Cheryl Butler’s parents were perturbed by her pivot in her new career. At least at first.

After studying accountancy at Johnson C. Smith University and securing a full-time position at a credit rating business, Butler became restless. She was living the American Dream, but she felt bored and disinterested. And so, after seven years, she quit her corporate gig to pursue her career as a full time cosmetologist and open StudioEast Styling Salon.

“My parents couldn’t fathom the idea that I would leave this job with a salary, benefits, and stability to style hair,” says Butler. “That’s how simple it was for them.” 

Today, nearly 20 years later, StudioEast is thriving. That’s because Butler, a “master stylist,” offers much more than haircuts and highlights. As a small business owner, she feels a certain responsibility to mentor other aspiring female entrepreneurs. We sat down with Butler to hear more about woman-to-woman mentorship, cosmetology, and passion.    

Where did your love for hair come from?

I grew up in a hair salon. My sister is a hairstylist and she’s about 17 years older than me. When I got to high school, I started working with my sister. I would assist her by blow-drying or shampooing clients. Those skills just stuck with me.

Then, when I was in college, I started using my skills. I started doing friends’ hair and those friends became paying customers. I had a small, but not necessarily legal, business in my dormitory for about four years. It kept some change in my pocket.

You earned a degree in accountancy and were living the American Dream at a corporate job. Why did you leave that behind?

I have more passion for serving others by doing their hair than by crunching numbers. But it took me a long time to open my salon. Right out of college, I went to work for a credit rating company called Moody’s Investors Service. I enrolled in cosmetology school part-time a few months after I started that job. Then, after I graduated from cosmetology school, I started working part-time in a salon while still working full-time in corporate America. I did that for seven years between two salons. After the sixth year, I realized that I just wasn’t passionate about my corporate job in the same way I was about the salon.

I could be creative and innovative in the salon even after working for eight hours at Moody’s Moody’s Investors Service. I had a second wind. It was like I was starting my day all over again. My clientele was growing so much that I would go to the salon at 6 a.m. before my 8-to-5 job. Then, I would go to work. At 5 p.m., I would rush back to the salon for afternoon appointments. It was just common sense — I could see that I had so much more passion for hairstyling.

What about your corporate job didn’t jive with your personality and lifestyle?

When I was in corporate America, I enjoyed the people, but I never developed a passion for the job. It was just that — a job. I was crunching numbers and I knew the product. I had even grown in the company, transitioning from an analyst to an editor. But I realized that the job was no longer interesting to me. It was the same thing, month after month after month. It was the same information, the same data, the same timeline. Nothing was ever different.

Another thing that bothered me about the corporate world was that I had to wait a whole year for someone to tell me that I was doing a great job. There was no instant gratification. But in the salon, it’s all instant gratification. When a client reschedules with me, it’s like they’re saying, “Hey, I appreciate you.” When they send a referral, it’s like they’re saying, “You’re doing such a great job that I want everybody to experience what you have to offer.”

Did you receive pushback from friends and family when you left your corporate job?

I most certainly did from my parents, who paid my tuition and put me through school. They were concerned about security. They wanted to make sure I could provide for myself. It was hard to tell my parents that this was what I wanted to do. The saving grace was that I didn’t rush. I didn’t just jump into it. It was definitely a leap of faith, but I planned. I didn’t have to move back home or sell my car. I was still able to take care of myself, and that helped.

My friends didn’t judge because they saw me working so hard. They saw me working two jobs. They saw my social life diminish to nothing. They saw me working in the morning and the evenings. They saw that I couldn’t accept invites for events. Sometimes, if I did go out, I would just fall asleep because I was so tired. But I had a goal and a purpose.

Tell us about the early days of your salon.

When I first started, I was working part-time in a salon as a booth renter. It was a small space for a reduced price. It was pennies — maybe $75 a week. I worked there for four years and then I went to a spa as an independent contractor. Then, in 2002, I opened StudioEast Styling Salon in a 1,200-square-foot building. I was there until March 2020. I downsized just before things closed because of COVID-19. I’m in a salon suite now.

You’ve owned your salon for nearly 20 years. How do you ensure that your business doesn’t stagnate?

In 20 years, I did sustain and grow a great business it was definitely not completely stagnated by the change in our community around us. 

Marketing and branding were an expenditure we could not afford to work without. We ran commercials on Time Warner, annual print ads in the USA Black Pages and a sponsorship walk with “Bottles and Bottoms.  I continually provided advanced training to new and existing stylists.  I offered business training and coached stylist to assist them with growing their own strong clientele.  We traveled to trade shows and participated in community events like “For Sister’s Only” to build a strong team that worked well together. We even sponsored a Live Television show here in the Queen City “Give Me The Mic Charlotte”, I drove for a teamwork environment that would promote our business and better service our clients.  We also used exclusive professional products only that set us apart. Providing a warm, clean and welcoming professional environment was a huge part of our customer service. The environment around us changed over the years. 

