The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hello Sugar: Revolutionizing the Brazilian Waxing Industry with Franchise Expansion

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Hello Sugar: Revolutionizing the Brazilian Waxing Industry with Franchise Expansion Hellosugar.salon Show Notes About The Guest(s): ​ Brigham Dallas is the founder and owner of Hello Sugar, a Brazilian wax and sugaring franchise based in Phoenix, Arizona. He started the company in 2015 and began franchising in 2021. Hello Sugar has quickly become one of the fastest-growing franchises in the country, with 76 units in just two years. ​ Summary: ​ Brigham Dallas, founder of Hello Sugar, joins Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show to discuss his unique approach to the Brazilian waxing and sugaring industry. Hello Sugar stands out by focusing on making customers feel comfortable and providing a high-quality experience. Brigham shares his origin story, the benefits of sugaring over waxing, and how he built Hello Sugar into a successful franchise. He also discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the business and the future of the industry. ​ Key Takeaways: ​ - Hello Sugar focuses on making customers feel comfortable during the waxing process. - Sugaring is an organic form of hair removal that is less painful than waxing. - Hello Sugar has a unique approach to franchising, with low startup costs and a suite-to-flagship concept. - The company uses AI technology to automate customer service and streamline operations. - Brigham Dallas is passionate about helping people start and grow their own businesses. ​ Quotes: ​ - "Hello Sugar is revolutionizing the Brazilian waxing and sugaring industry with its focus on making customers feel comfortable." - Brigham Dallas - "Sugaring is an organic form of hair removal that is less painful and lasts just as long as waxing." - Brigham Dallas - "Hello Sugar's unique franchise model allows entrepreneurs to start a business with low startup costs and minimal time commitment." - Brigham Dallas

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He's just so amazing. Brigham Dallas joins us on the show today. He is the founder and owner of Hello Sugar. There you go. And he is basically Hello Sugar is a Brazilian wax and sugaring franchise based in Phoenix, Arizona. He has a unique and technology focused approach that has made Hello Sugar one of the best companies in the nation and one of the fastest growing franchises in the country. With 76 units in just two years, and I believe those are franchise units, that's pretty amazing.

He's revolutionizing the industry. Welcome to the show, Brigham. How are you? Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm doing really well. Thanks for coming as well. And those are 76 units. Those are franchise units. Is that correct? Do I have that right? Yeah, those are 76 units. Those are franchise units. Is that correct? Do I have that right? Yeah, we have 76 units in the franchise.

There's 14 corporate stores in Phoenix as well. There you go. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs, wherever your website is, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, if you look at, look me up on TikTok, Brigham Dallas, always share some like business tips and stuff on there.

But mainly if you're interested in franchising or learning more about us, you go to hellosugar.salon, not.com, hellosugar.salon, and you can find all the information on there about franchising with us, or just to learn more about the company. There you go. And I see your tips over here on the big tickety-tockety over there. So give us a 30,000 overview in your words of what you guys do there at Hello Sugar. Yeah. So we're a Brazilian waxing and sugaring company. It's a competitive market.

There's four to six really big competitors in the space. So we've had to do a lot to stand out from others. Waxing in general, I don't know if you've been waxed yourself, but it's very painful. I don't know how women, they can put hot wax on their body. They can go through this, but they're still scared of a fly or a spider. It doesn't make any sense to me, but that's who our market is. Typically it's 20 to 40 year old females. We also have others in the market,

but that's like our main demographic. And people that do it, do it once a month. They come in, there's a wax, a Brazilian wax is, if you can think like a bikini area, it's the front and the back of the bikini. We do full body body but that's 80 to 90 percent of what we do is full body is brazilian waxing for males and females there you go yeah the service why do people need those why is that important yeah i mean chris i'm being

honest with you it's not what you think you know you probably think what are you thinking what do you think people get a wax i they you know there's a lot of you know i grew up in the 70s so you know there was a lot of bush going on out there there's a lot of a lot of fromage there's a lot of shrubbery that was the word i was looking for shrubbery and sometimes a little much you know you're you're like trying to you know it's you have to take a machete in there to try and find what you're looking for. I don't know what that would be, but that's what I've heard. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we're not speaking from experience here, right? I have no idea. I cannot confirm nor deny. Yeah. Well, you know, I used to think it was just bikinis going to the beach. But that's not waxing at all. We have just as much revenue in the wintertime in ski resort areas as we do in the summertime. And so the people that wax are people in relationships. People who want to be cleaned down in that area who just want to have a smooth feeling you can't get from shaving or from other methods.

There you go. Plus, it gives you more aerodynamic-ness, right? You can feel more free. Your farts will hurt a lot, Chris. You can move at a higher speed. I don't know what that means, but, you know, when you're speedwalking, you know, at the gym, you can pick up an extra probably, I don't know, mile or two or something. I don't know what it means.

