Listen to the Interview

Kayla MiChele

The Millionaire Hairstylist Cash Lawless is in the house. So Cash, I want to know all the deets. I don’t even know where to begin. I didn’t know this about you until I came across your website and saw your video introducing yourself but you were once homeless and then you landed a career working with A-list celebrities and traveling the world working in the fashion industry. I want to dive more into some of those details a little bit later.

I don’t mean to have you name drop but let’s do it.

Who are some of the celebrity and editorial clients that you’ve worked with?

Cash Lawless

Well, over the years, I’ve had the honor of working with people like Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber, Sienna Miller and a bunch of other people, but that names a few.

Kayla MiChele

Amazing and how about some editorial clients that you were published in?

Cash Lawless

I have been published in Vogue Magazine in multiple countries, Allure and In Style. This is challenging, trying to remember all this stuff? I’d say like dozens of magazines over the years.

Kayla MiChele

Nice. Yeah, probably like if you can think of it you most likely worked in it.

Cash Lawless

Yea, I think at this point there’s even publications that I’ve worked for that don’t even exist anymore. Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE Magazine. So yeah, a few big magazines.

Kayla MiChele

Awesome. Have you ever worked for ALLURE Magazine?

Cash Lawless

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kayla MiChele

I think it’s interesting that they actually went to digital only recently.

Cash Lawless

Did they really? That’s amazing. Yeah, I actually just did an article with them on the best clarifying shampoos. And man, they put out a lot of content. It’s crazy.

Starting out, building a career and becoming successful in the fashion and entertainment industry as a beauty professional

Kayla MiChele

Yeah, they sure do. Well, I wanted to mention my husband who you know pretty well, back in the day… I mentioned that I’m interviewing you today and he said, “Well, you know, Cash is a strikingly good looking man. I just need to share that.

Cash Lawless

That’s odd coming from him because he is also a strikingly good looking man. What’s crazy… this is crazy that you’re interviewing me because I feel like I should be interviewing you. Maybe I’ll get the chance to do that if you would be so inclined one day.

I remember your husband working at the Sally Hershberger salon. David Kruk. This is back in 2009 I believe and if I’ve got my years correct here and he was always eating 12 eggs a day, boiled eggs. He had this phenomenal body that I was just like, okay, so what are you doing to look so great. And then I started eating a dozen eggs a day and that was a very short lived period of my time that I would do that. He was always so good at fitness and you know it was incredible.

And then I remember he was telling me at the beginning of my career that you worked with celebrities and you were doing stuff for magazines and editorial stuff. And I think you came by the salon one time and I was just incredibly intimidated. I was like, oh, she’s doing everything I wish I was doing. So it’s crazy that we’re chatting here. I think this is 15 years later. And it’s an honor. Honestly, it’s an honor to be chatting with you because I’ve been a huge fan of your work for 15 years.

Kayla MiChele

Awe… get out of here Cash. You’re so sweet. I really appreciate you saying that. Thank you. I didn’t know you were so sweet towards what I was doing. Thanks for saying that.

You know, isn’t it interesting in our industry too, because I did move to New York City in 2008. And you know, I started out, my husband and I Dave, we both moved there… started out not really knowing anyone and it was interesting to start out test shooting with other makeup artists and fashion stylists. We were so new and not really super talented yet even… because I do think New York City definitely helps to refine your design eye and you understand what is in fashion better. What do they say? Everywhere else is 10 years behind or something like that when it comes to a fashion perspective of what’s in style and stuff like that?

Cash Lawless

That’s right.

Kayla MiChele

So it’s interesting now to see all those people that we kind of started with, now blow up and are famous within their field and very financially successful and accomplished. It’s just incredible. It’s really incredible.

Cash Lawless

You know what’s interesting, though, is to look at some of the careers of the people you start to get to know that you stumble upon, by the time you’ve found them often it’s 15 years after all of the hardship and the work and the free shoots and that $250 days where you worked for 20 hours straight and walked away with 80 bucks net. And people don’t see that. But really building a career as a hair stylist, especially in editorial, fashion, celebrity… it is a grind. And people often think like “Oh, they just worked with celebrities and got famous”.

