We recently connected with Oz Mendez and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Oz, thanks for joining us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

I am taking my very first full month long vacation starting on September 2nd this year! I have felt all the worries of taking time off… who will handle last minute problems? will my clients go somewhere else? will I actually be able to enjoy myself while on vacay or will I be worried the whole time? Of course, I started with short vacations, like a 3 day weekend.
I would recommend to first start by building your dream schedule. If you want to be able to take 3 day weekends easily and at any time then start now by not scheduling meetings on Fridays and automating everything you can so it’s not noticeable if you’re gone on a Friday.
My next practice is building a community of support with my clients. I have worked very hard to build great relationships with my clients. So when a vacation arrises their reaction is “oh wow that’s so amazing you deserve it”. This is the reaction we want, this is the type of clientele we want.
That brings me to my final point on building your ideal clientele. If you have a client that doesn’t support you even taking a one week vacation twice a year then they are not your ideal client. It’s time to spend more time giving attention to and cultivating the relationships with your ideal clients.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Oz Mendez and I am the creator of FABULOZ™ Hair Extensions. I have been a hair dresser for 18 years. I am also an International Trainer for John Paul Mitchell Systems. I live, breathe and sleep the hair industry everyday and my goal is to share my successes with other stylists so they can build amazing businesses. Thru the business of hair extensions we build guest loyalty and frequency of visit. These two factors are the lifeline of the hair dressers business. By showing stylists how to build their hair extensions business we help them work less hours and make more money. This allows them to live their dream balanced life.
I just want stylists to have a thriving and balanced business. Our industry has in the past promoted more of “the grind and hustle” mentality. Our new age mentality is balance.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

I manufacture custom hair extensions for salons. But it didn’t start out that way. When I began this journey I was creating custom hair extensions only for my personal clients…one by one. After a short time I started receiving phone calls from my friends in the industry asking if they could get in on the action. They heard about the quality and custom design. I truly never thought I would turn this into a business. The first big deal I was working on was a $14,000 deal, that was huge and scary for me. But we signed all the paperwork and it was time for the client to pay for their order. Like I said, I never meant for this to be an official business so at this time I didn’t have an LLC, EIN, CC processing system, I was flying blind. So I used a very well know cc processing service to put thru my first order. Immediately this very well know system flagged the charge as fraudulent and was holding the funds for at least 90 days and possibly longer. My only other option was to refund the client. I never wanted to share these details with the client, I didn’t want to share that I jumped the gun without having all my ducks in a row. So over the next 24 hours I pulled up my boot straps and got all the official paperwork done so I could get a legitimate cc processing system that wouldn’t flag the big deals. I did have to go to the customer and share what happened bc I needed to refund and recharge them. I was so nervous but they were very understanding. They were small business owners themselves and have had plenty of their own similar stories. I would not have done this differently, I learned from the experience and it pushed me to get my act together for the future of my company.

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

Be cautious who you give free/samples to. Make sure they are connected to your ideal clientele. I did a lot of sampling when I first began my company. Basically anyone who had a large following on social media I would send them free hair. My bad, I didn’t do my research. My biggest mistake was a sampling to someone who had over 2 million followers just on Instagram. I thought, “heck yeah I’ll give you free hair, you have a great following”. The mistake I made was I didn’t look at the demographic of who was following her. 98% of her following was male. 97% of those who wear hair extensions identify as female. I sent this influencer thousands of dollars in free hair and never got a single dollar in roi. Not the influencers fault, totally mine for not doing my research.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fabulozhair.com
• Instagram: @fabuloz_hair_extensions @ozmendezhair
• Facebook: FABULOZ Hair Extensions

Image Credits
FemForce Shoots