Beauty in Scale: Empowering Franchise Leaders with Meg Roberts

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:18)
Well, welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and we have a special guest who will introduce in a moment.
Behind every successful franchise system are people, franchise owners taking entrepreneurial risks, teams delivering the brand experience, mentors, developing new leaders, and executives, creating conditions for everyone to succeed, and that human dimension becomes even more important in beauty and wellness, where customers return not only for a service, but also for confidence or self-expression, care, and connection. Today, we are exploring beauty in scale, empowering franchise leaders, and we've got a special guest. Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:04)
Yes, very excited. Our guest today is Meg Roberts. She is the CEO of Head to Toe Brands, a beauty and wellness franchise platform that includes The Lash Lounge, Frenchies Modern Nail Care, Bishops Cut & Color, and Delta Crown Extensions. Before leading Head to Toe Brands, Meg served as CEO and President of The Lash Lounge, growing the system from 14 to more than 140 open locations. Earlier in her career, she became the youngest president to lead Molly Maid, supporting a system of more than 250 franchisees. Meg has served on the board of the International Franchise Association, also known as the IFA, and was appointed Vice Chair of the IFA Foundation in 2026
She also co-founded the 30 Under 30 Mentor Program to support and develop professionals who are new to franchising.
Meg credits much of her success to the mentors who invested in her development. And she continues to make mentorship a central part of her leadership. Meg, welcome to the Bliss Business Podcast.

**Meg Roberts** (2:15)
Thank you for having me, gentlemen. I'm excited to be here. I love what you're doing, and I love what Bliss stands for. I think it's super, super cool.
Build Love Into Scalable Systems. Franchising is all about scale. And I think sometimes we overlook how important it is to not only love what we're doing, but love who we're doing it with. So I'm really excited to be here today.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:37)
Yeah, you know, and the challenge sometimes with growing and scaling is that, yeah, you build these systems that, you know, can end up being a little cold and, you know, without that human element.
You know, so Tullio mentioned you helped grow the Lash Lounge from 14 to more than 140 locations. What changes when a franchise brand moves from kind of that emerging stage? You have developed some systems, but now you're, you know, you're definitely a much larger system.

**Meg Roberts** (3:07)
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, you hear people say when you go from one child to two, it feels crazy. But when you go from two to four or six, it doesn't feel that extreme. I actually would challenge that. I think the bigger you get, the more responsibility you have to take in making sure that you are addressing the needs of the multiplier, right? Whether it's 50 or 70 or 100, but then also recognize that each of those franchisees themselves are uniquely different. Franchising is designed to be replicable and scalable, but you also have to pay close attention to the fact that your franchisees are different and they may receive learning in a different way. They may be a kinetic learner. They may be someone who appreciates doing everything online. So to answer your question, I would say the biggest change for us was recognizing that our audience had now changed so dramatically and that the way in which we were going to communicate, to train, to engage with that growing audience needed to also expand. We needed to recognize that different people digest things differently. And that was a really key component of keeping our franchisees engaged and helping them learn as quickly as they needed to.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:26)
Yeah, I feel like at some point, at the 14 range maybe, that's like I could juggle three balls, but you're throwing me seven or eight now suddenly and ten and I'm like toast. So it's like, yeah, there's definitely that difference between that emerging stage and getting to where you were in there. And I think that, yeah.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:47)
Thanks for those watching too, making comments. We got a comment from PureWave Technologies on LinkedIn that said, leadership from 14 to 140 location isn't just growth. It's a complete rebuild on how leadership operates. Culture preservation during expansion is the real challenge. Either you design it upfront or you spend years recovering from it. So very good comment. So and that brings me to our sort of next question because beauty and wellness branch, it's a very deeply personal service, right? Customers often build meaningful relationship, not just with the salon, but with the professional themselves, right? And it's almost like cheating.