A household name in Texas, most notably as the official salon for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, Tangerine Salon stepped into the spotlight in this summer’s smash hit Netflix series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. However, their journey to success was years in the making and a testament to the power of determination, innovation, and a people-first approach.
In a recent conversation with Tangerine Salon Co-owner Brandon Hensley and General Manager Lauren Radoncic, they opened up about the business’s beginnings, challenges, and transformation into a thriving multi-salon enterprise.
Tell us about your business. How did you get your start?
Brandon: When we opened Tangerine in August 2005, we wanted it to be in the Aveda network, so we flipped our business into employment-based – a great business model if it’s done correctly. It gives so much more control over quality, which is great for customers and staff, as it gives them somebody who has their back.
When we started Tangerine, we had no idea it would become what it is. The first location had about five or six staff members, and now we’ve grown to about 180 -190.
I don’t know anything about hair or any of that stuff. Of course, my wife’s an expert at it – for me, no, I gloss over whenever I hear technical terms, as far as what the stylists are talking about. I’m just not built that way.
Still, to this day, I don’t say that I’m in the salon business. We’re in the people business, so it’s people through and through. It’s people who are doing the job. It’s people who are coming in and paying for the services. So, it’s a 100% people business, and hair is the product. Once I got past the idea that I didn’t know anything about the hair business and figured out it was a people business, the growth happened naturally.
We want to ensure we’re the best place to work, balanced with the best place to get your hair done, and when you do that, you can’t stop success. People want to work here, and people want to get their hair done here.
At what point did you expand to multiple locations?
Brandon: We went quicker than we probably should have. We began the Tangerine brand in this whole new business model in 2005 and, in 2007, opened our second location. That second location just took off like wildfire and did $1 million in its first year – back then, that was a huge accomplishment. I naively thought, ‘Okay, this is easy, like we can open a million of these!’ So, we opened our third location about a year later (2008), but that one didn’t go as well. I learned my lesson that you cannot just sign a lease and expect success. It took us a bit to get that location going. It’s still in operation and booming, coming up on its fifteenth year.
When did you add the other locations?
Brandon: Our first three salons were all in the suburbs of Dallas, which served us well. That helped us get a head start catering to that particular clientele at that time. The business was all word of mouth. You get in good with the PTAs and the soccer moms, and then you know that’s your best form of advertising.
That was our strategy back then, but I wanted an urban Dallas location. We finally found a fantastic location and started that many years later.
I was actually going to stop at four salons. I had a saying: ‘Four, no more’ because the more salons equals more people, the more resources, and all these things. I thought we hit a sweet spot at four locations, but then we signed the partnership with the Dallas Cowboys, and they offered me a spot in their new headquarters shopping and dining district in Frisco, Texas, and I couldn’t turn that down. We opened that location in 2018.
But by the time we got to a fifth [salon], the team had it down because multiple locations are both easy and hard at the same time. They have pros and cons. But now, with the fifth location, we have it down to a really great science. Lauren does a fantastic job of balancing all the locations because each has a very different personality and clientele.
How has that been to manage that many locations?
Lauren: It’s funny because we built up slowly so that as you acclimate to three, then you acclimated to four, now we’re to five, and now we’re all like, oh, we can have a 6th one, that’d be fun. Let’s throw another one in the mix. So, I think that once you get comfortable with it, then it’s fine to expand because you’ve got your routine, but that’s also kind of scary because you’re comfortable; you don’t want to get complacent or forget or overlook areas that still need the attention, or spread your attention too thin. So, it’s a delicate balance once you get bigger and bigger.
What hurdles or pain points did you experience in the growth process? What were the most challenging parts?
Brandon: The pain points were my fast expansion with our third location. I got a little too confident because our second one went so well. So the big pain point was, ‘Okay, you’ve got these different locations. You’ve got to learn that there are different personalities to staff. You have to learn there are different personalities with the clientele.’
Our saying is one salon, five locations. We want to be very unified. If you walk into one location, you’ve walked into another, in some senses. And in some senses, that’s not the case. It can’t be the case.
But the biggest hurdle was trying to figure out how to keep our standards at every one of our locations as we grew and added in people. What I had to learn pretty quickly is when you open a new location you have got to take some of your top people who believe in your mission, who believe in your purpose statement, and who have a love of the company, and a love of excellence the same that we do. You plant those people there to build the foundation of what that salon will be. Because if you open a location, put all new people in there, and hire a manager, they have zero clue about what your company’s about, what your goals are, and what your mission is.
