{"id":8449,"date":"2026-08-16T09:36:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T16:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/?p=8449"},"modified":"2026-08-12T09:28:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T16:28:51","slug":"what-sally-lemmo-taught-me-about-hair-boundaries-and-showing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/what-sally-lemmo-taught-me-about-hair-boundaries-and-showing-up\/","title":{"rendered":"What Sally Lemmo Taught Me About Hair, Boundaries and Showing Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ac07b-412b-bb0-6f0a-5f83b188ba2a_Sally-105.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/ac07b-412b-bb0-6f0a-5f83b188ba2a_Sally-105-710x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8450\" style=\"width:710px;height:auto\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Sally Lemmo Reminded Me About This Industry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br>Some conversations just have momentum from the first minute. That was this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I sat down with Sally Lemmo, it felt less like a formal interview and more like getting a front-row seat to the kind of industry conversation you wish you could overhear at a hair show bar after hours. She\u2019s funny, wildly honest, deeply experienced, and the kind of person who can go from making you laugh to making you rethink your entire career in about thirty seconds.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Stop Posting Perfect, Start Posting Useful\" width=\"563\" height=\"1000\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5tVGznrRwWs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally\u2019s story doesn\u2019t begin with some neat, polished \u201cI always knew I wanted to do hair\u201d moment. It starts with a future lawyer from a family of barbers who ended up in barber school almost by accident, then learned hair color the hard way. And I mean the hard way. Her retelling of an early color disaster is the kind of story only another hairdresser can fully appreciate: equal parts horrifying, hilarious, and permanently etched into the nervous system. But buried inside that chaos was the turning point. She realized she wanted to understand color deeply, not just for technique\u2019s sake, but because she wanted to know how to make people feel good and never leave them feeling wrecked. That instinct pushed her toward education, and it shaped everything that came after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I loved most is that Sally doesn\u2019t talk about education like it\u2019s some polished badge you earn and hang on the wall. She talks about it like survival. Like responsibility. Like the thing that keeps you growing when the industry changes under your feet. She shared how that drive took her from salon life to brand education, through salon ownership, failure, rebuilding, and eventually into creating her own independent education company. There\u2019s no fake gloss on it either. She talked openly about bankruptcy, loss, starting over, and learning what not to do before figuring out what actually works. That kind of honesty lands, especially in an industry that too often only shows the highlight reel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We also got into the shift our industry has felt since COVID, and Sally had one of the sharpest takes I\u2019ve heard in a while: maybe clients didn\u2019t suddenly become terrible, maybe their expectations got higher. That hit. Her point was that clients now have more access, more language, more education, and a much clearer sense of what they\u2019re paying for. At the same time, stylists finally learned how to say no, protect their time, and build better boundaries. That combination changed everything behind the chair. She also shared one deceptively simple tip she swears by for retention: voice notes. Not just texts. Actual voice notes. It\u2019s personal, memorable, and very Sally: practical, human, and rooted in connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another standout moment was hearing her talk about bridging the gap between generations of stylists. Sally has real respect for newer pros who come in confident, charge what they\u2019re worth, and move differently than many of us were taught to. But she also has a deep respect for the experience, resilience, and communication skills that older stylists built before social media did half the talking for us. Her take wasn\u2019t \u201cone side is right.\u201d It was that both sides have something the other needs, and the industry gets better when that knowledge is shared instead of guarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then the conversation went deeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally opened up about finding breast cancer at the same time she was stepping more fully into her next chapter. She spoke about catching it early, coming through it, and how it changed her relationship to time, health, and what really matters. One of the clearest threads running through our entire conversation was this: our industry matters because people leave us different than they came in. Seen. Held. Lighter. More themselves. Sally put language to something a lot of us feel but don\u2019t always say out loud. This work is personal. It is skilled. It is professional. And it carries more weight than people outside the industry often realize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the end of our conversation, I felt like I\u2019d been reminded of a few things at once: why education matters, why connection still wins, and why the best people in this industry never stop evolving. Sally has stories for days, but more importantly, she has perspective. The kind that only comes from doing the work, messing up, rebuilding, teaching, and staying open the whole way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Watch the full interview if you want the unfiltered version, because this conversation has way more in it than one blog post can hold. And trust me, you\u2019ll want to hear Sally tell these stories herself.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"How Hairdressers Build Boundaries, Trust, and Client Value\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lyAcgYBITE4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br><strong>You can find Sally at:<br><\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/clevelandhairboss\/\">https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/clevelandhairboss\/<\/a><br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hairbossuniversity.com\/\">https:\/\/www.hairbossuniversity.com\/<\/a><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<br><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (00:03)<br>Okay, fantastic. I am here with Sally Lemmo. Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you doing? Yeah? Great. I am great. It is a nice day. I am having fun. Yeah, I love my\u2026 Yeah. Where are you located?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (00:11)<br>Thank you for having me. I&#8217;m amazing. How are you doing? Good. Good. It&#8217;s beautiful. Yes. The sun is shining. We are happy. Daylight savings is coming. It&#8217;s all good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am near Cleveland, Ohio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (00:28)<br>okay i wondered because i see cleveland hair boss is the name that you have and that doesn&#8217;t mean you have to be in or near cleveland it just<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (00:31)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. Well, I did discover recently that there&#8217;s a Cleveland, Georgia, which I did not really realize that. Well, recently means a couple of years, but still, I wasn&#8217;t fully aware of that when I made my Instagram handle. So I just assumed everyone would know I was from Cleveland, Ohio, but I guess not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (00:40)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, everyone does know, but somebody from Cleveland, Georgia<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">says, well, which one? And it&#8217;s like, no one, no one says that except if you&#8217;re from there and you know, you have to say Cleveland, Georgia. It&#8217;s not fair. It&#8217;s just the way it works. Right. Like I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m in Vancouver, BC in Canada, but I also know there&#8217;s a Vancouver, Washington that I&#8217;ve been through numerous times, not far from here. And so occasionally I need to mention which one. \u2053 yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (00:58)<br>Right? Right? It&#8217;s just the way it works. Okay. Okay. Yep. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (01:21)<br>It&#8217;s just the way it is. \u2053 Well, I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (01:22)<br>Just the way it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com?utm_source=salonmonster-blog&amp;utm_medium=social-organic&amp;utm_campaign=right-sidebar-14daysfree\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-1024x576.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8593\" srcset=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-400x225.png 400w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2-800x450.png 800w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (01:23)<br>really appreciate you joining me today. I am going to just sort of start off where I always do, which is how did you end up in this industry?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (01:35)<br>It&#8217;s so funny because I really never sought out to be in this industry. It&#8217;s not because anything negative. just I wanted to be a lawyer. I was going to be the first lawyer in my family from a very, very young age. I was not the first lawyer in my family. I&#8217;m sorry. I was going to be the first female lawyer in my family because I had a family of lawyers. But what I also had was a family of barbers. And yes, and from way back when and when I graduated high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (01:47)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (02:05)<br>And I could not get, my grades would like get me into college barely, let&#8217;s be honest. But financially, I couldn&#8217;t get any financial aid because I made too much money. Cause I had like 27 jobs because I just loved money and always wanted to make money. I, swear when I was a kid, I, I created businesses for fun. Like since the age of like four years old, like that&#8217;s what I did. Right. So I always worked constantly and that&#8217;s what I did for fun. But then also my parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (02:11)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (02:35)<br>made like, I guess, just a touch too much to be able to get financial aid. So I couldn&#8217;t really get into college. So I call my aunt and I&#8217;m like, I hate my job. I hate my life. I hate what I don&#8217;t know what to do. And she&#8217;s like, well, and she owned, she went to barber school and she owned a barber shop. She&#8217;s like, why don&#8217;t you go to barber school? And I was like, Hmm, let me think about this for a minute. I love men. I love touching men. I love flirting with men. Okay. I&#8217;m going to find a husband. That&#8217;s, mean, I, this was about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (03:02)<br>I mean, or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">several.