For sure, you know, dry cohesion drops incredibly. Brazilian wax is a big deal. People want it. I remember I had one girlfriend one year that she got the laser thing for her legs. Yeah. Man, that was really harsh. I think her legs were all screwed up for a while. It really burnt the hell out of her skin.

So, you know, I imagine using wax might be a little safer i don't know what's safer or not i want to get into that i don't know what attorney's calling me but so you guys do this how long you've been doing this for so i started the company in 2015 i started franchising in 2021 there you go so what give us a little bit of your origin story what what what was your history how did you become an entrepreneur? What made you interested in it? Were you sitting there having a Brazilian wax one day and you're like, I should turn this into a business? No, not at all, man.

Honestly, no interest in waxing. I don't wax myself. It wasn't something that was just like, I'm just super passionate about this business and need to do it. My origin story is in my 20s, I dropped out of college and moved to a beach in thailand and just traveled for six years lived out of a suitcase and just had this like digital nomad life for a long time a lot of countries speak languages learned a lot of cool things it's kind of like the nomadic dream kind of stuff and i was doing it through online advertising and so like 26 27 i got asked to come to phoenix to advertise for this company and they were selling diet pills and i was like yeah sure why

not i come down there and it's so scammy chris i mean it's like it's like fake pills they don't work we're just selling whatever it is and i just i hated i hated the unethical side of this and i wanted to do something that i just didn't like that. Right. So I said to myself, I need $5,000 a month just to be able to live. And I can quit this job in this unethical field and go do my own thing. Like some other way, go back to traveling. Right.

There you go. Well, I started a one room studio. I didn't have much money. I mean, I didn't need much to live as a nomad. Right. And so I had, you know, I put $3,000 into this. I found a friend of mine who was a plastic surgeon, Dr. Mosher Rafa, and he had an extra room with a table in there. And so I went in, set up the shop there. And I, there's a couple of things about the business, Chris, I really liked.

I liked the broad market. You know, it can apply to a lot of people. I liked that there's recurring revenue. And I liked that the cost of the service is very high. And the time that it takes apply to a lot of people. I like that there's recurring revenue and I like that the cost of the service is very high. And the time that it takes to do a service is very low. So to give an hour, you can make between 150 to $200 revenue per room. And then the actual cost of the wax itself is like three bucks. Really?

That's pretty good. Hey, I'm quitting this business. I'm going into Brazilian waxing. Come on down, Chris. Good deal, man. What the hell am I doing wrong? Yeah. quitting this business i'm going into brazilian waxing come on down chris good deal man what the hell am i doing wrong yeah now do i have to wear a helmet during this no i'm just kidding so go

ahead with the rest of your story and get that joke in there yeah so like i started i had no idea what i was doing the first year it was just about market understanding and differentiation so what i did was i i found a bunch of reviews online of all the competitors. And I found out that the thing that most people want in this business was to feel comfortable. So it's okay. I'm gonna make a business about feeling comfortable. And I put onto Facebook three different ads. Yeah. European wax is the biggest competitor. They're all like high fashion. So I put an ad up for like high fashion stuff to see how that would do. I did a beachy themed dad. And I did an ad with a girl who was a larger heavy set bikini. And they call this thing a fat Keeney.

It's the name they made it. I didn't make that name, but it's just, just to give you an idea, it was just a larger heavy set girl. She looked beautiful. She was really classy, elegant person.

And that person got three times engagement of everything else. So I was like, okay, we want real women. We want women to feel comfortable. I'm going to hire people that help people feel comfortable. They're going to become your best friend right away. I'm going to do all kinds of positive sentiment and positive imagery in the

salons. You look good today. You deserve the world. I'm going to really emphasize this brand of making people feel comfortable. So for the next five years, that's what we did. We built a brand on feeling comfortable, proved the concept out, and I said, you know, I think this is something I could take nationally. And in 2021, we started the journey for the franchising.

So when you say feeling comfortable, is that like a customer service sort of attention, detail, making people feel welcome? You know, I mean, you kind of are putting them through a bit of a, for a very short time, painful procedure, I guess. But other than that, making them feel like, you know, they're taking care of the customer basically. Yeah.

