Drybar founder Alli Webb’s messy truths

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ALLI WEBB: I don’t really know where to start. But what I do know is how to run a salon. I’ve worked in salons a big part of my 20s, I knew hair really well. 

JEFF BERMAN: Alli Webb wanted to open her own salon called Drybar — one that would focus on a specific service: the blowout. No haircuts. No hair dye. Just the perfect blow-dry and styling. Her business-savvy brother realized she was onto something, and he made her an offer.

WEBB: He said to me, I’ll put up all the money. I’ll own 50 percent, and you’ll own 50%. Yours will be sweat equity. And I was like, ‘What’s sweat equity?’ I didn’t know what that meant. And when he explained it to me, I was like, ‘wow, great.’ So we felt like this was a really beautiful chocolate peanut butter moment of him being able to handle the things that I didn’t know how to do.

BERMAN: Within just a few years of opening the first Drybar in Los Angeles, the business grew to include dozens of locations across the country. Alli also launched a successful hair care product line. She transformed her side hustle into a business of impressive scale. 

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, your host.

Alli Webb’s story of scaling Drybar from scratch is packed with important lessons for anyone starting a business. We’ll hear about how she took Drybar to unexpected heights, why she decided to sell, and what she’s cooking up next. First, I wanted to hear how it all started. 

 Alli, welcome to Masters of Scale.

WEBB: Thanks for having me.

Copy LinkWhere the Drybar idea came from

BERMAN: Great to have you. For our audience who may not yet be familiar with it, where did the Drybar idea come from?

WEBB: I’d spent my 20s working in hair salons and doing blowouts. So I just had like, you know, Malcolm Gladwell’s 10 000 hours in spades by the time I decided to start what was a mobile blowout business, which eventually led to Drybar. 

My initial pitch was like a mommy group on Yahoo. That was like, “Hey, I’m a stay-at-home mom, long-time hairstylist, I’m thinking about starting a mobile blowout business where I come over and blow out your hair like while your baby is sleeping.” Because my network was moms at the time. That’s all I knew in LA because I’d just moved to LA and, sure enough, I got tons of clients and I was pretty good at doing blowouts and so the word of mouth grew very quickly.

And that’s kind of when the light bulb went off for me of maybe instead of me going to them, they come to me. And so I went to my brother, Michael Landau, who’s been my best friend my whole life, and he also happens to be bald. And he was like, “What? Like, what do you want to do?” I’m like, well, I’m having so much success charging 40 in this mobile business, and I can’t keep up with the demand. So I feel like maybe I should start a brick-and-mortar instead of, you know, them coming, me going to them. And, you know, again, he was a little perplexed, “Like, why don’t, why can’t women blow out their own hair?” And his wife at the time had naturally straight hair. And I was like, you did grow up with me.

But he kinda saw the success that my mobile business was having and was like willing to kind of help me get this off the ground financially. And he has such a. brilliant business mind. And so we were like, let’s give it a shot. And my then-husband, Cameron, was the advertising creative guy. And he was going to help us create the brand. And it was like, you know, the three of us joining forces.

Copy LinkWhat is Drybar’s blow-out experience?

 BERMAN: What is the blowout experience?

WEBB: So a blowout is basically, at Drybar anyways, is you come in, you have a consultation. In Drybar, you pick from a menu of hairstyles, and then your stylist washes your hair. And then basically blows out your hair into the style that you want and that’s all it is.

So no cuts, no color, just blowouts. And you walk out the door with amazing confidence, which is the other probably important thing to mention is that, while we are initially just selling blowouts, we very quickly learned that we weren’t just selling blowouts. We were selling the happiness and confidence that women get from having great hair.

BERMAN: Well I have to imagine also: the color scheme, the music, I mean, when you walk into a Drybar, it’s uplifting even before.

WEBB: I mean, well, that was the thing. It was like, for me, it was like, “How do I create this thing that I really want?” I was creating Drybar From the positioning of a stylist, because I was a stylist, and also the consumer and what did I want on both sides of that?

Copy LinkConcerns around Drybar’s business model

BERMAN: And were you at all concerned that this wasn’t a full-service salon that this didn’t exist before right like come in quote-unquote just for a blowout?