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (03:04)<br>Or maybe, right? Whatever, whatever was available. And I did find a husband actually. And so my first husband, he&#8217;s not my forever husband, but I married him twice. That&#8217;s a whole nother frickin podcast, to be honest, but my God. Yes, yes. But so I went to barber school, and \u2053 I went to work for my aunt. And but it wasn&#8217;t a barber shop where we only did men&#8217;s hair, although I did a ton of men&#8217;s hair. We did<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (03:09)<br>Okay, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay, we&#8217;ll do that next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (03:31)<br>color and things like that. so it was more of a unisex salon barbershop. And yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (03:35)<br>I was hoping you would say that word because that&#8217;s one of I don&#8217;t know why I always have this attachment because I remember when it first started popping up, it&#8217;s like it&#8217;s unisex salon. \u2053 I chatted with somebody a couple<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of hours ago who used the same word. I don&#8217;t know if most people coming out of the industry coming into the industry see that word anymore because. Yeah, like, well, I don&#8217;t I don&#8217;t think there are any gender specific spaces, \u2053 but yeah, anyways, blah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (03:49)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think it&#8217;s an older reference, to be honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yeah, right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we didn&#8217;t just do men&#8217;s hair. did women&#8217;s hair. We did everything, right? But I didn&#8217;t. I didn&#8217;t know anything. And my first experience with hair color was horrific. It was in barber school. Oh my god, this gentleman came in. I had never colored my hair before. I was a natural level six. I was the dream. like whatever. I didn&#8217;t even know what hair color was. He comes in and he had just permed his hair at home. So he had a pubic hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (04:09)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Great call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (04:30)<br>on his head, right? And so a great call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (04:31)<br>Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. \u2053 no. \u2053 no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (04:36)<br>And so I know I&#8217;m like, well, we did shit like that. It was wild. And so he comes in and he was a natural level three. Now I didn&#8217;t know. Do you do haircut? I don&#8217;t even know. Okay. Okay. So, um, and at the time I didn&#8217;t know that a natural level three was like close to black, right? So very, very dark. I didn&#8217;t know what that meant. Well, he brought in a picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (04:45)<br>Yep, yes, yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (04:58)<br>that he wanted his hair colored to a barber school, by the way. And \u2053 he wanted his hair to look like \u2053 Christina Aguilera or Gwen Stefani, OK, when they were the blondest they could be. OK. And so they, of course, told me I had to do it because I was a girl. And girls are the only ones that would know how to do hair color, right? So I&#8217;m so unfair. Set me up for failure. And so I&#8217;m like, OK, let&#8217;s do this, right? So I go out the back door. We have no hair color there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (05:08)<br>Right. Yes. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What? All right, OK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (05:27)<br>I go out the back door, go to the Revco, CVS Revco at the time. And I bought a box of hair color that had Gwen Stefani&#8217;s hair on it. And so I, you know, opened the box, I threw out the gloves, because I had no idea what they were for. I took this styrofoam cup and had my coffee in it, dumped it out, didn&#8217;t even rinse it. Okay, I didn&#8217;t even rinse it because I didn&#8217;t know. And so I take these two things, I put them in the cup and I&#8217;m mixing it with my fingers, right? Because again, I have no idea what this is. And so I start to massage it in his head. Well, as my fingerprints are literally burning off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (05:31)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (05:57)<br>I&#8217;m thinking something chemically is not right here. My boyfriend at the time, who is now my ex-husband, comes up to me and he&#8217;s like, do you want to go to lunch? And I was like, yeah, of course I want to go to lunch, right? So we went to lunch. And lunch was beer at the bar. And three, four, seven of them later, three, four hours later, making out in the car, I&#8217;m like, do you think that guy&#8217;s still there? OK, listen, let me tell you something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (06:01)<br>my god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (06:26)<br>\u2053 You think anyone checked on him? Nope. You think our instructor, our teacher even knew he was there? Nope. Let me tell you something. He was still there. And \u2053 like I ask this in my classes all the time, has anyone here ever made a man cry by accident? We&#8217;ve all done it on purpose, right? But if you do it by accident, you still clench your butt cheeks 35 years later when you talk about it. I destroyed this man. He looked like a calico cat with mange. Like I&#8217;ve never seen anything like it. His hair was just falling off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (06:33)<br>God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (06:55)<br>He had blisters. It was horrible. It was horrible. Because he had just permed his hair, right? So it was a mess. So I go to work for my aunt, and she&#8217;s like, color my hair. And I&#8217;m like, I know what that does. no way. Uh-uh, no way. And it was crazy because I did. I put \u2053 gloves on up to my armpits. I stared at my watch 20 minutes through her butt in the bowl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (07:00)<br>Ugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I don&#8217;t do that. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (07:17)<br>And the craziest thing happened. It stayed attached. There was no blisters. It was beautiful. It was like, holy shit. I didn&#8217;t even know this could be good. And yeah, so that was my experience with hair color. And so through those two experiences and being in a salon, \u2053 my goodness, being in a salon that was getting more demand for hair color services, I was like, I need to know how to do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (07:22)<br>Who knew?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">polar opposites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (07:46)<br>That was the moment though, actually for me, that was \u2053 my butterfly effect, so to speak, that I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. It was like a lightning bolt hit me and something in me was released that I was like, I want to always make someone feel like this and never make someone feel like this. And so I innately knew that it was through education. I needed education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (08:03)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Muff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (08:12)<br>Right? needed educated. We didn&#8217;t learn hair color in barber school, clearly, at all. So I sought out to become an educator, but not to teach, but to be surrounded by the teachers. That was my goal, because it really is. Well, there wasn&#8217;t. We didn&#8217;t have social media. We didn&#8217;t have access to YouTube. We didn&#8217;t have any of this that we have now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (08:12)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, what&#8217;s the best way back in the day to get educated? There wasn&#8217;t any there was product knowledge classes, but there wasn&#8217;t no<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had a couple<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of like VHS and DVDs sent by product companies that didn&#8217;t really show you how to do it, but showed you what it could look like. We won&#8217;t tell you which of our products we actually didn&#8217;t use it with something else to achieve this. Where you&#8217;re like, that&#8217;s not, yeah. I loved those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (08:40)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Exactly. my God. Listen, you said it. I didn&#8217;t, but you&#8217;re right. And it&#8217;s like, listen, I&#8217;ve been behind<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the scenes. I know. I became a brand educator. I taught and I learned with Redken, one of the most, the best education companies in the world at the time. And I learned so much that, but the shocking truth that I really discovered was I wasn&#8217;t the only one that didn&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (09:07)<br>Hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (09:17)<br>It was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">shocking to me how many other people that were there that really didn&#8217;t know. And so it was such a missing link in our industry. And that was when the education, like sharing got released in me. And so at a very young age, I started public speaking. My dad put me in Toastmasters when I was 12. yeah, while everyone else was outside playing. Yeah, I was public speaking to 75 year old man. was like the craziest thing, But little did I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (09:35)<br>Awesome. Tossed you in the deep end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (09:46)<br>that was going to really prepare me for this stage most specifically, specifically, did I say that right? \u2053 In my 50s, in the latter part of my salon career where I&#8217;m now a \u2053 professional public speaker and I have my own independent education company. So I&#8217;ve gone from being a barber and I don&#8217;t wanna say just cutting, there&#8217;s no just in our industry in my opinion, but.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (09:51)<br>Mhm. Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (10:12)<br>solely cutting, moving into coloring, learning how to not destroy people, but then uncovering, you know, the connection part of it as well, right? The personal connection part of it. And then I left my aunt&#8217;s salon, opened my own and several along the way. I lost a salon, I felt bankruptcy. I had my car repossessed in front of my kid. I lost my house. But at the same time, opened another salon in a completely different city and learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I did it completely different because I knew what not to do. Right. And so I sold that and four or five others for a profit. I&#8217;m now. \u2053 Yeah. So.