I mean, you got a couple of touch points before they come into the salon. So you got emails and texts that go out and we're going to use body positivity during the text. Hello, gorgeous or Hey sugar. And we're going gonna then on all the all the advertisements we do all the emails and everything we're gonna use real women larger people we use different ethnicities so like from the whitest of white skin to the darkest of black and everything in between are going to be on our our advertisements and then when they get in

this is really important chris we we do a personality test with all of our hirees and we make sure that they're the type of people that they become your best friend the minute you walk in the room oh wow yeah because you're naked on the table will they loan you money no they don't loan you money man i don't think they have that's not a very good friend i'm just kidding we have to do the jokes here it's a it's a law evidently that that are they yeah they they actually hold one of my dogs hostage throughout most of the show and uh and if i don't do jokes then bad things will happen to i don't i'm just kidding it's really dark fluffy you gotta keep

fluffy alive and i gotta keep fluffy alive then and refer the show to your family friends relatives or fluffy gets it no i'm just kidding man what kind of show is this so you you have something called sugaring versus waxing what is that i've never heard that term before i've heard the waxing term yeah sugaring is an organic form of hair removal so it's oh really yeah it's it's organic it doesn't hurt your skin as much It lasts just as long as waxing does. So it hurts less. It hurts less than waxing. That sounds, anything that hurts less is fine by my book because I'm not

going on to pain needles or doctors or anything like that. So sugaring, is it like, what does it look like? Because I have this idea of you're sprinkling powdered sugar all over the area and then, I don't know, whatever. So what does the sugaring look like? it look like the waxer imagine honey it looks just like honey it's honey really water and lemon juice that's all it's made out of it's just it looks like honey there you go honey there you go and it's it's why is it less painful than waxing and oh gosh we're going into the we're going into the real i mean i don't have to read the the the white paper but give us this yeah yeah well you know dr brigham

here we go your hair hurts when it comes out because you have a really thick bulb of hair underneath the skin that's trying to push to the surface of the skin your hair grows in certain directions so if you look at your hair it's probably growing let's say towards your head or away from your head in a certain direction. When you wax, you pull the hair opposite direction of growth. When you sugar, you pull it with the direction of growth. So it's not stretching the skin as much as it's coming out of the bulb. The bulb's coming out of the skin.

And it usually leads to a cleaner process. Because imagine if a blade of grass was going the opposite direction of the hair growth. It's going to break sometimes. So the bulb doesn't break as much. So you get fewer ingrowns and it's like less painful because of that. There you go. Well, sugaring. There you go. And is that unique to what you guys do?

Is there a lot of other companies that are competing with you on that? Sugaring is not something that other companies are doing right now. There's a few. But in market share wise, it's probably 15% of the business. And it was Chris's serendipitous. The name Hello Sugar just was something that was about making women feel comfortable. And everyone called us and were like, do you guys sugar? Do you guys sugar?

And we're like, what is that? Like, no, I don't. We don't sugar. And then eventually we're like, we got to start offering this. And now half of our business is sugaring. There you go. Well, I'm glad it works for you. I tried using that line multiple

times in bars to pick up girls i always had drink thrown in my face hello sugar yeah that's it was also in the 70s yeah oh shoot but yeah most of the sugaring we did in the 70s though at area 51 was a different type of sugar let's put it that way let's go yeah yeah mick jagger mick jagger sort of sugar there's a lot of mirrors and razor blades anyway moving on you guys also have the brazilian enzyme treatment is that unique to you guys or no i mean that's so look chris like the thing the thing about waxing it's not like we're reinventing the wheel on anything there's nothing there's nothing special about the end result when you leave our salon you're going to leave hairless just like everybody else the secret sauce is going to be the way you treat the people when they're in there the kind of products you use like the wax and sugar and stuff

the enzyme treatment i don't i think others do it as well now this this is all interesting interesting chris yeah the treatment is about it was made from the vaginal so the facial for the vagina that's basically oh the vaginal i see this is why i do the show i learn stuff all day long yeah so we want to be more classy so we call it the enzyme treatment and we also do something that you you might be interested in, Chris. It's a Brazilian intimate lightening, which is, in other less classy terms, anal bleaching. Oh, yeah. I've seen that on Howard Stern. I learned about that on Howard Stern years ago.

Yeah. The anal bleaching. Because, I mean, do we really need to explain why people need that? Or is that pretty obvious i think maybe ah you know yeah it was in vegas it was made popular by the like porn stars and when i guess when when you get older women they get older hormones set in and it gets darker into the areas down in that area of the skin that doesn't matter what you believe could be the front or the back side but yeah it's just something that they wanted to keep the same uniform skin type.

And so that became something. There you go. You know, I mean, when I usually do my anal bleaching or my bikini waxing, I just use WD-40. Is that right? Oh, it's a lot cheaper. It's a lot cheaper. It burns, though. There's a lot of burning.

And the ER says I can't do it anymore. But, I mean, it seemed pretty effective at the time. I can't feel my left nut, but that could be another problem. But, yeah, maybe I don't recommend that. One of the problems I have as an old man is as I carry my grandfather's curse, when I was young, I used to tease him about his ear and nose hair. And he used to say to me, you just wait till you're my age and now i am and i have nose hair and ear hair that can grow unlike any hair on earth i'll put that it's my grandfather's curse yeah

so one day i'll just look up and there's, there's like a whole shrubbery going out the side of my head off my ear. And you know, people of course that are bald, can't grow hair, receiving airlines are like hating me. And I'm like, geez, I got more hair on my ear this last week than you do on your head. And they're just like, fuck. So there you go. So do you guys do any of the nose, nose waxing that you're whatever?

