Wade Armstrong

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We Mean Business: Jazyhair

Posted Wednesday October 15, 2008 in Entrepreneurship

There’s a fun new show on A&E - We Mean Business a small business makeover show. With all the successful personal and home style makeover shows out there, it’s nice to see one just for entrepreneurs. Since I had so much fun blogging about American Inventor here a few years ago, I’m going to weekly summarize the latest We Mean Business episode - and throw in an idea or two about what I think the entrepreneur really should do to make over their business.

Briefly, the Show Format

We Mean Business is hosted by Apprentice Season 1 winner Bill Rancic, who brings his sidekicks - designer Peter Gurski and “tech wizard” Katie Linendoll. Every week, our three musketeers take on a new entrepreneur with a new struggling business, promising to turn things around in just 48 hours. Each of the musketeers fixes a specific part of the business - Rancic takes on finance and strategy, Gurski gives the company a makeover, and Linendoll shows how using technology can help.

This Week’s Episode

This week, We Mean Business takes on Jazyhair Salon, just up the road from me in Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles’s famous San Fernando Valley (of Valley Girl fame). Owner Jasmine Bell is deep in debt and not making money - they just don’t have enough clients. She wants Jazyhair to be a beautiful, upscale salon, but she doesn’t have either the high-end experience or a wide range of services.

The show starts, as always, with the “what’s the problem here?” segment. The owner is defensive about criticism,¹ sure she knows best, and sure her salon is luxurious. The salon is filled with empty stations - without hairstylists to rent these chairs, they generate no income.

Rancic takes Bell out to a premium salon to learn what the standard of customer service is for her target audience. He and Gurski also strong-arm her into adding manicure and makeup stations to replace empty hairstyling chairs.

Gurski overhauls the salon’s logo into something more contemporary and redecorates the location, greatly improving the look of the place. Unfortunately, the “more visible” logo is actually smaller than the original, making me worry if it’s visible from the street.

Linendoll suggests putting the portfolios of every stylist on computers and making the whole salon wireless, with laptops at every station, for the customers who sit around for longer services such as color and weaves. Unfortunately, all we hear about are the brand names of the laptops and other things that Jazyhair gets (all Dell, by the way). We don’t learn what they really do - and, in fact, all we see of the portfolio catalog are a few photos being scanned in and then the staff browsing them in Windows - not even a specialized application.

What I Would Recommend

I was concerned that they pushed the idea to replace empty hairstyling chairs with makeup and manicure stations. While an empty salon does nobody any good, how many chairs does Bell need to have in operation to break even? If she needs the 10 chairs she started out with, and not the 7 chairs she ended up with, then she either needs to keep those chairs or somehow get more revenue from each customer. It would’ve been great to do a quick overview - with a graphic showing revenue per seat or something like that - to explain the economics of how many chairs it was worth having. Why can’t we talk about the number of customers per day we need?

And speaking of the number of customers, Jasmine needs to understand how to market her salon. She should look into direct mail, because it’s easy and surprisingly cheap to buy a list of potential customers, described by demographic values, and to send them a postcard. Jasmine could easily send one to everyone within a mile who meets the target income level, for instance, or to offices in high-end commercial space in the area. It is probably also inexpensive to advertise in several local magazines. At the end of the day, it’s all about how many people she can get in the door, and, to do that, she needs to get the word out!

And a Few Thoughts on the Show Itself

Right off the bat, the tech segment was a total flop - just Dell Dell Dell Dell. It seemed more of an ad than anything of value. I don’t know if Linendoll knows her stuff, but she comes off only as a shill. A better approach would have been to find a local Value Added Reseller (VAR), a technology specialist who sells hardware and software and provides support for it. VARs can be great partners for small businesses, because most VARs specialize in a small range of industries. A good VAR knows all of the tools out there and can help an entrepreneur buy the right products and lean how to use them. What VAR wouldn’t set everything up for free for 30 seconds on-camera to talk about how the technology matches with what Rancic and crew are doing, and mention the name of their company? For the products they got, Jasmine will probably make just as much money by selling them on eBay.

Linendoll wasn’t the only weak player; Rancic was simply overpowered by Jasmine. He’s not an aggressive extrovert a la Gordon Ramsay, and he doesn’t need to be . A good parallel to Rancic is Tim Gunn, of Project Runway and Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. Smart and able to connect on a personal level, just like Rancic, Gunn doesn’t own the room when he steps in. So he’s paired with a perky, aggressive co-host who can do that job for him. Linendoll is certainly that perky and aggressive, and Gurski is aggressive and funny, so there’s the talent there; they just need to be more equals and less Rancic’s staff. That should increase the energy post-haste.

There are also some production weaknesses, possibly because the show is so new. Sound is frequently awful, on the level one would expect from a cheap consumer camcorder. That means a lot of statements are re-recorded in the studio and then edited into the final product; it’s easy to tell where that’s done and disconcerting to hear. The camerawork can be jerky at times. The overall effect is very “reality” but not as much “professional” as the producers might want.

Nonetheless, We Mean Business is a ton of fun. I look forward to the rest of the season, and hope you all watch it too!

¹ It’s worth noting that these shows are cut for drama and not to be as accurate as possible at all times. Was Bell actually defensive throughout the whole process? Who knows! But that’s the footage the editors, producers, and director decided to use. Heck would you want to watch a show in which everyone was reasonable all the time?