Join Salon Mavens with Marnie Kallmeyer here. 

Marnie sold her salon business for a big payout

Nearly 14 years ago, when WSM was in its infancy, I met a new Member whose salon happened to be only a few blocks away from our office.

Marnie Kallmeyer had bought my original Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, much to the sneering objections of her husband Peter, who derided it as “just another scam”.
Marnie’s business was really struggling at the time, but she did nothing with the Toolkit for some months, until finally, driven by desperation, she picked it up and started using the tools and instructions contained within it.
Let’s cut to the chase – the business quickly took off, doubled then tripled sales, and Peter had to eat a healthy serving of humble pie. It got better though. Marnie fell over and badly injured her hand, so much so that she could no longer work on clients, and was forced to work ‘on’ the business instead of in it.
She immersed herself in education, schooling herself on all things marketing, subscribing to the work of great marketers like Dan Kennedy, and more importantly, implementing what she was learning.
Marnie became not merely a business owner, but an entrepreneur.
A couple of years after that, she put the business on the market, and sold it – for a solid six-figure sum.
Every year since, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to persuade Marnie to come out of ‘retirement’ (she’s far too young for that!) and make her enormous skills, her no-nonsense approach, her warmth and sense of empathy available to our salon & spa owners all over the world.
This month, I tried again. “Do you just want to fiddle around doing the odd eyelash extension, or do you want to use your knowledge and business experience to actually make a difference in the world?” I asked her.
Thankfully, that must have pushed a ‘hot button.’ So I’m absolutely delighted to let you know that Marnie has agreed to join WSM officially.
We don’t even have a title for Marnie yet. But safe to say, she’ll be intimately involved in guiding our Members, in group video training, in answering questions in our forum, and developing new ways of helping salon owners achieve their goals.
Marnie has been where many Members are right now, at the bottom and struggling to find clear air. She’s also been at the summit of success, and knows exactly what it takes to get there. But more to the point, Marnie is a wife and a mother, just like so many of our Members. She’s been through the School of Hard Knocks, graduated from the University of Having the Shit Kicked Out of You, and came out smiling, despite the scars and war-wounds.
She’s hard-nosed, but soft as butter inside. You couldn’t want for a better industry-specific mentor, guide and Marketing Maven.