I don't know. Yeah. Full body, man. Full body. We'll take care of it. Full body. There you go. Men as well. We'll do Brazilian waxing for men.

For me to do a full body hair removal, you're going to need one of those riding lawnmowers. That's all I can say about that. I have a lot of hair. But, you know, it beats not. But a lot of people like this sort of thing. So you built this out to 14. You have 14 of you guys' own units, and then you're franchising the rest. How did you fund getting these units up and going when you didn't have any money to start with?

Yeah, I had no money. My first salon, $3,000, and we're up in two months in running. So that seems a little counterintuitive when you think about the industry. The industry right now, if you want to do a salon, it's $400,000 to open one. And it takes a year to build a salon out. From start to finish,

it will take you one year. Wow. So how were you able to do it with $3,000? In two months, yeah. So I had a friend that was a plastic surgeon and he let me put a salon in the back of his oh that's right you said yeah you told us that thing so that's how you built it out you you worked off of his business because one of the challenges with this sort of business is just

brick and mortar so you gotta normally you'd have to get a lease you know you assign that for five years and hope three to five years or whatever i hope the business works yeah um you know location location so that's pretty innovative what you did. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, you gotta, you gotta be creative when you don't have any money. So I basically put in the back of his plastic surgeon office and then, you know, I was there for about six or eight months testing out the market, figuring if it's going to work. And then once I felt confident about the business and I felt like, Hey, I'm profitable, I'm

making money. I transitioned that one room studio into an actual actual 1,200-square-foot brick-and-mortar unit. Wow. You probably didn't make it because you had gone in a low cost. We started our first two companies. I wrote about this in my book. Our first company in 1993, we started with $2,000 and, of course, a lot of sweat equity. We were doing a delivery service, so there really wasn't a product inventory thing other than just get in the car and deliver the stuff.

And because we'd started with such an inexpensive cost, all the profits were able to go right into our growth. And not having that debt, this really helps you scale. And then a year and a half later, we started our mortgage company with $4,000 of course that scaled into multiple in our companies but having that and i know what that's like not having you know massive debt and any cash that comes in the business if you know you're not using it to buy top ramen you can so he did you can take and use it to scale the business and then you can hire people and grow and sounds like that's what you really did with your model yeah so for five years i, that's exactly right. I would start a salon suite, similar to that, one of the plastic surgeons office.

It would cost me less than $10,000 to build it out. I would build it, run it, get it profitable, and then find a location later on that would allow me to have a bigger footprint. And by the time I opened the bigger footprint, I was secure enough to know that it was going to be profitable and work. And if the location was, wasn't really doing it, I mean, these things are cheap to build, right? So it was one of the things I could just keep as a suite while I focus on other markets to build like the flagships out. So you're using the market test as well then to test an area of, you know, is this locale good? Because location is everything too.

You know, they always say in retail or, you know, brick and mortar location, location, location. It's so true. You can, I mean, if you put your business in the wrong strip mall that isn't facing the street or, you know, it's somehow buried, you know. I always love the people that they, there's some restaurant that goes out of business because it's obviously the location that sucks. Either the, it's a hidden sort of strip mall or it's around the corner and, you know, people can't see it, which is usually

bad from the road. And, and so people just keep going in and putting up new restaurants in the same restaurant. They keep going out of business and you're like, it's the location, buddy. Yeah. It doesn't matter what you put there it's a turd uh so i like i like that idea and this is a real important lesson that you've given to people you know so many people they they you know they approach me like hey chris i want some ideas i want to go into business i'm like okay what is it okay great well i need to raise like you know fifty thousand hundred thousand you know and they're probably thinking along the mindset of some of your competitors that were out there in the marketplace. For example,

you know, thinking of just going and doing a facility where you, number one, got your market fit, you got your market, made sure that you had your widget right and reselling it as we like to think of it. Because a CEO taught me this a long time ago, he was Chris, take and get that widget to work. And once you and get that widget to work. And once you can get that widget to work and you, you can scale some, you can put some profitability in there and, you know, pretty much at that point, once you get everything, the right formula, all you have to do is scale it and then everything will come together, but you got to get the widget right first. And so that's what you're doing. And so that's really

brilliant because a lot of people have excuses on why they can't start a business. Oh, I don't have the big, I don't have money, I don't have a rich uncle. Like I said, I've started several multimillionaire companies with chump change. It's freaking insane what you can do. And the power that you have when you can be profitable is enormous. So you've scaled this up now. You built this up to 14 units. When did you move into franchising? And what sort of things did you overcome in building out franchising?