I did stagnate, out of fear. I knew for a while that I needed to relocate my salon. The environment around it was changing. There was less foot traffic of potential clients and more panhandling. A lot of people were hanging around and they weren’t always pleasant. The experience that occurred on the inside of my salon didn’t match the outside.

I needed my stylists to feel like this was a place where they could grow. I knew that it was time to make the change. I dragged my feet because the location was convenient to my home and my son’s school. I wish I had moved forward faster.

Small business owners are constantly growing and evolving. What’s something new that you’re learning right now?

COVID-19 was unfortunate overall. However, for my business, it was a blessing. It gave me time to reorganize and restructure. For a while now, I have wanted to become more of a business operator. I have wanted to get out from behind the chair and run, manage, and grow the salon. But that has been hard because I wear so many hats.

While we were home from March to June, I was able to reorganize my business by making calculated decisions. I looked at my time — how much time I was spending with a client and how often the client came to me. I also looked at my products. There are only so many services or clients I can do, so retail is important. I needed to make sure I was offering my clients products that could help them. If they aren’t going to buy hair products from me, they’re going to buy them from somewhere else. I reimagined my business plan completely.  My advice, trust the process, be prepared to pivot, plan, prepare and move forward when the need arrives.

As a female business owner, what do you think needs to change to help more women become entrepreneurs?

In this industry, female hairstylists have more many challenges because we’re mothers, we’re homemakers, and we’re caregivers. We’re more stretched than our male counterparts when it comes to home/work balance in many cases. My fiancée works for himself as well, our work loads are somewhat different when I get off work at the end of the day than his home responsibilities. The long hours and the 7-day work week required to grow a strong business in the beginning is challenging if you have a family and you are a mother. That might be because when women are more focused on business than family, it’s judged. Women support groups and more shared responsibility all the way around would even out the playing field.  

Also, when I talk to people in this industry, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s hard to work for women.” Or they’ll say, “Women are so catty. I’d rather work for a guy.” That’s something we need to improve on. We need to respect and honor the leadership of women in business.

Minji Ro is not who you would expect to see on Wall Street. She’s Asian, gay, and a woman. But she’s never been too interested in maintaining the status quo. 

Ro, who studied mathematical methods at Northwestern University, worked in sales and trading for over a decade. She started her career as an analyst at Merrill Lynch in 2006 but left eight months later for a position at Goldman Sachs in part because of the homophobia she encountered. 

In the years to come, Ro would focus on helping the underdog— recruiting and mentoring other young professionals who didn’t fit the white, heteronormative mold. In 2016, she partnered with coworker Bill Shelton to provide career coaching to professional athletes who would soon be transitioning out of their sport. The program was so successful that both Ro and Shelton quit their day jobs three years ago to make it a full time endeavor. 

Ro is now the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Evolution of Sports, an organization that works to change the future of athletes all around the world. Ro also co-founded Parity, an online marketplace that matches professional women athletes with social media marketing opportunities. Ro took time out of her busy schedule to talk basketball, equity and inclusion, and progressive workplace policies.       

You’re an avid basketball player — a four-time rec champion, no less. Have you played basketball your whole life?

Yes! I started playing when I was five. I was never good enough to make a go of it and I didn’t have the financial means to really take it seriously. I was also a huge nerd. But I continued to play in high school and then I played on the club team at Northwestern University. I continued to play as an adult in the New York City Gay Basketball League. I think it’s the greatest sport ever. 

Why do you think basketball is the greatest sport ever?

Basketball is nearly non-stop. There’s always something happening and it’s relatively straightforward. You try to get the ball into the hoop — that’s it. 

What skills has basketball taught you that you’ve taken off the court and into the office?

There’s a bunch of research that shows how a huge percentage of women CEOs and executive leaders have played sports. So that question is spot-on — there are many parallels between sport and work. Basketball, for instance, is a team sport. There are positions on the court. Every player has a job and every job is different. Being good at basketball can mean a lot of different things. You need somebody who’s very tall. You need somebody who’s dedicated to defense. You need somebody who’s going to be vocal and organize everything. Basketball and work are alike in that you don’t want five of the exact same person on your team. Intelligence comes in a lot of different forms and understanding the ideal mix of people is key. 

