Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in personal care but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Sean Finley, Owner and Co-Founder of Scissors & Scotch, located in Kansas City, MO, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Scissors & Scotch is the grooming experience every guy deserves - where traditional barbering and modern spa services meet your favorite watering hole. Now a national franchise, at each S&S, clients can sit back, relax, get groomed - then enjoy a cocktail, coffee, or cold one in our private lounge.
Tell us about yourself
When it comes to men's grooming, there are basically three options – your dad's barbershop, your wife's salon, or any joint with clips in the name. So, the way most ideas are born, a few cocktails one night parlayed into a brand new concept that gives guys a better alternative. Fast forward a few years later, and S&S has become the grooming experience we wish we'd always had.
Every stage of brand growth brings new challenges and opportunities, but as a recovering attorney (focused on startup and corporate law) and in-house stat nerd (with an undying passion for Excel that can occasionally make my wife jealous), I will always love building and optimizing the systems that help S&S scale.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Starting a business with two great friends and zero industry experience (total) has been a thrilling journey full of highs and lows. Seeing the Scissors & Scotch concept snowball into a franchise and witnessing the positive impact it has on the confidence and good spirits of guys across the country has been especially rewarding.
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
Riding the mental rollercoaster of entrepreneurship is always a challenge--both exhilarating and exhausting at times. Learning to stay consistent through the highs and lows is one of the toughest and most useful lessons. Things aren't often as bad (... or as good) as you may initially think.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
So many! Three favorites, in no particular order:
- Be a sponge: Be relentlessly curious about everything within and tangential to your industry. Read books, articles, and news. Talk to peers, experts, thought leaders, and those who have "been through it." Research the history of successes and failures. Constantly search for "why," not just the answer itself.
- Think for yourself: Trust but verify everything. Challenge the consensus and status quo. See "the way things are done" as an option but never a requirement. Seek out original ideas and productive disagreement. Focus on the justification underlying a thought, not only the thought itself.
- Empower everyone around you: Give before you get. Help others contribute. Think ahead to your company at 10X--who should be learning things now? Surround yourself with sharp, driven people that share your "North Star" and complement each other's skillsets and thinking. Focus on getting things right, not being right. See challenges and disagreements as additive, not competitive. Create shared goals and common ownership of the company's vision.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://scissorsscotch.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scissorsscotch/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scissorsscotch/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scissors-&-scotch/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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