Yeah, that's a big question. In 2020, when COVID hit, is when we decided to go into franchising. It was like around that time. And that was actually when I got the economics right on the company. So we were too cheap for the first five years. We were underpricing competitors, hoping to gain the business of people that wanted a cheaper service. And that wasn't the right move. And so then COVID hits and the price of gloves, we have to have gloves when we wax vaginas, the price of gloves were out of the roof expensive. The price of sticks, like the tongue depressors, they became super expensive yeah and the price of

cavisai which is a product that we use to wipe the table it's like a kills aids it's like the most high level clorox you could buy i use it when i shower oh okay oh yeah yeah you get good i sweat a lot there's a lot of body hair as we established earlier well Well, you look great. You look great. So those things, yeah, those things became super expensive. So we decided there's no way we can keep business if, you know, we're running at this rate.

So I raised my prices from $39 a wax for a membership to $49 a wax for a membership. It was like a 20% raise and everything just started to flow perfectly from there on out. I had enough money to train properly. I had enough money to put like really nice things in the salons, to invest in tech for the reception. Everything started to work after that, like at a really great rate because I had the profits to do so.

And I think that's a big lesson for entrepreneurs. It's like, we always think that we have to be competitive on price, but when I raised my prices, we came back into business after COVID and people didn't blink about the raise in price. It was just part of the business. And it was crazy. I raised them a lot. I mean, it was a 20% raise.

That is a lot. And sometimes if you raise it too much, it's kind of a shock to the system of your clients. But evidently, they love the service, the ambiance, the, you know, you hired right for the right people that can make friends with people, you know, their relationship,

people pay extra for a good relationship. I'll pay extra for good food and a great waiter. And yeah. Yeah. Especially on this service where it's like intimate, something that hurts. So you want somebody that does it right. Yeah.

So we're moving into franchising and you know i had this thought i said okay how much could i sell my business for well three to five x that's the typical price of a brick and mortar business well european in 2018 they sold their business for 450 million dollars to a private equity group so how is that possible well they had a franchise so they sold the franchise in an 18x multiple and so i started looking at this and i was like okay if i could just package the business differently as a franchise i could go from a three to five x to an 18x multiple that was the thought yeah it wasn't as easy like it that was a stupid thought now looking back on it this was like the most impossible hard thing that i've ever done franchising is extremely difficult and you've really got to have the right business to

be able to do it uh but it worked out for us and actually for us it was it was a good position and you know we just had the perfect storm having taught at byu i had a lot of my old students that were brilliant students they came on they became my first franchisees had proof of concept you know they they were doing well and successful and so other people were able to come on with it and we were just figuring it out as we went but we had a really good team behind us to help us get through that first initial phase and because we were able to pull people fast without having to give the money to franchise like marketing groups we can keep the fees low we can build our system faster which means more

royalty royalties are coming in and And because it only takes us, we do the suite to flagship concept just like I did in my first store. You know, a suite costs us 50,000 to open to 60,000 to open, two months to open it. Now we're getting royalties from two months in. It's like a lot faster. So we're able to like expand

without having to take one to $2 million in debt to fund the franchise. Wow. Dude, you are kicking ass and taking names. You're doing really good for this is your first business, really. Is that correct? The first big business, yeah. I mean, it putts around with other things.

So you had a little warm-up and you did the little practice things to kind of get in gears. Yeah, I mean, when I was running my digital ads agency, which is how I was traveling the whole time, I seeing a lot of other businesses and like seeing how they operated so i think that was a good learning ground for me to learn how to run a business there you go so you know this is what a lot of entrepreneurs do they they they muck about with the with stuff they test they sometimes they try a few things and then sometimes you, it's just maybe you just have to find the right thing. Or, you know, that's what we did. You know, we mucked around with a lot of little things.

And then all of a sudden, you know, the lights went on and what we were doing. And, of course, we had to guide it and stuff. But it sounds like it's turning out really well for you. I can see that you guys have a ton of locations all over. You've got Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Vegas. Vegas, baby. guys have a ton of locations all over you got oregon idaho utah colorado arizona vegas vegas baby you got to be in vegas got florida north carolina all the way up the east coast there and in massachusetts and all that good stuff i'm in utah right now maybe i'll go in for it looks like you're on your website you offer free bikini wax maybe i'll go in for one no it's not happening

women have a higher tolerance to pain than i do so there you go yeah um i mean they date me so i know that they have a higher tolerance so there you go but it sounds like you're you're kicking ass and taking names dude and and and did did the covid slow you down at all you know i know a lot of people weren't coming into shops and stuff. How'd that work? How'd you get through COVID? Well, luckily, we're in Arizona. So we had five weeks when we were out.