I was working with celebrities 15 years ago, and I didn’t really start working my way up until probably, I don’t know, five, six years into the career. Where it was like, okay, I’m starting to get some traction.

People think it happens overnight a lot of times because that’s when they meet you in your journey.

I met you when you were doing magazines and stuff like that, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, she must be so talented. I had no idea you had just moved to New York and just started maybe a year before, but I was super super impressed and kind of wanted to know more about how you do that.

Kayla MiChele

Awe. Yeah… you are totally right. It does take a lot of years of dedication and ups and downs and not earning very much money in the beginning. But I think that one of the beautiful things is you know, if you really are passionate about it, it’s kind of like sky’s the limit, like all these opportunities can be yours. You’re not too old. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight. It’s so inclusive of an industry. It’s skys the limit… I think it’s really interesting.

You said maybe 15 years that people finally started making it. I feel like it was between like 10 and 15 years where everyone’s career really just amped up to be super successful. And it’s an incredible journey watching that happen for sure.

Cash Lawless

It’s very cool to see people grow. I love that… some of my favorite things.

Kayla MiChele

Me too.

So I just want a juicy question right away.

Have you ever dated one of your celebrity or model clients because you’re so hot?

Cash Lawless

No, I’ve never dated any of my clients. Not that there weren’t probably some moments where I thought about it. I just really really wanted to build my career and not destroy it. And so as I started working in the industry, I kind of made a rule for myself and for a lot of the years in the beginning of my career, I was dating someone so you know, that wasn’t even on the table. There was probably a short period of my career where I was single to even consider it. Then I got married in 2014. So I’ve been taken for quite a while of most of that career. So a small window. Nothing ever came of it.

Kayla MiChele

Yeah, it’s pretty interesting to see how there are relationships that come out of that. There’s the hairstylist Teddy Charles, he’s either married or dating supermodel Amber Valetta. Like Grace Coddington and hair artist Didier. These industry relationships with the beauty artists are quite interesting to me. You know, I’m sure it helps your career.

Cash Lawless

Yeah, I mean, hey, you know, dating supermodels. I’m sure that can be very helpful.

Kayla MiChele

Oh my goodness, it’s so funny. Okay, well, we’re going to dive more into your story as a hair artist and your career a little bit later.

The inspiration behind the name of the brand The Millionaire Hairstylist

I really am intrigued to learn more about your brand The Millionaire Hairstylist. Which by the way is such a clever name. I can just envision beauty artists… their ears perking up when they hear that name. It’s so like… Teach me more… How do I do this? And that’s exactly what you’re doing.

So you are officially a millionaire hairstylist as we speak, correct?

Cash Lawless

That’s correct. Yes. Yeah. But the name actually came from the desire to accomplish something that people thought was impossible. And so when I first got to New York City, I just thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m working for Sally Hershberger. How is she working with celebs like Meg Ryan and John Mayer and that’s impossible?”.

Then later in my career, I accomplished working with some great people.

It just kind of was this habit of always seeing everything beyond me as damn near impossible.

And so when I started progressing in my career, and I started building wealth, in the beginning of my career, I thought… being financially fit… this is not why I chose this career. I didn’t choose this to be a multimillionaire. I don’t think anyone gets into this thinking that that’s the reason they start and I always thought sort of building wealth was off the table and impossible just like I did all the other big accomplishments.

But as I grew and as I started to accomplish things, I thought, “You know what? I’m just not convinced anything is impossible anymore.” So the title came from one of the biggest things that I think creatives think is almost impossible for them to become a millionaire. And so the name of the brand, sort of lights the pathway to what we think is impossible, but it’s actually totally possible.

Kayla MiChele

I agree. I think it is totally possible. And you know, unfortunately nowadays, it’s almost like you have to figure out how to become one for the cost of living.

Cash Lawless

Yes, that’s absolutely true. Yes.

Kayla MiChele

So many people dream of becoming a millionaire. So how did you figure out how to make it to millionaire status?

Did you have mentors or important books along the way that helped influence you in the story of your career journey?

Cash Lawless

So the way that that progression started was that when I was homeless, a family took me in and they gave me a much needed discipline and structure. They were a very, very strict religious family. I had to go to church.

