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

Shakayla , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

I had the idea to start a business at the age of 22. I guess looking back my life was always shaping up to turn out this way. My mother always says I was an independent, and creative young child and would often draw “fashionable dolls” every chance I got (think, Bratz doll knock off) so that this is no surprise to her..

After duly deciding on starting a business I took a day long course at a local college called “starting a business 101”. It taught me all the basics I needed to be being. I found my first studio on Craigslist and used my last check from a previous job to begin. My husband was very supportive and gave me the green light to focus on my dream and rest was me clumsily failing forward to be honest. Here are the few things I learned along the way.

As a cosmetology based business it’s a specialty so you have to have a checklist of things you go through before your salon is inhabitable for clients. I did NOT know that starting out and it took a lot of pivoting to get to a place I wasn’t always paranoid I was doing wrong. In order to operate as a licensed cosmetologist you need to have:

Insurance for both you kit, tools and salon
A business license
A salon establishment license
A sales tax license( for is you want to sell product)
An articles of operation form( for running your business and franchise
tax purposes)
Among many other things I worked my way through in the beginning. Once I did a few things like that( after about 6 months of learning task after task) I was finally secure enough in my business to start focusing on building.

Shakayla , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started in the beauty industry at age 19. I had taken the traditional route of college first but felt like there was something I was missing.. I knew college wasn’t for me at the time because I never found a major I felt worth spending my mother’s dime on and even with the partial academic scholarships it wasn’t enough to warrant me to keep going.

After taking a gap year I decided hair school was a great option. It was creative, had a structured program, and I could use the money to pay for school if I decided to go on my own and run a business eventually, so that’s what I did.

I have a few different sectors of the beauty industry I specialize in. Makeup, Hair extensions and lived in color. Makeup is the specialty I have held the longest and been the most active in pursuing, but after 6 years as a wedding specific hair and makeup artist I shifted to being behind the chair doing extensions and color more,

Most of what people think of when they think of makeup & hair tends to be celebrity status. They think of the glitz and glamour but in reality, there is something so powerful about doing makeup and hair on everyday clients too. I work on mainly middle class and upper middle class clientele with good solid jobs who deserve to be pampered and taken care of just as if they were a celebrity. I focus my business on building relationships with local blue collar( and some white collar) clientele and create beautiful hair and makeup in the most efficient time frames for them.

One of the things I’m most proud of is creating time efficient practices within my business to give my clients beautiful outcomes and feeling confident within shorter amounts of time than traditional services. I don’t compromise quality and I give them their time back to spend with family, work or do things they wouldn’t normally be able to do after a typical day in salon.

My brand has evolved. It’s evolution is something I’m so proud of because it’s growing with me as a person. As I grow and change, so do my plans for my business and my clients get to reap the benefits of that as well. It’s such a beautiful, sometimes messy and rewarding thing to be a part of.

I think I’d want my potential guests to know that o genuinely care about their events and the health of the their hair. I provide an extremely calming, and laid back environment to get beauty services done that is very unique to my area. I like to think of it as a little hidden oasis and I love that each and every client has told me how relaxed, cared for and at home they feel in my humble shop.

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

This past two years in business, in a new place provided me with the opportunity to pivot in business. I’m originally from Arkansas. While there I focused mainly on weddings and spent a lot of time at events and things of that nature. I knew that I wanted a deeper connection with my clients and felt that the only way to build the community I was seeking was to be back behind the chair. Things strong of thoughts led me to rebrand my business and expand it to allow services both inside and out of studio and I’m so grateful I took a year( another kind of gap year, if you will) to truly figure out the brand messaging and legacy I’d like to start building for myself in Arizona.

Now, I truly value maintenance appointments with clients because I seen them so often and I really have built amazing bonds with them. Now when they come in it’s like old friends catching up. Sometimes we have so much to talk about and other times they quietly relax while I do their services. Either way, it always feels like time well spent and I get to fill my own cup by helping fill someone else’s for the day.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy I have for building clientele is to network. Each of the two times I’ve entered a new market, the most gainful things for my business has been name recognition. I tend to do styled shoots quite a bit to offer my services for free or discounted prices so that it’s an equal exchange. I get marketing material in the form of photos, people get a chance to see my work in person and I get to meet many vendors within the industry like business owners who moonlight as models, floral vendors, photographers, planners, etc. etc. and build relationships with them so they think of me when they may need my expertise for other things they’re doing. So far, it’s worked so heavily in my favor doing that, that after the first year in business I gained my business 70% of the time from word of mouth and the other 30% of the time from google search and SEO optimization on my website.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.betransformedbeauty.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/btbeautyaz
• Facebook: Www.Facebook.com/betransformedbeautyllc

Image Credits
Photo 3 photographer: Laura Powers Photo 4&5: Courtney Boyd