What’s the best way to handle things when a staff member leaves your salon? I’ve got a bird’s-eye view of the different approaches from working with so many salons through salonMonster. I’ve seen that some can lead to business success and others can be destructive and counter-productive.
After talking with a lot of salon owners about this, I can tell you that some have a very strong opinion on the subject: Clients belong to the salon. These owners figure they’ve spent good money on marketing, promotions and keeping the salon afloat. The client is theirs and staff members are blocked from the client contact list, end of story.
I receive many panicked calls from salon owners asking me to immediately shut down a stylist’s account and block their access when they find out that stylist is leaving. The team member is leaving and the owner is worried they’re going to take all their hard won clients with them!
I hear you folks, you put a lot of effort into building your business. But I’m sorry to tell you you’re wrong.
The salon doesn’t own the client.
The stylist doesn’t own the client.
The client owns the client!
The client is the only person who can decide who they want to see for their hair. You can help influence their decision, but the decision is theirs and theirs alone.
This realization is critical to properly handling salon staff departures. In fact, understanding this can help you run a healthier, more successful business.
If you came here from a search about the legal side of this — whether you can contact clients, whether you can be sued — that’s answered in full at the bottom of this page. The rest is what I think you should actually do.
Here’s what not to do when a stylist leaves
Blocking access to client records and contact details when a staff member is leaving may seem like a good idea, but it’s not as effective as it sounds. You are clearly demonstrating to your staff that you don’t trust them, and this leads to a lack of “buy in.” If your staff are not invested in your business, they are more likely to leave.
From my observations of business success at salonMonster I have noticed that the highest failure rate of multi-chair salons is amongst businesses that do not allow staff access to their clients’ contact records.
Blocking the stylist’s access after they have given notice might make you feel better but it doesn’t stop staff from getting client details. People are resourceful. They’ll often copy contact details before they give notice, or photograph or copy it out by hand from the front desk or with the help of a co-worker. The only impact blocking access will have is to create a negative work environment.
Another common “solution” is to not tell the client where the stylist has gone. You tell them you “don’t know,” but clients aren’t that naive. This is a surefire way to show them that you don’t respect them. You’re withholding information from them. You are clearly demonstrating that you don’t have their best interest in mind, and you’re as likely to push them away as to make them stay with you. After all, it’s not hard for someone to Google their stylist’s name and find out where they’ve gone.
So, what should you do when a stylist leaves?
Get ahead of the news. Notify all of the stylist’s clients that the stylist is moving. Send them an email or letter, or update them by phone. Show them that you have their best interests at heart.
Let the client know you have another stylist you think would be perfect for them. Explain how this stylist’s experience and skill set would be great match for their hair’s needs.
Offer them a discount for the next visit. If you can get them back into the salon and working with a new stylist your chance of retaining them as a client goes up exponentially. Giving them 25% off now is cheap compared to losing them as a client.
While none of these things will guarantee you won’t lose any clients, together they will increase your chances of retaining them for the long term.
Acknowledging that neither the salon or stylist have exclusive “rights” to a client can help tackle the challenge of staff departure more effectively. To believe you have exclusive rights to the client is to delude yourself.
The client is in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding where to spend their money. Knowing this, we can do our best to earn their trust and continued business.
Tara’s thoughts
Tara Main from SalonSkipper.com
With today’s technology, you’d be a fool not to think that your staff has already friended their clients on facebook, Instagram and whatever other social media platforms they use. Your clients and staff probably exchange texts and perhaps even emails. As owners, we should be encouraging relationship building. I preach transparency, it’s the only way to have your team feeling an integral part of your business. Blocking them from seeing client records means they may not be able to access pertinent information or reach out to their clients to follow up or encourage a return visit. It’s your job, as the salon owner, to make sure your salon is an environment that neither the staff nor clients want to leave. Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll really have no reason to be worried about a walk out or client “stealing”.
Brenda’s thoughts
Brenda Perham from Bamboo Consulting
Thanks Stephen for throwing this topic up for debate! Here’s my ten cents worth….
“Reason, season or a lifetime” is a quote that I really like. In reality stylists will always come and always go from your business – don’t forget as a salon owner you left the salon you worked at before you started your own business!