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (10:47)<br>Amazing. You sold multiple<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">salons for a profit. Almost no one does that. One time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (10:52)<br>Yeah, well, the first,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the one I sold for a profit, the other ones I think I sold as a break even, but it was more to get rid of. Yeah, yeah, it was more just, it was time for the next thing, you know, whatever. And I feel like I, God led me to maybe open these for that next person that wasn&#8217;t in a position to be able to do it. And so I was \u2053 the catalyst to do it and I was honored to be the one, but now I&#8217;m in my own independent suite and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (10:59)<br>That&#8217;s fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (11:21)<br>educating full-time. So that was my long-winded way to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (11:22)<br>Yeah, I love me an independent suite. It&#8217;s a great one. That&#8217;s great. I mean, my body is still<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">stuck in the trauma of that first bleach out that you did right now. Like I&#8217;m still physically I can see I remember the first time I saw a man at the salon I did my apprenticeship at sitting under a hood dryer with bleach on crying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (11:31)<br>Same. Are you kidding?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Uh-uh. Uh-uh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I can&#8217;t even like, well, I can&#8217;t even use heat. I can&#8217;t even use heat without having panic because of what happened with that man. I don&#8217;t even listen. Anything, I am a control freak when it comes to color, probably to a fault, but because of that. I&#8217;m like, listen, if you haven&#8217;t destroyed anybody, you don&#8217;t know that trauma. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (11:47)<br>where you&#8217;re like, first of all, why are they under the dryer? That seems like a not\u2026 No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yeah. Well, there&#8217;s no\u2026 Yeah. I mean, even separate<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">from making them cry, there&#8217;s nothing quite like, \u2053 feeling hair coming out in your hands to sort of either stop you from ever doing color again or figuring out how to never have that happen again. It is terrifying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (12:15)<br>God, no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, I don&#8217;t know how you feel about these videos, but there are people, when they share those videos of people bleaching their hair at home or in the salon and the hair is just falling off, right? Or they&#8217;re at home and they&#8217;re going like this and the hair is just falling off. I literally have a gag reflex to that. Like, and I think it&#8217;s from the, I can&#8217;t watch it. I literally will swipe by those as if it&#8217;s a scary movie because for me it is. That&#8217;s my worst nightmare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (12:38)<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it is a scary movie it&#8217;s horrifying<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (12:57)<br>It&#8217;s my worst nightmare. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (12:57)<br>no i still remember that first like youtube viral video of the of the little girl using the curling iron on her hair and holding it and then it came off and i was yeah and i was like nope nope click i can&#8217;t nope that&#8217;s the that&#8217;s awful \u2053 yeah yeah how to \u2053 my god<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com?utm_source=salonmonster-blog&amp;utm_medium=social-organic&amp;utm_campaign=right-sidebar-14daysfree\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1-1024x576.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8592\" srcset=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1-400x225.png 400w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1-800x450.png 800w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (13:04)<br>Hold it for 20. She says hold it for 20.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my god. It&#8217;s horrible. It&#8217;s horrible. my<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (13:18)<br>\u2053 It&#8217;s always amazing that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">we all meet the kind of person who&#8217;s able to do that multiple times and it doesn&#8217;t bother them. can&#8217;t, like, they a sociopath or how do you do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (13:24)<br>I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I might there&#8217;s there&#8217;s got<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">to be Yeah, I don&#8217;t I would quit. I don&#8217;t know. Maybe maybe they&#8217;re missing that empath gene or some<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (13:31)<br>Or they&#8217;re just not tortured with the horrifying sense of having to feel everyone&#8217;s feelings 24 hours a day. And yeah, yeah. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s I mean, it&#8217;s not awesome. It has its perks, but it&#8217;s not ideal. \u2053 man. So Redkin was the first education opportunity you were in. Is that that&#8217;s the beginning of teaching? Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (13:44)<br>It&#8217;s not right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">yeah, Redken was the beginning of my education career. That&#8217;s where it started. I worked with some of the most incredible educators, leaders, pillars in our industry. I had the gift of time with Johnny Stilado, Sam Via, Chris Barron, like just like, honestly, incredible, incredible people. And \u2053 I was with them on and off because through my salon ownership, there came times in my salon ownership that I just I couldn&#8217;t commit to anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (14:05)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (14:25)<br>And but then I went back and I was with them for, I would say, I don&#8217;t know, for 15 to 20 years. I was with them for a long time. But then I worked with Lanza Healing Hair Care for seven or eight years. I was their global color ambassador for the last several years and traveled around the world for them. And it was a wonderful, wonderful journey. Again, worked with some of the most amazing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (14:37)<br>Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s so cool. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (14:53)<br>educators, influencers, people, leaders in our industry. through that time and through COVID, my following and my social media presence just blew up. And not on purpose though. It wasn&#8217;t something I set out to do. I mean, yeah. Well, yeah, you know, and so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (15:09)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, no, everybody was at home for three months or more. There&#8217;s just everybody that we just was like so and we were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (15:21)<br>it had nothing else to do, right? But scroll our phones and eat all of our snacks because I don&#8217;t know about you, but I bought enough snacks for the two weeks they told us to do the curve and we ate them in two hours, but whatever. And so I was 20 pounds heavier and whatever. \u2053 when we shut down, when the world shut down, and this has to do with the story of working with Lonza and eventually moving into my own independent education, when the world shut down, I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (15:23)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I did that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (15:50)<br>I took our industry for what I think because I had already lost everything. I already knew. I already knew how to come back. I came back and I came back hard and I knew it was going to be okay. I knew in the end I was going to be okay. I knew how to survive. I knew how to make money. But I just had this thing in my heart for our industry and I was so worried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">about our industry, you know, due to the mental health, due to the isolation, due to the, you know, lack of most of our industry, knowing how to save money, how to plan for the future, no, we&#8217;re not taught any of that, right? There was just so much of it that I took on as a burden, right? And I was like, my gosh, I don&#8217;t know what to do, but I know how to teach. And so I created a private page on Facebook. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (16:16)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (16:44)<br>I charged $9 and I showed up and I donated. wasn&#8217;t for me. It was just, if it&#8217;s free, you may not show up. And I wanted people to show up and be there. And so I showed up every day for an hour for 14 days. And I was like, I just wanted to keep us connected because I am so passionate about our industry. I know that there is such connection between us and what we do and each other. And all of a sudden, not just our money was taken from us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (17:07)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (17:11)<br>But that connection was taken from us. And we were all being isolated in our homes. And I just was so worried about our industry not being connected to our industry. And so I wanted to keep that connection alive. And so after the two weeks to flatten the curve, that turned into three months, at least for me. It turned into a year for so many people. Like, it was just a long time. And so I was like, I don&#8217;t know what to do. I couldn&#8217;t really do the whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (17:13)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (17:40)<br>hour a day thing anymore and the needs of everyone were changing and there needed to be more instant gratification. So I, my Instagram at the time, I think I had a couple thousand followers, which has nothing to sneeze at. If you think about it, right. If you have a thousand people in one room, that&#8217;s a lot of fricking people. But in the, in the scheme of things and what a lot of people look at follower count, it wasn&#8217;t super high, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (17:56)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s a lot of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (18:07)<br>But I was not trying, I didn&#8217;t care. I was a salon owner. I used my Instagram to get clients. That was what I did. But at that time, my thought process changed. And I went from posting pretty pictures of hair I did that made me feel really good about what I did that built my confidence in my career, that felt made me feel good about what I was showing other people. I switched it to serving the audience that I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and serving the people that I loved and serving the industry that I truly, truly wanted to save and, and stay, keep connected. So I started teaching. I started showing up live. I started sharing videos. I didn&#8217;t give a shit what I looked like. I looked like I lived in a dumpster and I did not care. And I showed up so unbelievably authentic. I showed up scared. I could cry when I think, when I think about it. I showed up scared and I just showed up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (19:01)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (19:07)<br>I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">just showed up and I knew I needed to keep showing up and honest to God Liam, the more I showed up, the more my page grew and it blew up from 2000 to 20,000 in like a couple of weeks and then to 50,000. And then it was just crazy and I didn&#8217;t do it on purpose. it is soon as, and this would be like my, my one thing, so many people when I meet them, they&#8217;re like, their first word is, it&#8217;s so nice to meet you. had to get better at Instagram. And I&#8217;m like, why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You know, why? Unless we want to use it to reach people, you don&#8217;t need to get better at Instagram, right? But if your goal is to reach people and to grow your business and to make an impact through your social media, we need to move from sharing things that maybe fill and build our ego into serving the audience that we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (19:47)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (20:07)<br>And once we move from feeding ourselves into feeding others, that&#8217;s when everything will change. And it truly did unintentionally. And so I tell people all the time, I&#8217;m an accidental influencer, like totally accidental. It was not on purpose. There&#8217;s a responsibility that comes with it and I&#8217;m honored to have it. I&#8217;m honored to be trusted with it. You know what I mean? And it&#8217;s fun to grow it, but I still don&#8217;t really try to grow my following.