We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Briana Hickman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Briana below.

Briana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s jump right into the heart of things. Outsiders often think businesses or industries have much larger profit margins than they actually do – the reason is that outsiders are often unaware of the biggest challenges to profitability in various industries – what’s the biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

I believe the biggest challenge(s) to profitability in our industry is time management.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Briana Hickman. I have owned B. Xquisit, LLC for 12 years. I grew up working in a hair salon and always loved the aspects of running a business. I wasn’t as sure I would own hair salons as much as I was sure I would own several businesses. Since I was always performing hair services and knew a lot about the beauty industry at a young age, I decided to make my first business a hair salon.

We provide Hair Care and Full Body Hair Removal services in the Metro Atlanta area.

I understood at an early age how important professionalism is to run a business and quickly realized that our industry could use some help in that department.

We run our salon as a team environement, allowing the clients of the salon a wider range of specialized services.

I am most proud of B. Xquisit, LLC purchasing its first commercial real estate building in July 2019 and I am so grateful for all the people that helped B. Xquisit in any way. I would like to encourage everyone to make goals and work towards them and avoid distractions.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn was using cash to pay for everything in my business. I was always told by my peers and mentors at the time to pay for all my business items in full with cash. I later learned that leveraging credit is not a bad way to build your business. When you pay for cash for everything, you tend to fall in a mindset of doing EVERYTHING on your own. As I started understanding the significant pros to leveraging credit responsibly, it quickly changed my mindset.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In 2017, our company experienced what our industry refers to as a walk out as soon as I announced the opening of our second location. A walk out is when you have a lot of employees quit or get fired from your company almost at once. We definitely had a mixture of both in a 2 week time frame. What seemed like a nightmare (revenue dropping, major adjustments quickly, and the ultimate betrayals) happened to be one of the best things that could have happened in our company. I learned so many things from this happening and it reminded me that you have to adjust in business and it definitely wont always be planned. 2 years and 1 month later, we closed on our new salon home in a great location. we celebrate 12 years in 2022.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bxquisit.com
• Instagram: @bxquisit
• Facebook: B. Xquisit Hair Studio
• Youtube: B. Xquisit Studios
• Other: TikTok @bxquisit

Image Credits
Photographer: Modest Media LLC