From the brink of bankruptcy to $3.9 million
I joined the hair industry at 13 because I wanted to get out of the house. I qualified as a hairstylist at seventeen, a makeup artist and barber at eighteen, and I bought my first salon at nineteen. I had no idea what I was doing. Nobody taught me. I just knew I wanted to work hard, make my own money, and build something that was totally mine.
Naturally I thought I knew everything, and between growing a team of hairdressers and beauty therapists from two to twelve, throwing a second salon in the mix (because you know, more salons = more money, LOL not!) I realised quickly I was very out of my depth.
By 24, I was working 80+ hours a week, staring down bankruptcy, and wondering how I could be so fully booked and so completely broke at the same time. I had ATO debt, a business worth less than what I owed on it, and a salon that was slowly killing me. On paper, I was a successful salon owner. In reality, I was falling apart.
I grew up conditioned to believe I wouldn't amount to much. I survived a traumatic childhood and a domestic violence marriage before I ever had to worry about rebooking rates or profit margins. So when my business started going under, every voice I'd ever heard telling me I'd fail got really f*cking loud.
After surviving a horrible motorbike accident that took me off the floor for half a year, it gave me the push I needed to realise that my staff treating me like a doormat, my financial instability and illiteracy, and my general business and life failings was all on me. I let it happen. I did nothing about it. I was the problem. I had to do the work, and I did. Confronting, difficult, painful - all of it.
I flicked the second salon and the third, pulled my OG business apart, figured out what was broken, taught myself everything nobody had ever bothered to teach me, and built systems that worked. Within a few years, I took that same salon from the brink of collapse to $3.9 million in revenue and $391,000 in profit in a single year, while being completely 100% off the floor. I wasn't behind the chair. I ran the business like a real business.
I went on to build a barbershop from scratch that turned a profit in three months (again, without me on the floor at all). I bought, sold, and scaled a total of four businesses across the hair and beauty industry over sixteen years. I managed teams of up to 27 people at once, profited six figures while travelling the world, and eventually sold Huntress Hair Religion, my flagship salon in regional Victoria, for $592,000.
Somewhere along the way, I fell out of love with being a colourist and fell hard into something else: helping other salon owners stop making the same mistakes I'd spent years bleeding through.
I started Iconic Coaching in 2017 because the 24-year-old version of me, crying in the car park with $300 in the bank, needed someone like me… and that person didn't exist.
The coaching space in this industry was (and still is) full of people selling advice they've never had to take. People who've never run a salon and instead talk about "mindset" because they don't know how to read a P&L. That shit makes my blood boil. Everything I teach at Iconic comes from the floor, the books, the staff meetings that went sideways, the BAS payments that nearly broke me, and the wins I earned the hard way.
I'm also a certified NLP Master Practitioner, a certified Non-Violent Communication Practitioner, and an accredited DISC Advanced Profiler, because understanding humans is half the job. My team are the same. We've all owned, operated, and managed our own businesses. We don't teach from textbooks. We teach from scars.