WEBB: I wasn’t concerned, but everybody else was. You know, I mean, the common question was like, “How do you make this business concept work?” 

The name of the game was volume. Ironically, there’s so many puns in this world of mine, and at the time I thought if we could do 30 to 40 blowouts a day, that would get us to a good point.

Not even really making that much money. That was more like breaking even, but it would work. I didn’t have big lofty dreams at that point. I was just like, I wanted to open one shop for myself, like something for me to go and do that I loved. And, you know, I loved the environment of the salons that I’d worked in. And so I was really excited about it and not thinking I was going to turn it into this massive multi-million-dollar blowout empire.

What I thought was going to be 30 to 40 blowouts a day turned out to be like between 60 and 80 blowouts a day, which we were completely unprepared for, by the way, like we didn’t have enough stylists, like it was a total disaster in the beginning, even though it was so popular, it was like we were completely unprepared for what was coming.

Copy LinkInside Drybar’s early success

BERMAN: So how do you go from one store in Brentwood to literally within a few years, you’re like 40 locations around the country. What happened that you were able to accelerate so quickly?

WEBB: Well we realized very quickly, very quickly, like within the first few days, like we had captured lightning in a bottle.

It was like, holy shit, like women were coming in and quite literally droves. I mean, we were turning people away left and right. 

The first couple of stores were really clunky, like getting those open and figuring out how to get people into those stores.

And then we eventually started hiring people who were smarter than us, who knew how to do this. And we eventually took angel investment from some friends and family and customers, and then we realized that we needed to really, if we were going to really expand this, because I think we got to like 10 or 11 stores, like bootstrapping it ourselves.

And then we raised about 26 million was our first big tranche from Castanea, with the intention of opening a lot more stores and starting a product line. And that was about, I don’t know, two-ish years in.

BERMAN: So Alli, I imagine when you opened your first brick-and-mortar Drybar location, people came in and saying, “Great, I need a cut color, the hole, the shebang.” And you’re like, no, no, no, we just do the blowout. So what was that customer education experience like?

WEBB: Yeah, I mean there was definitely a subset of women who knew what a blowout was. We’re giving blowouts and figuring it out, which me included. But then there was, you know, that was a big thing early on, like educating people and women on what this was, and a lot of women were like: “You know, what’s a blowout?” I mean, a lot of people were like, what’s a blowout? And, you know, I would always explain like, you know, when you go and get your haircut and colored or cut or colored and they blow out your hair after and your hair kind of never looks better than when it looks and they’re like, “Yeah, I love how my hair looks after I get a haircut.”

Like, yeah, because somebody professionally blew it out. So we’re talking with Drybar, that one piece of the puzzle of going to a salon, the whole experience and we’re just taking the blowout. We’re blow drying your hair, washing the hair. That was also a big thing people would ask, like, do you wash the hair too?

I’m like, yeah, yeah. We wash it so it’s clean and you can make it last for as long as humanly possible, which women love. But yeah, it was an interesting time because, even as we were opening more and more locations there, there were a lot of questions, especially investors, but that’s a whole other story. Like men in suits were like, what? You know, so many like sexual jokes and whatever. I’m like, yeah, yeah.

And, and now, you know, blowouts are like such a common thing and, you know, there’s so many other places that are doing them and we made this an affordable luxury, you know, for women everywhere.

Copy LinkThe double-edged sword of franchising

BERMAN: And joke on the investors who are making those jokes. Yeah? There are two different threads I’d love to pull on. One is, this is a point at which a lot of companies would say, “We’re going franchise, right?” This is the fastest way to scale. 

So, talk about what was that conversation?

WEBB: Well, it was a lot of back and forth. I mean, Michael wanted to franchise like right away and I was very anti-franchise because of, you know, this was my baby, like it felt like a third child to me, you know, and I was like, I don’t want to put this in other people’s hands, you know, and that was really how I felt about it.

But Michael was like, “We just got to open more stores.” And he was right. We did need to open more stores. And we, you know, as you know, like we had so much competition, we had tons of people were starting to knock us off. So we felt very strongly that we needed to open more.