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I just want to serve the ones that I have and I just feel so lucky, you know? Yeah, it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (20:37)<br>Yeah. That&#8217;s so amazing. It was such an<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">interesting time. I don&#8217;t think very many people grew on purpose. Most of our industry wasn&#8217;t, yeah, like to, it&#8217;s not an industry filled with people that are built to be able to pivot, which was that word that got used, like who could pivot? Who could find another revenue source? Nobody in the industry, say for a couple of people, are naturally built to\u2026 \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (20:46)<br>Yeah, what a time to be alive. my God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (21:05)<br>adjust to a completely different scenario. \u2053 There was so much authenticity going on at that point. There was so much \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (21:08)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (21:17)<br>poorly recorded but fabulous education going around, right? Nobody had good enough internet to do live streams, so would always be herky-jerky, but it was amazing. I I still have a bunch of it sitting on a hard drive, like a bunch that was recorded at the time. There was so much learning. There was so much\u2026 It was incredible. Because we went from there was no\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (21:19)<br>Hi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I miss that time, I&#8217;ll be honest with you. I do. I mean, really, it wouldn&#8217;t\u2026 \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (21:46)<br>So for me in Vancouver, you know, we have a hair show that&#8217;s supposed to happen every year. It gets canceled every year, every other year, because it&#8217;s not popular enough. Sometimes people of note come, not usually. And so you would either have to go to the Sassoon Academy somewhere else or go to, you know, go to one of the academies. There weren&#8217;t people coming into town on a regular basis and there was no such thing as online. And then suddenly \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (21:53)<br>\u2053 yeah, right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (22:14)<br>everything was available. Like I could learn everything. \u2053 It was so that part was so much fun. Like the doom and gloom wasn&#8217;t fun. And the people I knew in California that got shut down and then reopened for two weeks, then shut down again and reopen for like there was it was awful to watch. But \u2053 it was a transformative time for the industry. Yeah. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (22:16)<br>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, it&#8217;s terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It really was. Well, and a lot has changed since, you know, and so,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and, and I, the thing is, is that I hear a lot from a lot of people that, you know, customers now are clients now are, they&#8217;re brutal, they&#8217;re mean, they&#8217;re all of these things. And \u2053 I&#8217;m not sure, a hundred percent sure that&#8217;s the case. I really, I&#8217;m really not. And cause I see in a lot of these forums on Facebook where, and I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s just younger stylists. I think really it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s every generation of stylist that, that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (22:55)<br>No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (23:06)<br>We&#8217;ll say, these customers are terrible, get rid of her. You don&#8217;t need those clients, this and that. And that our clients have changed and the industry has changed. They&#8217;re not wrong that the industry has changed. I would agree. I think since COVID, what has changed for us is that we learned how to say no. We learned how to say no because now we had permission. We had permission to say no now. If you had a cough, no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (23:17)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (23:32)<br>Right? Well, whereas before I literally would have people with pneumonia laying in my chair in my shampoo bowl, coughing in my face, and they would have a fever. I literally would have clients be like, oh, well, you know what? I had a fever of 102, but I didn&#8217;t want to miss this appointment. Are you out of your mind? You know what I mean? You can&#8217;t pull that. You can&#8217;t pull that shit now. Right? You couldn&#8217;t pull that shit after COVID. So we suddenly had permission to be able to guard our time and guard our health and guard our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (23:37)<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep. Yeah. We&#8217;re all gonna die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (24:02)<br>Where most of us, I don&#8217;t know about you, I, old are you? Do you mind if I ask you? That&#8217;s so rude, right? I was like, you, the only reason I would think you were in your forties is because you have some gray hair, because your skin is perfect, which is a bunch of bullshit, by the way. You look like you&#8217;re 30. It is, you look like you&#8217;re 30. \u2053 so, but the, \u2053 my God, ADHD, what were we talking about?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (24:06)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol start=\"47\" class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Nope, that&#8217;s no, not root.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, that&#8217;s nice of you to say. That&#8217;s not really true, but I think appreciate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let&#8217;s just move on to the next thing keep going ADHD this guy right here, too \u2053 We were talking about the industry has changed and learning to say no Yeah<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (24:29)<br>my goodness, I know, I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s it. Yeah. So we learned to say no, right? And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">so with that, with us being able to say no, because for me, and I think probably most of us in our industry, although the younger generation, they&#8217;re definitely being taught boundaries that we were never taught. But I never said no. I came in early, I stayed late, I charged. Yeah, wait, what? You don&#8217;t have to stay until 11 o&#8217;clock to finish your, what do you mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (24:51)<br>yes. \u2053 yeah. Yes. I didn&#8217;t know it was an option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">walked the owner&#8217;s dogs, I house sat for people, I made sure people ate, the amount of stuff that was probably not a great idea that took place. And I had, I felt lucky, I started in 99 and already that pushing back against the really abusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (25:04)<br>And \u2053 God, yes, 100%. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (25:25)<br>people had started so already it was better and it&#8217;s still a debacle when i look at it like nothing none of that was okay that&#8217;s just a whole pile of not yeah<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (25:25)<br>Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, and salon ownership was so different than it is now<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">too, right? Because so much of salon ownership, I mean, it still is to a point, but in that stage of my career, so much of salon ownership was emotional. There were no facts involved. No one knew what the hell their numbers were. They were charging and pricing and making demands strictly out of emotion and pressure to not lose their business. mean, at that time, I don&#8217;t know if those numbers are still the same, but only 5 % of salons were profitable, maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (25:46)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (26:03)<br>Right. And that&#8217;s like even at a break even, I think only 2 % were actually making money. Right. Because we weren&#8217;t taught any of this in school. Well, now after COVID, you know, suddenly we&#8217;re saying no. And suddenly we&#8217;re like, well, you know what? I learned what it was like to be home with my family. And I&#8217;m not willing to compromise that anymore. And now I&#8217;m realizing I have to stay healthy because if I get COVID, I could die. And so we were exposed to a part of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (26:03)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (26:32)<br>that most of us as professional silists were not ever given the luxury of, we weren&#8217;t allowed the luxury of saying no or allowed the luxury of putting ourselves first or any of that. that to me is how our industry definitely has changed. I think the client has changed, yes, but I don&#8217;t think that they&#8217;re mean. don&#8217;t necessarily, I mean, are some rude, yes. Okay. I mean, there are people, right? But what I truly,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (26:37)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, sure, but there&#8217;s not a rash of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (27:03)<br>Yeah, but what I truly think has happened is that also through COVID, I think that their expectations are much higher. Because of social media, right now, they through COVID also, they run social media just like us. Guess what? Your clients have access to everything you do. They have access to all the