I had to read books all the time… I had to read a lot of books. And through reading those books and working I started to develop a different mindset and it woke me up to like, “Oh, I am the reason I am the way I am”. I was a pretty angry person at the time, obviously destroying my life. And then I finally thought you know what, I want to be the best I can be.

Reading books like ‘Think and Grow Rich’ or ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’… That really changed the trajectory of my life. Now, at the time, I just learned… I can do anything. If I can see it, and I can think it… this gift of kind of like seeing something. And if it’s really clear in my head, I can just see this path straight to it, and I just go for it.

So when I first got my first job working $6 an hour front desk at a salon, I saw hairdressers, I saw the life and I started envisioning. I think I could do this. And so I developed this passion and commitment, and I was like, you know, I’m going to do this for five years, no matter what if I want to quit, that doesn’t matter. I’m going to do as many hours a day as possible.

So I would be working at the salon at 7am starting to wash hair and then I’d go to school. I worked until 4 and then I’d go to school 5 to 11. Then, I’d go home and watch DVDs. Wherever I could get them from, like Nick Arrojo school. Or I’d spend every penny I could on additional education. And I dedicated five years to just being the very, very, very best I could. And in that five years…

I started to realize it takes a lot more than just being good to actually be successful and have a life I wanted.

I was working so hard and wasn’t really being financially rewarded for it and I started to burn out. I started to be like, “Is this it? I’m going to work my ass off this long and what am I supposed to do when I can’t? Or if I can’t do this? What if I’m physically incapable? What if I want to do something else? I have no freedom. I need this money and I need this income. So I started feeling chained and trapped.

That’s around the time I met my wife and when I met my wife, I hit a brick wall. She lived in Texas and I lived in New York. She cleaned houses for 60 bucks a day and I was making about the same as a hairdresser in New York. When I met her I just knew… like I said, when I see that thing I want I can see the path clearly to it. And I was like “You are exactly what I want for a life partner and I’m willing to do anything to get that.” So we decided, “You know what, we can’t see each other very often because we can’t afford to travel… however, we’re going to get married.” So we got married.

Over the next seven years of a long distance marriage… I stayed in New York, I traveled, I lived in LA… trying to build a career and trying to build wealth. Through that time, we said well, “What’s the strategy for building wealth and actually being able to move and see each other and afford the life we want?” She had four kids at the time too. So I was like, “Oh gosh, taking on an immediate family of five, this is going to require a lot more of me than I thought”.

So I actually started asking my clients and I just changed my script when I started talking to people. I used to chit chat about hotels and restaurants and the life that I wasn’t living and they were. I changed it to “Alright, level with me… I’ll do this service for free, I’ll come cut your hair for free, I’ll do your extensions for free, whatever… if you will share your advice with me on how to be successful and be financially fit like you are”.

These are people like CMOS, CFOs CEOs and celebrities. Some of the celebrities I’ve talked to… I’m like, “That’s not what I want to do.” Because some of them are not as financially fit as you think.

So I started learning these lessons, and they greatly improved my life. And I started treating my money differently. I started treating my rate differently.

My rate went from when I first got to New York… I had a $25 haircut, $50 haircut, $500 haircut, $1,000, $5,000, $15,000 service. So as I worked my way up and started building demand for my service… it was eye opening to see… wow, I can’t just be good at hair. I need to figure out what to do with this money. I need to figure out what to invest in. I need to figure out how to multiply what I’m making because I don’t want to be just caught in this never ending trap of earn, spend, earn, spend, earn, spend.

So that’s what I did, I asked my mentors and as I observed their behavior… I knew

1) I wanted to maximize my earned income as quickly as possible.

2) I wanted to learn how to invest in growth assets.

3) I wanted to start learning how to allocate money to generate passive income vehicles.

And that’s what I started doing in 2013 and just went hardcore.

Kayla MiChele

Wow.

Do you write business plans often?

Or are you just kind of like go with the flow?

Cash Lawless

I do all kinds of things. I am pretty strategic. So when I see something that I think makes sense, and I’m obviously honing that skill in over time. When I first started my first business, it was all over the place. There was no order. I had no education and no experience… like “Hey, well I need organizational systems or I need an economic model, I need to figure out what’s the profit model or how does the business work and where am I going to find clients?”

