Beyond The Chair: What Other Industries Can Teach Us About Running a Salon

Lorenzo Colangelo has run the gallery (Professional Independent Salon of the Year at the 2025 Pro Hair Awards) for 30 years. In this new series, he tells Pro Hair all about the surprising lessons he’s learnt about salon ownership through looking outside the hair industry.

Over the years, I’ve built a successful salon business. Not just by refining my technique or watching what other salons are doing, but by learning from unexpected places. Podcasts, business books and conversations with clients who are CEOs and leaders – that’s where some of my biggest mindset shifts have come from.

When you stop looking sideways at what your competitors are doing and start looking at how other innovators are building culture, motivating people and creating, high-performing environments… that’s when things really change.

The Book That Changed My Thinking

Here’s something I didn’t expect to say when I opened my first salon: one of the most valuable lessons I ever learnt about leadership came from a story set in a smelly fish market in Seattle. Not exactly what you picture when you think of a luxury hair salon, is it? But bear with me…

I was in my twenties when a client gave me a copy of Fish! – a short, punchy business book by Stephen C. Lundin and a few others, about workplace culture. It tells the story of a woman tasked with turning around a toxic office team. We’re talking low energy, low productivity and staff who couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone. Sound familiar?

On her lunch break one day, she stumbles across a fish market, and she’s totally struck by how alive the place feels. The energy, the laughter, the teamwork. These people are slinging cold fish across the stalls and still having a better time than most of us on the salon floor. It’s wet, it stinks… and yet it’s buzzing.

She starts chatting to the guys at the fish stalls and learns there are four core principles that guide their culture, ultimately transforming her own workplace by applying them:

1. Be There
   It sounds simple, but it’s about more than just turning up. It means being present with people – whether it’s your client, your assistant or your teammate. In a salon, this is massive. You can feel the difference when someone’s really with you versus just going through the motions. And it goes both ways – if you want your team to show up, you need to show up for them first.
2. Play
   This isn’t about messing around; it’s about bringing lightness and joy to the everyday. In hairdressing – where we’re often flat out from 9am till 6pm – a bit of humour and fun can make the whole thing better. BUT – and this is crucial – fun only works when people know their role and are good at it. There’s nothing worse than the team joker who fails to master the simplest task!
3. Make Their Day
   This one’s magic. It can be as small as noticing someone looks a bit flat and making them a coffee without asking, or offering to help a junior finish their end-of-day jobs so they’re not the last one out the door. I always say: if you consciously try to make someone’s day, you will.
4. Choose Your Attitude
   You get to decide what version of yourself walks through the door every morning, and the attitude you bring affects everything. If everyone on your team of 20 brings just 10% more energy, you’re looking at a 200% uplift in the room. That’s massive.

What blew my mind about Fish! is that it took a setting as unglamorous as a fish stall and made it a blueprint for brilliant workplace culture. And that’s the point – the principles are universal. You don’t need a shiny floor and a glossy front desk to have a team that’s energised and proud to be there.

This was one of the first business books I ever read, and I still draw on it now. The biggest lesson? If you want different results, look in different places. Don’t just double down on targets or panic about sales; look at the people, the energy and the day-to-day interactions. That’s where the magic starts.

So, if your team feels flat or your culture has slipped, don’t just work harder; look wider. Step back, stay curious and open your mind, because the next big idea is almost certainly sitting outside the safe four walls of your salon…