The Coterie news

Savvy salon ideas, broken business partnerships and clever collaborations. Guest blogger and The Coterie member Aid Tams, co-founder of Bad Apple Hair, takes us on a journey from learning the basics in Birmingham to backstage Fashion Week passes in the Big Apple…

At the age of 17, after being told not to sit my A Levels, I found myself working in a Walsall YTS centre called Interworks. This was where the girls did hairdressing and the boys (except me) did woodwork. After three weeks, I was approached by Lee Clift from Francesco Group in Walsall, who I met by chance on a night out, and he told me to go into the salon and speak to Angela Lawrence. I got the job after a 15-minute interview that consisted of a cigarette break and chat about our nightlife interests. All of this was so new to me I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now I look back and think how strange it was! Angela is very dear to my heart, I believe what I’ve done today I owe to her! She was tough to work for but fair.

I started straight away and attended an academy the group had in Stafford. My lecturer was Sharon Peake, who was part of the FAME Team at the time, an excellent mentor who got me through the course. I qualified at the academy within two years, however at the end of my level two I was drawn to Toni&Guy by their inspirational images and I knew I had to work for them! I spoke to a hairdresser I had trained with who went to work for Toni&Guy in Birmingham, and he told me to apply for a job there.

My trade test began, and within 10 minutes I was told to put my scissors down and wait in reception. I was confused; everything I had learnt at Francesco Group in those past two years was clearly not what Toni&Guy wanted. The owner told me that I had to retrain in my own time, unpaid. This took six months. James Nash was my mentor during this time and still remains a friend to this day (he’s now in Australia and doing very well). At that point my original contact into Toni&Guy had decided to open a branch in Stafford and asked me to work for him. Within the first year we grossed £750,000 and after two years of evolving my skills and honing some very bespoke haircuts, I felt I had run out of new clients I could do advanced work on!

This prompted me to move back to the Toni&Guy in Birmingham with my original team, which consisted of Paul Hanlon at the time (another close friend). After two years there I became their biggest grossing stylist but it wasn’t enough, so my then colleague Ben Matthews and I decided to go solo. We handed in our notice, found a unit and set about designing and planning our first salon. With hindsight, we did it wrong. Yes, it was a beautiful dream salon with all the whistles and bells, but we had no working capital and our recruitment process was sloppy. I put this down to naivety and the security that a big brand like Toni&Guy gives you. We were very busy, and with little attention to numbers, appraisals and growth plans we soon found ourselves in a very sticky position. It’s not what I’d wanted and not what I’d gone into hairdressing for.

I knew that in order to be successful I needed a partner to look at the other 50 per cent of the business in the way that I looked at hairdressing. Our problem was this first salon was being run by two very passionate hairdressers that didn’t look at the numbers. We parted ways and I worked on my own for three months, collected my thoughts and moved forward with a view to getting a business partner that wasn’t a hairdresser. I’d always had a dream of owning a particular salon that was full of stylists like myself. Having worked in Birmingham for several years I knew this could be achieved!

Tune in tomorrow to read what happens next…

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 9:41 am and is filed under Guest blogger, Stylists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.