We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jacquelyn Rodriguez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jacquelyn, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

It started at home. I was a mom on a mission to make my house safer for my kids, and I started with the cleaning products under my sink. That opened a Pandora’s box. Once I started looking, I couldn’t stop. Cleaning products led to lotions, then the products I was putting on my kids, then plastics, then waste. I went deep into the low-tox world and started making swaps everywhere I could.
But then I’d go to work.
I was working in a conventional salon, and I remember asking my managers and coworkers if there were better options. Could we do better? Could we be less toxic, less wasteful? I got eye rolls. “That’s too much work.” “There’s nothing like that.” “Why are you making things hard on yourself?”
What I didn’t realize at the time was how much my body was already answering that question for me. After creating a clean environment at home, I started noticing how different I felt away from the salon versus after a long stretch of shifts. Every single day I left with a headache and a dry, raspy throat. I had always chalked it up to a hard day’s work. That just felt normal. Until it didn’t.
Around that same time, I was burning out fast. My lunch kept getting pulled for walk-in clients. I was missing my kids’ sports. Every time I raised a concern, I was shut down. So I made a decision that scared me a little. I took a six-month break, went home, and started researching everything.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to open my own salon. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, though, and I couldn’t sit still for long. The more I researched, the more I saw a real gap: nobody was building what I was looking for. No blueprint. No roadmap. Just a lot of silence on something that was clearly affecting people’s health, their sense of purpose, and the planet.
So I built it myself. I started as a traveling stylist, researching brands, reducing waste, doing it all on the road. Eventually I moved into a studio in the back of a photography studio. Then I hired my first employee. Then we grew into a full location. Every single decision was built around the same idea: reduce the toxins, incorporate wellness, and do less harm as beauty professionals.
That was 14 years ago. And I no longer leave work with a headache.
About five years in, I started thinking, this works. Not just for me personally, but financially, for my team, for our clients. My employees felt grounded. They were building real careers. Clients felt the difference. And I started to wonder why more salon owners didn’t know this was possible.
That’s when I started sharing. I got loud on social media about my philosophies and what I believed in, and that’s how I connected with Daniel, Hannah, and Mazey. Daniel was building something called the Green Beauty Community, and we all came together and co-founded it. It’s now a nonprofit for the beauty industry, raising awareness at a real scale.
From there, I took everything I had learned over more than a decade of running the salon and built the Conscious Leader program so I could give other salon owners the full blueprint. The one I never had.
It has not been the easy route. There were plenty of times I second-guessed it, because when you’re doing something nobody’s talking about yet, you can feel very alone. I felt that for years. And then I met people who didn’t look at me like I was crazy, who wanted the same impact, and everything shifted.
That’s still what drives me. The mission is bigger than my salon. Clean, sustainable, and profitable beauty is possible for this whole industry, and I’m 100% committed to proving that.

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 background and context?