All those things I learned over time and to date, I’ve started three multimillion dollar businesses. I purchased $190 million in real estate investments. So I’ve accomplished some significant financial growth from where I came from. And through doing that, I’ve gained a lot of experience.

So nowadays, I coach people and I help people. I’m coaching someone right now through building their first product line. I’m coaching someone coming out with a home goods product, a haircare product, and so I’ve developed over 100 physical good products. I’ve built a good service business in my hair career, so I understand service businesses. I’ve built an investment firm, I understand investments, assets, asset classes, economics and finance. All of that I’ve studied and studied and studied and learned and learned.

The Millionaire Hairstylist is about kind of distilling those lessons into simple digestible lessons. That hairdressers and artists and creatives can understand. Because all that stuff is really really overwhelming and kind of complex and it’s everywhere. And that was really challenging for me and time consuming.

But once I started figuring it out, people on set were coming to me and saying Cash. “What are you doing?” Like when I bought my yacht… So I lived out in California on a beautiful boat for two years. And people were like, “Are you sure you’re a hairdresser and not a drug lord or something?” And I was like, yes, yes, I’m a hairdresser. I’m just investing what I’m earning. And that’s going well for me because I’ve been doing it consistently for a long time.

So I started getting questions and some honesty from other hairdressers, makeup artists and photographers. They were saying, “Okay, so I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and I have $20,000 to my name and I’m getting kind of scared. I’ve got two kids and I just earn and then I spend and I just can not seem to get ahead”. I heard this story more and more and more and more and it led me to believe there are lessons I’ve learned that everyone needs to learn. And so that’s what starting the company was built on.

Kayla MiChele

Nice. Love that this is what inspired your business. It’s amazing.

Who are your ideal students for your online courses?

I know you said you do some consulting and coaching work, but would you say the bulk of The Millionaire Hairstylist, as a company, that you’re offering online courses?

Cash Lawless

That’s right. Yeah.

Our online courses are sort of like everything you need to know about managing your personal finances, all the way through developing business clarity over where you’re going, who you are, what role you want to play in your business and kind of designing that out. Setting strategy, hiring, firing, training, organizational systems, to marketing, sales, understanding your finances, reading your statements…

So all this stuff I think we need to understand and great sophisticated business people understand these things. You have to understand them, but you have to recognize you shouldn’t be doing all of them. So there’s this two part thing where you have to have enough knowledge to communicate on a sophisticated level where you can get something done and communicate with these people and then also understand your role in your business.

It doesn’t work just to be a great artist these days. You do need to understand the business side, if you’re going to achieve financial success anyway. And in order to do that, you’re going need help. You’re going need a CPA, you’re going to need an attorney at some point, you’re going to need someone to draft up some documents.

Learning how to speak this language of money, finance and business is really important. You definitely shouldn’t be doing it all. And that’s why I’m a big proponent of asking the question… who? not how? in your businesses. There was a book written several years back by an author who wrote a book called ‘Who Not How’. That book was so pivotal for me because I started asking the question, who should be doing this? Not, how should I do this? When that changed… the results of everything I did changed. When I found the right people to do the right things… that’s when everything really started to click and roll because I was always the hairdresser who was like, “How do I do that? How do I do that? How do I do that?” Then eventually, you have no more hours in the day to do anything.

So those are just some of the really important lessons that I learned through going in this career and putting these courses together. Those are some of the lessons that we teach in those courses.

Kayla MiChele

Wow, impressive.

As a beauty artist myself, when I consider some of the topics that you teach, I naturally feel intimidated. I almost feel like if I attempt to learn this sort of material… Am I even going to get it? Is it just going to go over my head? Is that a normal feeling for people?

Cash Lawless

Yeah, absolutely. And if you feel that way, you’re in the majority of people. Most people don’t tackle new topics, because we assume it’s so difficult, right?

So take rocket science for example. You have a person like Elon Musk, who didn’t know anything about rockets when he was younger, but just said I’m going to learn about rockets. And then eventually, as you start reading and studying, he learned more about rockets and then bought a rocket.

With finance or business for creatives. We avoid things that we assume are difficult or impossible. So that’s the whole point of The Millionaire Hairstylist. It feels impossible, so you don’t even embark on the journey. But when you take one step at a time, and you learn a word, learn two words… much like learning a language. In becoming financially fit, successful and more business savvy… it gives you a new vocabulary and eventually you start speaking that language. You start thinking with those opportunities.

