Miss Jessie's: Creating a Successful Business from Scratch---Naturally

by Miko Branch

  “Ever bartend before?” Christine asked.

  “No, but I’ve waitressed, and I think I can do it,” I said, feeling confident.

  “Well, all right, you look the part. It pays fifteen dollars an hour, but you get to keep your own tips. How does that sound?”

  “That sounds real good, what time?”

  I got there early to get a few quick tips on mixing drinks from Christine. We stuck to the basics. If someone ordered something I didn’t know how to make, I just had to smile sweetly and offer a rum and Coke or something. It seemed easy enough, because all night almost everyone was ordering Moët or Cristal champagne, no mixing necessary. After the four-hour job, I thought I could make about a hundred dollars with tips and cover my cable and utility bills. I was wrong! I made close to two thousand in tips. It turned out to be a huge baller event, with people like that guy who lived around the corner from us on State Street—Jay-Z.

  At the end of the shift, Christine came up to me. “Good job, Miko! If you want, you can go home now. The guy has already paid us, and I’m ready to get out of here.”

  “No, I’m good. I’ll keep working until the last guest leaves, if that’s okay with you.”

  You have to be willing to do anything, including taking a second job, in order for your business to thrive.

  I didn’t want to leave, because the dollars were still flying at me. It was so much cash that I barely had room in my pocketbook. The night’s work enabled me to not only make rent but also to keep my dream alive just long enough to build momentum. Rolling up my sleeves and mixing drinks wasn’t beneath me. The experience taught me that a willingness to work hard and learn can carry you through any situation and help further your goal.

  GROWING HANDS

  My first home client was a pretty woman named Sayeda. I started doing her hair while I was still at Joseph’s. My plan was to do hair at home as my side hustle until I had a steady base of clients to build a bigger business. I liked to test the waters first.

  Titi and I met Sayeda at one of those hipster parties in Harlem that was full of actors, who were among Titi’s circle of friends. “Oh my God, I love your hair!” Sayeda gushed at us, then immediately introduced herself. “Are you two sisters? Do you do it yourselves?”

  “As a matter of fact, Miko does it for me,” said Titi, my biggest cheerleader and unofficial publicist. “She’s one of the top stylists in Manhattan.”

  “Can you do mine?”

  Sayeda sat in my chair for twelve hours. Her hair was very thick, and I was not quite at pro status yet, which made me nervous. Over the years, there had been a lot of damage. Years of harsh chemicals and dyes had caused her hair to come out in chunks, by the root—a not-uncommon phenomenon for women of color who put their hair through the wringer in the name of a more European standard of beauty. Sayeda had a chin-length bob that she could never get to grow past her shoulders because of the poor health of her hair roots. Before I cut and styled her hair, I used peppermint oil to soothe her scalp, and I soaked her brittle hair follicles in the richest conditioners I could find on the drugstore shelves.

  “You know, Sayeda, you’ve got to be kinder to your hair. It’s a part of you,” I told her as we got to know each other in the intimate environment. “Treat it well, and it might actually grow to the length you dream about.”

  A few months later, Sayeda came back to me with lush, long tresses past her shoulders.“Oh my God, Miko, you have growing hands. My mother said if I wasn’t her child, she’d think I was wearing a wig!”

  Take care of your scalp, and condition hair from tip to root. This is the foundation of beautiful hair.

  She told everyone she knew, and soon my chair was always busy. All at once I had a business. It was actually working! Not having to work for someone at a nine-to-five job, billing my own clients, making money, and fulfilling my creative side made me feel good about myself for the first time in my life. I was finally coming into my own, hanging out with hip Brooklyn artists and freelancers, sleeping late, and living life on my own terms.

  SISTER ACT

  Never would it have occurred to me that anything I did in business could influence Titi. She was doing well at ABC, filling in for other reporters, conducting interviews, and working as a field producer. My big sister was on track to a promising future. I really admired her for it. But unbeknownst to me, she’d caught the entrepreneurial bug, observing all the small businesses that had started to sprout up in the neighborhood. Titi also saw the freedom I was enjoying as my own boss.