We used the five weeks to recalibrate. We raised our prices, like I said. And then one thing that really helped us, what we built before COVID, we do all of... If you call HelloSugar today, it will say, we're exclusively through text message as soon as you hang up we're going to text you really yeah and then we hired a team overseas to do all of our texting so we didn't want to have the awkward you know accents and stuff but we create the like language through macros like pre-scripted stuff there's only a couple ways to skin a cat and reschedule people and so yeah we had a full team overseas doing all the scheduling and when covid came back in like

when we're able to start up again everyone calls you know european and all these competitors and they're like they're bombarded just like we were they couldn't get through but they got through to us and we would just say hey we're gonna we're gonna take your your text just give us a little bit to you know get to. You're in the queue. We'll get a time for you. And I remember we had every receptionist full 12 to 13-hour days for a week straight, just booking appointments from all the different people trying to get into the salons. Not just from our company, but from others. And so we really built our clientele fast because we were the only ones that they could communicate with at the time yeah you know that's really freaking brilliant i've i my my the place to get my pet supplies for my dogs they always assist on texting and they like texting

and scheduling their if you want your dog's nails done or grooming or something and i'm kind of old world so i find it a little bit irritating but it it works so i'm kind of like okay we'll find whatever i mean yeah it's a little bit you know waiting for the phone to ring and but but but but if you call them they tell you you know hey can you text us and we want to do that that way but then once you have this set up you kind of almost have the relationship going and it's so many of the new groups like that, my testosterone clinic that just switched to it, and they switched to it, I think, last week or the week before. And so now I actually get a text that reminds me of,

hey, are you going to be here on Friday and do your thing? Yeah. And check in, which is kind of good. It's kind of nice to have because it's not like I'd forget it. But, you know, it's good to, it's good to have, Hey, make sure that's on the plan.

You know, we, of course we have with the Chris Voss show, we, I guess technically we have a texture through calendly where calendly annoys the hell out of all of our guests and says, Hey, make sure you show up and shave and shave and get a Brazilian wax too,

as it is. You're mentioning, you're mentioning earlier skin of cat. That's the, also the i use for brazilian waxing not sure what that means but i had to get that joke in there so it sounds you know and maybe this is the future come to think of it maybe i'm just not realizing it but what you're doing there with the customer service texting you know can simplify things because yeah i mean in the old days i've seen switchboards lit up you know i used to have those giant switchboard machines that cost you know a hundred thousand dollars and it's got 50

trillion lines and you know it's you got you gotta wire it to bob extension 107 and crap yeah and yeah that's that's a bit much and if you're getting that sort of volume you know and and i think a lot of employees aren't into answering phones anymore either that's kind of a start yeah you're getting that sort of volume, you know, and I think a lot of employees aren't into answering phones anymore either. That's kind of a start. Yeah, you're going to get like less quality employees. You know, if they're just on the phone all day, that's really annoying. Yeah. Well, it was 2019 and we were doing texting and calls and we were missing 60% of the calls that came in.

Holy crap. Yeah. Because if you're slammed, you know, you're getting a busy signal. So they're going to call somebody else. Exactly. And so I said to myself, I would rather have less customer service for the people that have to take the phone than miss 60%. And I made the switch entirely to texting and people thought I was crazy. They're like, there's no way this is going to work.

I'm like, we're going to figure it out. We'll make this work. And now like, Chris is so crazy. We invested this year, 250,000 into AI sentiment based texting. And so AI is run on large language learning models, right?

So it's a repository that you can take information from. So we give it a facts, like a frequently asked questions, like repository that we've built in house. And then it does crazy things. It's, oh my gosh, I just got in a car wreck. I won't be able to make my appointment today. And it knows to use empathy,

say something about the car wreck, and then ask them to get rescheduled right after. Really? Yeah, it's crazy. That is extraordinary. Yeah. Or, hey, I'm really nervous. And then we have responses and it's based on our repository so our thing is it hurts less here that's like our brand and so i look at the repository and i'll say oh i don't be nervous it's okay we're gonna find the

right product for your skin and you know our estheticians are trained on pain management because it hurts less here and then like it goes through and like weaves our brain into the narrative can we get you scheduled right away yeah there you go there you go and yeah i think it works a whole lot better with with text and stuff there's a there's one company i have naked nutrition that i buy all my proteins from and they make a really clean uh simple very few ingredients product very you know everything's everything's super clean not a lot not junks not fillers you know that kind of crap that's why they call it naked and they probably had a bazillion wax too but so they they normally will respond you know if i leave something in the cart laying around or if i have

questions or something and you know it's so hard just to call them or figure out where our phone number is. But sure, that texting sure is nice. Somehow they've got it integrated with the chat bot on their site. So it's all tied in there together. So here's like a thing for like business owners. You got to ask yourself, where do we cut costs? And one of the areas that I think is kind of the announcement completely is reception. And, you know, in our salons, you think about this, I don't like this experience. I mean,

millennials, Gen Z, you walk into a salon or something, you got to go talk to somebody, you're the only one in the waiting area, you sit down, you're on your phone, but you feel weird because there's somebody else right there in the room with you. And you feel like you got to talk to them. And it's awkward and stuff. I just don't like that experience. I'd rather just be on TikTok on my own when they call me back. Cool. I'm going to go back there and do my thing. And so really reception is kind of obsolete if you do things right. So when you walk into a HelloSugar, our flagships, not the one room studios, but the flagships, there's an iPad that you check in on. They get a text message or a watch notification to the one room studios, but the flagships. There's an iPad that you check in on.