In NYC Gay Basketball League, you volunteer to be a captain and, if you’re a captain, you draft your team. So on draft day, all the new players come into the gym and run a bunch of drills. All the captains are there watching to see what those players’ different skills and styles are. You can see people’s personalities come through in terms of how they play.

When it was time to draft your team, people had all different strategies. Some people only picked their friends. I took a totally different approach even though it was just rec, because I wanted to win.  So I always tried to draft the best available players who played team basketball. 

Circling back to your last answer, you mentioned that women who play sports are more likely to fill senior leadership positions. Why do you think that is?

90 percent of women C-suite execs played sports at some point in their lives and more than half played sports at the college level. As to why, I would say that being on a team and understanding what that means is valuable in most professional settings. If you’re a CEO, by definition, you’re running a company. You’re working with a bunch of different people and trying to figure out how to work towards a shared goal.

Second, you’re always being coached as an athlete. You’re always getting feedback. There’s always somebody telling you how to be better. I think people who can receive feedback and grow from it are probably more likely to succeed anywhere in life. 

Lastly, I think women who play sports are likely to have a shared interest with men. Professionally, senior-level roles are still mostly male-dominated so I would imagine playing sports helps women network with men. It gives you something to talk about and makes you approachable. Networking is a big factor in helping people have successful careers. 

Tell me about Evolution of Sports. How did that organization start?

I founded Evolution of Sports with my co-CEO. He’s my BFF and we’ve been working together for nearly 15 years now. We were the most unlikely duo, especially in finance. I’m Asian, gay, and kind of irreverent. He’s a 57-year-old giant, black, bald guy. We went against the grain a bit on Wall Street generally because we didn’t look like the typical person you would find working on the trading floor of Goldman Sachs.

He and I have two big things in common. One, we’re both sports nuts. Two, because of what we look like and our backgrounds, we’ve always had this very intense focus on not just perpetuating the status quo. On Wall Street, that involved a lot of recruiting and mentoring. We wanted students to know that people can look different and still be successful. We wanted to make sure that we were constantly bringing in different viewpoints. So that’s what really cemented our professional relationship and then, eventually, our personal relationship. 

He and I started Evolution of Sports while we were still working full-time. It was just a passion project that we worked on outside of work hours. At that point, it was a career coaching and mentorship program for professional athletes who can’t be professional athletes forever. He was on the board of USA Track and Field and we both had a ton of experience in resume writing, interviewing, networking — all of those career transition skills.

When we started, it was very manageable. The program just involved ten athletes and we were being paid by USA Track and Field. It went really well and they wanted to increase the program to include 30 or 40 athletes. At that point, we had to decide to either shut down the company because we couldn’t manage it while having a day job or quit our day jobs. That was three years ago. 

When it comes to creating an inclusive culture, are there things you can do now that you couldn’t do when you worked on Wall Street? 

From a recruiting standpoint, there were a bunch of guidelines and processes in place at the banks. For example, when we were reviewing resumes to fill summer internship slots in finance, there was a recommended GPA cutoff of 3.5. You had to have something really extraordinary if you were below that cutoff. There were also target schools that we were very focused on hiring from.

Now, one of the biggest changes is that we hire whoever we want to hire. Do I really care that you have a college degree? No, not really. Do you have a lower GPA because you had this really cool side project? That’s what I actually care about. The more interesting you are, the more appealing you are to us. At the end of the day, I care that you can do the job effectively, not that you rowed crew at Harvard. 

Your hiring approach parallels your drafting approach with the New York City Gay Basketball League — you pick people who will help you win. You’re playing by your own rules.  

Totally. That’s a very succinct encapsulation. 

So besides hiring who you want, what other freedoms does running your own organization afford you?

I have to decide what the thing is going to look like. I’m starting with a blank sheet of paper — a totally blank Google search bar. For instance, I have to decide how often we do a performance review. Well, we actually don’t want to offer performance reviews because we want to be giving feedback all the time. You shouldn’t be waiting every six months to get a sense of if things are going well. You should know every day. That’s a specific example of what we try to do differently. 

Obviously, gender equality is also something that’s important to us. So we wrote our parental leave policy from scratch. The finance industry actually has one of the most progressive maternity leave policies but it has a terrible paternity leave policy. What’s typical is four months paid for birthing mothers and two weeks paid for dads. That made no sense because parents are parents. We believe having a kid is a big deal and you should spend a lot of time with your kids, even if you’re not the woman giving birth. We landed at four months paid for moms and then two months for supporting parents and want to extend it as our company grows. 

What’s another progressive workplace policy you would like to implement?

I’m definitely intrigued by the four-day workweek. Obviously, you have to see the data and understand how they’re collecting it, but it seems like the four-day workweek is eminently doable. That’s definitely on my radar. 

