You are not just a barber.

Let me ask you something nobody in this industry asks enough:

How do you maximize what you do when what you do is more than one thing?

That question changed my life. And I think it might change yours too.

I never fit in one lane.

Barbering is what I do. But it was never all of who I am.

Early on, I started investing in photography and videography in equipment, time, research and at a moment when most people in this industry weren't doing that. Not because someone told me to. Because I was so proud of the skill I was building in that chair that I wanted the world to see it the way I felt it.

I wanted it to look as epic as it made me feel.

That was the first moment I realized something: my passion didn't stop at the haircut. It extended to how I told the story of it. And that realization cracked something open in me.

The mindset nobody talks about

Here's what I had to unlearn: that success in this industry meant cutting fast, doing women's hair, adding color, stacking as many heads per day as possible.

That's the hustle culture version of this career. And for some people, it works. But for me and maybe for you, it was a slow burn toward burnout.

The real lie wasn't that you can't make a great living just cutting hair. You can. The lie was that you had to and that there was only one way to do it.

The truth is, the barber's chair has always been more than a place to work. It's a confessional. A coaching session. A connection point between someone's outside and their inside. People sit down for a fade and end up talking about their career, their relationship, their next move in life.

We are connectors. We carry more knowledge and insight through our networks than most people realize because we sit across from every walk of life, every day, and we listen.

I got to a point where other barbers were booking appointments with me not just for a haircut but to pick my brain. When that kept happening, I had to pay attention to what it was telling me.

It was telling me I was already coaching. I just hadn't named it yet.

What it actually takes to grow beyond the chair

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Making this shift from barber to multi-hyphenated creative required me to accept a version of myself that looked very different from most people in my industry.

I had to sit with that discomfort. I had to be okay with being misunderstood before I was understood.

What got me through was this: the right environment, real discipline, an action-taking mindset, and a grit that doesn't quit even when the path isn't clear.

Today, my income comes from education, brand work, freelance content production, and when someone's willing to pay a high-ticket price to pull me away from everything else, a haircut.

That's my reality now. And it took courage to accept it and being in this space, I hope that I can help more people experience it.

This newsletter is for you if:

You're a young barber trying to figure out who you are beyond the chair. Or a veteran who's great at what you do but feels something pulling you toward more and you don't know how to follow it without losing what you've built.

This series is called Beyond the Chair for a reason and it's about how we grow as multi-hyphenated creatives. Not just better barbers. Full, layered, lucrative human beings who happen to cut hair.

Because some of the most powerful things I've seen weren't the cuts I gave. They were the moments someone sat down feeling invisible and stood up feeling like themselves again.

That's the power we carry. It's time to take it seriously.

More next week.

— SOF!