Black Tech Green Money: Barbershop Industry Report: Key Insights with Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant of SQUIRE

Will Lucas (0:00)

Will Lucas, Black Tech Green Money, so good to be with you guys for another episode. I got the Squire boys here. Squire boys in the building, Dave Salvant, Songe LaRon, President and CEO, respectfully. Squire is the business management platform built for barbershops that run booking, payments, marketing, and shop operations all in one system. Dave and Songe were named EY's Entrepreneurs of the Year for the New York Region 2025 Welcome, Dave and Songe.

Happy to be here. Yeah. It's good to have you guys back. It's been a minute. Yeah. It's been a minute. It's been like a year or so. And I want to kick this off talking about recent events. So you guys dropped your latest industry reports, kind of like state of the barbershop industry. And you looked at just about 14 million appointments across 7,000 US shops, which is a hunk of data. That's a lot of data to be getting insights from. And a few numbers jumped out at me. And I want to get your perspective on this. Almost half of clients who come in once to a shop never come back. More than a third of chairs sit empty, or chairs sit empty half, like a third of the time.

A quarter of the bookings clients make themselves come in after shops have already been closed, so people are booking late into the evening.

So when you look at these reports, what is the one number, I want you guys both to chime in because you may have different answers or may be the same. When you look at this report, what's the one number that should keep a shop owner up at night and what should they do about it? We'll start with you, Songe.

Songe LaRon (1:36)

Yeah.

Thanks for having us. Yeah, the report is actually the first time that we formally released the report and we realized that we were sitting on this Trevor Chogue of data and we wanted to figure out how to make it useful and valuable to the customers. I think the one out of what you mentioned, the retention one was really the most jaw-dropping and surprising. How many times when a new client comes in, it doesn't necessarily mean that that client is coming back. We tell our customers that one of the most important things to think about is, what can they do to ensure that they're providing a great experience on that first booking, but most importantly, getting their clientele to come back and then getting their existing business to retain and book more often. Because that is really where the majority of the revenue of any business comes from, is from existing customers. So we try to provide them with tools and a lot of stuff we can get into related to AI and stuff to automate that. So yeah, that was a surprising fact though.

Will Lucas (2:42)

Hey, what was surprising for you?

Dave Salvant (2:45)

I mean, the most surprising thing is the retention number to me.

I think a lot of barbers don't understand how much money they're losing. But they always seem to be focused on how much new clients or new business they get. But the other side of the coin and the more costly side is keeping the business that you already have. Though I think the statistic says on behalf of the customers that you get a new chair will never come back. Even if they could be marginally improved that, it can make a whole world of difference for the business.

Will Lucas (3:31)

So when you see users join the app, are these people who are fishing for a new barber or is it typically that they're traveling? Because what I found, at least in the people I know who were using the app, is they may be out of town looking for somebody and they find a dope barber on the app, but they may not be there for a long period of time to be going back. So is that one isolated consortium of people and then the other is just somebody who actually lives in town is like, yeah, I went to guy over around the corner, not going back. Like, how do you normalize that data, I guess is the question.

Songe LaRon (4:09)

Yeah, on general men are tend to be very loyal. Like, once they actually find that barber that they rock with, they tend to be very loyal. And we'll go back to the same barber. So when we find people looking kind of like what we call like being in discovery mode, you're looking for somebody new, to your point, it usually is because they're traveling or they just recently moved, or it's because they're not satisfied for whatever reason with the existing barber and they're looking to try out somebody new. Those are the main use cases we see. There's a subset, and this kind of varies by demographics as well.