40 minutes in the life of a Sport Clips wannabe

Bob Chelberg promised I could vacuum and maybe wash his hair, but he drew the line there. I should have known he wouldn’t be a good sport about letting me cut his hair—much less one of Sport Clips’ customers. My younger daughter still gets a facial tick whenever she remembers the time she was 8 and I trimmed her bangs six inches above her right eyebrow. But in fairness to me, it was only three inches too short on the left side.

I spent most of August reading Julie Bennett’s updated "Franchise Times Guide to Selecting, Buying and Owning a Franchise" and it rekindled my interest in whether I would make a good franchisee. Julie, who’s a freelancer for the magazine as well as the author of our book, confessed that when she took the franchisee personality profile test, she flunked because she would let her employees walk all over her. In the book, Julie writes about the time she almost bought a Cousins’ Subs while attending its Discovery Day for a story, and her less-than-stellar attempt to learn how to install bathtub liners. Unfortunately, her ineptness in the handyman category made her real-franchisee partner look bad—but on a positive note, the franchise went belly up a few years later, so he really didn’t need that skill.

Over the years, I’ve tried on several franchise careers for less than an hour. I’ve been a doggy daycare attendant, where I learned to hipcheck amorous dogs; a burrito assembler using a tool called the "Bob;" and watched braver men than I wash windows on the outside of a high-rise. I’ve attended a preschool-age children’s art class—where my picture was far superior to the other students’—and painted a nude male model at a wine-and-painting franchise in Chicago.  My painting was not the best in class there, but it was better than Fishman PR President Debra Vilchis’s, who made the exotic-dancer-turned-art-model look like Abe Lincoln.

When I emailed Sport Clips’ PR person, Dana Dussing Berry, about pulling a shift at Sport Clips, I knew I wouldn’t be cutting hair. After all, the same daughter whose hair I defaced, told me when she was 10 she’d like to work in the beauty field, but not cutting hair, because a bad haircut could totally ruin someone’s life. And yes she has forgiven me, and allows me to visit her children as long as we’re supervised.

Bob Chelberg (no relation to the aforementioned spatula named Bob), is the area developer for Minnesota and South Dakota, and my supervisor at the Sport Clips a half mile from my office. 

My first chore was vacuuming the floor around the chair after a haircut. The hose is cleverly hidden inside a cupboard by each station. I know my way around a vacuum at home, but in a professional setting, I was clumsy. After watching me for a minute, Chelberg, who claims to be an excellent vacuumer, showed me how to hold the hose so it didn’t just blow the hair around but actually sucked it up. Fortunately, I do not judge my worth by my cleaning skills so I didn’t need to personally suck it up.

Next I watched Rosemary Swanson cut Chelberg’s hair. I tried not to be jealous; she did have more training cutting hair than I did. After the haircut and an eyebrow trim, we all headed back to the "showers"—remember this is a sports-themed place—and Chelberg climbed into the chair and laid his head back into the wash bowl. Swanson handed him the remote for the chair—"Guys love remotes," he said. She handed me a hot towel and demonstrated how to place it on his face. "Wave it a bit first," she warned, "it’s hot."

 I wrapped the steamy towel around his face starting at his chin, and smoothing it over his eyes. "Better leave a space for his nose so he can breathe," Swanson advised. Even I could see the logic in that. 

While his face steamed, I learned the proper way to wash hair. Cup your hand around the nozzle so the water stays on the hair, and make six circles at the temple, back of the neck and crown. Not five circles, not seven, but six. It must have something to do with sports superstition.Once the shampoo was completed, we returned to the styling chair where Swanson dried and styled Chelberg’s hair and gave him a neck massage. Once she finished, he added more product and parted his hair. Most of us wait until we’re in our car before undoing a stylist’s hard work, but he is an area developer...

The franchisee, Steve Pawlyshyn, began to clean up Chelberg’s hair and the two men started trash-talking about who was the superior vacuumer. I turned to Swanson and asked, "I bet the stylists (who are all women) are not the least bit competitive about vacuuming, right?"

"Right," she said, rolling her eyes.

I would have challenged Pawlyshyn and Chelberg to a vacuum-off, but there were two men and only one TV remote between them—plus I had already been there less than an hour; my shift was over.