We recently connected with Martha Nicola and have shared our conversation below.

Martha, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

As a salon owner, one of the biggest challenges is attracting and retaining clients. As well with the sky rocket in costs on our supplies the competive prices. With so many salons out there, it can be tough to stand out and keep clients coming back. It requires providing exceptional service, staying up-to-date with the latest trends, and creating a welcoming atmosphere. Building a loyal client base takes time and effort, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run! 💇‍♀️✨

Martha, 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?

I was a young little girl cutting my Barbie’s hair and mixing different kinds of koolaid to color their hair. The older I got I had the opportunity to do cosmetology school in high school and took advantage of it and went full force so when I turned 18 I took my state exam and passed. I wanted to not only make women happy , i wanted to make them feel beautiful by helping them all achieve their hair goals. I went to an extensive assiting program at a salon that was top of the line and got the best education there and continued taking classes. I became a hair educator and loved it but at time I was a single mother and my kiddos needed me to be a mom as well as I missed being behind the chair. My next goal was to own my own business and to be my own boss so i started with opening a small studio and loved it so much that I expanded. Being that it was expensive as it was to live in California my husband and I made the move to our amazing Texas. We both decided to go into business together and open a salon as a team and now provide tattoos and hair!! It was hard but worth every struggle we had with learning the new in Texas and what we wanted to have and provide for our amazing guests. Now we have been open for almost 6 years and have a phenomenal team!!! So guess what I did? I am now an educator for an extension company called Beauvoir. I absolutely love what i do and continue to take education and watching lots of tik toks to see what’s trending as well as watching high fashion shows.. I am the most proud of how happy our clients are leaving our salon and feeling amazing. The relationships we have grown to love and care about. Every day we fall in love in our small community and appreciate every single one of our guests that walks in and sits in our chair.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

When my husband I made the decision to jump ship and move to Texas we brainstormed on how we can move to another state and introduce ourselves to a new community… So what we did we went on Facebook and searched restaurants most visited, popular places and saw who Checked in. With who we saw we looked for who had amazing hair, tattoos and or was friends with our family that already lived in the surrounding area of New Braunfels and started to request people. As people accepted our requests we gave a little introduction to our page of who we are and what we do and appreciated the add. Once we got a larger following we had a contest of the first 100 that went to our business location to take a picture of themselves In front of our salon and they would get 50% off tattoos and hair to welcome then to our new business in the new town!!! My oh my it was amazing we had our neighbors calling us like what the heck is going on there’s lots of people in front of your business taking photos and cars lined up lol how amazing that was! We continued posting our services we did and made sure we had clean crisp pictures with no filters to show people what we did. Then we did a countdown to when we were arriving to open the new place, got everyone excited for us to arrive as we were so excited to be finally home doing what we love!

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

So how I met my business partner is a funny story…. Soooooo I had an appointment at a new tattoo studio (new to me) and my artist had not shown up, so the other individual who was at the studio (my future husband/business partner) was there to help me as he apologized for his co worker. So as frustrated as I was I left very quickly. My artist then called me and apologized that he hadn’t reached out due to an emergency. So I went back to the studio a few days later to get a tattoo and he then introduced me to my future husband. We hit it off and shared a common love for our hairless cats. As we started to date in a later time we stated to share clientele and realized that it would be amazing if we combined our business together and voilà here we are today with a business together and married .

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Martha.at.your.elysian