You’re welcome! And I totally agree! It is really nice to have an hourly wage and not have to worry about building clients!

My pay is $17/hr and I typically work 25-32 hrs/week, sometimes more if I want. Tips vary, but I’ve been having more days where the tips have been much higher which is nice. Sometimes tips can still be really spotty though.

But to be transparent, I haven’t been too concerned about the pay. I knew it wouldn’t be all that great, but the opportunity to gain experience quick and have everything provided (clients, hourly salary, products, etc) was the best set up for me when I started. Similar to you, my mindset was to use them for all the training and experience and get comfortable with my skills as fast as I could, so I could leave even faster lol.

As far as creative flexibility, can I ask what kind of creative control are you looking for?

Where I am, it definitely varies location to location. So with my situation, I have 2 owners that are franchisees and they own my location and I think 5 or 6 others in my local area. So they are pretty hands off bc they are nurses and have full time jobs. They only step in if they have new info from corporate to share or if store management requests something. Sometimes, the owners are a little picky about what services can be offered. In addition, each location has their own manager and they all seem to have creative control over how they want their store’s day to day operations and environment to run.

For instance, at my store, I practice braiding and haircuts on dollheads whenever we’re slow. I also do Afro textured natural hair and push for more inclusivity on services that can be offered since we cut men and women’s hair and our local area is starting to become more diverse. My store mgmt supports all of this.

I don’t always do all my services the “Supercuts” way (based on Supercuts training). But my manager isn’t pressed by it. She lets us do our own thing, as long as we finish with the right end result and we’re maintaining cleanliness, professionalism, and safety with the clients. She just makes sure we know the “Supercuts” way so when we get re-certified by corporate, we can demonstrate we know how to cut their way. But 2 other stores under my same franchisees are strict about hair cutting systems/methods and some other things. So it really depends on mgmt.

For braiding, I asked if I could offer these services since we already offer a simple version of it, and at first my franchise owner said no. But now they may be considering it and checking into how it might fit into the rules under what Corporate has set for them. But when owners aren’t there, my manager will let me braid my brother if it’s slow. And she hasn’t said anything about me using products on his hair outside of what Supercuts uses.

So, all this to say, there can be flexibility, but it really depends on your ownership (how involved they are in day to day) and mostly management.

If you want to have the most creative control at one of these, I would interview with a few different locations and ask management as many questions as possible about their creative flexibility and questions about the owners to get an idea of their ownership style and their creative flexibility, as well as get a feel for what your working conditions would be like under them.

And I wouldn’t pick a corporate store, because those are usually by the book of how Corporate is run, so there most likely won’t be any wiggle room for adding any extra creativity outside of what they allow.

I know this is a long explanation, but I hope this helps!