What female athletes inspire you?

There’s a woman on my team at Evolution of Sports and her name is Kara Winger. She’s literally the best javelin thrower our country has ever produced. Kara has been throwing for 14 years and, out of those 14 years, she’s been the national champion eight times. All the other times, she’s either been second or third. 

Kara reminds me of this quote that says, “Being great is just being good every day.” I love this quote because a lot of people have a string of amazing days but then they drop off the face of the planet. They’re completely unreliable, but they have these magical moments every once in a while. They draw you in and let you down. Kara is the opposite. Kara is consistent and reliable all the time, which is what makes her excellent. 

My other pick, which I’m also certain you’ll never have heard of, is a basketball player named Jasmine Thomas. She’s not a super high-scoring all-star or the face of the WNBA but if you watch her teams and how they play, she’s the glue. She’s the organizer. She’s that quiet consistent force. She shows up the same way every single game. Reliability and consistency are things that are really important to me.

These days, we’re obsessed with self-care. We use pricey face masks, book appointments with acupuncturists, drink ceremonial cacao, and download meditation apps. But Shelly Domenech, owner of I.C. London Lingerie in Charlotte’s SouthPark, is suggesting a new approach to personal improvement. 

“Bra fitting is life-changing for women,” says Domenech, “especially for women who’ve never worn the right size in their entire life.”

Since 1992, when the award-winning lingerie boutique first opened, Domenech has emerged as a bra fitting expert — an artisan and entrepreneur whose life mission is to make sure women (and their bosoms) feel cared for. We sat down with Domenech to hear about how she rocked the Queen City with high-quality bras and panties.   

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Where did your passion for women’s fashion come from? Not many kids want to grow up to own a lingerie store. 

It’s funny because it actually started very early on. In high school, I was part of the Distributive Education Clubs of America program and one of the things we did was study fashion merchandising. So I was working in a little boutique and this woman came into the shop. She was surprised that I was still in high school. She told me, “I would like for you to come work at my new lingerie store.” 

I worked for Barbara through college. I was taking marketing classes at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and thought I’d soon be working for some big Fortune 500 company. But three years into my job with Barbara, she announced that she was selling her store. She had young children and didn’t want to continue the grind of retail. I came home and told my parents this news. My dad just looked me in the eye and said, “Well, why don’t we buy the store?” I was like, “Yes! I’m 20 years old. I can do this.”

Wow. That’s very young to dive headfirst into a business. 

I laugh now. I had so much confidence for only being 20 years old. I had been working hand-in-hand with Barbara for several years and was getting ready to graduate from college. So we bought it as a family business and my sister and I ran it. When I graduated in 1991, I came to Charlotte for graduate school and left the store behind in our hometown. My mom and sister were going to run it and I was moving on to the next phase in my life. 

Since I knew how to bra fit, I decided to go around Charlotte to the lingerie stores and look for a part-time job. But there were no lingerie stores. So this idea started to formulate in my head: I should open a second location in Charlotte. I thought I could let my sister have the one in our hometown and I would start a new one. But my sister, who now owns a hair salon, soon told my parents that selling lingerie wasn’t her cup of tea. 

At that point, I had been in Charlotte for a year. I was going to graduate school, writing my business plan, meeting with bankers, and getting turned down left and right. Nobody wanted to invest with me at the time, which just made me all the more determined to do it. Finally, in the fall of 1992, I packed up and moved the store to Charlotte. Our original location was in Dilworth. We were there for ten years. Then I opened a second store in the Ballantyne area of south Charlotte. 

Throughout that whole time, the Dilworth store had continued to grow. I started with 1,000 square feet and then, in 2008, I doubled the square footage. Of course, in the fall of that same year, the stock market crashed. 

The Great Recession was a turning point for many entrepreneurs. Was the same true for you?  

Looking back, it was probably the biggest struggle in the history of my 28 years in business. When the recession happened, a lot of people — especially in the Ballantyne area — were living good lives. They had beautiful homes and beautiful children. But they were hit the hardest when the stock market crashed. They were the ones who just stopped shopping. Wives would come into my Ballantyne store and say, “I can buy one bra but it needs to be very basic. Please don’t tell me about anything else because I can’t afford it.” 

We saw a big downturn at my newer store. My older store fared a little better, but business went down overall. The very next month after the stock market crash, my sales were down 40 percent. We didn’t start recovering until 2011. So for three years, I barely scraped by. At the same time, I was a mom of two kids in preschool. My husband was trying to hold on to his job. It was crazy stressful.  

How did you adapt to ensure your business and family came out on the other side?