I’m Jacquelyn Rodriguez, a Clean Beauty Business Coach, salon owner, author, podcast host, and co-founder of the Green Beauty Community. I’ve spent 26 years in the beauty industry and the last 14 of those building and running Enlightened Styles, a holistic, eco-conscious salon. For the past five years, I’ve been taking everything I built there and turning it into education for beauty and wellness professionals who want to do the same.
My story starts in a place most people don’t expect.
I graduated high school with my cosmetology license already in hand. But back then, doing hair wasn’t considered a respected or serious career, so I felt like I had to do something more with my life. I enrolled in community college and started studying architecture. I loved the classes. I genuinely did. But when I got into a firm as an intern, I realized quickly that it wasn’t for me. I was being put in a box. Rigid rules, no real creative freedom, no connection with people in the way that actually fueled me. So I made what everyone around me thought was an insane decision. I quit college, walked away from the internship, and went back to hair.
People thought I was crazy. And honestly, I was scared too. I didn’t know how it would all work out. I just knew something was calling me back, and I’ve learned over the course of my life that I can’t ignore that feeling, even when it terrifies me. Following my gut, even without a clear map, has been one of the throughlines of everything I’ve built.
I went back to the industry and rose quickly. I became a top-performing stylist, moved into a management role, got married, started having kids, and then hit a wall that so many women in this industry hit. Beauty doesn’t make it easy to be a mother. Maternity leave, flexibility, time with your kids, the industry structure just doesn’t support it. I had to step down from my management position and go back behind the chair. I was driving an hour to work and an hour home for years. That grind, on top of an environment that kept shutting down every idea I brought forward, is a big part of what pushed me to eventually start my own thing.
But before the salon came a harder season.
In 2008, my life turned upside down. I was in a really dark place, not the mother I wanted to be, not the person I wanted to be. I knew something had to change. I had always been curious about meditation but convinced myself I couldn’t quiet my mind enough to actually do it. I decided to try anyway. Thirty days, every day. By the end of those thirty days, I was a different person. The way I was showing up for my kids, for myself, for everyone around me had shifted in a way I couldn’t ignore.
That thirty days cracked open a whole path. Meditation led to a holistic approach to my life, then to energy work and frequency work, and eventually to becoming a certified master Neuro-coach. I started to understand that I am in control of how I respond to life. That where I focus my attention shapes what I bring into my life. That leadership starts from the inside. All of that became the foundation for how I lead my salon team, and now how I lead other salon owners to step into their own power.
The clean beauty piece came later, but it came from the same instinct. I was making my home safer for my kids, going deep into the low-tox world, and then walking into a conventional salon every day and feeling the contrast in my body. Headaches after every shift, a dry raspy voice, symptoms I had always written off as just part of the job. Once I started asking questions, I couldn’t stop. And when no one in the industry was offering real answers or real alternatives, I built my own solution.
Enlightened Styles became the proof of concept. A holistic, eco-conscious salon that was also financially strong, fulfilling for the team inside it, and genuinely different for clients. That’s what I now help other beauty and wellness professionals build through the Holistic Salon Academy and my signature program, The Conscious Leader.
The framework I teach isn’t just about swapping products. It’s a full business transformation, covering foundation, mindset, team culture, client experience, and sustainable growth. It’s sequential because the order matters. Skipping steps is why so many passionate people feel like clean beauty isn’t working for their business when really, the structure just isn’t in place yet.
I’m also co-founder of the Green Beauty Community, a nonprofit raising awareness and driving change across the beauty industry. I host the Impactful Salon Owner Podcast and wrote “Changeworthy: Profit with Purpose,” which captures the philosophy behind everything I do.
I’m a creative at my core. For a long time I had passions all over the place, design, wellness, business, education, and I had to learn how to stop treating them as separate and start weaving them together. That’s actually what the work became. Everything I care about most lives inside it.
What I’m most proud of is the ripple effect. When a salon owner goes through this process and starts feeling better physically because their environment has changed, when their team shows up differently, when their clients feel something has shifted, that’s why I’m here.
What I want people to know most is simple. You don’t have to choose between doing good and doing well. Every scary decision I’ve ever made, leaving architecture, walking away from management, taking a six-month break, starting the salon, stepping into education, it all led here. The path is rarely obvious. But if you keep following what you know is true, it builds into something real.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The pivot that changed everything happened before the salon, before the coaching, before any of it. It happened when I walked away from architecture.
