A Cut Above: How Sport Clips Founder Gordon Logan’s Attention To An Overlooked Market Share Spurred One of the Country’s Top Franchises
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It stands to reason that when you make a living in the financial planning industry, you gain plenty of insights into potentially lucrative trends over a wide swath of industries.
For Gordon Logan, those insights came via a Wall Street Journal article about the hair care industry. Seeing some of the changes there were coming, he rode the wave by purchasing a franchise in a popular salon chain in the Houston market.
But while things were going well, and business was growing, Logan couldn’t help but notice an obvious deficiency in the customer base…..
Namely, men.
Logan set about to find a way to get what was essentially half of his target customer base on board with what he was doing. Through extensive market research, he found that, by and large, men still wanted the camaraderie found in traditional barber shops (long recognized as a haven where guys could be guys), but were somewhat leery of the quality of the final product, which varied from shop to shop.
Armed with the knowledge that men generally wanted a male-intensive user experience akin to a barber shop, but also the quality haircut that one can find in a salon, Logan revamped his salon to cater to these exact needs.
Locker-room atmosphere? Check.
Multiple TV’s, all showing sports, throughout the place? Check.
Friendly, energetic hair stylists trained to know the best way to cut a man’s head of hair? Check.
And so, in 1995, Sport Clips was born.
Since its inception, Sport Clips, much like the hair that that the company specializes in cutting, has grown and grown, to the point where it ranks among high atop Entrepreneur Magazine’s list of Top 500 franchises for 2015., placing 36th overall, and second in the hair care industry.
Not bad for a business that almost exclusively targets what had previously been a disenfranchised market sector. And all because Gordon Logan decided to think differently from the norm.
On today’s edition of “The Raja Show”, Gordon Logan discusses his story with Raja, including an in-depth look at why he decided to zig when the rest of the growing industry in which he was a part chose to zag. He’ll talk about the importance of taking risks, managing growth, staying humble, and putting the customer first every step of the way.