If you didn’t know a Ferrari existed, would you go look for one? Would you go find one? When Steve Jobs made the iPad… before he made the iPad… nobody back in the 80s said, “I just need an iPad. If someone could make an iPad that’d be great”. He actually just went out there and thought, I’m going to do this… I have this idea and then generated the demand for the iPad.

So when you think things are impossible, or that there’s no need for it, you don’t even start. But really doing this… all that’s required is that you take one step at a time you’ll learn one word at a time, you will learn one thing at a time and over time that develops into a language that allows you to start thinking… “Okay, you know what, I understand what rate of return means now, is this a good investment? What’s the rate of return? That’s a question you may never have asked before, right? Unless you knew the word rate of return.

So that financial education comes one day and one step at a time, and that’s what we do. We just sort of simplify it and make it extremely actionable, eliminating a bunch of the stuff. Do you need to know what a MVP analysis is?

There’s a certain vernacular in the finance world where like 90% of this crap is useless to an entrepreneur. So we kind of distill everything down to what you actually need to know, what are the important numbers, what’s the important vocabulary, and how should you be thinking about things and then what should you do about that? That’s really kind of what we do.

Kayla MiChele

Well that’s very nice. Do you think that the fact that it is kind of confusing is set up that way on purpose, so only so many people can thrive?

Cash Lawless

Yeah, I think the financial industry has done a very good job at making it so complicated that the only solution would be to give them your money. That’s certainly not the only solution out there and just with a little bit of education, you can accomplish a lot.

People ask me all the time, “Oh, should I pay someone to manage my money? Should I not?”… That’s totally a personal preference, but I always say, “By the time you learn how to identify someone who could achieve great things with your money, you will know what you need to know to achieve great things with your own money and then not pay them those exorbitant fees.”

So it’s sort of this toss up where you need to determine what’s right for you and you can do that with some pretty simple analysis. There’s some tools out there, some pretty good tools to say, “Hey, what should I be doing with my money? What position am I in right now? Where am I at financially and what are my goals?”

Just starting with those simple things, like in our course, Master Your Money, you start with some pretty simple things like, “What do I want? Where do I want to be in life? Who do I want to be with? What networth do I really want? What kind of passive income do I want?” Start there and then you start reverse engineering.

Kayla MiChele

Interesting. So regarding your courses, for someone like myself, who’s a bit intimidated and doesn’t really know much about the financial world and investing at all. With your courses I see you have at the moment five courses right now on your website, which course would be the perfect starting place?

Cash Lawless

Master Your Money is always the best starting place. Because Master Your Money is like… why would you go out and make 10 times more money when you don’t know what to do with the little amount of money you already have. So what typically happens is if people make more money, they waste just as much in proportion to their earnings. So if they’re spending 99% of their income now, they’ll be spending 99% of their income whether they’re making 10 times as much or not. They’ll find ways to do it unless you know what you’re doing with your money and you have a very strategic and specific plan for how to allocate that.

So we teach students how to allocate capital just like a billion dollar business would. How to put money, where to put money, when to put money, all those kinds of things on a personal basis. So you can determine if I’m earning this much, I can be putting this much here… I can be putting that much toward that and really getting a grip on personal finance. Once that system is built for money to be put into it, then start putting as much money into that system as possible.

But I always think it’s not a good idea to put money into a broken system, like money doesn’t fix things. It doesn’t multiply itself, money only multiplies when it’s put into an effective system. And that whole system is automated, by the way. Managing money shouldn’t be like 90 hours a month. So I manage millions of dollars in maybe 90 minutes a month. So this is something that is a great point that’s great to start at, because it allows you to go then earn more effectively in a way that will actually build wealth for you.

Kayla MiChele

Interesting. You’re a good salesman.

Cash Lawless

I’ve had to sell a lot of ideas to a lot of people. Every employee I’ve hired, I’ve had to sell them on the vision that they should work for me and not Google. So maybe I’ve had some practice.

