Booth rent or commission for four chairs, and my build out finishes in two weeks

Keisha Brown· Opening a four-chair natural hair salon; lease signed, build-out underway· Registered, Beauty & Personal Care·1w

Four chairs, natural hair, lease signed in May and the build out is nearly done. Plumbing for the shampoo bowls took three weeks longer than anyone told me it would and cost about $4,000 more, which is its own thread.

What I cannot settle is how the chairs work. The two stylists I actually want have both rented before and expect booth rent, somewhere around $225 a week here, and they want their own clients, their own hours and their own products. That is clean money for me and I stop worrying about slow weeks.

Commission at fifty fifty with me supplying product means I control the schedule, the booking system and the client list, and the client belongs to the salon rather than to whoever is standing behind the chair. It also means I carry the cost when a Tuesday is dead.

The part I keep chewing on is the client list. If everyone is a renter with their own booking link, I am a landlord with a very expensive building, not a salon with a brand.

My state has its own test for who counts as a contractor, so I know that is a conversation with a local employment attorney and not with the internet.

Owners with chairs: what do you actually run, and would you do it that way again?

4 replies

Nina Park· Idea stage·1w

I am the renter in this equation right now, so here is the other side of the chair. I pay $200 a week for a station in someone else's salon and what I am actually buying is a door people already walk through and a bathroom I do not clean.

What would make me leave is the owner acting like an owner while charging me like a landlord. Mine schedules a mandatory Saturday meeting and has opinions about my own booking page, and technically neither of those is hers to have.

If you want the brand and the client list, I honestly think you have to pay for it with commission. Renters will never hand you the list.

Keisha Brown· Registered·1w

The mandatory Saturday meeting is exactly the trap I was about to walk into, because I had already written a little culture paragraph about team huddles and shared standards. Reading it back after your reply, I was describing employees and pricing them as renters.

So it is probably two chairs on commission that I build the brand around, including me, and two chairs I rent to established stylists who bring their own book and are left alone. Different deals, written down differently, and nobody pretending the rent chair is part of the team in ways that cost them money.

Dana Kowalski· Open·1w

HR consultant, not in your industry, and classification tests vary by state so please do use that local attorney. The pattern I can tell you about is that mixed models fail on the details rather than the concept.

If you run both, the renters need their own written agreement covering rent, term, what the space includes and how either side ends it, and then you have to actually behave consistently with it. No setting their hours, no requiring your product line, no telling them what to charge. The moment you do any of that for convenience, you have blurred the thing your paperwork says.

Write the two agreements before you have the conversations, not after someone says yes.

Nina Park· Idea stage·1w

This is useful to me too, from the opposite direction. I have no written agreement at all, just a text thread and a weekly payment, which I have been telling myself is fine because we get along.

If I ever open my own studio I want the version Keisha just described, where the deal is clear enough that liking each other is a bonus rather than the whole structure. I am going to ask my current owner for something in writing this week and see how that conversation goes, which will itself tell me a lot.

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