And you know, the thing about franchising is a double-edged sword because you are, you know, it’s a great way to expand quickly, but it’s also like, these are entrepreneurs themselves and they want to do things the way they want to do them.

And I was, you know, one of the most profound things, I think it was my brother who said it was like, there’s a lot of ways to do things right, but there’s one way that we do things and I want all the franchisees to do that. And you only have so much control over them. 

And so I wouldn’t recommend it the way we did it because what we did was like we were basically now running two different organizations.

One was franchised and one was company-owned. And so the needs of those two stores were quite different. And managing the franchisees and those owners, our partners, was very just time-consuming.

BERMAN: I mean, it sounds time-consuming. It also sounds like maybe the optimal approach because you’re able to keep control of the ones that you’re operating. You’re able to evolve the brand and the experience, but you’re also able to scale more quickly.

WEBB: But you’re just, you got, but we’re so we had to hire a lot more people. We were, we were, you know, this is a completely different operation, which, which is interesting now, fast forward to 2000. You know, years later, we started a new concept called Squeeze, which is our massage concept, which is on fire. And we’ve sold over a hundred locations and it will start popping up all over the country.

But we decided to do that completely franchised because we got the opportunity to see what it’s like to run a franchise organization and what it’s like to run a company-owned organization. And, you know, at the end of the day, it’s harder to run a company-owned operation because you have, of the 150, there’s 180 actually now, but when we sold it was 150, and probably 70 or so were company-owned and the rest were franchised. But you know, you have a manager, you have 70 managers. And assistant managers and regional managers and stylists. And there was so much staff. We had 5,000 employees and it was crazy. It was so much to manage that the systems and the people you have to put in place to manage that kind of overhead of people is a lot.

And it is easier, we found, when there was a franchise because you have an owner-operator that’s managing their own stores and they have a lot of skin in the game, you know? So it’s an arguably easier way to do it, which is why we did this. Did it that way with Squeeze.

BERMAN: And so but looking back on the Drybar experience if you had to do it over again, going back in time knowing what you know now, would you have gone full franchise in the beginning or do you think it was essential to be in control to really develop the experience in the brand?

WEBB: I hate that question.

BERMAN: I’m sorry.

WEBB: It’s okay. Because I don’t think I would, I mean, I don’t think I would do it. I don’t think I would have done it differently. But that said, we used the learning and applied it to Squeeze. I’m glad that we had the learning and I liked that we owned the stores. But it was still really challenging, but I don’t, yeah, I don’t think I would change it, even though I wouldn’t recommend it. I know that’s like a weird answer.

BERMAN: No, it’s not. I mean, we learn from our mistakes, right?

WEBB: Yeah, had I, had we not gone through that, I never would have learned all of that. 

Copy LinkExpanding Drybar’s product line

BERMAN: So, before we get to Squeeze, the other thread to pull on is the expansion to products. So, was that part of the original vision? Did that come in later? Where did that originate and how? Because that’s a whole other business you’ve got to figure out.

WEBB: Yeah, and really, I mean, I don’t know if you’re, you know this, but like we sold the product division for 255 million. We didn’t sell the whole enchilada, which is an important distinction because the product was like a little bit of an afterthought for everybody else. Not for me. You know, I knew very early on I wanted to do product because what I was finding — because I was in the store every day and I was touching hair and I was doing blowouts — the assortment we had, which was a bunch of my favorite product lines, weren’t all working well together.

And so I felt like we really needed a product line that really, you know, supported a perfect blowout. Like what we were doing, making the blowout last as long as humanly possible. So every product was developed through the lens of like crafted for the perfect blowout. That’s really what it was for. So when we raised the money with Castanea, I think we earmarked like a million dollars, which is more or less what you need to start a product of that scale and size.

BERMAN: Right, and so you’re not just slapping a Drybar label on some existing product, you’re actually doing product development, right? 

WEBB: I mean, listen, the way, you know, it’s not really, anybody who works in this industry knows that there’s a couple labs that really make all the stuff.

So you don’t have a ton of room for creativity. But what you do have is like, you know, you use benchmarks and it’s like, “Oh, I love this product by X company, but I don’t like the way it smells.” It’s a little too strong, it’s a little too heavy, so you can go in and tweak and say, I want a, or you’re coming at it and saying to a lab, I want a product that is this, this, this, and this.