Kayla MiChele

I love it. Who are your ideal students for your courses because you definitely seem like you’re targeting hair stylists, makeup artists, nail technicians, maybe specialized beauty artists, like someone that does eyelash extensions, for example.

Do your business and wealth online courses apply to other job career titles besides beauty artists as well?

Cash Lawless

Yeah. So we actually started with hairstylists because we thought, when we start businesses, we always ask, “How are we uniquely positioned to solve this problem better than anyone else? And who are we uniquely solving this problem for.” Hairstylist was the immediate audience that I could speak to and relate to the fastest, right? So if I went out and started talking to plumbers, it’d be like… “You’re not a plumber, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

However, what we’ve discovered this year alone as we have over 800 new students. So with this many people signing up, we’re seeing tattoo artists, nail artists, makeup artists, all kinds of creative service providers. And even some service providers that are not even creative are taking these courses and they are loving them because this stuff is applicable to any service or creative business. If you’re in a creative business, if you’re an artist, a painter, if you’re a service provider… this stuff can be applicable to you. If you’re a waiter… So these are principles of business.

And when people think, “Oh that career of a hair stylist is just so unique and different.” It’s like, ah… the service business has some really standardized pillars because it’s been around for a long, long, long time. So all these lessons are told in the allegory of a hairstylist. So we use stories to kind of tell and teach. We use the hair stylist named Alex, who finds herself in a bunch of different financial situations and kind of teach through how she looks at these things and how she thinks about these things. It’s a really good way to teach and people really like seeing a story that I can relate to… I have that in my business. So we use a hairstylist so we don’t have to say… “If you’re a nail artist, makeup artist, tattoo artist, graphic designer, video editor…”. We build a character and archetype to teach around.

Kayla MiChele

Sure. Love it.

Provide a brief, quick description of each of your five online courses?

Cash Lawless

Master Your Money

Master Your Money is about mastering your personal finances and learning how to build wealth as a hairstylist.

Accelerate Business Growth

Accelerate Business Growth is all about maximizing revenue. So your top line growth in your business. That’s marketing, prospecting, how to analyze the numbers in your business, how to actually grow a business financially.

Gaining Business Clarity

Gaining Business Clarity is about identifying you in your business and setting up a plan and a strategy for who you want to be in your business, who you need in your business, where you want to go, what you want your business to accomplish. So many people skip this step and they just do, do, do and chase a million different directions. So Gaining Business Clarity is all about how every great business person has a crystal clear idea about what they wanted, where they wanted to go and how they were going to accomplish that. And so that course helps you understand, what are you doing? Where are you going? Where is this going? What’s the plan?

The Profit Playbook

The Profit Playbook is all about taking a business that is in existence and maximizing profit. That’s understanding your statements, understanding the numbers you need to know, understanding how that’s affecting your personal wealth picture.

Your Power Circle

Your Power Circle is all about how to identify and hire the 10 people you absolutely have to have in order to scale any business. You need to have these 10 people in your pocket… you need to have them and whether you hire them or you contract them or they are in your circle as a relationship or as a mentor. These are the people that you need to have so you can pick up the phone and get answers and solve problems… if you’re going to scale. You do not want to be scaling a business stuck doing everything. That’s why I think people’s burnout comes in. So really the answer to… who?, not how? is that course.

So in all of these courses it’s broken down into small digestible lessons anywhere from like two to six minute videos that you can watch one at a time… small bite sized stuff. And over time you start to learn because there’s over 100 lessons in these courses, teaching you about everything from business strategy to sales funnels, to marketing to finance.

Kayla MiChele

Oh, wow. Impressive. It must feel great that you are now becoming a mentor to so many people in their career path to success.

Cash Lawless

Oh, it’s amazing! We get messages and I screenshot the DMs. Like… “Oh my gosh, this is like my Bible right now”. Just kind of hearing the feedback and the impact that we’re having on creative individuals who otherwise probably never would have listened to a finance guy that could teach them lessons about this stuff. It’s like… “I don’t relate to you. You’ve never done this. You don’t know what it’s like to work every day behind the chair with my hands and then have to deal with this stuff.” So I feel like hearing that it’s working… (because we took a huge risk in starting a new business). Obviously it takes a lot of money to do this. We’re two years in and we’ve dedicated a lot of time and resources and we’ve got more than 10 people working on this business. And so it is extremely rewarding to hear that it’s actually making a difference and to see that we’re growing really fast.