Because I had been open for so long, I had great relationships with my vendors. I contacted all of them immediately and said, “This is the situation and these are my sales.” I kept the communication lines open and would send what money I could each week. They would send me small orders in return. That’s how I sold my way out of the hole. 

I also came up with a crazy idea to offer a customer loyalty card. Customers would buy the card for $40, and it would give them 20 percent off every purchase they made for a year. I really do believe the customer loyalty card saved me because, even though I was losing 20 percent of the sale, customers were spending money at my store instead of going to a big-box retailer.

But those were still very tough years. When we finally started coming out of it, the leases at my two locations were coming to an end. I told my husband, “Once these leases are done, we’re scaling back.” I was going to close my Ballantyne store and scale back the Dilworth store to 1,000 square feet. But as I was literally packing up the Ballantyne store, a leasing agent from SouthPark came by to tell me about a spot she thought would be perfect for me. I took my husband by the place and he said, “You belong here.”

Is it safe to assume that consumer shopping preferences have changed in the nearly 30 years you’ve been running this business? If so, has your business model changed in response?

Gosh, in 1994, a friend of mine came to me and said that computers were one day all going to be connected by what was called the world wide web. He asked if he could build me a website — I didn’t even know what a website was back then. So my first website came out in 1994. I’ve tried other eCommerce sites throughout the years. But I do old-timey bra fittings, and I need that one-on-one connection with people. 

When Amazon came along, people’s expectations of what a website should be like changed. People now think merchandise should always be available and that it should be shipped out in 24 hours. For me to have an eCommerce site, I would have to constantly update the online inventory. That’s not feasible. If I can’t do a website well, I’d rather not do it at all. So I haven’t had an eCommerce website in over five years. 

Everybody thinks I’m losing out but I’ve focused my energies on making my store the best it can be and cultivating personal relationships. For example, I have a lady that was a Charlotte resident but has lived in Florida for the past five years. I still do business with her. I’ll send her a photo of a bra I know she’ll love and then ship the bra directly to her. I communicate with customers all over the country via text or phone. I did this even more during COVID. 

As you’ve mentioned, your business is better suited for a brick-and-mortar setting. So was it challenging to sell lingerie over the phone during the pandemic?

Oh gosh, yes. A lot of people’s bodies changed during COVID. They were home and they gained a little weight, so I did a lot of virtual bra fittings. Since I’ve been in the business for 30 years, I know my brands well. I can say to someone, “I see from your profile that you were a 34J. Now you’ve got some spillage and it’s tight around the back. Let me send you a 36JJ. Try it on and if it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, send it back.” I did a lot of that last year. 

People had this strong desire to support local businesses. Customers wanted me to survive this. So in April, when we were closed, I ran a gift card special. For every $50 they spent on a gift card, I would add $10 to the value of the card. I would call customers and ask if they would like to buy a gift card. That way, when they came back into the store, they would have $60 waiting for them.  

That’s such a customer-centric approach. To adjust to such a high level of personalization, did you have to add more staff or add more hours to your day?

I went into COVID with two full-timers and one part-timer. Of course, I laid everybody off right away because we closed in March. We were following mall guidelines, so we didn’t reopen until early May. For those few months, I would go into my store every day with sweatpants on and work the phone. We also weren’t receiving any shipments, so I was in my store looking at what products I did have and calling people who I thought might be interested. 

I also did so much on social media. I was taking my mannequin, dressing her, and snapping photos. I was just trying to engage people. Customers were so sweet. They’d call me and be like, “Do you still have those flamingo pajamas?” And then they’d pull up the store, open their trunk, and I’d stick the bag in their car. I did that until May 10 or so. When I reopened, I was working by myself because there just weren’t enough people shopping for me to bring back employees. 

There were many days when I pulled some crazy, long hours between being physically at the store and then doing billing or answering emails at night. But you do what you have to do. The crash in 2008 gave me the skills I needed to survive the pandemic. I learned how to adapt — how to be an entrepreneur. 

What advice would you give your younger self?

When the store had been open for seven years, I wanted to sell it. I was so sick of working six days a week and never having any money. I was envious of all my friends who were in careers and getting paid vacations. I felt like I was tied to my store. Then I met with a business broker and he told me the assessment of what my business was worth. I was so insulted but it lit a fire in me. I remodeled my store that year. I changed my merchandise selection. I repainted. I created a logo. That fire continued for the next ten years until I opened my second store. 

Like other young entrepreneurs, I wasn’t patient. I wanted it all right away. I saw everybody being successful and I was frustrated. So I would tell my younger self to be patient. It will come — just continue to work hard. Don’t expect to become an overnight success.