YouTube. They have access to me. If you knew how many of my \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">followers, clients reach out to me and ask me questions. What should I tell my stylist to do to my hair? And I&#8217;m not the only one, but I only know my account, right? And so the expectations, because of social media, because of Pinterest, because of YouTube, because of Instagram, because of all of these things, our clients now know our verbiage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (27:35)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (27:50)<br>our clients now understand more of what&#8217;s involved to achieve said result. We&#8217;re not doing one trend at a time anymore. We&#8217;re doing 10. You know what I mean? We&#8217;re doing 15 color trends at a time, cutting trends at a time. So because our clients are more aware and because they have a further understanding, I have clients that&#8217;ll sit in my chair that I swear to God they could color my hair because of the education that they have like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (28:16)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (28:17)<br>gotten on YouTube. I&#8217;m not kidding. Like, would it be perfect? No, but they know more than they should. Right? They know more than they should. It&#8217;s true. It&#8217;s true. God bless her. Right? Well, but so, you know, but that&#8217;s where I feel like the client didn&#8217;t necessarily change, but their expectations did. And what we learned through that is that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (28:23)<br>A bunch of people did do people&#8217;s hair through COVID, you know? My wife cut my hair, like, because someone had to do it and I was a Q-tip. Yeah. Yeah. I just look surprised all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (28:46)<br>Clients are willing to pay. They&#8217;re willing to pay. They just want value. They want the value for what they&#8217;re paying for. And what happened was the perceived value changed. The perceived value changed. And so if we&#8217;re not bringing that perceived value to the table, well, then the clients are now saying, hey, I didn&#8217;t get what I thought I was paying for. And that also wasn&#8217;t happening prior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (28:50)<br>Yes. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (29:12)<br>So that&#8217;s what I personally think has changed more in our industry is we changed because we got some balls and started sticking up for ourselves a little bit. But also our clients did too. You know, know, our clients did too. So I don&#8217;t even know why I went on that tangent. Did you even ask me about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (29:26)<br>I think that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">doesn&#8217;t matter i have no idea makes no difference that&#8217;s not that&#8217;s the this is not that kind of conversation just no no no no i&#8217;m i i come from a from a from a like an elbows up family i remember \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (29:34)<br>Am I taking over this conversation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (29:45)<br>a friend started dating somebody that had a similar family and they were a speak one spoken to person and I was with them and the whole gang and said there&#8217;s not going to be a gap no one&#8217;s going to stop and ask you what you think you just have to interrupt no one will even think you&#8217;re being rude you think you will that&#8217;s the only way so it&#8217;s not you know another adhd hairstylist that&#8217;s more than happy to \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (30:05)<br>All right, good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (30:09)<br>go on a long meandering no one knows where it started tangent someone will it&#8217;s in the recording doesn&#8217;t matter it&#8217;s not really important<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (30:13)<br>or where it&#8217;s going. Thank God. Someone will<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">figure it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (30:18)<br>I have a bunch of clients that are teachers, not in the hair industry, but \u2053 students of kids. And they talked about \u2053 the generation of students who spent their last couple of years of high school working, going to school from home, partially remotely \u2053 and social distancing. And that that sort of had a shift socially in that they weren&#8217;t having the same type of\u2026 \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was a distant social relationship. And so a lot of those people, when they entered other careers, like in the hair industry, they didn&#8217;t come from that same place. And they were used to sort of a standoffish. They weren&#8217;t used to the customer service side of things. For myself, like I hear people say what you talked about, about people being mean. I&#8217;ve heard that. I haven&#8217;t experienced it. I&#8217;m an okay hairdresser. Like I do some, I put out some good work. I am not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (31:04)<br>Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (31:14)<br>the world&#8217;s most talented. \u2053 My\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (31:16)<br>I think I&#8217;m losing you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (31:18)<br>skill set lies in \u2053 communication, making sure a person feels better when they leave, when they arrive, controlling the whole appointment, whether no matter what it is they&#8217;re asking for, making sure we figure out together what they want and make them feel the way they want to feel. I didn&#8217;t find COVID created that problem for me, but I know it did for people that weren&#8217;t \u2053 empaths and that weren&#8217;t great at the communication side and didn&#8217;t know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (31:23)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (31:48)<br>how to make people feel safe and comfortable. I left a multi-chair space to a one-room studio and inherited a bunch of people&#8217;s clients because people left the industry. My, I grew. I got much busier. I changed my pricing. I started making way more money. \u2053 But I think it also crushed a bunch of people too that didn&#8217;t know how to. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (31:51)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (32:11)<br>how to navigate the making people feel safe and heard and understanding that they know what&#8217;s possible and they&#8217;re gonna start asking for it. And if you&#8217;re not giving it to them, they&#8217;re gonna move on. Yeah. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (32:18)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, I think I agree. I agree with you. Well, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the whole communication thing, \u2053 I think that there&#8217;s a \u2053 definite gift that elder hairdressers, I don&#8217;t even know if I should say elder hairdressers, mature, Gen X, elder millennial, like whatever we want to call that. But we experienced growing a clientele before social media. so the reason, the gift in that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (32:46)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com?utm_source=salonmonster-blog&amp;utm_medium=social-organic&amp;utm_campaign=right-sidebar-14daysfree\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-1024x576.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8570\" srcset=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-1024x576.png 1024w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-768x432.png 768w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-1536x864.png 1536w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-2048x1152.png 2048w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-400x225.png 400w, https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/14-days-free-800x450.png 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (32:51)<br>The gift in that was that we had to actually talk to people. And we had to, like, \u2053 I was pimping myself out in four inch heels, 12 hours a day, trying to find, right? Like we were walking up to strangers, I want to do your hair. We were creating marketing \u2053 campaigns that involved talking to people. And like, didn&#8217;t, couldn&#8217;t just post a picture or a video. We didn&#8217;t even have that. I didn&#8217;t even get my first cell phone, I think, till I graduated high school. So like, they didn&#8217;t even exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (32:54)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was on the street. yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (33:20)<br>So we didn&#8217;t have access to all of these things. so because of that, we innately had to create connection. If we didn&#8217;t create connection with our clients, they didn&#8217;t come back. And so, but I also think, you know, maybe the other gift was that our clients really didn&#8217;t know what else existed because they didn&#8217;t have the internet either. \u2053 you got nine yellow stripes down the part and you liked it. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (33:34)<br>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes, yes, yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">that&#8217;s on purpose<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">what are you talking about god i hated doing those i hated doing those so much the back-to-back slices going it&#8217;s just it just never looked good always bleeding okay anyways blah blah blah<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (33:51)<br>And that&#8217;s right. I mean, it was beautiful. And so I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Unbelievable. It was awful. It was awful. It was awful. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But yeah, but so, but now because of social media, because of texting, because of DMing, because of being able to communicate through these phones without actually talking to people, I think that&#8217;s part of the problem. I really do. I think that&#8217;s a huge missing link in our industry is taking the time to create.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (34:26)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (34:30)<br>personal connection with people to show up like, like for me, I tell people in my classes all the time, do this one thing and you&#8217;ll notice a difference in your retention. I don&#8217;t just send texts. actually send voice notes. That one thing that one shift is because then this person, especially a new client that is reaching out to me, I will send them a voice note. They will hear my personality. Now they get to know me a little on Instagram already, but<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (34:44)<br>Mm-hmm. I love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (34:59)<br>I can create a personal connection in that way. And I&#8217;m going to tell you something almost every single time. They are blown away that I took the time to create a voice note. Blown away. They can&#8217;t even believe that I took the time to do this. You know? I mean, yes, because then, yes. Right? Little did they know. It&#8217;s so much easier, right? But.