37-year-old's hair salon brings in over $1 million a year—how she did it without a bachelor's degree

As a tattoo artist put the finishing touches on her ink — her son's name, Elijah, scrawled across her left shoulder — he made small talk with Lee (who goes by her middle name professionally) and her friend.

The artist complimented her friend's haircut, which Lee had given her with a pair of kitchen scissors just hours earlier. 

"He said, 'Where's your salon?' and I told him I didn't work at one, that I just did hair for fun," Lee, 37, recalls. "And I'll never forget, he said, 'Well, you might want to reconsider what you're doing for a living. It's clear you have a gift.'" 

The unsolicited advice gave Lee, then 20, pause. She loved doing her friends' hair and experimenting with new hairstyles on her curly locks but considered it more of a hobby than a vocation. 

It was 2007, two years after Lee graduated from high school and one year after she dropped out of Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois, after finding out she was pregnant. 

In the months leading up to Elijah's birth, Lee moved into a small apartment in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois, and found a customer service job she loved at Maui Jim, a sunglasses company. She trained and got promoted to be an accounting clerk within her first year at the company.

"Math always came easy to me, and I thought, by working in finance, I'd never be poor again," says Lee. 

But something was missing in her corporate career. "I craved the creative freedom I felt doing hair," she adds. "I guess I just needed encouragement from a stranger to go for it."

She decided to switch careers on the drive home. "I had no clue if it would work out, but I knew I would regret not trying," she says. 

By all measures, the risk has paid off: Lee owns Flourish Curls Salon in Arlington, Texas, a business that brought in $1.1 million in revenue last year, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

After deducting business expenses and taxes, Lee's take-home pay is between $100,000 and $150,000 a year (she declined to share her exact salary).

Here's how Lee spun her interest in hair into a six-figure career.

The morning after getting her tattoo, Lee stopped at a building she had driven past countless times: Regency Beauty Institute, a cosmetology school in Peoria. 

She registered for classes and quit her job at Maui Jim as soon as she paid her first deposit. The cosmetology program, which took Lee about 18 months to complete, cost $22,000 and required her to be in classes five days a week from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. 

When she wasn't in school, Lee, who is a single parent, waitressed at a local steakhouse to pay her tuition and other bills. Her grandparents watched Elijah. 

The requirements to become a hairstylist vary by state, but generally, prospective stylists must complete a cosmetology program at an accredited school and obtain a state-issued license by passing a written and practical exam. 

Many states also require prospective stylists to complete an apprenticeship or work as an assistant in a salon first.

Once Lee finished the requirements for her license in 2009, she started taking on clients at home and working part-time at a salon that specializes in natural hair in Peoria.

In her first year as a stylist, Lee made close to $30,000 a year. She continued to work part-time as a waitress for the next two years to cover her bills.

At the time, Facebook was becoming more popular, and Lee decided to take full advantage of the platform's free advertising opportunities: She created a business page, sent friend requests to potential clients, and started documenting her work with photos and videos. 

She quickly garnered a reputation for working with different curl patterns and clients who were biracial like herself. 

"My mom is white, my dad is Black and I always had curly hair, but my mom had bone straight hair, so she just had no idea how to style it for me growing up," she says.

That childhood experience inspired Lee to start dyeing, highlighting, trimming and straightening her hair when she was a teenager until she found styles she liked. 

"I wanted to learn how to make my hair look good, feel confident in my own skin, and I want to inspire that same confidence in others," she says. 

For the next five years, Lee continued to work at the salon and build her following on social media. She says she loved the people she worked with and felt settled in her career.

But in 2015, Lee — then pregnant with her fourth child — started feeling "the itch to move." 

She had spent most of her life in Illinois and craved a change of scenery and warmer weather. 

A friend invited her to spend a long weekend together in two of Texas' biggest cities, Austin and Dallas. 

Lee says she was instantly smitten with the southern hospitality and wide-open spaces. She toured apartments for her and her four children that same weekend. 

The family of five relocated to Arlington, a city between Dallas and Fort Worth, in January 2016. 

Moving to a different state emboldened Lee to chase another dream that had been percolating in the back of her mind: Opening a salon. 

Lee spent 10 months and $50,000 of her savings to open Flourish Curls Salon, which started taking customers in 2017.

To Lee's relief, word spread quickly about the salon — within months of opening, she had a waitlist of customers.

Lee attributes Flourish Curls' popularity to the audience she cultivated across Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. 

She started posting hair tutorials, client testimonials, style how-to's, product recommendations and more online in the early 2000s. Her YouTube channel has nearly 60,000 subscribers. 

"Having a strong social media community helped a lot," Lee adds. "There's also not a ton of salons that specialize in curly and natural hair in our neighborhood — many cosmetology schools and salons still don't train their stylists to work with those textures."

Flourish Curls' services include hair cuts, twists, scalp exfoliation and styling that cost anywhere from $150 to $375. Last year, 2023, was the first year Flourish Curls broke $1 million in annual revenue.

The salon has 11 stylists including Lee, who only sees a few clients each month. 

She says building up her staff and hiring two virtual assistants has helped her stave off burnout and resist the urge to "always be on," a common challenge for business owners. 

Lee front-loads her workweek, taking on meetings and appointments Monday through Wednesday so she can spend more time with her children, now ranging in age from 8 to 18. 

"In my 20s, I thought that to be successful, I'd have to work 50-plus hours a week," says Lee. "But I've been able to build a six-figure career from working three days a week most weeks."

As an entrepreneur, Lee has enjoyed the autonomy and flexibility of designing her work schedule.

However, the most fulfilling aspect of running her own salon, she says, has been the positive difference she's been able to make in people's lives by showing them how to be comfortable and confident with their natural hair — a community she wishes she had access to as an "insecure, frustrated" teenager. 

Adds Lee: "Nothing's better than helping people feel beautiful."

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