So you have to take roots from the beginning of the company and plant them in the new parts of your company while there’s new growth. There’s also old growth that is the same anytime you open a new location. So, our most significant pain point was just that: figuring out how to make each location a Tangerine and not just a building with some people doing some hair, calling it Tangerine, and hoping for the best.
How difficult is it to ensure employees meet your standards when hiring locally?
Brandon: It used to be [difficult], but now you can only come into our company if you have those standards. The team won’t let you. But before, yeah, it was very difficult, and I had to learn: you have to put some really strong leadership from people who have been there a long time, who have been with us when it wasn’t cool to work at Tangerine. Now, it’s cool to work at Tangerine. We’re on Netflix, doing all that stuff with the Dallas Cowboys, and our locations are amazing, so it’s a lot easier to hire and keep that quality.
Lauren: Well, I wasn’t the hiring person when we opened the third location. The biggest difference when we hire now for a new location versus hiring before is that we’re okay with not being full if they’re not the quality we want. So, when we opened Dallas, we only opened with four or five stylists, and we were okay with that. It’s a sixteen-person salon, and it was okay to have five and six and seven slowly to make sure that the right people were moving into those chairs and not just people moving into those chairs; so, I think we always try to keep that perspective to that.
Even if you are underperforming slightly for a short time, in the long run, it pays off better to have the people you want representing your mission. Another thing on the mission statement: a big change between our third salon and our fourth salon was we didn’t have a mission statement or a purpose statement when we had those three; it was all over the place. Like you said, it was just open it, you are Tangerine, go out there and do good hair. But we united under at least a purpose statement: to create happiness. And so really working with the team to always go back to that whenever we’re struggling is all of our goals is the exact same no matter what your role is in the company, we’re here to create happiness for others, and that’s not just the guest that comes in, but it’s the team as a whole.
How much does your education and coaching with Tangerine U affect your hiring process?
Lauren: We’ve developed a really strong education program where we can take somebody who just recently finished school and create a really great hairdresser in a short amount of time. And [while] we do hire people with experience, still, we prefer a student or somebody just starting their career or just moving to the area. We want to build them up with us rather than come in and have all these preconceived notions or maybe a mission or purpose statement from a salon that doesn’t truly represent our mission and purpose statement. We have found that bringing people in and utilizing our great stylists who have been with us for years to coach and mentor those newer stylists creates great future Tangerine peeps.
What would you say is your secret to success overall?
Brandon: It is balancing the best place to work with the best place to get your hair done, which is the key. People management is the key to success, and if you’re doing one thing wrong, in either portion of that being on the client side or the employee side, you just can’t succeed.
And so, you’ve got to be able to balance that, you know, when I say balance, it’s not just the best place to get your hair done. It would be to work at Tangerine; I can come in anytime I want, and I can charge whatever I want. I can do or wear whatever I want. I can do all of this, right? No, you cannot. That won’t create success.
So we find where we are flexible enough to still be successful with the team but still give the high-quality that we can demand the prices that we demand with the clientele. Once the team understands that, they will get that mission statement in their head, and they will get that purpose statement going. Okay, for me to succeed, I will have to give up some personal liberties. Maybe I can’t wear exactly what I want. It has to be professional. In the summer, I can’t wear a tank top and shorts, or something like that. So, I think that we figured out the key to success pretty quickly. That third location taking off slowly is when we figured out that we’ve got to get the people portion correct. When we get the people portion correct, you just can’t lose.
How has technology helped you grow your business?
Brandon: When we started out, we didn’t have technology. In fact, we were still using paper appointment books in the salon that we had before Tangerine. We accepted checks, we had to go to the bank, we had to have all these things right. But I’m a techie at heart – in my other businesses, technology is everything. I knew we had to transform our salon when we got started. Only a couple of companies did salon software at the time. None of it was internet-based; you had to have a server in your salon. But we embraced it well, and then I started seeing all these other companies pop up, like all of these email marketing things when that started, and then websites. I was early on in embracing the internet to promote everything. Now, technology is just so easy, and Aura basically does all the work for us.