I had graduated high school with my cosmetology license already in hand, but doing hair wasn’t considered a real career back then. It wasn’t respected. So I enrolled in community college, started studying architecture, and honestly, I loved it. The coursework lit me up. I was good at it. I had a plan.
Then I got into a firm as an intern and everything fell apart.
It wasn’t what I thought it would be. I was being put into a box, expected to follow rigid rules, stay quiet, stay in my lane. The creative freedom I had imagined just wasn’t there. And the thing that really fuels me has always been people. Connection. Creativity that moves between you and another human being. That doesn’t happen behind a drafting table in a firm where speaking up is a problem.
I remember sitting with this growing dread that I had chosen the wrong thing. And then the scarier realization that I already knew what I wanted to go back to.
I quit. I walked away from the internship, left school, and went back to hair. The people around me could not understand it. A good job, a clear future, a respectable path, and I was throwing it away to do hair? People said it to my face. I was making a mistake. I was being naive. I was going to regret it.
I was scared they were right. I had no guarantee it would work out. I didn’t have a plan beyond knowing that something was calling me back and that I couldn’t keep ignoring it.
That decision taught me something I’ve come back to over and over again: the scariest choice is usually the right one. Not because fear means you’re on the right path, but because the things that matter most, the ones that are truly yours, will keep showing up no matter how hard you try to talk yourself out of them. Hair kept showing up for me. I couldn’t leave it alone.
I went back and rose quickly. Top stylist, then management, then eventually my own business. None of that happens if I stay in that firm and keep pretending I’m okay.
Every major pivot I’ve made since, stepping down from management, taking a six-month break to start fresh, building a salon around values no one was talking about, stepping into education and coaching, has asked the same thing of me. To trust what I know even when I can’t fully explain it yet. That’s the muscle I built when I left architecture. And I’ve been using it ever since.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The lesson I had to unlearn is that difficulty means you’re doing something wrong.
I internalized that somewhere early. If something is hard, if people are pushing back, if you feel alone in it, that’s a signal to stop. Reconsider. Find the easier path. Do the thing that makes more sense to everyone else.
That belief quietly ran my life for years, and it almost cost me everything I’ve actually built.
When I left architecture and went back to hair, it was hard. People told me I was making a mistake. When I started asking questions in the conventional salon about toxic ingredients and better options, it was hard. Nobody wanted to hear it. When I stepped down from management to spend more time with my kids, that was hard. When I took a six-month break and decided to start my own salon built on values nobody in the industry was talking about yet, that was really hard.
Every single one of those moments felt like a warning sign. Like maybe I was getting it wrong. Like maybe everyone pushing back on me was seeing something I couldn’t.
The clearest test of that belief came in 2008. My life had turned upside down and I was in a genuinely dark place. I wasn’t showing up the way I wanted to for my kids, and I knew something had to change. I started meditating, not because I thought I’d be good at it, but because the alternative was staying exactly where I was. Thirty days straight. By the end, I was a different person.
That experience started rewiring something in me. I began to understand that where I put my attention shapes what I create. That I am in control of how I respond to my life, not just what happens in it. That the fear and the resistance aren’t necessarily stop signs. Sometimes they’re just the cost of doing something that actually matters.
The clean beauty work was met with eye rolls for years. Building the salon the way I built it was lonely at first. Stepping into education and coaching in a space that still isn’t mainstream has not been the easy route. There were plenty of moments I second-guessed all of it.
But I kept coming back to the same truth. The hardest decisions I ever made are the ones I’m most grateful for. And the things that were truly mine kept showing up no matter how many times I tried to talk myself out of them.
Difficulty isn’t a detour. Sometimes it’s confirmation that you’re building something worth building.
That shift, from seeing hard as a warning to seeing it as information, changed how I lead my salon, how I lead my team, and now how I coach other business owners to lead themselves. It’s actually the foundation of everything. You can’t build something new if you keep retreating to what’s comfortable. And you can’t lead others through change if you haven’t learned to walk through it yourself first.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cleanbeautybiz.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cleanbeautybizcoach/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CleanBeautyBizCoach
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cleanbeautybizcoach/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CleanBeautyBizCoach?sub_confirmation=1
• Other: Salon links:
  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/enlightenedstyles/
  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enlightenedstyles/
  Website: https://www.enlightenedstyles.com/

Image Credits

Jeff Mullins for some the ones of me in the poka dot shirt