The Moment of Truth
What Closing My Salon Taught Me About Leading With Clarity
For nine years, I built something I am genuinely proud of. Allure Beauty Bar grew into a seven-figure business with more than twenty-five professionals at its peak, earned five Salon Today Top 200 recognitions, and put me in rooms with people I had admired for most of my career. I directed photo shoots, built our online retail presence from scratch, sat on the PBA Salon/Spa Advisory Council, and trained stylists who went on to become leaders in their own right. I set out to build a business that reflected the standard I believed this industry deserved, and I did that.
I also closed it. In early 2026, after three deliberate months of transition, I shut the doors, helped my team find their next steps, and deleted our entire online presence: the website, the social accounts, years of documented history. No announcement. No farewell tour. Nine years of highs and lows do not compress into a caption.
What I want to talk about now is not the closing itself. It is what I found on the other side of it, and why I believe it matters for anyone leading in this industry, not just for me.
The Pattern I Had Stopped Seeing
Running a business at that scale requires real systems: color formulation, team structure, retail targets, brand standards, client experience. I built those systems well. What I had not built, and did not know I was missing, was a way of staying rooted in my own self-trust while everyone around me had an opinion about what I should do next.
Somewhere in the process of growing Allure, keeping others comfortable started to feel indistinguishable from good leadership. I got skilled at reading a room, smoothing tension, absorbing friction so the business could keep moving. That skill served me for years, and I do not regret having it. But it also meant that, slowly, other people's fear and other people's expectations started to carry more weight in my decisions than my own discernment did. I would not have called it that at the time. I called it being a good leader. In hindsight, it was avoidance wearing leadership's clothes.
By the time I made the decision to close, I was not deciding out of failure. The business had done what I set out to build it to do. I was deciding because staying past the point where I already knew the truth was not something I was willing to keep doing, to myself or to the people who worked alongside me.
Why I Went Quiet Instead of Public
I spent three of the heaviest months of my life closing Allure. I gave what I had left, and some days that was more than others. Nine years does not compress into an announcement, and the truth I needed to face required more than a caption's worth of honesty.
Clearing that history was about creating a clean path forward. Before I took anything down, I built a landing page with every stylist's new contact information, so our guests could find their people without wading through a closed chapter to get there. Once that page had done its job, I let the rest go. Holding onto pages and posts that no longer served anyone would have been about my own attachment, not their needs.
Finding the Aligned Day
Once I had the space to actually think, I went looking for something I did not fully have language for yet: a way to make decisions from my own self-trust instead of from the accumulated noise of everyone else's. That search led me to Regan Hilyer's work, and I went through it thoroughly, podcasts and videos, over months.
What I built from that period is not something I borrowed wholesale. I tested every part of it on myself first, in the middle of a genuinely difficult stretch, before I ever considered bringing it into my work. I call it the Aligned Day, and it starts every morning the same way: waking up and declaring the intention for that day, out loud, specific enough to actually mean something.
That specificity is the entire practice. It is easy to say you want to make more money. It costs nothing and changes nothing, because technically, one extra dollar satisfies it. The real work is refusing to stop there. What does the number actually look like? Is it $150,000 over the next year? A new house, and if so, which neighborhood, what does the kitchen look like, what does it smell like on the morning you wake up there for the first time? Vague wanting keeps you comfortable because it asks nothing of you. Specific wanting is uncomfortable, because once you can see it and feel it, you also have to admit whether your current choices are actually taking you there.
I pause throughout the day to return to that picture. Some days that means a reminder on my phone. The goal is not the interruption itself, it is training myself to keep checking in with what I actually want instead of running on autopilot until the day absorbs me. This is not passive wishing. It is a discipline of radical honesty with yourself, followed by the willingness to actually listen to what your body and your instincts are telling you about the steps that get you there.
I want to be direct about something, because I know how this can sound. Some people will hear "alignment" and picture vague wellness language with nothing underneath it. I understand that reaction, because I have had it myself about other people's version of this work. But this is not vague. This is declaring a specific outcome, checking in with it daily, and having the discipline to act from it instead of drifting through decisions on autopilot. Self-trust, discernment, and daily discipline are not soft concepts. They are operational ones.
What I Kept Building
None of this happened in isolation from my work. While I was developing the Aligned Day, I was also building custom AI tools for professional colorists, forming new partnerships, and saying yes to events because they were genuinely right for me, not because I felt obligated to show up. Staying connected to this industry through that period was part of the practice, not separate from it.
What This Means for How I Lead Going Forward
Everyone chasing some secret formula for success in this industry already has the only ingredient that actually matters: their own highest self, waiting to be claimed. The real differentiator between operators who build something sustainable and operators who eventually burn out or lose themselves inside their own success is not talent or work ethic. Most people at this level have both. It is whether they have built a way to keep hearing their own discernment over the noise, and whether they have the conviction to follow it even when it is inconvenient.
That is the system I am bringing into whatever I build next.
Closing Allure was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, precisely because I cared about it as much as I did. Nine years of building something real does not end easily, and it shouldn’t. Closing it was how I finished that chapter with the same integrity I built it with, so the next one could start from my highest self instead of my fear. That is the work now, and I am genuinely glad to be doing it in the open.
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If you want to hear this explained better than I ever could, this is the episode of Regan Hilyer's podcast that put language to what I had already been circling on my own. No affiliate link, nothing to gain by sharing it, just genuinely valuable work worth your time if any of this resonated.