How Salon Suite Real Estate Creates Cash Flow Without Buying a Franchise

Karen Kaminski (00:00)
I’ve actually had a few of them. ⁓ One, I had a contractor who literally walked away with the deposit money and just peaced out. I rallied back after that.

I had another project where it was my third location and it was a subdivided space and there was two bathrooms in there that had the trunks that looked like a perfect vanilla shell.

Michelle Tack (01:54)
Hi, welcome to our podcast, Investor Fuel, about how we have a network of individuals to learn from and potentially invest with. I’m psyched today to have Karen Kaminski with me to discuss her unique position in terms of what she provides. And specifically, it’s something that we haven’t really seen here that often in terms of

Karen Kaminski (02:21)
you

Michelle Tack (02:23)
building out for salon. So we’re psyched about that to learn from you, Karen, ⁓ and go to the next ⁓ process. So Karen, again, thank you very much for joining. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching what you do as we had that discussion about how you are different than ⁓ large entities who are franchise model. So let’s dive in.

So first off, for people who may not be familiar with your world, can you give us a short version what your main focus ⁓ is these days?

Karen Kaminski (03:02)
So again, thank you so much for having me. Again, my name is Karen Kaminski. I’m owner of actually two companies. One is Allure Salon Suite Consulting, where I help individuals, ⁓ investors, and ⁓ development companies, property development companies create salon suites within their facilities. And I also own my own private salon suite company here in Pennsylvania. We have five locations that ⁓ start at.

this Grant and Wolfsberry area and go all the way down into the Philadelphia suburbs. So what we tend to do is everything that we do in our business, we actually help investors do in their business. we’re kind of always, you know, again, like we talked about battle testing, you know, everything that does work and doesn’t work. And we’re able to turn that on to our clients to make sure that they have successful businesses.

Michelle Tack (03:52)
That’s awesome. I love that. What caught my attention about what you have been able to do is the specific strings of taking what you’ve done in your own business, right, with the five salons and taking that directly to the investor who’s purchasing a property ⁓ and building out it to form, but not to be a franchise, really with, you know, the look and feel of a, you know,

a bespoke environment. And I think that’s awesome. That’s not easy in this climate. When you talk about how you’ve been able to do that, can you talk about how you facilitate that in terms of running your business smoothly, in terms of the process, et cetera, that some of our folks may be wanting to hear? Because there’s always a challenge of getting that process.

down correctly from the build out to the end stage, et cetera.

Karen Kaminski (04:52)
Absolutely. So when we start with clients, we just having me on board to help them gives a landlord a little bit more

validity when it comes to even talking to a client. What we see a lot of times is these investors have no experience in the salon suite world. So they come to me and then we help them from the whole entire aspect. We help them find the property. We help them negotiate their LOIs. We help them negotiate their lease.

Then we’re moving that on to the design and the build. ⁓ If they need help with their contractors, we could help them, source them out. And during the construction and even kind of beforehand, we started to, we moved into doing their branding and their logos and everything that.

their brand would represent. Because a lot of the landlords want to see kind of a vision before. So we actually do all of that. And then during construction, we’re setting up their website. actually starting to bring brand awareness through social media, because that’s where these tenants usually live. They live on Instagram and ⁓ Facebook and

not so much on LinkedIn, the investors are on LinkedIn, and we take them through the whole process. And once they open the doors, that’s where we take a step back, but we’re always here to help them. And what makes me like completely different than anybody else is my five locations. Whatever I do in my company is what we roll out to our.

⁓ actual clients in the consulting firm. And so we know that it works from anything from, especially now with the marketing, like we were talking about, you know, making sure the marketing works and you’re not just throwing away dollars and, you know, bringing that.

all together. And it was funny because I never thought to get into the consulting business. It was because people saw me on ⁓ saw my brand on like a Google way back in like 10 years ago when I started and people start calling me going, well, how did you do this? And how did you hook up that? And how did you make that work? And that’s how I turned it into a business. It was never I’m going to be a salon, salon suite owner, and I’m just going to show people how to do it. I kind of fell into it and, you know,

Michelle Tack (07:39)
really?