A note from 2026: Brenda’s paragraph below is from 2016, and the legal point in it has since moved — New Zealand replaced its Privacy Act in 2020, and Australia’s regime has shifted too. I have left her words exactly as she wrote them. The short version is that nobody “owns” personal information under current law in either country; the longer one is in the legal section below.
Essentially the clients do belong to the salon and their contact details were given to the salon so if a stylist is accessing them they are breaching privacy laws (that’s the way it is in Australasia – not sure about other countries laws) BUT in reality like Stephen says by the time they give you notice they have probably connected with their clients (especially via social media) and you are probably the last person to know that they are leaving. The horse has bolted.
The three solutions that Stephen has suggested are perfect for reaching out to the client in a professional manner but lets step back a bit further as I think there are a few things we can do to prevent the situation rather than trying to cure it after it happens.
Here’s something to think about…..what if the stylist that was leaving wasn’t a very busy stylist and maybe not really making you any money? You probably wouldn’t be so worried about it, you might even celebrate as they were essentially the ‘weakest link’ in the team. The real reason you are concerned as a salon owner is you can see that potentially big $ will be missing from your weekly turnover, meaning that your salon won’t be as profitable and you might not be able to make ends meet or even take a cut in your own income.
Here’s some points I think are worth considering, as stylists will always leave you (that’s a no brainer) but you can to a degree minimize the impact that is has on your business financially.
Ensure that everyone in your team delivers an amazing client journey, for every client, every time. You need to create a culture of care within your salon that a client doesn’t want to leave. If that culture of care is only coming from their stylist they won’t trust the rest of the team to look after them when their stylist leaves.
Don’t let stylists become superstars! Don’t you love awesome stylists that are naturally motivated and great at what they do. It’s easy to show favouritism towards them, maybe bend the rules for them and book all the new clients into them because you know they will come back. You need to mentor and grow your stylists so they are all operating at the same high level – the split between technical and client journey education should be 50/50. Always have a pecking order for new clients so the less aggressive stylist don’t get trampled while they are trying to build their clientele.
Make sure that your salon is future proofed by ensuring that if you lost a stylist and their clients it wouldn’t endanger the future of your business or you personally. I have had many a salon owner say that losing a top performing stylist was the best thing that happened to them in the big picture, as they looked into every corner of their business to save money and realized they had been running a pretty loose ship!
So in summary my recommendation is the ‘girl guide method’….be prepared! ☺
Keep records that can be handed over cleanly
Most of the panic in a departure is really about records. Who has the phone numbers, the colour formulas, the notes about which client hates having her neck touched. If that lives in one stylist’s head or one stylist’s phone, losing the stylist means losing the knowledge — and no policy fixes that after the fact.
The salons that handle departures best tend to have the same three things in place long before anyone hands in notice. Client records live in the business, not in a personal phone. Everyone can see the clients they work with, because locking people out breeds exactly the behaviour it is meant to prevent. And the data can be exported at any time, so nobody has to argue about who is holding it hostage.
That last one is the reason salonMonster works the way it does — your client list, history and formulas export whenever you want, without asking me first. I would say the same about any system you are weighing up. If a vendor cannot tell you how to get your own client list back out, that is your answer about them.
The legal questions, answered
Everything above is what I think. This part is the law, as best I understand it, because a lot of people arrive here in the middle of a bad week and need the factual answer before they can hear anyone’s opinion.
None of this is legal advice. I build salon software. I’m not a lawyer, and nobody on my team is either. The law here shifts with your province, your state, your country, whether you’re an employee or renting a chair, and whatever you signed on your first day. If there’s real money in it, go spend an hour with an employment lawyer where you actually are — it’s cheaper than the alternative. Everything below links out to the regulators so you can check me.
Is it illegal to contact clients when leaving a salon?
Usually not on its own. It comes down to what you signed, and how you left.
In most of Canada and the US, nothing stops you telling your clients where you’ve gone. What can stop you is a contract — normally a non-solicitation clause. How much those are worth varies wildly:
- Ontario banned non-competes outright for anything signed on or after 25 October 2021. Older ones aren’t automatically void though, so check the date on yours. Non-solicits are still fair game either way (the plain-language guide, the statute).
- Quebec runs on the Civil Code, not common law, so it’s a different test altogether. One bit worth knowing: if you were fired without serious cause, the non-compete being waved at you may already be dead (art. 2095).