They get a text message or a watch notification to the esthetician, letting them know immediately that somebody's there. And the esthetician will take them back on his time. There's no way for the client to go into the back area where the rooms are. It's locked. There's no product up front to steal. And we are completely receptionless in the salons. And the five to $7,000 extra profit a month.

Oh yeah. Oh, totally. You know, cause yeah, that, that makes complete sense. I mean,

I mean having that front desk and having a, a person there, but I mean, yeah, people know what they're coming in for. They're coming in to get, you know, waxed and wham,

bam, thank you ma'am. And get, get the getter done. You know, it's not like they need somebody to talk to at the front desk. And even then, you know, you know, waxed and wham bam thank you ma'am and get her done. It's not like they need somebody to talk to at the front desk and even then it's just kind of I don't know, whatever. It's kind of

pointing directions. I think this is kind of the future where brick and mortar is going. Mortar is a technological thing. Well, I think it's going to be led in California. So California the biggest tech place in the world. And right now the laws are being passed.

And I don't know if you've seen some of the stuff on there, but it's like $24 an hour is what they want to move fast food. And the result of that is, you know, McDonald's is going to come out and say, we just don't need somebody at the front key. We'll just have a kiosk. We already do it in a lot of places. Yeah, they do in a lot of places.

Taco Bell, Del Taco. I've been to places in Vegas, in California, where you have to order off this giant touchscreen menu if you want something. You're just looking at the counter going, is there anybody alive around here? I think they're doing more than that. I think Taco Bell has some news reports, and they've got a picture of it.

They have a two-story building they're putting in. the top part is just machines that make your food and serve it and then drop it down to you through a pneumatic tube or something and they're like have fun with that i've seen franchises of a starbucks remake and it's literally just an automated store without any humans inside of it and the more that we push this higher wage like minimum it's great that have enough to live, but I think it's going to push a lot of people out of the service industry to be replaced by robots and faster. That's what we're thinking. Yeah, that's kind of how progress works. The AI works. I mean, it's just one of those things. Who are the people back in the 1400s to 1600s, the people they call, people who are resistant

to change in technology. I forget. We had somebody on the show from Oxford that talked about it once. But, yeah, it's just a matter of fact and time. I mean, I'm actually surprised it hasn't happened sooner. Taxi drivers being replaced by automation cars and stuff like that. I've been seeing a lot of that popping up even down your way in Arizona. Big time in Arizona because we don't have weather.

There's no rain for it to block the lines on the road if needed for the time. There you go. They just have to run over those geckos or rattlesnakes and stuff. Or scorpions. Scorpions. Run over the scorpions, damn it.

I live in Vegas. I don't like scorpions at all either. Fortunately, I've only seen one the whole time I've been there. It's kind of weird. So what about your business that we talked about that people should know about? Yeah, I think from the franchise side, people are interested in franchising. This is a unique opportunity because it's a low startup cost. As of last year, it was about $65,000 The average profit of a one room studio suite top quartile, we're making like 115,000.

And then on our flagships, once they get turned into a flagships, it's between 150 to 250,000 that the flagships were making on average. Yeah. A profit. And those things happen after you prove the business model on the tiny suite. And so one of the, one of the benefits of our company

is that we're looking for all the ways to automate. The average franchise owner running a salon suite concept like ours inside of our company is three to 10 hours a week of work. Wow. Yeah. I'm quitting. I'm out.

I'm not doing this anymore. I'm going to go do this Brazilian thing. Yeah. And the way we did that again this is really innovative but you know we looked at what a manager does and we had problems where we hired these managers that were the best estheticians and they're amazing estheticians but they weren't always amazing managers

it wasn't what they were yeah and you think they would translate but they always they don't always translate no so we'd have to fire our manager who's like an awesome person awesome esthetician we just lost our best esthetician because the management was poor right yeah so we start we started saying okay what do we need to do to have a manager and have all of the things that a manager does but not have an esthetician because we can't afford the high-end you you know, C-suite level managers in a salon like this.

So just like we did with our reception being overseas, we actually offshored all of our management for the salons. Really? Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah. There you go. So how do they manage? Do they video in or how does that work?

Yeah. So like the things that a manager for for salon are going to do is it's going to be setting up schedules blocks on the schedules they're going to be making sure the inventory is stocked for the rooms the rooms are clean and they're going to take care of clients that are upset and they're going to take care of clients that like text in that need something and then they're going to run through feedback online and stuff and the feedback section we just use ai so we take the comments that are coming in through you know different reviews and we just use AI. So we take the comments that are coming in through, you know, different reviews. And we just say, hey, respond in this voice, they put it into our AI feedback robot, and it creates a response that we spit out and put onto Facebook and Google.