Karen Kaminski (07:56)
that has really taken off and again I’m able to you know use real life experience as to how things are supposed to work and what things don’t work and what things you want to avoid and what things you know you do want to go with.

Michelle Tack (08:10)
You know, that’s invaluable, Karen, as you obviously know, to, you know, doing it from the ground up with having you have done it. You know, as I shared with you before, when we were preparing for this podcast, my brother just sold his commercial real estate retail company. And I have seen, you know, things that other owners have done that have been, you know, unrealistic or it’s taken too long or there’s a problem with what contractor you’re building in. So

You really bring a superior level of knowledge to folks that are interested in this. Not every operator, I know, has things go well for perfect from the get-go. So maybe for those that are new to this type of environment, maybe a deal that went sideways or a time that you had it pivot fast. Can you talk to that or anything that challenges you had but you were able to recover from?

Karen Kaminski (09:09)
I’ve actually had a few of them. ⁓ One, I had a contractor who literally walked away with the deposit money and just peaced out. I rallied back after that.

I had another project where it was my third location and it was a subdivided space and there was two bathrooms in there that had the trunks that looked like a perfect vanilla shell.

Well, after months of working in there and everybody using the bathrooms, we realized the bathrooms were never hooked up to the sewer line and the day before we were supposed to get our final inspection, everything was pristine. Everything was cleaned. Everything was ready to go. And we had to then

tarp everything off. had a trench outside the hallway down another short hallway, 40 feet down another hallway, and then probably another 75 feet into the parking lot

Michelle Tack (09:55)
Oh my gosh.

Karen Kaminski (10:37)
to connect me to the sewer line. Because then the sewer line that they had like existing that was collapsing and it was hooked up to like a restaurant that had

wasn’t really using their grease traps. And in order to save the project, because I had a 15 year lease, I was like, no, we have to do it this way. So that was a cost. So now we make sure we camera every line before we even look to even talking about the LOI or the lease, camera all the lines. And then we have another project, honestly, that we got into. was a project out in.

Michelle Tack (11:06)
Thank

Karen Kaminski (11:15)
a bigger city like out in Jersey. And from the outside, looked great. But after we did our designs and our plans, like a typical salon suite, we realized the space cannot support it. You know, the venting is too far. There’s not enough power to support it. Like the landlord and you know, they didn’t realize just how these, you know, spaces run. Like each studio has three circuits.

Michelle Tack (11:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Karen Kaminski (11:40)
You you have to have one for your high-powered blow dryer and then the other two are for the lights and for everything else. And, you know, after we went through two sets of drawings and six months later, you know, I came to the final decision, like this isn’t going to go forward. It can’t go forward. And, you know, it’s disappointing because I had, you know, big visions for this, but it happens. And the one thing you have to rally quick, you have to pivot quick.

Michelle Tack (12:05)
Absolutely.

Karen Kaminski (12:09)
and move on and go on to the next one.

Michelle Tack (12:14)
You know, this is the type of stuff that people don’t talk about enough, right? And honestly, it’s what separates people that just dabble in real estate in this case from the ones who stay in the game long term. There are things that are going to come up. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad operator. Clearly, you’re not. ⁓ But, you know, things happen. Let me ask you, what are you most focused on ⁓ solving or scaling next? What is your next real goal?

goal for you in your business.

Karen Kaminski (12:46)
So what we started to do is I have a lot of, ⁓ I have a bunch of investors who got into this business and they’re not really operators. They were investors in different companies. And what we’re looking at now is the consulting company buying those brands and bringing it under one umbrella.

putting all our SOPs into place and then kind of growing a little portfolio and then putting it to market because the private equity companies are all looking for them. But when private equity buys them, they want to make sure that they’re running perfectly and it’s a handoff. So that’s one.

Michelle Tack (13:15)
Mm-hmm.

Interesting. Yeah,

that’s very unique. Thank you for that. That’s big, especially when you’ve already got your other salons in place. I have a question I want to pivot a little bit to things can get sort of compounded and ⁓ create chaos goes on in the type of field that you’re in. But I’m thinking about your network.

