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Barbering can be a surprising lucrative career. Especially men's barbering. Has a particularly high dollar/hour rate too. Tooling is $1k for clippers and sciss

Barbering can be a surprising lucrative career. Especially men's barbering. Has a particularly high dollar/hour rate too. Tooling is $1k for clippers and scissors and razors. Not sure about chairs, but probably another $1k. Suppose you charge $20 a cut, typical cut takes ~15-20 minutes and you're open 360 days a year. 10 cuts/day => $72k/yr. 2-3 hours of work a day. 20 cuts/day => $144k/yr. 4-5 hours of work a day. Find reasonable rent and you're netting a pretty good profit. And yes it's an easy space to enter, but generally, once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.

tnli 6y ago
Assuming you can keep your customer queue sufficient at all times, and that your clients can come when you are open. Most likely this means a location that already has a high throughput of potential customers and that also most likely means a place that has high rents. Sure, if you already have a place, like an extra room in your house, and you manage to establish yourself on the area. But even then you might find out that your first client wants to come in at 7 or 8 am, to get ready for whatever work thing they have that day, and the last client wants to come in at 8 pm, because they can’t earlier.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  By the sound of it barbering resembles consulting a lot. Being in a lively area could help find some customers at first, but once you have established relationships with customers that value you specifically you can probably set up anywhere. (And if someone wants to come in at strange hours for important work appearances, I’m sure they won’t mind being charged double the price either!)
strogonoff 6y ago
> once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks. I’m curious whether it’s really specific to male population, and if so why… That aside, and I can’t believe that this is where the thread took us, I empathise so much with this. Even in countries where I can converse easily with anybody it’s a struggle for me to trust someone with my hair, despite me presumably not really caring about it. Now living in countries where I don’t speak local languages and locals predominantly don’t speak any of mine (or do so with much difficulty) I haven’t gone to a barber in years—I pretty much gave up and just live with terrible hair. I guess if I ever find “my barber” I may be willing to travel far to get my haircut.
ponker 6y ago
LOL. 360 days a year tells me everything I need to know about your analysis.

tnli 6y ago

Assuming you can keep your customer queue sufficient at all times, and that your clients can come when you are open. Most likely this means a location that already has a high throughput of potential customers and that also most likely means a place that has high rents. Sure, if you already have a place, like an extra room in your house, and you manage to establish yourself on the area. But even then you might find out that your first client wants to come in at 7 or 8 am, to get ready for whatever work thing they have that day, and the last client wants to come in at 8 pm, because they can’t earlier.

strogonoff 6y ago
By the sound of it barbering resembles consulting a lot. Being in a lively area could help find some customers at first, but once you have established relationships with customers that value you specifically you can probably set up anywhere. (And if someone wants to come in at strange hours for important work appearances, I’m sure they won’t mind being charged double the price either!)

strogonoff 6y ago

> once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks. I’m curious whether it’s really specific to male population, and if so why… That aside, and I can’t believe that this is where the thread took us, I empathise so much with this. Even in countries where I can converse easily with anybody it’s a struggle for me to trust someone with my hair, despite me presumably not really caring about it. Now living in countries where I don’t speak local languages and locals predominantly don’t speak any of mine (or do so with much difficulty) I haven’t gone to a barber in years—I pretty much gave up and just live with terrible hair. I guess if I ever find “my barber” I may be willing to travel far to get my haircut.

ponker 6y ago

LOL. 360 days a year tells me everything I need to know about your analysis.