And they will put something together for you and, and then you tweak it to get it to where you want it. So for me, I knew products couldn’t be too heavy because women always wanted their blot to last as long as possible. I obviously knew creating a really great dry shampoo was paramount to what we were doing.

The very first product we ever came out with was a shower cap that was a larger than normal shower cap, and it was like terry cloth lined and nobody else was doing that. And so everything I developed was again, thinking about the customer and what she wanted after she had a blowout.

But it was like everybody was much more focused on the stores and the growth of the stores which was right. You know, we were growing at leaps and bounds and there was so much excitement about the stores and everybody wanted a Drybar.

But the product was really personally important to me and the team supported me on that. But, nobody knew the longevity and the legs that it would have, which it did.

BERMAN: It’s also more marketing. I mean you’ve got a virtuous cycle of marketing then.

WEBB: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, we had the stores obviously, but then we also, you know, went to Sephora and said, “Hey, we want to do this.”

And really it was like, we want to give the products that we’re using in Drybar including the blow dryers and the curling irons and all this stuff. If you don’t have a Drybar near you here’s what our stylists are using so you can get this great look at home. I launched my first book which was like a total hair tutorial to do it.

I went on QVC, and selling the products, and it was really fun and great. It was such a great natural extension. And mind you our investors and even clients, everybody was like, Oh, you could sell so many other things here. You could sell makeup. You could offer lashes. You could do all this stuff. I’m like, no, no.

I felt very strongly we do this one thing and we’re the best at it and we’re not going to create this environment where women come in and they feel like they’re being hard sold to about, buying this or buying that. Like I just wanted to do the one thing we were doing and the one thing we were, we were trying to do really well.

Copy LinkThe sale(s) of Drybar

BERMAN: One night at a business dinner, Alli got some frank advice about the inevitable future of her budding empire. Her business was part salons, part product line. An exec from a major player in her industry told her this:

WEBB: You’re never going to be able to sell. this whole thing to one person. L’Oreal or Estee Lauder, they’re not inheriting 5,000 employees. And I was like, “Oh man, you’re right.” 

Because, you know, a Unilever, L’Oreal, like Helen of Troy, who did end up buying us, like those are huge product companies. They don’t want a service company. It’s a very different buyer that wants a service business.

And so, you know, all the smart investment bankers that were around us were like, we’re going to have to break these two companies off. 

But yeah that’s what we ultimately did. So in 2019, we’ve really started to do a formal process, realizing we were going to be selling this to two different people and had, you know, tons of interest as you would imagine. And ultimately, it’s a long story, but ultimately sold to Helen of Troy.

And the plan was we were going to then sell off the markets. So if you wanted to buy the LA market, you could buy 25 stores and whatever multiple, and that would be that. And then COVID hits and the stores go to zero.

But yeah, I mean, the store, we basically kind of gave them away because we had, we were, they weren’t making any money. We were selling to pay rent. It was a total shit show that the stores, but luckily we sold the product division like truly what felt like moments, it was actually weeks before the whole world shut down and everything collapsed. But, yeah, we got that sale done under the wire. Thank God.

BERMAN: Still ahead, Alli explains why after making her name as someone who makes you look super polished, she decided to get messy.

[AD BREAK]

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. 

In 2023, Alli published a memoir called The Messy Truth. It’s an intensely honest look at all the things that were falling apart in her life behind the scenes while her business was publicly booming.

Copy LinkAlli Webb on sharing her messy truths

BERMAN: One of the extraordinarily compelling parts of following your journey over these last several years is how open you’ve been about your own challenges, journey, the things that the curve balls that have come your way, and how you’ve handled them and I mean, I can deeply relate. Thank you for being open about it and why be open about it?

WEBB: Going back to my first divorce from my co-founder, which you know, I myself wasn’t a super public persona at that point, but for the sake of the business and our employees, you know, I remember like the first we posted like Instagram, you know, where you get all your information that we were divorcing, but that It was really more for our employees because like I said, we had thousands at that point and we kind of felt like we needed to make a statement, but it’s not like we’re making a statement in like, you know, the New York Post.