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (35:09)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Did they know that it was much easier for me because I find typing tedious and takes forever and just talking on my phone is so much easier? Yeah. I was just cutting, I was cutting corners. didn&#8217;t,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (35:27)<br>Yeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (35:27)<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (35:28)<br>exactly. But you know, so much of our industry, especially the, you know, I don&#8217;t want to say the newer generation, you know, younger generation, meaning last 15 years, probably, you know, 15 years or less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (35:38)<br>Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, it is a shift. It&#8217;s not about them. Like it&#8217;s one of the things I try and tell people there is no generation that&#8217;s better or worse than another generation. It&#8217;s what&#8217;s your environment like and it will have positive and negative effects. So is it awesome to start in the age of social media where you have access to way more videos of education and stuff like this? Yes. Is it also rough because you didn&#8217;t have to do the torturous and I wouldn&#8217;t wish it upon anyone like as a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (35:42)<br>Yeah. Yeah. It&#8217;s what you have access to. Yep. Nope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">100%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (36:10)<br>as a male trying to walk up to women on the street and say, hey, do you want to? It was like a Sassoon style education. So it was like, who wants a one length bob that no one wants right now? Does anybody want that? Please? I promise I&#8217;ve done it one time before. It&#8217;ll be great. It&#8217;s free. Does that make it sound better? Ugh, God. yeah. Um.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (36:11)<br>Right. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;ll be great. That is so funny. No, but you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">what? feel like there&#8217;s this like gap in our industry right now of like, like our generation of hairstylists and then also the younger generation and where it&#8217;s almost like, where does the connection come in? Like where&#8217;s the middle ground? You know what I mean? And that&#8217;s where my passion is definitely starting to grow. And, and I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m developing a stronger passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 to connect and remind our generation of their relevance. Because so often I have so many people that reach out to me they&#8217;re like, how do you stay relevant? I feel like I&#8217;m being passed by. I feel like I don&#8217;t belong in the industry anymore. I don&#8217;t know how to catch up. Social media is a nightmare. Like all of these things. And I get it. I totally get it. And \u2053 I&#8217;m definitely developing a much stronger passion. And I&#8217;m also in the process of developing \u2053 a program for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (36:58)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (37:22)<br>stylist to stay and feel connected to our industry and to be able to update their skills, update their whatever, because it&#8217;s necessary. It just is, it&#8217;s necessary. And how we can bring our genius of what we learned without all the gifts of social media and online education and all of these things, but also to not feel intimidated, offended and \u2053 what&#8217;s the word? \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (37:26)<br>It&#8217;s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (37:50)<br>like taken over by the younger generation because that&#8217;s not what&#8217;s happening. And I personally am so inspired by these, these younger stylists that come out of school and will charge four or five, $600. Hell yes. Good for you. I wish that I would have had a molecule of that confidence to be able to understand my numbers and to understand like what it takes and to have the confidence in my skillset to charge something like that. Whereas<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (37:54)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh my god, that&#8217;s the best. Good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (38:21)<br>I come across so many in my travels that are very offended by it or put out and can&#8217;t even understand the audacity of it. And so I just, I would love, I want to bridge that gap and bring us together where the generations learn from each other because both of them have so much to give and so much to give each other. And \u2053 that&#8217;s where, you know, I just have seen through my travels, there&#8217;s a divide and there doesn&#8217;t need to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (38:40)<br>Yes!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (38:50)<br>because we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (38:50)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (38:50)<br>all bring so much to the table, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (38:53)<br>We have to find a new way to do it too because salons aren&#8217;t what they used to be. mean, you know, when you and I were coming up, the salon I started at, did an apprenticeship. It was 12 chairs, 13 stylists. 10 of them were chair renters, but that was not the norm at the time. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (38:56)<br>Yeah, true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (39:14)<br>And one of the things I see now is because so much of our generation went independent, like booth rentals, private studios and things like that, there aren&#8217;t the same quantity of large salons young people can start at and have that \u2053 the group molding them and seeing lots of perspectives and ways people, know, both for good and bad reasons, things you should do things you shouldn&#8217;t do. And so you&#8217;re not having they weren&#8217;t mentorships, but you were surrounded by people and you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (39:31)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (39:44)<br>learned and there&#8217;s a lot more siloing of that and people not there&#8217;s less sharing. So I think that&#8217;s one of the problems you see between the generations within the industry. So I&#8217;m glad that you&#8217;re gonna tackle that because we could use all we could get. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. When do we get to hear the next part of whatever that is? Okay, good. Okay. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (39:55)<br>I would agree. Yeah, I&#8217;m excited. More to come. Soon. Very soon. Very soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (40:08)<br>Let me know. We&#8217;ll do this again when that&#8217;s launched if you want. Because then you can describe all of it to me because I like to know everything that everyone does ever. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (40:09)<br>Almost done with it. I would love to. Yeah, I&#8217;ll let you know. Yep, for sure. Yeah. Yes. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (40:19)<br>Okay, so are you behind the chair still at this point a little bit? Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (40:26)<br>I am, I am, a little<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">bit, not a ton. I&#8217;m more in, I&#8217;m a full-time independent educator. Okay, so I guess, okay, so circling back what Instagram and growing my following did, I was working with Lanza still at the time and the demand for me teaching outside of a brand started to grow. I had stylists that were not using Lanza \u2053 asking me to come teach at their salon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (40:31)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (40:53)<br>And so I started doing that because I was an independent contractor. And that soon became a little bit of a conflict of interest. And I get it. I understand. know, whatever. I understand. And it just got to a place where I just honestly, I was making more money independently. And I couldn&#8217;t justify the time for both. And the demand for me independently was growing so fast and so strong that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (41:01)<br>Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (41:22)<br>I \u2053 eventually just made a choice to not renew my contract with them. so, \u2053 and I stepped out and this was in 2022-ish, I think, I&#8217;m pretty sure. And I became full-time independent and it has been crazy and \u2053 amazing. And we now have retired my husband from teaching and he is now our director of operations and quality control and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (41:34)<br>Okay, yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (41:50)<br>all that kind of stuff. And so we&#8217;re growing by leaps and bounds. But what&#8217;s crazy is that year that I stepped out into independent education, I found out that I had breast cancer. And so I had found a lump that year. I think it was that year. And crazily, I had signed a lease on a new salon, 2,000 square foot salon that on one side it was going to have an advanced academy and the other side was a salon space with four chairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And two weeks after I signed my lease, I found out I had cancer. And so it was crazy. But I will tell you, I have, I know, right? Buskill, ready? Ready? Buskill. Yeah, it was a lot. It was crazy. but it, it wasn&#8217;t, are you still there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (42:25)<br>off<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That was heavy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, not even it doesn&#8217;t. I just mean that&#8217;s that&#8217;s a lot like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (42:50)<br>Hello.