I ran profitable salons for years and still couldn't tell you why.
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.
A people person. Always good on the floor, always good with a team, always struggled with numbers. I wanted to understand them visually and nobody ever showed me that way.
The salons were profitable. But every year got a little harder, in a way I couldn't point to. We were busy, I was doing the work better than I ever had, and there was still less at the end of it. You can feel it in your soul when something's off. I started questioning whether I'd spent years focusing on the wrong things.
So I did what you do. Phorest and Xero printed endless reports that told me everything and answered nothing. I did the courses. 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. And, as Carl put it to me later, that's the whole problem. They don't understand what it takes to run a profitable salon, so they can hand you a report but never tell you which thing actually moves it. You're left holding numbers with no judgment and no floor. What you needed was the same report, read by someone who knows what Tuesday morning looks like.
Door two is the coach.
And to be fair, there are good ones. But a lot of them are hairdressers who couldn't make it running a salon themselves. They can teach it; they just never did it. And even with the good ones, 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 and half of it their own bias. The hard truth about your numbers never quite arrives, because the business only works if you stay a client. So you're kept busy on things that sound good and change nothing: a prettier price list, a nicer feed, checking what everyone in your area charges, when everyone in your area is undercharging too. What you needed was the hard truth about your numbers on day one, from someone with nothing to gain from keeping you enrolled.
Why both doors are broken
Both doors are broken for the same reason. The people who actually know how to run a profitable salon are too busy running one to teach it.
Then I watched some of my best stylists go out on their own. Booked out, brilliant, great following, genuinely talented. I told them everything I knew at the time. A handful made it. Most are struggling. Not because they're bad hairdressers. Because nobody showed them the foundation fast enough or clearly enough. That's when it stopped being about my salons.
Who actually knew?
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. I'd done his courses. I'd seen him speak. 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 over my own numbers, I finally understood what I'd been doing wrong. I'd 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 I'd needed the whole time (a CFO, a coach, and a profitable owner with the pulse) had never once been in the same room looking at my 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