  “I handed in my notice today,” she told me one day out of the blue.

  “What? Why?”

  Titi had a way of keeping quiet and brooding on something until she was ready to spring into action.

  “There’s too much politics in network television. I can’t own whatever it is I’m doing, and I’m just not feeling it anymore. I am done.”

  All along, I had assumed she was happy. Titi was always interested in current affairs. She was knowledgeable, able to communicate even the most complex of ideas persuasively. ABC seemed to be right in her wheelhouse.

  Titi caught hell from our family. Miss Jessie simply could not understand why Titi would leave a “good job” at ABC and told her flat out it was a stupid move. “Girl, you’re a fool to throw away that good job like that,” she scolded, never one to bite her tongue. “If that ain’t stupid!”

  Daddy, who’d gotten settled with the fact that Titi would not be an entrepreneur and would instead build a career in the news media, made no secret of the fact that he was annoyed. A daughter who works for a major network news producer comes with plenty of bragging rights, and she’d taken that away from him.

  But I admired her for it. Giving up a job like that took guts. With no client base to speak of, Titi decided to become an agent, jumping without a net and determined to build something from nothing.

  In 1996 she opened an office on Twelfth Street in the Village under the name Icon Creative Artists and started representing photographers, using her connections as a producer and her ingenious way with words to pitch for them. The business wasn’t generating any money until Titi started representing me; her passion for my work shone through to prospective media and advertising outlets. It made perfect sense for the two of us to get together.

  Always one to define everything, Garrett told us: “Miko, you’re the visionary, and Titi is the facilitator, dedicated to your dream. The two of you together are a powerful force.”

  He also referred to us as the Delany sisters, after those two women in Harlem, Bessie and Sadie, who lived together their whole lives, both well past a hundred. We used to laugh every time he called us that, but there was something to it. Ever since we were children, we’d been a great team. By coincidence, our separate paths were starting to overlap more and more. A lot of the work Titi was getting for her celebrity photographers came through some of the top hair salons around New York City. She also arranged a lot of shoots for hair product companies. When she got home and we swapped stories about our day, it occurred to us that we were essentially in the same business.

  The fact that my sister was proud of my work and wanted to represent me felt good. I was deeply touched that she placed so much faith in my talent. Titi hustled hard for me, arranging my first photo shoot through a referral she got from a cameraman at ABC. I used my own salon clients and even filled in as a model myself. Titi took care of everything, from the catering (Miss Monique’s fried chicken and potato salad) to the delivery of the pictures, reaching out to all the black hair magazines. Adrienne Moore, the editor of Hype Hair, one of the hottest hair publications on the market, gave us our very first double-page center spread. Titi’s efforts paid off handsomely.

  After a robbery at her agency’s Village headquarters and months of financial struggle, Titi finally decided to close the doors of that office, relocate her operations to the apartment, and focus entirely on helping me in my career, which was now making money for both of us. I was happy
to split my proceeds with her 50/50; I was smitten with the fact that my smart corporate-type sister wanted to represent me exclusively. Titi had to make a move; if not, she would have had to go back to working as someone’s employee. The life of an entrepreneur was too good to give up on. That freedom, with no one telling her what to do, must have felt too good. Besides, being an entrepreneur was the new cool. Now Titi just had to make the money to go with the profile. She needed me on board to get her business off the ground.

  And soon enough, she did. A wonderful woman, Sonia Alleyne, editor of what was then Black Elegance magazine, gave Titi a referral that led to an advertising gig. I did all the models’ hair for a print campaign for the Ashley Stewart fashion label, netting us eight thousand dollars—the most money we’d ever seen. It was a perfect example of how our strengths blended together, and confirmation beyond a few satisfied customers in the four walls of my living room that I had something. People in the advertising and fashion industries recognized that I was doing good work, and that meant the world to me.