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 You&#8217;re on the other side now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (42:56)<br>again<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">and Denver I apologize you&#8217;re gonna have to edit these together that&#8217;s not you that&#8217;s Denver&#8217;s gonna be doing the editing and the last video I had all my mic and everything disconnected 400 times so Denver&#8217;s gonna anyways anyways we&#8217;ll just \u2053 carry so heavy you got the breast cancer diagnosis<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (43:00)<br>That&#8217;s okay. That&#8217;s all right. That&#8217;s all right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 jeez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s okay. Heavy. We got the breast<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">cancer diagnosis. so \u2053 then that year in July, I got a double mastectomy \u2053 and I am now, I am cancer free, thank God. I found it very, very early. It was \u2053 stage 1A and \u2053 I found it through a breast exam and I hadn&#8217;t had a mammogram in so many years of not taking care of myself. And I swear it was like, I audibly like\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (43:27)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (43:39)<br>from God, you need to check your boobs. And I did. And I found a lump. And it was crazy. And I told my husband, was like, hey, can you feel this? Because I don&#8217;t know. This doesn&#8217;t feel right. And he&#8217;s like, well, I think you need to get that checked. And it turns out that it was breast cancer. And I opted for a double mastectomy. I personally did not get implants. I just chose to not do that. And \u2053 they told me that \u2053 a mammogram wouldn&#8217;t have found it until it was stage two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that, um, so, mean, I&#8217;m not saying don&#8217;t get mammograms, but they&#8217;re not the only way. And, and I would have had to, I didn&#8217;t have to get chemo. I didn&#8217;t have to get radiation. I found it very, very early. It did not metastasize. It was not in my lymph nodes. I, when I tell you, I, and I&#8217;m going to be honest, I went through some major survivor guilt though, from that, because so many people have sat in my chair. So many stylists have shared with me their stories of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (44:09)<br>Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (44:38)<br>losing their hair, of losing their like, like, like, God, and I&#8217;m like, why didn&#8217;t I have to go through that? And I think maybe the reason is, is that I was trusted, I feel like I was trusted with the message, because I have a big mouth, and I don&#8217;t give a shit. And I will show up and say whatever I needs to be said. And, you know, I am a big check your boobs girl, you know, I&#8217;m like, I&#8217;m like, the boobless wonder. And like, listen,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (45:07)<br>Good, everybody should<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">be told that. mean, it&#8217;s like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (45:08)<br>Right? It&#8217;s true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Men and women. It doesn&#8217;t matter. If you have boobs, you need to check them, you know, because you don&#8217;t know. And again, and doctors don&#8217;t know. And I was so sick for a year and a half, and I didn&#8217;t know why. I didn&#8217;t know why. And it was because I had cancer growing in my body. It was growing very slowly. But the craziest part about this is I&#8217;m telling you, when I woke up from my surgery, I knew the cancer was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my body felt completely different. I looked in the mirror and my eyes were light hazel again. They were like a dark, dark blue. My eyes got darker. It was crazy. OK? So the doctors don&#8217;t always know because I was going to doctors and they were like, they were doing tests and not ever, you&#8217;re fine. You&#8217;re just, you know what? You&#8217;re getting older. You&#8217;re getting older. was that, you know, I&#8217;m like, oh my, and something&#8217;s not right. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (45:44)<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes, that&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s what it is. You&#8217;re at the end anyways. So I mean, right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (46:05)<br>Yeah, shit. Yeah. Well,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (46:06)<br>Right. Fucking doctors. God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (46:09)<br>and I learned the hard way through that whole thing of how important our lymphatic system is. And unfortunately, I had developed lymphedema from my surgery. And we&#8217;re not taught these things as hairdressers, as professional stylists. And so that also is part of this little movement I&#8217;m working on is just really and truly healing our industry in so many different ways. Because we just are not taught. you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">COVID told us we didn&#8217;t matter. We weren&#8217;t essential and all of those things. And I just don&#8217;t believe that. And I&#8217;m here to prove it. I&#8217;m here to prove it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (46:41)<br>No, no, I felt the opposite because I felt when I went<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">back to work, when I reopened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (46:47)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (46:51)<br>I felt \u2053 the enthusiasm at which people, I mean, I was the only person a lot of these people were seeing outside of their household or maybe their little cohort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (47:00)<br>100 %<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep. Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But we&#8217;re ready for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (47:25)<br>I have nothing. I&#8217;ve got no\u2026 At least it&#8217;s telling me. \u2053 Yeah, what I found was\u2026 \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (47:26)<br>Well, least it&#8217;s telling you, so that&#8217;s good, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mm-hmm<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (47:35)<br>I had some people, even for two years after I went back, was the only person they saw one client, she talked to her building manager and me. And I was certainly the only people that was having physical contact, right? There was touch and there was just this sense of it felt more important. \u2053 But I know that was not everyone&#8217;s experience. So I felt really lucky in that way. And I feel really lucky that you made it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (47:40)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yep, truly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Very, very, very blessed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, and I feel very, very blessed to be here. I, \u2053 you know, you have something like that happen, and it gives you a completely different perspective on it. Your priorities change overnight, you know, and I&#8217;ve learned the hard way \u2053 that money isn&#8217;t freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (48:03)<br>and got through everything and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (48:26)<br>you know, and truly, and money isn&#8217;t my only currency, time is time is my number one currency. And whatever I need to do in my life to have unlimited freedom of my time is what I want to do. And if that means, you know, making millions, if that means making no money, I don&#8217;t care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I just know that time is the currency. And so that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve built my education platform on, is teaching people how to do things faster and more efficiently and stop wasting time because it&#8217;s just not necessary. And putting all this stress on our bodies unnecessarily. so \u2053 just so much of that. I mean, to the COVID thing, I don&#8217;t know about you, but I had people offering to pay me $500 to color their hair behind a freaking dumpster. They&#8217;re like, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (49:04)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (49:16)<br>Like we were like, and when I, so many people did, so many people did. We had to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (49:17)<br>I did home color kits for some people. Like, you know, I mean, only<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">because I had a rash of 6NN and 20 volume people where it was like, yeah, go for it, here you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (49:26)<br>Listen, well, and many<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">of us, and honestly, in my opinion, I mean, I get it. I know a lot of color companies were like, if you do this, we&#8217;re going to, you won&#8217;t be able to buy color from us anymore, or whatever. But we had people that were showing up on Zooms, and they still had to work through everything. And we were telling them to go color their hair at home and use store-bought colors. And I don&#8217;t know. The whole situation was just terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (49:53)<br>we all had to take<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">care of each other in whatever way we could and if i need to give you some professional hair color \u2053 fine it&#8217;s not like i gave it to everyone and it&#8217;s not like i i didn&#8217;t let anybody mess it up it&#8217;s just you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (49:55)<br>We had to just figure it out. We just had to figure it out, you know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Listen, whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I would much<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">rather my client have have access to using what I know they&#8217;re using and that I could tell them how to use it to not hurt themselves and destroy their hair so that I have to spend 12 hours fixing it with a mask on and barely touching them and all you know what I mean? Like forget it. Forget it. But so yeah, so the whole like world telling us that we weren&#8217;t essential. Our clients proved how essential we were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (50:14)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Please. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I love it. I love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (50:37)<br>And what was proved was, and this is again, one of the things that I teach in my classes is, know, our industry is the only industry that I can think of that. And I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re familiar with the five love languages or not, but our industry is the only industry that we activate all five during the service. We activate all five and guess what? We also receive all five. And that was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (50:49)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s interesting. Yeah. Never thought about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (51:04)<br>what really prompted me during COVID was because, you know, think about this, we do a service, right? We perform a service. So there&#8217;s our acts of service. And then \u2053 quality time. And so it&#8217;s spending that time with that client with that individualized attention. Often, we are the only space for so many people where they feel seen, like fully seen, right? And then physical touch, the act, you know, what we&#8217;re doing physical touch. \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (51:26)<br>Yeah. