Finding your Niche

It’s Monday morning at 8:30am it’s my office hour that I have scheduled out for my self….It’s my least favorite hour of my week! I like to create. I like change, which if you have been with me you would know because I change the furniture in the shop monthly! Ok back to Monday mornings. I used to half ass do all the “business” stuff whenever I have a free minute, well those free minutes kept getting further and further apart and the “business” stuff got shoved aside and then I started drowning in it. So Monday mornings 8-9am I have scheduled out to do all things business so that my creative side can flow freely and not stress about ordering things and cleaning and call/emailing back.

I have found that I do love to write, and tell a story so I am going to attempt to blog about hair. I will probably fail more often than I success at this but hey I am trying.

A few years ago I found out what a niche was, it has a pretty fancy definition but basically it’s a thing, place, position, that you love and enjoy and are good at. Mine is color and extensions. Hence the additional name to Rustic Salon. I want color and extensions to be the thing that I mostly focus my creativity on. Once you find your niche you get to give your all to it, instead of giving you all to a bunch of different areas in your profession you get to focus on that one thing. Mine go hand in hand. Without the color part the extension part doesn’t blend well, and while I can do color wonderfully and it looks great on its own adding extensions can really make it pop!

In 2013 I ventured down to California to a stylist I had been watching for a few years on You Tube. She had stated teaching classes on her extension and color methods. I dove in head first and wanted to know all the things. I spent the next 3 years flying down a couple times a year for extended classes and spent a full year in their online trainings. After that year I found where they were headed wasn’t for me. I had learned what I wanted and then some and decided to go my own way. At first it was really hard to watch as the tribe moved on with out me but eventually the fear of missing out passed and I found what worked for me here at Rustic.

Now having a niche means basically every thing/service you provide works with that niche. That doesn’t work for everyone and I had to come to terms with that and realize I would lose some clients and gain others. While in the online program I was in for the year they really encouraged you do remove any services that didn’t go with extensions. I tried that and I didn’t like it. I missed my clients and I felt bad and THAT has never been my goal, to feel bad about what I was doing. I wanted to have my niche and still be able to do non niche things.

Extensions and color are not for everyone and it took me a couple years to figure that out, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find a common ground and be able to have the best of both worlds. Rustic Salon color and extension boutique has given me a way to have my cake and eat it too.

All my love and style, Tab