The music was pumping. Famed stylist Laurent D. — hairdresser to celebrity clients Teri Hatcher, Uma Thurman, and Sharon Stone — was clipping locks. Appetizers from the Hard Rock’s trendy Simon Kitchen & Bar made their way around the room. And Motley Crue rocker Vince Neil donated wine to supplement the free-flowing champagne. It wasn’t the Los Angeles opening of a star stylist’s new salon, but the September launch of The Cutting Room, a new Henderson salon that is the brainchild of 23-year-old Katie Koll, ’05 BS Business Administration.
It took Koll and four UNLV classmates less than six weeks to write a proposal for The Cutting Room last spring for her businessplan class. In May, the proposal landed among the finalists in the Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup Business Plan Competition, held by the Nevada Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.
The four partners who helped Koll write the plan for The Cutting Room — Nataly Tatone, Lance Howard, Cory VanAken, and Phil Sander — pursued other post-college plans. But Koll, who worked the front desk at Diva Studio in Henderson while a UNLV student, was smitten with the salon business and wanted to implement plans for The Cutting Room.
“I liked the concept of making people feel better about themselves,” Koll says. “I liked the family feeling of working at a salon. This industry doesn’t have a corporate feel. Everybody comes together as a team to help someone look and feel better.”
Securing the Backing
So Koll made a gutsy move. During a hair-coloring appointment with Michael Boychuk, the popular celebrity stylist who owns Amp Salon at the Palms and manages The Salon at Canyon Ranch Spa inside The Venetian, Koll mentioned the business plan she had helped assemble. Boychuk asked to see the plan; after the two had several meetings, Boychuk forwarded Koll to two of his longtime employees: Kevin Teitler, who is now The Cutting Room’s artistic director, and Dawn Oguri, who is its salon director. In addition, Boychuk, good friends with both Laurent D. and Vince Neil, talked the two into their contributions to The Cutting Room’s opening.
Koll also found an investor: Her father, Jerry Koll, an environmental engineer who lives in Summerlin, put up the capital to open the salon.
Richard Arend, the professor who advised Koll and her classmates on their Governor’s Cup entry, said Koll’s “experience and contacts in the industry” and her ability to marshal finances and employees were essential to getting The Cutting Room off the ground. He added that Koll and her group had “a good grasp of the key success factors in the industry and the market they chose.”
Amending the Plan
But as with any big idea, plans change along the way. Koll said roughly half of the proposal she and her classmates submitted for the Governor’s Cup competition stayed intact. Out were plans to give every Cutting Room employee 5 percent ownership in the company after a certain period of time with the salon; Governor’s Cup judges warned that vested interests could get complicated if staffers left to take jobs with other salons. Koll also boosted The Cutting Room’s planned number of product lines from two to three to ensure the salon could offer shampoos and conditioners “for everybody’s price range.”
Koll also faced obstacles no business plan could address. Delays in obtaining Henderson business and building permits — due mostly to the difficult time Koll had getting the power and phones turned on — pushed the salon’s opening from early August to mid- September.
And once she set a specific opening date — Sept. 17, her mother’s birthday — “things got stressful,” Koll said. “Usually, salons are open a month and then they have their grand opening. Our grand opening was our first day.” Plumbers and electricians were still working just hours before The Cutting Room opened. “It kind of felt like everyone was against me at one point because nothing was going right,” Koll recalls.
Today, Koll is grateful for those early obstacles. “I know now that there will be issues, and I know how to handle those issues,” she said. “You can’t get angry when things go wrong and you can’t look for people to blame. You just have to think of a solution.”
Koll also credited her professors for their guidance. Daniel McAllister, a management professor, “taught me about life and management, and gave everybody a good idea of what the world would be like when we got out there.” And Stoney Alder, who taught Koll’s human resource management class, “really interacted well with the students,” she said.
Alder remembers Koll as an eager student. “She had a wonderful attitude and was motivated,” he said. “More important, she related well and got along well with others, including both students and faculty.”
Koll plans to use all she’s learned in school and on the job to significantly expand The Cutting Room. The 2,800-square-foot salon, 10575 S. Eastern Ave., has 16 stylist stations and just six stylists, so there’s “room to grow,” Koll said. She would like to open another salon in Nevada, as well as one in California. She also dreams of an outpost in New York City.
But those plans will have to wait a few years. “I’m going to focus for at least the next five years on this salon. It’s like watching your kid grow up — you want to be there every day. I love being here, working long days, and feeling like I’ve achieved something.”
