366 How to Scale a Salon Business From One Store to One Hundred with Sudheer Koneru

Across the world, there are literally hundreds of thousands of salons, spas, med spas, and barbers that open every single year. Most of them are owner-operated businesses employing less than four people. And if they survive the early stages of business, then most of them will plateau at one salon. A few might expand and build businesses with five to 10 locations, but very few ever go on to reach 100 plus. And until now, nobody has seriously ever studied why. So today's guest is Sudhir Kaniro, co-founder of Zanotti Salon Software. And I previously had Sudhir on episode 267 of the Grow My Salon Business podcast. where the focus was all about Zanotti and the ever-changing world of tech. So if you want the backstory, I recommend you go back and you check that episode to find out more, because today we're going to be talking about Sudhir's new book, Growth Diaries, how the best beauty and wellness brands scale from one store to 100 plus. So welcome back, Sudhir. It's good to have this chance to talk with you once again.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Anthony, and it was fun talking with you the last time around.

Great. Okay. So I've just, you know, in the introduction said that we're going to talk all about the Growth Diaries. So I want to jump straight into that because it's a very interesting project and I'm really glad you've done it. Let me start off by just asking you, what was the inspiration behind writing the Growth Diaries? Where did that idea come from?

Yeah, honestly, I didn't think of writing the book as such. I got passionate about just hearing stories of people. So obviously, I work with so many business leaders. I meet them regularly because of the nature of my job at Zenody. And I felt inspired. You know, often even at Zanotti, me and my staff tend to focus on our software. Okay, we are trying to sell software, we're trying to support software. But I said, no, I want my employees to know the real people behind us, the real stories about how these businesses were built, because every business has a lot of blood, sweat and tears which go into making it happen. And I wanted my people to have an education on, no, you need to know the real business and then you will know how to work with our customers better. So I was very passionate to say, I'll go record this. I will go put it up. And I make it a point that every employee. you want to learn how a waxing business works listen to this podcast this is going to give you the real story about whether it's salon whether it's faxing Etc so uh my goal was actually very business focused in saying I I want these stories to be you know available to my folks first and foremost and then of course we said yeah let's put them out there and do all that But once we had enough episodes and I had done so many calls, I realized there is so much commonality and so many threads that I can tie together between all these people's journeys. That's when I felt it would be nice. There isn't such a book around. Maybe it will help people in the industry to see what's the most common traits that stand out.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's interesting because you yourself, even though you worked, and I don't want to