We were lucky to catch up with Maria Ferrer Riggert recently and have shared our conversation below.

Maria, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Who is your hero and why? What lessons have you learned from them and how have they influenced your journey?

Hands down, my professional hero is my business partner, Nicole Brunz Hunt. For 17 years, Nicole and I have worked side by side, and I continue to learn things from and with her.
When it comes to our business, we bring different strengths to the table. Her intuitive strengths in the area of business projections and financial stability are immense. During the beginning of our careers as peer Stylists working in a local Atlanta salon, she taught me how to pull my individual sales reports from the salon’s software. During our breaks, we’d sit together in our cars while she coached me on how to track and project my service and retail revenue better than any team leader who led my biannual reviews.
Within our craft, she’s an extraordinary artist, especially within the realm of haircutting. I’ve attended countless classes throughout my career and can honestly say that she is one of the most gifted haircutters and hair cutting educators I’ve had the opportunity to learn from.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to share our career journeys together, grow side by side, and build a business together.

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?

I am Maria Ferrer Riggert, co-owner of RUUT Aveda Concept Salon. I began my journey as a Hair Stylist in 2004 by attending the Aveda Institute of New Orleans. I had a very specific idea in my mind of the type of salon and culture I wanted to begin my career in, following my graduation from the Aveda Institute. I couldn’t seem to find that ideal place in New Orleans, which led me to explore salons outside of Louisiana. This is how I found myself relocating to Atlanta to begin my career at an Aveda Salon here in 2005. I was offered many opportunities to grow within that multi-salon group and acquired the position of the Lead Color Educator for that company. My business partner today, Nicole Brunz Hunt, was a new Stylist working for that same company at the time I joined the team. Our career paths were parallel within our ten years there, as she acquired and held the position of the Lead Cutting Educator. Together, we worked closely with the owner of that salon group, learning many behind-the-scenes details of salon ownership. By 2013, Nicole and I both felt ready for a shift. We longed for a smaller, more intimate salon setting and wanted to create a culture that honored the Aveda brand in a different way. We openly discussed this with our salon owner and received his blessings to pursue our venture.
By 2015, we opened the doors of RUUT Salon. At RUUT, our culture is to truly honor and care for the needs of our guests and our team in a more customized and individualized approach. We work together with our clients to gather all the details of their desires, lifestyle, goals and any challenges they may have with their hair and scalp health. This allows us to more deeply focus on guiding our guests to achieve their goals, provide solutions to challenges, and educate them on how to maintain their results. We’ve created an environment for our guests that fosters open communication, feedback and trust. The majority of our Stylists at RUUT have traveled to New York Fashion Week, working alongside the world’s most talented artists creating hair trends for runway shows. This integrates a unique element that we’re able to artistically provide to our clients at RUUT.
Nicole and I have been committed to building a team with individuals who value the culture we’ve strived to create at RUUT. For our team, we lead with the same approach as we do with our guests. We individualize our approach with each team member to learn the details of their goals and offer customized support and encouragement.
As an artist working behind the chair, I thrive on building individual relationships with my guests to better serve their needs. I never create the same haircut, color or style for anyone, which keeps things fresh and exciting. This also pushes me to continue to grow in my craft. The opportunity to empower our clients to feel good about themselves is something I truly cherish.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Managing a team and maintaining high morale is one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced as business owners and team leaders. While we implemented some key foundational elements into our culture from the start that have brought us success, it’s important to remember that this is a constantly changing area that requires regular attention. One of the key foundational elements within our team culture is the fact that we use Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is a personality assessment. We have each candidate complete this assessment before joining our team. We don’t use it as a means to decide if someone is qualified, but we use it to encourage authenticity and to better understand how each person approaches tasks and processes information. It also has set a prioritized tone for everyone on the team to better actively support each other individually in daily interaction, while working together on projects, and even in the midst of unforeseen challenges. This has even branched off in other ways of how our team prioritizes individual and overall alignment as a core value. Additionally, this assessment helps provide insight into which roles each individual is more likely to excel in. Job performance, productivity and team morale is going to be enhanced overall if everyone is in the role that is right for them and feels supported as their authentic self.
Another key foundational element of our team culture is offering encouragement to people to set their own goals. Obviously, there are benchmarks and goals that are vital for the company. While it’s important that each individual on the team works towards those goals, it’s also important to hear, encourage and support each individual’s personal and professional goals. As their leader, empower them and make what is important to them important to you.
Lastly, another key foundational element to our culture is good humor. Make sure you leave room for this in your daily grind together. Any environment infused with good laughs will create more positive outcomes and better bonds. A team that can have fun together will go further together.
Even with 100% good intention and effort, it’s important to understand that reaching perfection in this area is unobtainable. There are many variables that create natural ebbs and flows. There’s no winning streak when it comes to maintaining morale. You can lay building blocks that should result in positive and successful outcomes, but your work doesn’t end there. Morale is something that has to be constantly nurtured and fostered. Even with all the effort we’ve made to create a supportive environment that encourages openness, authenticity and inclusion, not everyone has valued our culture, and some have even taken advantage of it. There’s a right role and right culture for everyone. Help them find it – even if it’s not on your team.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Funny enough – we are presently in a pivot! When we were first opening RUUT Salon in 2015 as brand new business owners, I expected to roll out our business plan and follow it exactly like a road map. That makes me giggle at myself now. This coming June will be our seventh anniversary and I can humbly admit that this journey has required multiple changes to the plan, which has certainly kept us on our toes.
We are presently shifting and redefining a pretty major element of our business operations and culture in a way that is not traditionally common within our industry. We are redesigning roles and modifying the service wheel, ultimately moving towards a direction that involves less dependency on traditional Front Desk Receptionist coverage and expands self-sufficiency among the Stylists and guests. As consumers, we’ve shifted to being comfortable with and often preferring self check-in, self check-out, greater online accessibility, less communication by phone call, and more communication through email and text. One of our greatest challenges in salon ownership has been hiring, training and retaining strong and loyal candidates in the role of the salon’s Front Desk Receptionist Department. This is a commonly known challenge within our industry. For a small salon like ours, we have heavily depended on that role within our daily operations and service wheel, but it’s been somewhat of an Achilles’ heel. We’ve invested more than most salons into this department and role, hopeful that it would entice and create more long-term professionals. However, the results have not matched our efforts, as most of the stronger candidates we’ve found and hired were in a more transient place in their lives (moving, starting school, transitioning into a Hair Stylist position, etc.).
Between the pattern of long-term retention challenges we’ve experienced and the employment challenges that arose following our brief COVID shut down in 2020, that prompted us to brainstorm about the possibility of having less coverage dependency on that role altogether and recreating a more evolved bigger picture.
As of December 2021, we decided to begin moving in this direction and are operating with only one part-time team member in that receptionist department and role. We’ve reduced incoming phone hours and implemented more text and email communication outside of those set hours. Given the evolution of general communication through email and text, we haven’t found this change to be a sacrifice to our business. To enhance our online tools, we will be integrating more active informational, appointment request, and communication elements into our website experience. In terms of service wheel, the goal is to create an experience that doesn’t sacrifice the attention to detail, but implements a more self-guided check-in and check-out experience.
This present transitional period is giving us the opportunity to explore how to rebuild a more evolved and sustainable operating plan from here, allowing us to see exactly what resources and supportive roles are truly needed to sustain a more evolved operation. We are actively putting the big picture together as a team, one step at a time. Fortunately, we have the willingness within our team to grow in this new direction.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ruutsalon.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maria.ferrer.riggert/

Image Credits
John Perez