Slavery: I Don't need your body, Just Your Mind. in Musings

I do love Alex being back in my life… I feel like he respects me more as an equal, as a man, and he tries really hard to take part of my life, my interests, my endeavors and my business.
He didn’t really take an interest in my business before…
My salon is kind of suffering because I’m not there as often… and when I am there I am booked from morning to closing…

Alex pointed out something really important… because we are a smaller salon and because my partner and I have kind of taken a step back, to live our lives… our staff, especially the newer staff, the apprentices and junior stylist—they have not been trained properly on our brand.

The junior stylists have been promoted because I felt that they had the skill, talent and aesthetic that is needed to survive on the floor, charging 3-4-500$ for a service.

Alex did mention to me that I didn’t train them personally and they are just floating by a loose idea of what is expected of them without entirely understanding the brand or the culture—so raw talent alone does not a successful business make.

A lot of the reasons we are faltering as a salon, is because the clients don’t come to my salon for my apprentices… they come to them because they are my apprentices and they trust that they can achieve a look that is similar to mine…but the hope is, that they supersede my skill and they become the client of that person, instead of me being overbooked with clients that only think that I can do the job and having return clients that only want to see me…

I should be booked with new clientele… I’m the brand and I’m the talent that sets the standard for any person that enters my business… the name and the hairstylists who own the salon, two Upper East Side, celebrity hairstylists is why the salon works…
The clientele that our salon attracts is mostly long haired and blonde, it’s not because we don’t know how to do any other color, but it’s because we’ve niched our salon into that particular group of people… I was trained as a long haired guru, published in Allure magazine and later on in my career I was known and established myself as a blonde hair specialist and my business partner is known for being “the blonde whisperer”.

Alex is right… I didn’t really cement my niche or relay my knowledge onto my apprentices, the way that it was cemented into me… and now they run a mock in a salon that is known for being the premier salon of long blonde hair.

So now I have to work hard in training my stylists and the apprentices into my literal protégés… the way I was… people came to me as a young stylist because I was the apprentice of the blonde masters and the long haired masters…but they stayed with me, because I matched and exceeded the talent given to me from my mentors.

As a business owner, yes, I know that there will be those clients that think that my vision, objective and design is the best… but the way that things are now in my business, I am stagnant, attempting to reach the next level of success because I didn’t teach my apprentices on how to achieve the look that has made me published, or the look that has branded my success.
So yeah…I’m stupid for assuming that by an apprentice watching me they will get the skills that can make them better than me, therefore, skyrocketing my business.
I also have a really big issue with training anyone… and it’s something that I was trained to do—don’t teach anyone if it doesn’t benefit you, and for so long before I owned this salon, my mentors would teach me, teach me hard, but not because they wanted to teach me to be better, but because they had to, in order to produce a certain caliber of work…I was just a pawn and an imminent and inevitable outcome that will eventually supersede my mentor.

I’ve also believed that I’m not an educator because why should I train a legion of apprentices to be better than me… but I’m a business owner and I want to come in every 6 or 8 weeks for 1-2 weeks and live my life.

Alex and I have come to the conclusion that I tried to fly before I could walk and now the business is in shambles because of my own arrogance.

I’ve met with my employees… from the receptionist to my apprentices… and I am trying to correct it all… i have someone coming in to speak about the dynamics of customer service, I am sending my General manager to a “manage to succeed” type of class. And also, instead of me jetsetting and leaving for weeks at a time, I am investing my time and energy to teach the young ones in my salon, my techniques, my vision, my aesthetic… from consultation to execution. The things that have made me successful.

How to manipulate a client paying 3-4-500$ to spend it HAPPILY, by reading body language. I might’ve apprenticed under the best of the best—but I know, that some of them weren’t necessarily skilled in hairdressing, they were mostly skilled in being vultures on low-self esteem and manipulated there feelings.

After Alex explained what he did, and as a person who has no idea of what or why in the upper echelons of the beauty industry we charge a lot of money, he made sense. You train your future, in a way that guarantees there success and also guarantees there loyalty to you…

It all bothers me because it’s the way that white people enslave black people… it’s a fucked up mind game… but it makes sense because as I succeeded in my old upper east side salon, I trained dozens and dozens of apprentices in the way that I was…it’s fucked up… but it’s the reality of capitalism and the reality if you want to own a successful business that is profitable.

I have set up a bi-weekly training with my apprentices and junior stylist…my business partner and I are training these people who make money for us, in the way that we were enslaved by the people before us. Raw talent has no sort of financial return… but raw talent manipulated can make a profit…

It just makes me sick that I’ve tried to neglect that, and as a student learning in college the brainwashing effects of Edward Long and Willie Lynch on how to make generations upon generations of slaves that you can profit off of… at the end of the day—it’s a dog eat dog world. I suffered long and hard, if I have to train someone to be my profit and gain there loyalty to secure my economic success and have them continually replicate that to the future generations of my business… so be it.

I can go on and on for hours about how what Alex has given to me is disgusting and where it stems from and how it’s a manipulation tactic that leaves a legacy of brainwashed spirits… but in the end; I’m a Latino, I used the system I was oppressed by to gain the world I was always taught I could never get… however, we can’t deny that formal slavery doesn’t exist, but it no longer needs to be a part of our world, because I don’t need your body to make you a slave, when I have your mind…and if I groom your mind to believe I’m the best, I don’t have to worry about my own success because you will groom others..

Yeah… I know it’s disgusting… yeah, I’m a scoundrel and a piece of shit… or maybe I’m absolutely brilliant using the legacy that I lived under to achieve my success, using the mechanisms of my past to guarantee my future..

Maybe I am ugly. Maybe I am disgusting. Also, maybe I am a reflection of what you are too coward to do. No one succeeds by being fair, and because I’m Latino it seems like I’ve sold out…but I’m just using the system to solidify my own success.