Right? Like people that you ⁓ maybe in your journey built relationships with to assist you to be so successful. ⁓ Can you talk to that at all in terms of what may have made the difference for you in being able to get over some of these hurdles in terms of your network or subject matter experts that you used?

Karen Kaminski (14:16)
So there was two people. So when I first started my company, I was the first private salon suite in the state. And other than that, there was two in Pittsburgh and there was two in York and that was one of the franchise models. So again, I was a sales rep, I was a single mom, but I knew I wasn’t gonna retire as a sales rep because Pennsylvania and New Jersey were the only two states that didn’t have salon suites. So I knew I wasn’t gonna retire. So I was like, okay, I’m going on the hunt for…

Space and I went to 17 different landlords and they all told me no they thought I was absolutely out of my mind They were like, do you know how much plumbing you have to put in? Do know how much electrical I said? Well, yeah, but this is this concept is all over the US. It’s just not here in Pennsylvania

so to those two people Kevin mess it he actually helped me get the financing to be able to do this and the other person was Joe Amato he was a

⁓ or a stock car, ⁓ no he was a drag racer. He was a racer. Yeah, he was a drag

Michelle Tack (15:57)
racer was a racer with drag racer because that name sounds

familiar for some reason i know that name

Karen Kaminski (16:04)
Yeah,

so he has shopping centers. So I had met up with them and I said, hey, listen, I want to do this concept. And he was like, my God, I know this concept. I’m like, do you? He’s like, yeah. He goes, I spend most of my time at West Palm Beach where Florida has like a ton of salon suites. He goes, I wish it was the perfect match. So he’s like, yeah, definitely. He was like,

Michelle Tack (16:19)
Absolutely.

Karen Kaminski (16:25)
We went through, he helped me finance the project. Like I just paid extra my rent to do that. It was my smallest location. It was 4,800 square feet, but it had 14 studios in a classroom because I would, I was still a sales rep. So I was bringing in guest artists and he got my start. But then what that did too is another person who helped me out was Greg Jones. He was a, um, a real estate, um, broker in the Philadelphia market and what happened

Michelle Tack (16:54)
Mm-hmm.

Karen Kaminski (16:55)
was I met him because I was looking for a property for a client. And it was through him he introduced me. And that’s how I ended up getting my second and third locations and my fourth location. And it was because I had my first location and I was in the beauty industry. And when I would talk to these landlords, I’d be like, no, this is how it is. This is what’s going to happen. I was able to get to the five locations and build them out.

have a nice little business going.

Michelle Tack (17:26)
You know, that’s incredible and very inspiring. I love the fact that people are willing to assist you, but obviously it was your persistence and your knowledge of your subject matter expertise in that area that really drove you. But there’s nothing like grit, right? Nothing replaces that. You have to. Especially I realized that.

Karen Kaminski (17:46)
You have to be a business

person is not for the faint of heart. And if you don’t have a thick skin, it gets difficult.

Michelle Tack (17:52)
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. It does.

Well, I just wanted to very much thank you for your time, your story, your perspective. We need more people in this space who doing it the right way. And I want to thank you again. I want to make sure that people are able to contact you. ⁓ And maybe they want to invest with you. Maybe they want to partner with you. Maybe they just want to learn something from you.

Do you mind providing both your email, the name of your company, your email address, and your cell phone place?

Karen Kaminski (18:28)
Absolutely. So the name of my company again is Allure, A-L-L-U-R-E, Salon Suite Consulting (alluresalonsuiteconsulting.com). My email is [email protected] and my cell phone number is 570-294-8979. And then my office number is 570-955-0693.

Michelle Tack (18:52)
That’s great. ⁓ We’re thrilled to have you. For those who ⁓ are listening to the podcast and want to continue seeing some of these ⁓ great podcasts that we have, we have some 100, please make sure you’re a subscriber so you can take advantage of things that come in the future. Again, Karen, thank you so much.