Well, stylists are. They.
They are sport clips to our clients.
We want to make sure that we have
the best people delivering that championship quality experience,
and we want them to be happy people. All right.
Hi, I'm Gordon Logan, chairman
and founder of Sport Clips.
Hi, I'm Edward Logan, CEO of Sport Clips Haircuts.
I'm Julie Vargas, vice
president of career opportunities.
First of all, I'd like to welcome all of
our new team members to sport clips family.
I think you'll find there's a great group
of people here, and we look forward to
having you with us for a long career.
I grew up in hair salons.
My whole life since I was born,
my family's been in hair salons.
My mom is a licensed hairstylist.
My parents actually met through the industry.
So the hair industry as a whole and
the beauty industry means a lot to our
family, even well before sport equips existed.
While I like to think I was helping out,
I might have been getting in some of the
stylist way when I was pretty young.
The way hair styling chairs tend to spin around
was really fun for a kid, but always helped
out in the stores as much as I could.
Instead of a babysitter, I was following my mom and
dad around to do the salons and getting things done.
So just in my blood.
Well, it's kind of hard for me to believe, too,
but I signed my first franchise agreement in 1978, and
that's how I started in the hair business, was as
a franchisee with a system called Command Performance.
I opened my first salon in Austin in February of 79.
So I was in that system for
quite a long time, twelve years.
And I learned a lot of lessons,
but it was a great learning experience.
And I was elected to the board of directors
several terms in the eighties and learned a lot
about franchising from the other side of the table.
But one of the greatest benefits for being in that
system was that's how I met Betty, my wife.
So it's been a great experience, and we came
to the conclusion we didn't want to be in
the full service center of the business.
So we sold that system and started sport clips.
In 1993, we opened our first location in Austin, Texas.
Julie Vargas, who's still with us today, is
our vice president of career opportunities, was our
first team member and first store manager.
So Julie's been with us through their whole
ride, and it's been a great ride.
So how did I end up working
for sport clips back in 1993?
Well, at the time, I was working for a competitor.
And I was learning a lot and
actually had a lot of success there.
But at the time, we were at a managers
meeting and the owner literally was upset about something
and told us all that we were all replaceable.
He told every single manager at that table that they
were replaceable, and that did not sit well with me.
I actually turned to the girl next to me and
I said, wow, I can't believe he just said that.
And funny enough, she says to me, there's this
new concept coming to town called sport clips.
You should go check it out.
And I said, well, give me the information.
And I took the information from her and I went for
an interview and got hired on as the first manager.
So I had no idea what I was getting into.
I had no idea that this would become a franchise
that would have the success that it's had today.
But the good Lord led me there.
I'm pretty sure it was meant to be.
And I've had the opportunity to start out
as that first manager in 1993 to move
up to a technical coach, an area coach.
Then I became a regional coach and traveled
the northeast and opened up storage and trained
and really helped get those stores running.
And then it became what we call a career opportunity.
And that was a direction that
we needed to go for recruiting.
We did not have a recruiting program at the
time, so we really had the opportunity to start
focusing on branding the sport clips to the stylist
community and making people aware of all the amazing
career opportunities if you have a sport clubs.
And I've evolved into a vice president of the company,
and the Logans have been great to me from day
one and created such an amazing career path that I
never knew would be what it is today.
Stylists are everything we do.
We are a people business.
That stylist client interaction, that is our business.
And so when we look at that relationship, the investment
in a stylist, providing a culture where a stylist can
really build a great life and not just a great
career, and making sure that the core of our business,
the stylists, is taken care of, enjoying their life, enjoying
their job, and making an impact.
But the opportunities were endless.
I had some great mentors that helped me
through all that because there was so much
learning for all of us to do.
And we learned together as we went through this.
And the opportunity to have good gone through
that made me who I am today.
It was an amazing experience.
And little did I know I would grow up with this
company and become who I am today because of the values
and the things that Gordon's vision already had in place, but
they're now instilled in me and made me who I am.
And so I'm very thankful for that.
Well, culture is very much underestimated by most
businesses, and it's really difficult to define, but
really, our value system says it all.
And our value system is very short and to the point.
We like things short and to the point.
We borrowed it from coach Lou Holtz, who was
head coach at Notre Dame at the time.
And he had this video series called do right that
we were using for training even before sport clips.
But when we decided to go into sport clips and
have the sports team, we thought that was perfect fit.
So I wrote to coach Holtz and asked his
permission to use his material in our training programs
and so forth, which he graciously gave to us.
And it's very simple as do the right thing, do your
best, and treat people the way they want to be treated.
And there are three questions that go along
with that everyone should be able to answer
in their affirmative for their company.
And one is, can I trust you?
And it's absolutely critical.
Without trust, there is no culture.
Do you care about me?
People don't care how much you know
until they know how much you care.
And the third is, are you dedicated to excellence?
Everybody wants to be on a winning team.
So we're looking for team members
who want to be champions.
Coach Ho above the door in the locker
room for Notre Dame players always touched on
the way out, play like a champion.
Today I have one in my office.
Edward has one in his office.
And so that's something that makes you feel
good when you are working with team members,
that everybody is working towards the same goal,
everybody's feeling the same passion about their work.
You have a winning team.
First thing to remember about the future is we want
to stay true to our core, true to our roots,
true to our culture, true to who we are.
So it's first staying true to a really,
really strong foundation and building on that.
But we're really excited about the future, too.
We're doing a lot of innovation, some new
technology to help the client experience and the
stylist experience in the four walls.
But while we're doing that, it's really
important to remember that while innovation is
important and not getting stale is important,
it's also innovation within the core.
We're not dramatically changing the business model.
We cut hair.
We provide a championship haircut experience.
And the relationship between the client and the stylist is
really the core of what we do every single day.
So we're also not letting technology be the focus.
We're using it to boost
that client status relationship.
So we call that innovation within the core.
Also like to think about it as high tech, high touch.
Yes, we're going to be innovating.
We're going to be doing new things, but
there is no replacing that client stylist relationship.
That actually is our core business.
And so we're going to be
doing a lot of exciting things.
We're always going to be finding new support
programs, new ways to support the stylist, new
experiences that can be really exciting for a
client in different ways to boost that.
But it all stays true to who we are.
And again, back to the four walls and
that client stylus voice, one of the things
that I think really encapsulates our philosophies of
franchising, but also in business in general.
One of my favorite philosophers, country philosopher, motivational
speaker Zig Ziglar, one of his favorite sayings
was, you can have anything in life.
You won't if you help other people get what they want.
And I think that's true all the way down in the store.
If our team members help our clients get
what they want, stylists get what they want,
happy clients will come back and get tippers.
If the stylists get what they want, and the
manager, team leaders, and the company and the whole
sport clip system gets what they want, which is
happy, satisfied clients coming back over and over again
for that championship gun experience.
So we're people squared, and we recognize that.
We know that stylists are the
most important part of our business.
And so we truly believe in the importance of
the stylist and the whole stylist, not just the
one that shows up to work every day.
And so what's valuable about sport clips and
what's fun about sport clips is that we
really believe that it's authentic for us.
It's not just something we do, it's who we are.