And then for the rest of it, you know, there's there's this intangible piece of management of, you know, working one on ones. So we don't allow them to do that. We have a we have an esthetician who's a great esthetician, and her job is to be a success coach. She's a friend. She trains on specific things in the salon. She does one meeting a month with the team that we have in-house, and we pay her a nominal but a good wage to be able to do that side as well. But mainly the bulk of the admin stuff is done through overseas workers. Wow.

You got this down. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, you've cut the overhead of what can really muck with you. And then, yeah, I mean, people that do stuff good don't always make good managers. It's true. I learned that. I would try and promote great salespeople. And I'm like, well, if you're a great salesperson, you must be a great sales manager. That's usually, I don't know, put your worst salesperson in that job or something. I don't know.

So there you go. So give us your, what does it take for those who might be listening that would be interested in franchising with you guys? What's the sort of specs that they need to have to possibly look at getting one of those? Yeah, I mean, it's not a hard build like a lot of businesses. So a franchise owner would be someone that has maybe five to 10 hours a week on the side. They don't have to quit their job. They can keep doing this. We're going to help through the setup process. We'll help the hiring process to get them up and trained. We're going to go through and do all the marketing for them. All the marketing is automated as well. I'm sure you

can tell with the way that we built this. So we do all the marketing. We'll get them fully booked or close to fully booked by the time they open and up and running. And so somebody who has, you know, around 50 to 60,000 in capital can start up a franchise unit somewhere. And a lot of upfront work, you know, for this first two months. But then if they have about 10, 5 to 10 hours a week to put towards the business and they can keep this running. And then they have the understanding that once it's profitable and they've built a business out that they would apply for an SBA loan, which is a government backed loan to build this out into a flagship within

three and a half years. Wow. So do they have to find a shop they can set up in a back room with, with, there's a really cool concept in franchising called salon suites i think we work for salons so oh okay yeah yeah so we we built a custom software that tells us all the best places to go based on like our performance in other markets and we find all that we have a repository of all of the salon suites in the country and we basically say okay based on these demographics this income level

this type of percentage of females this is the right area here's the salon suites in that area go contact them it'll take one hour maybe to find the right one and we're ready to go ready to roll there you go yeah because you definitely want to have a lot of in an area where there's some ladies that love to do this and all that good stuff so that's probably important you don't want to you know i mean guys do this too i know it's a yeah but yeah it's true we do have guys what percentage amount of guys do it but i'm just curious five to ten percent are guys really wow there you go well you know it's you know you got to be built for speed whatever the hell that means and you can't you got to be aerodynamic man you can't be slowing shit down there's nothing worse than when when you're dealing

with something you know you're thick there in the bush it's like predator where you're deep in the the iwo jima of vietnam or whatever i don't know it's bullshit and you got a machete and you're just like it's in here somewhere honey i don't know i can hear i can hear it it's close whatever marco that's right all those nights uh after the clubs so there you go so give us your final pitch out to people as we go out tell them them where they can onboard and reach out to you guys to find out more information. I've got a passion just for business and people helping,

helping people start small businesses. And so, you know, whether it's franchising or other things, you can reach me at bring them a hell of sugar. That salon's my email address. So we can just, you know,

find, find franchising information on Brigham or hell of sugar. That salon, but, or just follow me on Tik TOK, Brigham Dallas and message me. You know, I, or just follow me on TikTok, Brigham Dallas and message me. You know, I'm pretty easy to get ahold of. I'd love to help people if not just with Hello Sugar, but just in general, I love seeing people start businesses and grow. It's my passion.

There you go. Pay it forward and they can book online too. This is, you go right to it, book your appointment. You can text this number or click the button to do the thing 24 seven. That's the other great thing about the texting is you can book and do the stuff 24 7 as opposed to you know the worst thing i hate especially nowadays is uh are you calling us after hours yeah we're only open from 10 to 2 yeah not on weekends yeah we actually have people overseas it's their daytime right because they're in asia it's our nighttime we have a night our night shift of people that book appointments for us so it's 24 7 we can do appointments on personally waxing there you go that's awesome

i might try one well thank you very much for coming on the show we really appreciate it man chris man it was a pleasure man i enjoyed talking to, it was a pleasure, man. I enjoyed talking to you. It was really fun. We do some of that on the show. There you go. Give us the dot, the dot, whatever there, one more time. Bring them at hellosugar.salon, and if you want to find out about franchising, hellosugar.salon. There you go. Thanks to everyone for tuning in. We certainly appreciate

it. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Foss, linkedin.com, 4Chest, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1 on the tickety-tockety aisles of the places. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.