- In the US, a handful of states — California, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Minnesota — void employee non-competes outright, and no amount of clever drafting saves them. There’s no federal ban either: the FTC’s 2024 rule never took effect and was pulled off the books in February 2026, so it’s state law all the way down. The FTC’s page is where to check what’s true today.
And if you rent your chair rather than draw a wage, none of this lands quite the same way — your obligations come from a rental agreement, not an employment contract, and courts treat those differently. Worth knowing too: whether you’re really a contractor gets decided by how the work actually runs day to day, not by what the paperwork calls you (the US Department of Labor spells this out).
So who owns the client list?
Strictly speaking, nobody does. I know that sounds like a dodge, but it is the actual legal answer, and it is the same thing I have been saying since 2016.
Privacy law doesn’t recognise owning someone’s personal information. It recognises who controls it — who decides what it was collected for and how it gets used. The salon is normally the controller of the details it took down. The client keeps rights over that information no matter what, and neither of you can sign those away on her behalf.
So “whose list is it?” is really two questions. Who holds the record, and what each of you is allowed to do with what’s on it.
In Canada that’s privacy law — PIPEDA federally, though BC, Alberta and Quebec each have their own statute that applies instead (here’s which one covers you). We’re a BC company, so for a lot of our salons the regulator that matters is the BC Information and Privacy Commissioner, not the federal one.
In the US it’s usually not privacy law at all — it’s trade secret law. That difference matters more than it sounds, because a client list only counts as a trade secret if the salon actually treated it like one. Restricted access, something in writing, not a file anyone could print off the front desk. You have to earn that protection. You don’t get it just by wanting it.
And on “but I only kept it in my head” — I had this wrong in an earlier version of this article, so let me be careful with it. The answer genuinely depends on where you are.
In Canada, the test follows what you’re using it for, not where it’s stored. Using client details you picked up at the salon to drum up business somewhere else is a use of that information whether it’s in a spreadsheet or your own phone. What changes if you never copied anything is how hard it is for anyone to prove.
In the US, it’s a real distinction, not just an evidence problem. A trade secret claim needs you to have taken something improperly, or broken a confidentiality duty. Never copied anything, never signed anything? Remembering who your own clients are generally isn’t misappropriation. Download the list on your way out and that’s another story — and remembering some of it afterwards doesn’t undo the download.
In the UK and EU, GDPR’s “purely personal or household” exemption is a lot narrower than people hope. Keeping contact details to tout for business isn’t personal use, and that’s exactly what this is.
Can a salon sue you for taking clients?
Three ways, and most people only think of two.
- Something you signed. A non-solicit, usually.
- Something you took. See the privacy and trade-secret business above.
- The way you left. This is the one nobody expects. Canadian courts have held departing employees liable with no clause and no copied data at all — purely for organising an exit on the quiet while still drawing a wage. The leading case is RBC Dominion Securities Inc v Merrill Lynch Canada Inc, 2008 SCC 54, and the damages were pinned to the notice they should have given.
Suing over clients who simply decide to follow you afterwards is much harder, because — and here’s my whole argument in one line — nobody owns a client’s decision but the client. The risk lives in how you leave, not in what she chooses once you’ve gone.
What if a stylist or contractor walked off with the client book?
There are really two separate questions here, and they do not have the same answer.
The records question is: what actually left, who had access, and what you owe as the business holding that information. If you’re in the US and thinking about a trade-secret claim, the first thing a lawyer will ask is what you did to keep that list confidential — and the answer usually decides the whole thing before anyone gets near a courtroom.
The clients question is the rest of this article. It starts with picking up the phone yourself, before anyone else does.
If you’re reading this from outside Canada or the US
Everything above is Canadian and US law. The UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand each run their own version, and “the list belongs to the salon” doesn’t translate cleanly into any of them.
Two things worth knowing: in Australia, small businesses under the turnover threshold sit outside the Privacy Principles entirely, which covers an awful lot of salons. In New Zealand there’s no such let-off — the Privacy Act 2020 applies whatever size you are.
Start with your own regulator: the ICO in the UK, the OAIC in Australia, the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand.
None of which changes the thing I said in 2016. The law can tell you what you are allowed to do. It cannot tell a client where to book. She decides that on her own, the way she always has — and the salons that come through a departure best are the ones that planned for that instead of trying to legislate their way around it.