Kayla MiChele

That’s amazing. The last time we spoke about doing an interview was quite a while ago, and I checked out your website then and I believe you only just had one course at that time?

Advice on starting a new business

Cash Lawless

That’s right. Yeah. So we did an MVP. So whenever you start a business… or whenever we start a business, you want to test the concept with an audience and then check market demand.

We came up with a course that we felt was going to be extremely valuable. Basically bring your best stuff to the table first. And we thought… what are hairstylists biggest pain points? So we actually went out and spent months and months and months interviewing and researching hair stylists. We literally went to salons, my business partner and I. We went to salons and set up a little audio recorder and asked them questions like, “What are you struggling with most? Where do you want to go? What’s going on with your career? What do you hope for?”. Then really figuring out where are hairstylists today and what are they really struggling with?

All of them inevitably said they wanted to be more financially rewarded for doing what they were doing. And so we thought what better than a way to come up with a course to help them make more money. Not only make more money, keep more money and build wealth.

So when we came out with that we were not committed to building a company at that point. It was just market testing to see if we wanted to build a company. And so we came up with a course and people loved it. It was crazy.

We spent a lot of time on clubhouse and on calls with people. Personally I was coaching people for free just trying to get into the heads of hair stylists and understand their needs and their pains and how we could solve those for them.

Kayla MiChele

Wow, that’s some great market research.

Cash Lawless

Yeah, you definitely want to know if your product is desirable to a market before you go all in.

Kayla MiChele

Okay well, this might be an interesting question.

What is the quickest way to become a millionaire from your perspective, minus the lottery.

Cash Lawless

So each person’s journey is going to have to take into account; where you are, who you are, your aptitudes, what’s valuable to you, because every journey is going to be unique and different.

I think for anyone to put a sticker or label on something that says… here’s the one path, here’s the easiest way… I think I’d be a fool to say that because someone inevitably in the audience will go “Yeah, but what about me?”

And so, I think investing in your education. You can’t make decisions or come up with plans or design a strategy for building wealth until you understand the language of wealth. So the first thing is to educate yourself. You need to get educated. The one thing that was holding me back from building wealth was my ignorance. I was financially ignorant and so I was making ignorant decisions with my money and inevitably money just doesn’t like to stick with ignorant people. It likes to stay with people who respect it. Who knows how to treat it, who knows how to multiply it. Those are the people money stays with. It doesn’t stay with people who, you know, the second that it comes in the door, they kick it right out.

If you understand these things, you can build a healthy relationship with money. When you have a healthy relationship with money… you can start learning how to multiply it, grow it, earn it, leverage it, and you need to know how to speak to it.

Like I can’t just come home to my wife and speak to her disrespectfully and poorly like, “money’s not everything, money doesn’t mean that much”. If I came home and said those things to my wife, like “You don’t mean that much, you’re not that important, I don’t need more of you. That would not be an indicator of a healthy relationship with my wife. And when we say those things about money, it’s an indicator of an unhealthy relationship with money.

So building that healthy relationship with my wife requires that I invest time to understand her. You know, “What are you into, what do you want, what makes you happy, what makes you grow?”. You treat money the same way and you’ll get the same result. I have a great marriage because I invest time in understanding my wife and understanding our relationship. And I have a good relationship with money because I invest time and understanding on how to multiply it and how to make it grow.

Kayla MiChele

Wow, that’s beautiful.

Regarding the different career paths in the beauty industry, which career path do you think is the most likely job title to pursue or business to start to become a millionaire?

So when I look at people that I think are probably millionaires that are within the beauty industry, I assume they either have a product line, or a very, very successful spa or salon with many, many, many employees. Or they’re like a celebrity hairstylist that gets a ton of the high paying budget jobs but also of course sponsorship deals. Do you think I hit them all or is there another beauty industry career path that you think is more destined to set yourself up for a millionaire status with what you earn from your career, not necessarily because you’re investing?

Cash Lawless

Yeah. And I would say, ask yourself a couple of questions because it’s going to be different for everybody. For me, it may not make sense to do certain things. For you, it might not make sense to do certain things. And it’s based on your interests.