And like we posted a picture of, we actually were on a family vacation in Jamaica even though we weren’t together anymore. And this really sweet picture of us in the ocean together and said: “We’ve decided to end our marriage, but we are still friends, and we’re still co-parenting,” and whatever.

And it really resonated with people. And I think that was one of the first moments that I was like, oh, it’s interesting to put something really personal like that out there and, and to feel a lot of love and support from it. 

And so fast forward to the next six months to a year when my life really fell apart, because my son who’s now 19 and now doing great, what, you know, kind of spiraled, we all kind of spiraled after the divorce. I mean, shit, you know what that’s like

I was struggling, he was struggling, my ex was struggling, it was a lot of struggle. We were all on the struggle bus but Grant, my older son, you know, ended up going into rehab because he was really struggling with drugs, which just took us all down, and I just felt like I couldn’t be, I didn’t want to be, inauthentic with what I was publicly doing because mind you, while that was happening, Drybar was like on fire, like we were expanding. We were in all these things. I was on the cover of magazines. Like I was asked to do shark tank as I was a guest shark. 

I mean, it was just like all this cool stuff was happening alongside our lives falling apart. And it was like, how do I manage this? Like I didn’t want to be inauthentic publicly just as I wasn’t being inauthentic privately. And so I felt like I’m going to talk about this stuff because I felt like it was showing the real side of anybody’s life. Right? Even like you can be having this tremendous success over here. But over here you’re really struggling.

And as somebody who is starting to be somewhat public in the success that I have had. I wanted to show the polarity of our lives, and the more I did it, the more support I got, the more messages I got from lots of other women who were going through it and admired me.

I was an inspiration to them. And, and for them to say, you know, messages like, I feel so much better knowing that I’m not alone. That you, somebody who looks like they have it all together and has all this success is also experiencing this. And so I think that that kind of fueled the fire for me to be like, “Oh, this is actually really helping people, me telling my truth and what’s happening for me.” And so I think I felt more compelled to do it more. 

Copy LinkThe intentionality that Alli is bringing to her new venture

BERMAN: There’s so much in your story and there’s so much in The Messy Truth, the book. One of my key aha-moments in COVID was work-life balance is bullshit. You talk about the balance is bullshit, right?

WEBB: Second chapter of my book.

BERMAN: And for me, it’s about leading an integrated life. I want to do work that’s meaningful I want to work with people who I like and respect and care about and and move seamlessly in my day among the various parts of my life, so you know having gone through this experience How how are you restructuring how you spend time and how you approach your day based on what you’ve learned?

WEBB: We sold the business in 2020 and we’re in the middle of 2024, and I just finally, I would say in the last like six months got my footing back into like, what am I doing now? What do I want my life to look like? And yeah, now, I’m really intentional, also very integrated. and I think just probably because of COVID because so many of our daily lives have changed. Like I work from home, I have an office at my house, I’m out and about a lot, but I’m working on a new secret project that I’ll tell you about later.

BERMAN: We’re maybe going to have you back on to talk about that, yeah?

WEBB: Absolutely giddy over and just feel this like a renewed sense of purpose that I’m excited about.

But I will tell you that I am pretty intentional with my time and how I spend it and what I take on in this new endeavor where I’m doing with my brother again, no ex-husbands involved this time, but what I will spend my time on, what I want, what my brother takes on, what I take on and like, you know, when I will take meetings and things like, I’m much better about saying no now to things that just suck my energy that I don’t enjoy doing.

I feel like I’ve kind of earned that. To some degree, but I even feel weird saying that because I think we should all give ourselves the permission to have autonomy over what we do in a day to like what feels great. And if that means you’re only working until three o’clock because you want to pick up your kids from school, do that.

Like set up your life in a way and whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re not an entrepreneur, like even the people who work for me and with me, like I’m very like, go do your thing. If you want to do yoga in the middle of the afternoon, I don’t care. Let’s just get all our shit done during the day, whether you do it at five in the morning or six at night, like whatever works for you, you know, and my right-hand girl who does so much for me, I really respect her.

