About In My Salon
I built my salon business the hard way. You don’t have to.
I’m Rachel Allen. Twenty-plus years behind the chair, more than twelve of them running my own studio, and I still love it. Somewhere in there I taught myself the part cosmetology school left out: how to run a business. In My Salon is where I hand you the map I had to draw myself.
Read this first
You are not behind.
Here’s something I wish someone had told me a lot sooner. The reason you feel behind isn’t that you’re behind. It’s that you’re holding your business skills up against your craft skills, and those took you years to build too.
You can do a flawless balayage and still freeze when a client asks what it costs to run your website. You can read a curl pattern in three seconds and still have no idea what “local SEO” means. That doesn’t make you bad at business. It makes you someone who was trained to be brilliant with your hands, then handed a business and wished good luck.
Nobody sat you down and explained any of this. So no, you’re not behind. You were just never given the map. That’s the part we can fix.
My story
It started with an empty suite and a lot of nerve.
I didn’t start with a plan. I started with an empty suite, a mirror, and the quiet panic of an appointment book with a lot of blank space in it.
There was no mentor. No one showing me how to build a website, write a blog post, get found on Google, or turn a first-time client into a regular. I learned it the slow and expensive way: trying things, breaking things, staying up too late, and figuring it out one mistake at a time.
Over twelve-plus years in my own studio, I taught myself how to build my website, use blogging to bring clients in, climb the local search results, grow an email list that actually gets opened, design signature services, raise my prices without losing the people I love working on, and build the systems that keep my chair full without me living on Instagram.
Today I run a salon studio I’m proud of in downtown San Francisco called Makers Make Parlor, where I specialize in curly hair, color, smoothing treatments, scalp health, and the kind of client experience that gets people rebooking before they’re out the door.
But In My Salon was never about teaching you to do hair. You’ve got that handled. This is about the other half of the job. The half nobody warned us about.
What I believe
Beauty pros deserve real business education, not recycled pep talks.
Most of us walked out of school knowing how to perform a service and knowing almost nothing about how to find the person who’ll pay for it. How to build a website. How to show up on Google. How to write something that brings clients in while you sleep. How to price your work like you believe in it. How to build income that isn’t tied to standing on your feet for ten hours a day.
That gap isn’t your fault. But it is your problem, and it happens to be a solvable one.
And one idea runs the whole show: build a salon business that supports your life. Not one that eats it.
What I teach
Plain English, no marketing degree required.
Just what worked for me, explained the way I’d explain it to the stylist in the suite next door.
Getting Found Online
Local SEO, Google, Pinterest, and blogging, so the right clients find you first.
View posts →Client Experience & Retention
Turn first-timers into regulars who rebook before they leave.
View posts →The hard way
Lessons I learned the hard way.
Some of these cost me money. All of them cost me time. You can have them for free.
I undercharged for years because raising prices felt rude. It isn’t. It’s how you stay in business long enough to get great.
I chased the algorithm before I built anything I actually owned. Your website and your email list don’t vanish because an app changed its mind. Build those first.
I made my first website pretty instead of useful. Pretty is nice. Booked is better.
I waited way too long to start collecting email addresses. Every name I didn’t capture was a client I had to go find all over again.
I treated “marketing” like a dirty word, until I realized it just means helping the right people find you. That one reframe changed everything.
I thought systems were for big businesses. Turns out a one-chair operation needs them most, because you are the whole team.
Why this exists
Why I created In My Salon.
Because I remember exactly what it felt like to do this alone, in the dark, with no one to ask.
I built In My Salon to be the resource I needed back then. The honest answer. The actual next step. The explanation that doesn’t assume you already speak the language. A place where an independent beauty pro can learn the business side without getting sold a dream or talked down to.
I’m not here to be your guru. I don’t have a secret. I just walked this road a few years ahead of you, kept notes the whole way, and I’m glad to share them.
Come hang out in your inbox with me.
It’s free, and you can leave anytime. No hard feelings.