Like if you don’t want to own 90 salons… why do that? Don’t do that, that’s not going to be the path. That’s someone else’s path. So you really want to start to understand yourself because successful people have good answers to… “What do I value most in life?”. They know what is important to them. “What do I want?”. They’ve clearly identified what they want in life based on what’s valuable to them. And then, “Do I have a clear plan for how to accomplish that?”.

When you start doing that, you start getting more clarity about the path that would yield something right for you. Now, if a construction worker said, “You know what Cash made millions of dollars doing x”… let’s just say, selling courses to hairstylists, and he has no unique positioning to sell courses to hair stylists. Well, then that wouldn’t be his path, right?

So you have to look and say, “What am I uniquely positioned to do? What am I disproportionately praised for?” So look at your life. Are people like, “Wow, you are just so good with people?”. Well then maybe working with celebrities and really networking your way through the industry and making friends with everybody and being social… that might be a path for you.

But then, you know, trading stocks in a dark room for 16 hours a day… if you’re a highly social person, is not going to be for you. That’s not going to be a path. But then for somebody who is like, “I do not like people, I like to be alone most of the time”, maybe trading stocks and the dark room 16 hours a day is for them.

So you really have to understand yourself and I think that’s where it starts. It all starts with every single asset and idea and venture to make money out there has a characteristic, has a risk profile. It has a personality, and so do you. So you want to find and identify the path that aligns with you and that starts with understanding yourself.

In our course Clarity, we have you take a lot of aptitude tests, personality tests, to help identify what roles you belong to in business. What projects you should be taking on, what things you should be delegating, because if you don’t understand yourself, you’re going to bump into things that dissatisfy you constantly because nothing is aligning and nothing’s working.

And so sometimes, it can be a product line. If you’re like, “Wow, I love chemistry. I love formulation. I love making products. I love branding. I love selling. I love getting out there and really making something a physical product and getting it into the hands of people and seeing them love it and be satisfied with it… I’m gifted at that”. If that’s you, maybe a product line is best.

Maybe if you are a great public speaker, maybe brand sponsorships are a huge way to build income.

There’s a huge difference between maximizing your income and building wealth. I know plenty of high income people who make a lot of money, but are not wealthy. So you have to understand the difference. Wealth is very different than income. Income is your ability to go generate money through your effort and the money that you earn. Wealth is the amount of time that you can survive not doing any of that. So how much does your life cost every single year? So we’re gonna break this down.

And so when you’re thinking about, “What’s the most lucrative path? It really depends on how well you understand yourself and how well you align your aptitudes with the opportunities in front of you. If you want to be successful, learn how to allocate your time and allocate your money to align with your aptitudes and the opportunities in front of you and don’t be scared to seize those opportunities with as much passion and aggression and urgency as you possibly can.

Kayla MiChele

Amazing. Wow.

Cash Lawless

I will say one more thing on that though. There are certain things in life that make less money than others typically. And I will say that there are salon owners who own a lot of salons who are flat broke and buried in debt. And there are some salons, from one salon that’s 28% profitable, right? And so, who’s in a better position?

When you think about it, the end of the road doesn’t exist… it’s just where you catch someone on that journey and where you’re saying, “Oh, well, they made a million dollars.” Well, they could lose all that tomorrow, right? So then it’s like, yesterday, that was the path and tomorrow it’s like, oh, that’s no longer the path… I don’t want that.

So be careful what you set your sights on and don’t be deluded by what you see online and what you think is the successful way. Dive deep inside, look inside because it’s not always as pretty on the other side, or as successful as you think it is. Even with huge companies, like 1500 employees or 500 employees or whatever it is… 100 locations… and it’s like they’re barely scraping by, losing like $10 million a month. It’s crazy when you find these things out. But it’s not always as glamorous on the other side as we think. So make sure that when you go down a path of building wealth that the lifestyle and the work required also aligns with what you value.

Kayla MiChele

Beautiful!

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Excited to hear Part 2 of this exclusive interview series? Stay tuned as we discuss with Cash Lawless topics including career advice for beauty artists to help manifest dreams to come true, working as a celebrity hair stylist around the globe and endless tips on how creatives can create wealth. Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know when it drops!

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