We're hairdressers first. Not coaches. Not accountants.
Hairdressers who know how to do hair and do it well, and who happen to run profitable salons. Between us we've got four salons, we've employed hundreds of staff over the years, and we see this industry from every angle at once: the owner's, the staff's, and the client's. We're in the trenches every single day, and we intend to stay there.
I was never the numbers person. Our business had people who were.
My name is Mitch. I'm a hairdresser, and Next International is my family's salon business on the Gold Coast: two locations, going since 1992.
We've run them profitably for years.
I'll be straight with you: I've never been a numbers person. I'm a people person. Good on the floor, good with a team, good with clients. What I had, that a lot of hairdressers don't, was a family business with people in it who were good with numbers. They kept the foundation right while I did what I'm good at.
It took me a long time to see how much that mattered.
Some of the most talented stylists I've ever worked with were with us for ten, fifteen, twenty years. Booked out, loyal clients, brilliant at the craft. A lot of them were just like me: amazing hairdressers, great with people, not numbers people. One by one, some of them went out on their own. I was proud of them. Then I watched most of them struggle, and some of them close.
They weren't worse hairdressers than the owners who were doing fine. They just didn't have anyone like the people I had behind me. Priced too low, wages running too high, no idea what they had to take in a week just to open the doors. Nobody had ever shown them which numbers actually move a salon forward, in a way that makes sense to people like us.
When they got into trouble, they did what everyone does. And when something feels off in your salon, you've really only got two doors to knock on.
Door one is the accountant.
Brilliant with numbers. Never stood behind a chair. They can hand you a report but never tell you which thing actually moves it. What you needed was the same report, read by someone who knows what Tuesday morning looks like.
Door two is the coach.
There are good ones. But the model is the problem: a contract that locks you in for months, the truth handed to you a bit at a time, half of it fluff. The hard truth about your numbers never quite arrives, because the business only works if you stay a client. What you needed was that truth on day one, from someone with nothing to gain from keeping you enrolled.
Why both doors are broken
The people who actually know how to run a profitable salon are too busy running one to teach it.
That's when it stopped being about my salons. If people this talented could lose a business on the numbers alone, how many owners were one bad year away from the same thing?
Who actually knew?
I wanted to get better with the numbers myself, and to build something that made them simple for hairdressers like me: brilliant on the floor, and without a numbers person behind them. So I went to Carl. Not a friend with a spreadsheet. The numbers authority in our industry. He and Belinda have run their own salons, Chumba, since 2003 and still do. When no training existed for salon finances, he built the systems himself: two years to build them, ten years to test them in real salons. Since then he's coached more than a hundred salon businesses and consults to some of the highest-turnover salons in Australia. And when I got to him, he was already using something in his own salon that worked.
The morning it made sense
Sitting with Carl's framework, for the first time I could see it myself, the way the numbers people in our business always had. My old stylists had been decorating the roof. Commission structures, work-life balance, closing Saturdays, charging your worth, adding services. None of it's wrong. It's just roof decoration. You can have the best commission structure in the world and still fail if the foundation numbers are broken and you can't see them.
The three people they'd needed the whole time, the numbers expert, the salon coach and an owner who'd done it profitably, had never once been in the same room looking at their salon.
Three experts, finally in one room
So we put them there. We fed everything into one intelligent layer: Carl's rules, the numbers, the maths, the hours of him coaching the best salons in the country, the hours he and I have spent sitting with staff young and old. Then we connected it to our own software. We built it for ourselves. To use, not to sell.
I walked into work this morning, sat down, and pulled up everything: how the month was tracking, how my team was going, who needed coaching. It answered every question I had, and a couple I hadn't thought to ask. We run successful salons, and we still open it every single day.
— Mitch
Two hairdressers, four salons, one layer.
The numbers, the rules, the coaching
Carl and Belinda Keeley have run their own salons since 2003 (Chumba, in Warragul and on Chapel Street) and still do. He built the salon finance systems from scratch when no training existed: two years to build, ten years to test in real salons. He's coached more than a hundred salon businesses, consults to some of Australia's highest-turnover salons, and can pull a salon apart financially in under ten minutes. This isn't past-tense authority. It's happening now.
The product, the floor, the phone
Mitch runs Next International's two Gold Coast salons, going since 1992. A people person, not a numbers person, he built Salon Brain for hairdressers like him who don't have a numbers person behind them. He answers the email. A hairdresser, not a help desk.
It was running our own salons long before it had a price on it.
Now it can run yours. The people who know how to run a highly profitable salon are too busy running one to teach it. We were too. So we built what we knew into the software instead. $590 setup, then $59 a month, no lock-in.
It reads your own figures and brings ideas and suggestions to the table, the way a good board member would. It doesn't give financial advice and isn't licensed to. The decisions stay yours, and your accountant and other advisors are there for the advice that fits your situation.