Sess Lee Cannon realized she was stuck in the wrong career while getting a tattoo.
A tattoo artist struck up a conversation with Lee (who uses her middle name professionally) and her friend as he applied the final touches to her ink, which included her son’s name, Elijah, inscribed across her left shoulder.
Just hours before, Lee had used a pair of kitchen scissors to give her buddy a haircut, which the artist praised.
Lee, 37, remembers, “He asked me, ‘Where is your salon?’ and I told him I did not work at one, that I just did hair for fun.” He added, “Well, you might want to reconsider what you are doing for a living,” which I will never forget. You obviously have a gift.
Lee, then 20 years old, paused at the unsolicited suggestion. Though she viewed it more as a hobby than a career, she enjoyed styling her friends’ hair and trying out different hairstyles on her own curly hair.
It was 2007, one year after Lee left Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois, after learning she was pregnant, and two years after she had graduated from high school.
In the months before Elijah was born, Lee found a job she enjoyed in customer service at Maui Jim, a sunglasses manufacturer, and moved into a little apartment in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois.
Within the first year of working for the company, she received training and was promoted to accounting clerk.
“I always found math easy, and I believed that working in finance would keep me out of poverty forever,” Lee explains.
However, there was a gap in her corporate career. She continues, “I yearned for the creative freedom I experienced doing hair.” “I suppose all I needed was a stranger’s encouragement to go for it.”
On the way home, she made the decision to change careers. “I knew I would regret not trying, but I had no idea if it would work out,” she adds.
The risk has, by all accounts, paid off: According to financial documents examined by CNBC Make It, Lee owns Flourish Curls Salon in Arlington, Texas, which generated $1.1 million in revenue the previous year.
Lee’s annual take-home pay, after taxes and company expenditures are subtracted, ranges from $100,000 to $150,000 (she refuses to divulge her actual compensation).
Here’s how Lee turned her passion for hair into a lucrative career.
Becoming a hairstylist
The morning following her tattoo, Lee made a stop at the Regency Beauty Institute, a Peoria cosmetology school, a structure she had driven past innumerable times.
As soon as she made her first deposit, she quit her job at Maui Jim and enrolled in studies. Lee had to attend courses five days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to finish the $22,000 cosmetology school, which took her roughly 18 months.
Lee, a single parent, worked as a server at a nearby steakhouse to help pay her tuition and other expenses while she was not in school. Elijah was attended by her grandparents.
Each state has different requirements for becoming a hairstylist, but in general, aspiring stylists need to finish a cosmetology program at an approved institution and pass a written and practical exam to receive a state-issued license.
Additionally, a lot of states mandate that aspiring stylists first serve as salon assistants or finish an apprenticeship.
After completing her licensure requirements in 2009, Lee began working part-time at a Peoria natural hair salon and taking on customers at home.
Lee earned about $30,000 in her first year as a stylist. For the next two years, she kept working part-time as a waitress to pay her expenses.
Facebook was growing in popularity at the time, so Lee made the decision to make the most of its free advertising features. She set up a business page, added prospective customers as friends, and began using pictures and videos to document her work.
She immediately became well-known for working with a variety of curl types and multicultural customers.
“I always had curly hair, but my mom had bone straight hair, so she just did not know how to style it for me growing up,” she recalls. “My dad is Black, and my mom is White.”
Because of that early experience, Lee began coloring, highlighting, cutting, and straightening her hair as a teenager until she discovered looks she liked.
“I wanted to feel confident in my own skin, learn how to make my hair look good, and encourage others to feel the same way,” she says.
Starting a business in a new state
Lee kept up her job at the salon and grew her social media following for the next five years. She claims that she felt content with her career and loved the individuals she worked with.
However, Lee, who was then expecting her fourth child, began to feel “the itch to move” in 2015.
She yearned for a change of scenery and warmer weather because she had lived in Illinois for the majority of her life.
She received an invitation from a friend to travel to Austin and Dallas, two of Texas’ largest cities, for a long weekend.
Lee claims she fell in love with the vast landscapes and southern warmth right away. That following weekend, she showed her four kids about apartments.
In January 2016, the family of five moved to Arlington, which is situated between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Relocating to a new state gave Lee the confidence to pursue a second goal that had been simmering in the back of her mind: starting a salon.
Lee opened Flourish Curls Salon in 2017 after using her savings of $50,000 and ten months to get started.
‘I’ve been able to build a six-figure career from working three days a week’
Thankfully, word of the salon spread fast, and within months of opening, Lee had a waiting list of clients.
Lee credits Flourish Curls’ success to the following she built on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
In the early 2000s, she began sharing product recommendations, style how-tos, client testimonials, hair videos, and more online. There are around 60,000 subscribers to her YouTube account.
Lee continues, “Having a strong social media community helped a lot.”
Additionally, there are not many salons in our neighborhood that specialize in curly and natural hair because many salons and cosmetology schools still do not teach their stylists how to work with those textures.
The services offered by Flourish Curls range in price from $150 to $375 and include hair cuts, twists, scalp exfoliation, and style. The first year Flourish Curls’ yearly revenue surpassed $1 million was 2023.
Lee, one of the salon’s eleven stylists, only sees a small number of customers each month.
She claims that increasing her workforce and bringing on two virtual assistants has prevented fatigue and the temptation to “always be on,” which is a typical problem for entrepreneurs.
In order to spend more time with her children, who are currently between the ages of 8 and 18, Lee front-loads her workweek by accepting meetings and appointments Monday through Wednesday.
“I believed that I would need to work more than fifty hours a week in my twenties in order to succeed,” Lee explains. “But by working three days a week most weeks, I have managed to establish a six-figure career.”
Lee has relished the independence and adaptability of creating her own work schedule as an entrepreneur.
However, she claims that the most rewarding part of owning her own salon has been the positive impact she has had on people’s lives by teaching them how to be at ease and confident with their natural hair.
As a “insecure, frustrated” adolescent, she wishes she had access to this community.
“There is nothing better than making people feel beautiful,” Lee continues.
Leave a Reply