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

PIERRE, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

About 60 Million Americans could use at-home hair services : older adults, people with disabilities or dementia, homebound people… Currently their needs are not properly addressed : they must rely on relatives to cut their hair, or drive them to the salon, or on the very few salon hair stylists accepting house calls.
This problem not being properly addressed, as a result, at-home services represent about 1% or 2% of the hair services market in the US … compared to 20% in Western Europe countries, like France.

These 60 Million Americans are the reason why DashStylists was created.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

DashStylists makes at-home hair services accessible Our tech platform enables hairstylists and barbers to offer at-home services to those who need them (primarily seniors and homebound people).
We use technology to serve our clients wherever they are : in their house, in assisted living community, in nursing homes, in rehab centers …

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

It’s not a near death moment, but it was an interesting one.

There is always a time gap between the moment you start offering a new offer / a new service and the time it starts selling, especially in BtoB. But you never know how much time it will be …
In business school I remember having heard “between 6 months and a year” to sign the first contract. Honestly, I don’t understand how you come up with a number like this one. it depends so much on the type of industry you are in…

We have an example at DashStylists : we launched the platform dedicated to individual appointments about 20 months ago and we knew there will be some BtoB customers (Senior living communities) down the road. So after 8-9 months we started working on a BtoB offer, and unsurprisingly the first months were very disappointing. There was a demand, we received many positive feedback, but the potential deals were either very unlikely to happen or likely to happen but with a very likely razor thin margin.

So after 9 months we were almost decided to shut down our efforts on the BtoB side, especially since the BtoC business was growing strongly.
That’s exactly when the magic moment happened : over a timespan of 4-5 weeks we signed half a dozen contracts with solid BtoB customers. And all this was just the result of all the work we had put in during the previous 9 months.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Probably as many companies ideated before the Covid pandemic, we can tell a story like this one. We planned to start a trial run of DashStylists in 2020, more precisely we were supposed to start the week. Georgia finally announced the shut down of schools and administrations in March 2020.
So ce obviously shut down our trial until things started to open up, and it took a lot of resilience to start back again in September 2020.
But we don’t believe it was the hardest past. the hardest part was the next 12 months : to start or restart a company in a world that is head over heels. Everything was disorganized, starting with … people habits and their fear.
So overcoming this period was a real act of resilience.    

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dashstylists.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DashStylists/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dashstylists/