Lauren: I agree. Technology was just a tool before, but now it helps us prioritize the areas that need prioritizing. We have reached a large amount of success, and if you just look at the books from one standpoint, you’re busy, and you could say, ‘Okay, check we’re done,’ but what we like to do is use the different reports to go and see, well, what did we do this time last year? Are we higher, or are we lower? Why are we higher or lower? Is that service provider underperforming for the amount of hours that they’re working? We can really use the technology now to prioritize ourselves so we don’t get stagnant or complacent in where we’re at and really look at the areas in which we still have room to grow.
Overall, what are your favorite features?
Lauren: The dashboard, as it is a snapshot view of performance. You can view different metrics for all locations, one location at a time, or individual service providers. I can pull up dashboards from my phone. So, it’s easy, quick, and gives you all the information you need to know. Also, the stylists also have access to their own performance metrics. It makes such a difference in just the personal responsibility of being productive as a stylist, seeing those benchmarks for yourself, and not having to have a sit-down formal meeting where several reports had to be pulled to find the right numbers. I mean, they can just pull it up and see how their day, their week, and their year have been. Again, you can create different metrics within those dashboards that are visible to them. But it’s nice to have that personal connection to your own business, and what you’re contributing daily, and what that looks like.
I also love to play with the newest report, the year over year, and this was something that we asked Aura to help develop because we do like to see what we were doing last year and if we are underperforming last year, over performing, and then compare the salons against each other and where the growth is. So, the year-over-year reports, one thing that we love to kind of challenge ourselves with.
How has your business improved or grown since switching to Aura?
Brandon: As far as my interaction, I think we were in on Aura pretty early. I mean, we’ve definitely seen Aura grow leaps and bounds since we came in. We switched software three times. So, we used the very first software we had for the first fifteen years. Then, we switched to another software for about a year. I’m the kind of person who, if something needs to change, changes it even if it’s hard. Even if it’s going to hurt initially, you change it. And so that other software was not working for us. We paid a fortune for it, all the migration and these different things. It wasn’t working for us, so we found Aura, and we said, ‘This is going to be an upcoming company. They’ve got the right mindset and they’ve got the same thought process as us. And so let’s, let’s just switch.’ So we just canceled that other one.
Lauren: It was necessary. The other software was so complicated on the back end that I feel like we neglected certain areas of business that needed attention because it was so hard to get to them. We knew we needed to prioritize both the guest experience and the managers, and the employees needed a streamlined experience too.
Brandon: Yeah, and on the other software, we made the change twice because we needed somebody who would listen to us. We know what we’re doing. Salons know what they’re doing and what they need. Many software companies build this thing, and you get what you get. With Aura, if we find something that we need that’s not built into the software, we can make a phone call, and it’s in the next software update. And that’s very important to us because a software company has to listen to the customers for what they need because if we need something, we need it. Aura has helped us with that. Whenever we see a report that we need, like the report that Lauren just mentioned, which was a fantastic report we had with the old software company – I could look at any moment and get a snapshot of my business, year over year, month over month, day over day, quarter over quarter. We could see a trend so easily. Lauren suggested this (the year-over-year report), and they built it for us.
Who better than the experts to recommend enhancements, right?
Brandon: I definitely think Aura has helped us because the software has got to help us. I mean it, it’s got to be easy. We have a reservation center, so our office building is where all incoming communication comes: phone calls, texts, Facebook, whatever it may be; it’s all booked in that location. When we train somebody to be as efficient as possible in building appointments, the software has got to be simple; it’s got to be easy. We’ve got to be able to train quickly. We don’t want to keep a new hire in training for longer than they need to be. They need to be getting the job done, not in training.
So, I feel like with Aura, everything is pretty self-explanatory. You know, our team has built an amazing training guide on Aura that a new hire can come in and start booking. What do you say, Lauren? How quickly can somebody start using the software confidently?
Lauren: Within a day or two, they’re able to check somebody in and out, open a ticket, click a payment. It really is pretty seamless and very intuitive. What you think you need to do next is the next step, so you can follow intuition to go through it. Nothing’s super complicated. It’s also easy to fix mistakes, which definitely happen because, again, we’re a people business, and people make mistakes. Aura makes it easy to pinpoint those. I don’t even have to train stylists on the app. Once they open it, they can figure it out because it’s so intuitive, and guest services are obviously on the other side. They need some procedural training, but overall, it’s easy to use.