  BREAKING OUT

  While I was enjoying a private moment in between hair appointments, Titi burst into my room.“Miko, we are going to open a salon.”

  Be Fearless Checklist

  1. Leap into the unfamiliar–but read up on it first.

  2. Ask for honest feedback from someone you trust.

  3. If your career is on autopilot, challenge yourself. Be uncomfortable with the comfortable.

  4. Associate with diverse people who can teach you something new.

  5. If you need to learn a skill, find a mentor or go back to school.

  6. Take calculated risks. The only thing worse than failing is refusing to try.

  As unexpected as it was, taking our partnership to the next level made perfect sense. Knowing me better than anyone else, she realized I needed that extra nudge. You’ve got to stretch to grow, but sometimes I felt too safe and cozy in my own little space to want to move. The thought of having to cover a higher overhead was terrifying. Titi was pushing me to take a risk and step out of my comfort zone. I wanted more, but I believed I was already doing something big with a few clients a day to cover my life expenses, with a little extra as disposable money. I was loving the freedom to have fun. The idea of leaving the house scared me.

  Titi’s insistence pushed me out of my own way. I went along with my sister because she was so insistent. We looked all over downtown Brooklyn and even considered a spot that was thirty-five hundred dollars a month. Garrett was highly upset when I told him the asking rent.“That would be a stupid move,” he told us. “Make the money first before you put that kind of pressure on yourselves.”

  In the spring of 1997, Titi found the perfect spot—a small two-chair salon at 103 Bond Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. She marched me up Atlantic Avenue, three lights up from our loft, and pointed to this cute, leafy area around the corner that almost looked like a village, with brownstones, or what the locals call “row houses,” and a couple of boutiques nearby. It was mostly residential, but there was plenty of traffic going by, and the place felt safe.

  Okay, I thought, drawing in a deep breath. I can do this.

  At Garrett’s suggestion, we called the place Curve, a cool and simple name that suggested something feminine and different from the norm. After all, we were never those “straight line” kind of girls.

  Curve was the first salon of its kind in Brooklyn. Its decor was eclectic, warm, and inviting. We used the revenue from the Ashley Stewart campaign as seed money, which just about covered our up-front costs for rent, renovations, and furnishings. We did it all on a budget, with a little help from our mother, who had a great eye for interior design. On a mission to give the place some style, Titi hunted the thrift shops, where she found a set of four retro burgundy leather swivel chairs made out of beer barrels for a hundred dollars. We restored and converted them into salon dryers.

  Use What You’ve Got to Start Any Business

  1. If you don’t have the capital, use your contacts.

  2. Homeownership is another resource, because it’s possible to start something out of your own living room or basement.

  3. Hard work and creativity–not to mention your own God-given talent–are assets that can be part of the foundation of your start-up.

  Whatever the business you hope to launch, use all that you’ve got. Once you really start looking, you’ll find you possess more assets than you ever realized.

  Using the renovation skills we’d honed as children when Daddy was selling properties, Titi and I spent the first month after we signed the lease sanding and staining the floors a red mahogany. We worked within our tight budget, shopping at Home Depot and learning what we had to do. Our mother, who was thrilled to help, used her artistic skills to do an amber-and-gold-glazed brushed wall treatment behind the dryer chairs to make them stand out.

  All this activity—hammering, sanding, and painting—attracted the attention of Victor, a guy with a distinct Harlem flair. Even though Victor lived uptown, we already knew him from the neighborhood because he worked across the street from our apartment on Atlantic Avenue as an X-ray technician. Although he was around our age, he was fast-talking and worldly, an old soul with a lot of wisdom to share. It felt good to have a man we could trust close by. Victor was always looking out for us and offering ideas. For all his rough edges, he had his own creative side, with a passion for photography and rare art objects. Anyone we attracted into our orbit seemed to have this artistic streak.

