Jada Riley

I would attribute my success to my support system and having people who really give me constructive criticism and feedback, not just yes-men. I can come to them and talk about my business, and they'll actually give me constructive criticism and feedback, and not just be like, okay, I'm just gonna go along with whatever you say. I have a great support system and a lot of mentors that have also had successful businesses and who are kind of in the know with what's the next big thing. I think that's what pushed me to go down the tech route in creating my app and my technology - just having a mentor who's in that space and saying, you need to get ahead of the curve.

The best career advice I've ever received is to build the plane while flying it and to fail fast. I've always been a person that is a super planner - I plan everything until it's perfect, and I won't execute until I feel like every small detail is where it needs to be. But I think there's no such thing as perfection, so if I'm waiting to start my business until I think every small detail is perfect, then you have all those people that can just sweep the rug from right under your feet and take that opportunity away from you. If you execute and take a leap of faith, if you fail fast, then you know exactly what you did wrong, and then you can pivot and do something else. Don't waste your time trying to make everything perfect - everything doesn't have to be perfect.

To young women that are entering the cosmetology industry specifically, my advice would be dare to be different. If you stood on a corner and threw a rock, you could hit 100 hair salons, so you really need to think about what you can do at your salon to not only be different, but to serve your community in a meaningful way.

I think the biggest opportunity is that society is placing a larger emphasis on health and wellness and being holistic. There's a lot more consumers who are interested in not just looking good and covering up the problem, but really getting into the inside and figuring out how to fix the problem and be healthy from the inside out. In the beauty and cosmetology community, there's been a lot more attention being placed on hair loss and scalp health. When I first started going to beauty conferences, there weren't really a lot of breakout sessions about hair loss and scalp health - most were just on precision hair cutting, extensions, or color. But now when you go to these conferences, you're seeing a lot more of the panelists and breakout sessions being about alopecia, hair loss, and different scalp conditions like psoriasis. The biggest challenge is that hair is very personal, and sometimes people can have a problem but they don't want to come forward because they'll try to fix it themselves. They don't come to a qualified professional until they've reached the point of exhaustion. Another challenge for me is that my business sits at the intersection of health and beauty, so when I'm applying for certain programs, accelerators, or grants, a lot of times people don't see the value. They just think, oh, you're just a hair salon, but the problem is much bigger than just being a hair salon. My business is not totally in the health side and not totally in the beauty side, so it's in this weird space that people sometimes don't understand. I have to do a lot of education to get people to understand why this problem is important.

I would say honesty for sure, empathy, and respect. I think as a cosmetologist, and especially in the space that I'm in, empathy is very important, honesty is very important. Those are my top three values.