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (51:33)<br>Wait, what&#8217;s an \u2053 words of affirmation. You know, how many times we&#8217;ve turned a client around and they see themselves and we&#8217;re like, you know, every time I see someone I&#8217;m like, my god, I love your earrings or I love your shoes or or positive, you know, reinforcement. And then gifts and how many of us have given the gift of you know, shaving someone&#8217;s head or or the gift of giving them products, maybe they were in a tough spot or just unlimited gifts that we give people. And so \u2053 that&#8217;s where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (51:46)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (52:02)<br>Our industry is truly the only one that I know of and that I can think of that does that. You know, that does that and how often we are thought of as not professional and as a backup plan and as non-essential and something that doesn&#8217;t really matter. it&#8217;s you do it really because you can&#8217;t do anything else. And I&#8217;m here to tell you, I&#8217;m here to tell you our industry is the most misunderstood, overlooked goldmine out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (52:30)<br>Mm-hmm. I agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (52:34)<br>And the only reason they think that we are any less professional than any other industries is because we have fun doing it. And people feel better when they leave us. You know, they feel much better when they leave us. You can&#8217;t say that for many other professional industries, right? Listen, and again, I don&#8217;t mean to monopolize the whole time, but like leading up to that, when I owned a larger salon, I would go to networking groups. And I went to this networking bonfire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (52:40)<br>Yeah. Yeah, that&#8217;s my goal. I love it. No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (53:01)<br>like wild shit, man. I guess we did that in the early 2000s. I don&#8217;t even know why this was a thing. But I was talking to this one guy, and I was like, so what do you do? And he&#8217;s like, I&#8217;m a lawyer. And I&#8217;m like, that&#8217;s great. I was like, wow, I bet you see some really crazy stuff. And you know, I was making conversation. He&#8217;s like, well, what do you do? And I said, and I was very excited to share. And I said, I&#8217;m a hairdresser. And he&#8217;s like, you just do hair? What the fuck did you just say to me? I just what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (53:02)<br>Okay. All right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">God,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (53:31)<br>I&#8217;m sorry. What? I just what? Like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the blood left my body. I had an out of body experience. I got dizzy. I still remember. I can feel it right now. It was terrible. I had to leave. was so, I just what? I&#8217;m in the car. And when I tell you I&#8217;m holding, I&#8217;m white knuckling the steering wheel. I&#8217;m so pissed. I&#8217;m slamming the steering wheel. I&#8217;m like,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">F you. I&#8217;m like yelling at this guy, right? I&#8217;m like, you don&#8217;t know what I do. You don&#8217;t know the babies I&#8217;ve buried. You don&#8217;t know the heads that I&#8217;ve shaved. You don&#8217;t know the divorces I&#8217;ve weathered. You don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t just do hair. Are you out of your mind? You know? And I went through, I think all the stages of grief that night. I really did. I was angry. I was sad. I felt very, I felt alone. Like I was questioning my existence. Like it was just, it was deep. It was deep. But I woke up the next day and I swear it was like, I audibly heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (54:01)<br>Mm-hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sure. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (54:21)<br>We teach people how to treat us. We teach people how to treat us. And I&#8217;m telling you, from that point on, when someone asks me, and I always say it, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I tell them, I&#8217;m a professional hairdresser. I&#8217;m a professional hairdresser because I am, and so are you. And I&#8217;m going to tell you what, just saying those words allowed me to step into my power and allowed me to hold my showers up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (54:24)<br>Mmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (54:51)<br>hold my shoulders back without trying. it just gave me permission to own it. It gave me permission to own it. And this is where I really believe this. We are no less professional than a doctor or a lawyer. Truly, I believe that. We go before the medical board. Maybe we don&#8217;t do what surgeons do, but I&#8217;m here to tell you. We go before the medical board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (55:01)<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (55:19)<br>teach these classes and I have people come into my classes, there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours of education just in that room. Like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of hours of education and learning and healing and serving just in that room. And the reason people think that maybe we are less professional or less deserving or less essential is because our clients or patients or whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">they leave us better for it. And I don&#8217;t think they leave the doctor or the lawyer or the plumber or the dentist often feeling the way they feel when they leave our chair. And we&#8217;re drinking a Starbucks, smoking a cigarette and cutting their hair at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (56:04)<br>the best it&#8217;s the best I love every minute I did yeah lots \u2053 your voice can&#8217;t sound like this you don&#8217;t get to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (56:06)<br>Did you smoke and do hair? I smoked and did hair when I was younger. It was great. Did you ever smoke? You probably didn&#8217;t. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I literally<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">would smoke a cigarette while I was cutting hair. It was wonderful. It was crazy. It was wonderful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (56:23)<br>I don&#8217;t remember a lot of smoking tobacco<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">in the salon, although definitely outside, \u2053 but \u2053 lots of other stuff was smoked in the salon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (56:27)<br>Oh, but I&#8217;m a lot older than you, actually. Oh, no, no. had, well, I was in Little Italy,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">100%. But I worked in Little Italy in Cleveland. So I think we kind of even did more. We didn&#8217;t give a shit even more. And it was a barbershop officially, so we could get away with a little. Our chairs had ashtrays in them, and they were filled. It was amazing. was amazing. It was amazing. You are. Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (56:38)<br>Yes. yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I love those. I love those. I know it&#8217;s great. It&#8217;s amazing. Sally, you&#8217;re amazing. This is so much fun. I could do this for \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">three days. Let&#8217;s do it again soon. I&#8217;m cognizant of not wanting to take up your entire day, \u2053 but I just wanted to ask one quick question before we wrap up, which is if\u2026 \u2053<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (56:57)<br>my God. I would love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2053 well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (57:10)<br>What do you say to a new person that wants to get into doing hair and says, what do I do? What should I do? What&#8217;s the first thing I should do? \u2053 What&#8217;s a piece of advice you tell people at the beginning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (57:19)<br>Well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, the first thing I would say is welcome to the most incredible industry in the entire world. Welcome to the freest opportunity of your life. And I would say, you are a product of the five people you surround yourself with. And so be very, very conscious of what you allow your eyes to see, what you allow your ears to hear, and what you allow your mouth to say. And surround yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (57:27)<br>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (57:48)<br>with with people with video content with like like written word that is going to inspire you that&#8217;s going to keep you connected to growing to positivity. Don&#8217;t sit your ass in the back room listening to all of the crap. Get out there and watch the elder millennial watch the gen X whipping through a foil and pick their brain. Pick<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (58:02)<br>Mm-mm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mhm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (58:11)<br>their brain because I&#8217;m telling<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (58:12)<br>Love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (58:13)<br>you, I&#8217;m telling you, there&#8217;s so much out there. There&#8217;s so much out there and there&#8217;s so much more you need to know than what just maybe YouTube can provide you. And you are who you hang out with. And that would be my biggest thing to say. Awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (58:21)<br>Yeah, yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I love it. Amazing. Great mic drop moment. Where can people find you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How do they get in touch with you? Okay. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (58:34)<br>Well, come hang out with me. I would love it. Come hang out with me. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">if you aren&#8217;t already following me, my Instagram handle and TikTok handle are Cleveland Hair Boss. You can follow me on Facebook. It&#8217;s Sally Lemmo. But I also have an online education space called Hair Boss University. And you can go there, hairbossuniversity.com. And I have all kinds of online education and in-person classes coming up. And I teach private salon classes to help build and grow and solidify cultures. So I&#8217;m in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Liam Shea (59:00)<br>get it love it thank you so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">much for taking the time today i really appreciate it all right well do it again soon<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sally Lemmo (59:03)<br>Thank you for having me. I love being here. Thank you. I hope so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Sally Lemmo Reminded Me About This Industry Some conversations just have momentum from the first minute. That was this one. When I sat down with Sally Lemmo, it felt less like a formal interview and more like getting a front-row seat to the kind of industry conversation you wish you could overhear at a &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"What Sally Lemmo Taught Me About Hair, Boundaries and Showing Up\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/what-sally-lemmo-taught-me-about-hair-boundaries-and-showing-up\/#more-8449\" aria-label=\"Read more about What Sally Lemmo Taught Me About Hair, Boundaries and Showing Up\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[515,512],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-salonmonster-spotlight","category-the-digital-chair-podcast-transcribed","infinite-scroll-item","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8449"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8634,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8449\/revisions\/8634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salonmonster.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}