  He was thrilled when he saw what we were up to, always ready to lend a hand putting up shelves or doing some heavy lifting. “Y’all amaze me,” he told us one day when he was hanging out in our shop on his coffee break. “I can’t believe the two of you sanded these floors with that heavy industrial sanding machine. And you stained them with this fly-ass burgundy color, too?”

  “Sure, Victor. Who else is going to do it if we don’t do it ourselves?” Titi replied.

  “What’s so amazing about that?” I asked him.

  “Back in Harlem, most women with your beauty would be living and eating off their looks,” he said. “Not you two! Y’all are working hard to pursue your dreams. That’s what I love to see!”

  It was coming together. By the time we were finished, Curve looked more like a hip, cozy living room and less like a typical salon, filled with plants, bunches of fresh-cut flowers we bought at the Korean market, and comfortable chairs. It was a combination of the Southern hospitality we’d learned from Miss Jessie, and the elegant aesthetic we’d picked up from our mother, who always knew exactly where to place a chair or drape a fabric. Visually, it stood out, especially from the street, because it had a huge glass picture window with two styling stations lit by the kind of lightbulbs typical of an old Hollywood movie set.

  Even then, we were our cheapest and best hair models. Titi got one of the photographers she’d been representing to do a professional photo session at a deep discount. A portrait of us with healthy hair stood front and center in the salon window. People were compelled to stop and look. There was even a stoplight on the corner of Bond Street and Atlantic Avenue that held cars in front of our salon.

  All eyes were on us, and before long, the place was jumping. But I still didn’t have peace of mind. It upset me that Titi had pushed me to jump in with both feet while she was maintaining a part-time job at Citibank’s headquarters—a gig she’d taken as backup. I understood why. We had to be certain we could pay the rent. But being in the salon by myself terrified me. I had never been that exposed to the public, and I needed my sister there with me. It was time for her to be all the way in.

  “Titi, I can’t be in the salon alone all day,” I told her. “You never know who’s going to come in off the street. It’s not safe for me! You need to be there, too.”

  Realizing that the gig could be up if I bailed, Titi decided to join me at the salon full-time. Soon we became known as “the two girls with the cute salon.”

  TAG TEA
M

  Even though most of our business revolved around hair straightening (I did a damn good relaxer), we wanted the salon to become known as the go-to place for healthy hair. With my early training at Hair Styling by Joseph, mixed with other techniques I’d learned along the way, I’d become a well-rounded stylist and had complete confidence in my craft. After seeing all the damage that women were doing to their hair, I felt the emphasis had to be on conditioning and counterbalancing the harsh effects of chemical relaxers. The focus paid off, and we made a profit within the first month of business. We were both excited!

  At first Titi supported me in the business by taking calls, greeting customers, handling marketing, and administering payroll; she did all the grunt work restoring, maintaining, and cleaning the premises. Beyond that, she brought some business sense. My book was always full for the simple reason that my brilliant sister asked our satisfied customers when they wanted to make their next appointment. As a one-woman show in our studio apartment, I never thought to rebook a client; I had to wait until my clients called me. That one small change in approach had a huge impact, improving cash flow, leaving less to chance, and making my schedule much more predictable and easy to manage.

  Get a partner, but choose wisely. Two heads can be better than one, as long as you have a clear understanding of who does what the best.

  Titi had a way with the customers, perfectly articulating the process for them with a quick informal consultation before they had the actual hair service. She’d examine the condition of their hair and make follow-up suggestions to help them improve their hair health and maintain their look long after they left the salon. It was all part of the rotation, which prevented clients from feeling like they were sitting around untended to. Unlike the beauty shop experience, where women might wait around for hours before seeing a stylist, our system moved them through our chairs as quickly as possible. We did not want to waste their valuable time. What wait time they did have, we wanted to be a pleasurable experience, so we always played music and offered good, wholesome conversation to give our ladies the sense that they were having a fun day at the salon. This approach helped us create a steady stream of great customers. It was a little of Miss Jessie coming through. She never let anyone step through her door without acknowledgment.