We caught up with the brilliant and insightful John (JJ) Hayden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi John (JJ), thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

Not at all, everything happened when it was suppose to. I started a tattoo studio of my own after professionally tattooing for 12 years. Though it took 9 months to physically get the location open, I always say it was actually 12 years in the making.

In fact I never wanted to own my own studio in the beginning. I thought dealing with artists, the overhead, all the responsibilities wouldn’t have been worth the trouble. It took me years of helping other people run studios, and helping other people open new studios for me to finally decide it was time to do it for myself.

All those years of experience helped prepare me. Even the bad experiences, working with people I can learn what “not to do” from haha.

At our studio our business model is built on three simple things. Having a good product, having a good guest experience, and treating our own team right as well. It’s only “simple” to me because I worked in the industry long enough to learn how to deliver those things. These things set us apart and help us thrive as one of the worlds busiest studios as a brand new shop.

My advice to anyone starting a business, gain experience in your industry prior. Learn it like the back of your hand. Help someone run their business in the same field to really get first hand experience. Some advice that a mentor gave me…”anything that can go wrong will” so be ready to handle that kind of stress on top of actually running the business.

John (JJ), love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is John Hayden, the owner of Creative Minds Tattoo in Las Vegas. I often go by the nickname “JJ” (John Jr). I have been a licensed/professional tattoo artist since 2012 and I learned to tattoo in Leesburg, Florida. I’m originally from Las Vegas, NV but moved to Florida when I was 20 years old. Tattooing saved my life, it was one of the only positive things I was willing to commit to growing up. Prior to learning to tattoo under Michael Tasse (Big Mike), I was getting into a lot of trouble. Mostly youthful offender situations, but I was definitely on the wrong path in life. Ultimately I grew outta that stage and became a hardworking responsible adult. One day at a time I started working towards making my situation better, not worse.

I was lucky enough to get into a decent apprenticeship, where I worked and learned under some of the best in the business. Learning more in one day of apprenticeship than I ever could trying to figure it out on my own. I carried the core lessons and values I learned through my career. Between that and a decent portfolio I never had to go without work in between jobs for too long.

Eventually, with the 12 years of experience under my belt, I finally opened my own studio. We became one of the top busiest shops in the city within the first year of opening. Possibly top busiest in the world realistically. It is important to me to instill the same fundamental values into our studio.

Tattoos are permanent and we are grateful to be chosen as someone’s artist. A client has to trust you to a degree to give you the honor of marking something permanent on their body. I am also grateful to do what I do for a living in the first place. It’s very hard to make a living off of anything art related. Tattooing is one of the few things artist can make a decent living from. We aren’t teachers or doctors…we aren’t saving lives, yet we can make decent money doing what we love for a living if we just take care of it and treat people right. Being humble is important in this industry.

We appreciate every one of our clients and strive to treat you as such. We want to offer you something reasonably affordable as well. We don’t want to be just another Vegas shop charging you top dollar for subpar work. We even have tattoos as low as $20, in fact that’s what draws a lot of people in to begin with!

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

I was taught early in my career, “you have to know how to save your money. Some days are good some days are bad, Busy season it’s good, but in slow season you may sit around all day and make zero dollars.” After all we’re only getting paid if we tattoo. It’s not a normal “hourly wage” gig.

I wasn’t always good with this though haha. It took me some growing up and enduring real life situations to learn how to be disciplined enough to save my money. Actually it’s a funny story, I didn’t start really getting good with my money until about halfway through my career. I was mid/late 20s and a young coworker was saying how she wanted to save 20k in a few months for a wedding. It made me realize how irresponsible I was, I didn’t have even a thousand to my name and I made more money generally than her. So I started there. I think saving your first thousand is the hardest. If you can do that, then you just repeat the process and eventually it becomes habit to be able to budget and be responsible with money. It’s more so about knowing what’s coming in, and being careful with what’s going out.

By the time I opened my studio I was a few years into being better with money. I was actually thinking of it as “this years investment”. I think it’s very important to position yourself appropriately before making huge financial decisions. You want to be as prepared as possible when it’s time to “jump off the cliff” and take huge risks. I put it all in the line opening my first studio. I knew exactly how many months I could live making zeros dollars before it would be time to reconsider. Luckily we got off to a great start and I worried for nothing haha.

If you are prepared and you a consistent you will succeed. At that point you need to be ready to handle that path as well. I don’t want to be “a lottery winner losing all the money they won.” When people say “if I just had this or just had that”, I think “well would you know what to do with it if you did have it? Or would it be spent irresponsibly within a blink of an eye.” It’s true though, becoming responsible prior will help you manage things better and build the character that will sustain the things you obtain once you become successful.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

It took about nine months to get our studio open from the time we signed the lease. We had to get a zoning permit initially that took a few months, then could proceed to submitting the work permits for city approval. The city permit approval process was a nightmare with all kinds of unexpected events that all cost money and time of some sort. I was scared to death we were going to have a falling out with the contractor and have to start the process all over again with a new more expensive contractor.

It turns out trying to save a little money on a lower bid, ends up costing just as much than going with a more experienced contractor in the first place. However this was my first time doing something like this, so it was all a very necessary learning experience. We had our original plumbing plans denied three times, ultimately deemed needing a “mechanical engineer to design them.” This alone cost us two months in time on rent just waiting. Another few thousand for the engineer, and another 10k for excavation since the plumbing was now going to the sewer line directly, instead of ran through the walls to the bathroom as originally planned. This whole time I was out of work, doing everything in my power trying to get this studio open. It was beyond stressful and scary.

I learned in a business management course years ago, you have to expect to take a loss your first year in business. However I learned first hand you need to over estimate your start up costs altogether. Anything that can go wrong will.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Creativemindtattoo.com
• Instagram: @creativemindstattoo
• Youtube: @creativemindstattoolv
• Other: Tik tok @creativemindstattoo

Image Credits

Christian, Micah, Martin, Alex, Nick, Vince.