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I’m here with the Ultimate Barber. What up? How you’re doing? Introduce yourself to the people.

How you doing? My name’s John Hall. Branded as The Ultimate Barber. I’ve been in this business for about 37 years now. Coming out of the DMV area. My barbershops are in the Alexandria, Virginia area, right on the side of Washington, DC. We opened our first location in 2017, 2016. We’ve had the brand since 2010. And things have been going well.

Now, tell me about that lane itself. Why Barbering? How did you step into that lane? Oh man, I think it found me <laugh>. I didn’t find it. It’s in the family. A lot of people in my family are either cosmetologists or barbers. So you know, more of a gift. It came easy to me. So, you know, just a blessing from up above just to be able to have those talents and skills where I was able to pick it up pretty quickly. And just from there, I just started to have a passion for it, fell in love with it.

You mentioned managing multiple shops. How do you balance that and still remain yourself, a creative?

To be honest with you, you know, not just opening a barbershop and just being able to operate it, but operating it from a bird’s eye view. So learning. I actually went back and took a course or two as far as being able to manage and run a beauty industry business properly. So I took a couple courses on numbers, how to follow numbers, how to track the numbers. So now with technology and being able to use some of the software that we have here, I’m able to, they say that numbers don’t lie. So I’m able to track the numbers and the numbers are actually able to tell me, what’s going on in the barbershops, what’s needed, what’s not needed, what we have to kind of remove, what we’ll have to implement. And from there’ve being able to operate a successful business from that.

Speaking of bird’s eye view, you’re giving people a perceptive into what you got going on. You’ve got the camera following you around, telling about your life as The Ultimate Barber. So tell us a little bit more about that series and what people can expect from watching the episodes. What you’re gonna see from that is, you’ll see a little bit more than just the just the Barbering aspect. I think on there, I did a mobile cut. This was, you know, right around or right after that time with Covid, so people were a little still uneasy coming back into the barbershop per se. I had that on there. Had some salon suites, so I ventured out into that right before Covid. Just getting another aspect of just ownership, business ownership. I had a 37 suite concept called Ultimate Salon Suites, some promo. So just getting some recognition in some major publications, magazines there. So we had took a trip to the bookstore, said we gotta find one of those magazines. Cause I think it had just came out.So we did that. And you know, just the life too as well. Got to be able to meet my family. Went to visit my mother. She talked about a little bit of my history there. My uncle, he was a Barber in the Navy back in the fifties. We talked and then some of the Barbers here within this area of the DMV that influenced me, got to able to go and talk to some of those guys as well. The older guys there were amazing; those are the ones that really gave me a foundation of what to follow as far within the industry there. So got to talk to them too.

Now, being that you have so much time invested into this industry, into this game, really 37 years, what is the biggest lesson that you would say was a constant, that carried you throughout that journey that you always had to go back to?

So there’s two things that I teach to the younger Barbers when they’re coming into the industry. And these two things right here, I said, if you keep this in mind, if you implement this, you’ll have a great career. This industry will take care of you. I told ‘em to be consistent and be reliable. Those two things right there. Consistent, as far as with the service that you’re giving to a client. Then reliability. Be on time, be punctual. I was taught by the older Barbers; one of the things that they instilled in me was, always be waiting on the client, don’t have the client waiting on you. So just those things there. Making sure you’re just being consistent and reliable. I guarantee you do that, you’ll have a very successful career as a Barber in this industry.

What else can we look forward to? Where they can find your shops, where they can visit you, where they can follow all of the endeavors that you have going on.

We’re in the Alexandria, Virginia area here. You’ll find us here, just look up The Ultimate Barber. We were franchising as well. We kind of pulled back just a little bit on that. But we’re taking a little different course there. Partnering up with some guys here within the industry and we’re gonna do something on a major level. Can’t disclose too much right now, but it’s gonna make some noise with y’all. And just with that, you can find us, we’re on Instagram.