enterprise bills and taxes, Lee’s take-home pay is between $100,000 and $150,000 a yr (she declined to share her actual wage).

This is how Lee spun her curiosity in hair right into a six-figure profession.

The morning after getting her tattoo, Lee stopped at a constructing she had pushed previous numerous occasions: Regency Magnificence Institute, a cosmetology college in Peoria. 

She registered for courses and stop her job at Maui Jim as quickly as she paid her first deposit. The cosmetology program, which took Lee about 18 months to finish, value $22,000 and required her to be in courses 5 days per week from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m. 

When she wasn’t at school, Lee, who’s a single dad or mum, waitressed at an area steakhouse to pay her tuition and different payments. Her grandparents watched Elijah. 

The necessities to turn into a hairstylist fluctuate by state, however usually, potential stylists should full a cosmetology program at an accredited college and procure a state-issued license by passing a written and sensible examination. 

Many states additionally require potential stylists to finish an apprenticeship or work as an assistant in a salon first.

As soon as Lee completed the necessities for her license in 2009, she began taking over shoppers at dwelling and dealing part-time at a salon that focuses on pure hair in Peoria.

In her first yr as a stylist, Lee made near $30,000 a yr. She continued to work part-time as a waitress for the following two years to cowl her payments.

On the time, Fb was gaining popularity, and Lee determined to take full benefit of the platform’s free promoting alternatives: She created a enterprise web page, despatched buddy requests to potential shoppers, and began documenting her work with images and movies. 

She rapidly garnered a status for working with totally different curl patterns and shoppers who have been biracial like herself. 

“My mother is white, my dad is Black and I all the time had curly hair, however my mother had bone straight hair, so she simply had no thought methods to type it for me rising up,” she says.

That childhood expertise impressed Lee to begin dyeing, highlighting, trimming and straightening her hair when she was a teen till she discovered kinds she favored. 

“I needed to learn to make my hair look good, really feel assured in my very own pores and skin, and I wish to encourage that very same confidence in others,” she says. 

Lee (pictured right here, third from the left) with a few of her workers at Flourish Curls Salon.

Photograph: Sess Lee Cannon

For the following 5 years, Lee continued to work on the salon and construct her following on social media. She says she beloved the individuals she labored with and felt settled in her profession.

However in 2015, Lee — then pregnant together with her fourth baby — began feeling “the itch to maneuver.” 

She had spent most of her life in Illinois and craved a change of surroundings and hotter climate. 

A buddy invited her to spend a protracted weekend collectively in two of Texas’ greatest cities, Austin and Dallas. 

Lee says she was immediately smitten with the southern hospitality and wide-open areas. She toured residences for her and her 4 youngsters that very same weekend. 

The household of 5 relocated to Arlington, a metropolis between Dallas and Fort Value, in January 2016. 

Transferring to a unique state emboldened Lee to chase one other dream that had been percolating at the back of her thoughts: Opening a salon. 

Lee spent 10 months and $50,000 of her financial savings to open Flourish Curls Salon, which began taking clients in 2017.

To Lee’s reduction, phrase unfold rapidly in regards to the salon — inside months of opening, she had a waitlist of shoppers.

Lee attributes Flourish Curls’ recognition to the viewers she cultivated throughout Fb, YouTube and Instagram. 

She began posting hair tutorials, consumer testimonials, type how-to’s, product suggestions and extra on-line within the early 2000s. Her YouTube channel has almost 60,000 subscribers. 

“Having a robust social media neighborhood helped so much,” Lee provides. “There’s additionally not a ton of salons specializing in curly and pure hair in our neighborhood — many cosmetology faculties and salons nonetheless do not prepare their stylists to work with these textures.”

Flourish Curls’ companies embrace hair cuts, twists, scalp exfoliation and styling that value anyplace from $150 to $375. Final yr, 2023, was the primary yr Flourish Curls broke $1 million in annual income.

The salon has 11 stylists together with Lee, who solely sees a number of shoppers every month. 

She says build up her workers and hiring two digital assistants has helped her stave off burnout and resist the urge to “all the time be on,” a standard problem for enterprise homeowners. 

Lee front-loads her workweek, taking over conferences and appointments Monday by way of Wednesday so she will spend extra time together with her youngsters, now ranging in age from 8 to 18. 

“In my 20s, I assumed that to achieve success, I might should work 50-plus hours per week,” says Lee. “However I have been capable of construct a six-figure profession from working three days per week most weeks.”

As an entrepreneur, Lee has loved the autonomy and suppleness of designing her work schedule.

Nevertheless, essentially the most fulfilling facet of working her personal salon, she says, has been the constructive distinction she’s been capable of make in individuals’s lives by exhibiting them methods to be comfy and assured with their pure hair — a neighborhood she needs she had entry to as an “insecure, pissed off” teenager. 

Provides Lee: “Nothing’s higher than serving to individuals really feel lovely.”

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