She’s given me boundaries of like how much, when I like, she really wants her weekends to be uninterrupted. And, you know, and I remember when she first told me that, I was like, “Does that mean I can’t text you on the weekends?”

You know? And we have, we, we figured out a system and we have like, we use an app, uh, it’s called Monday that like we keep our stuff on.

So if I think of things on the weekend, I just put them in there cause I’m like, but if I think of something I got to tell you, but it was really important for her and it was less about wanting to help me more about her needing the mental break, which I really understood and I really respected that.

And she kind of goes offline at like five o’clock, available to me if I need her, but I really respected that she laid down a boundary for me.

And I want people around me working really hard, but I just want everybody to feel integrated and to feel like they can do what they need to do with their lives and we don’t have to be sitting at a desk from nine to five to make things work, you know?

Copy LinkThe origins of Squeeze

BERMAN: Given this journey that you’ve been on, given what you’ve learned from Drybar, given the personal experience of the last several years, why Squeeze?

WEBB: Well, Squeeze really came out of my brother’s brain, because he was not participating in Drybar because he has no hair. And we were long time like massage-goers our whole life.

Our parents were, and so we just kind of inherited that behavior. But similar to Drybar, you know, which when we started Drybar, there were two bad choices in the market. There was like, you know, the discount chains where you get a blowup, the experience was bad and it was variable pricing and all the bad things.

And it’s similar with Squeeze. We found that we were frustrated, especially my brother, with the choices that were available for massage, which was like the discount chains, which leave a lot to be desired.

And then the high-end spas, you know, where massages are, upwards of $300 for a massage at a spa, like a, you know, or a hotel spa or whatever. And so we felt like there wasn’t this affordable, but great experience place to get a massage. And we really wanted to build it and felt like we could and that we kind of cut our teeth on Drybar, and that we could do this with Squeeze.

And, you know, the beauty of Squeeze is that one of the many things is that even though it’s a brick-and-mortar and you go in for a massage, it’s an app-based system. So you book on the app, you tip on the app, you put in all your preferences on the app. 

When you go to book your appointment, you see all the reviews that people have written about their therapist so you can pick and choose based on that. And so that took us about a year to develop our own proprietary app, which is a game changer. Nobody else has that in the industry. 

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to invent an iPhone to be a successful entrepreneur. What you do have to do is take something that you love, that potentially exists, that just isn’t done well. And that’s really what we did with Drybar. It’s what we’re doing with Squeeze, you know, and that I think is the hallmark of a really successful endeavor as an entrepreneur.

And that’s really what we did with Squeeze is like just create something that was better than anything that was out there. And I think that’s why we’ve sold so many franchises because we are different than any other massage concept out there. And frankly better. 

BERMAN: So if we’re sitting here two or three years from now, what’s your hope for what Squeeze is?

WEBB: I’d like to see Squeeze, you know, expand to like at least 500 locations across the country and I think that’s a real doable, achievable goal for sure.

Copy LinkLightning Round: Book recommendation?

BERMAN: Before we wrapped up our conversation, I invited Alli to answer a few lighting round questions to better understand the way she works.

Other than The Messy Truth, what is the book that you most recommend other entrepreneurs read? 

WEBB: I’m an Audible girl, so I like to listen to books because I love to walk and listen to books, but there’s so many good ones I have and I’ve read so many books and I love reading, or listening, I guess I should say. But, you know, I think one of the biggest The best books I’ve read is Untethered Soul and I’ve read it so many times and I keep going back to it because it’s just, and no matter where you are, who you are in your life, like I think every single human would benefit from that. The beautiful story of Michael Singer is just amazing and I’d say that’s my number one.

Copy LinkLightning Round: Lightning Round: Healthy habits?

BERMAN: What’s a habit of yours that you haven’t talked about publicly that others might benefit from knowing about?

WEBB: I probably haven’t talked about this, but I’m sure you’re familiar with Insight Timer, the meditation app, which is like, I’m on it every day and every night. And one of which I’m like, damn it, I didn’t do that today.

But what I do on most days is, I listen to a lot of the things, but there’s one little, it’s like a one-minute mantra, whatever, that I start my day off, which is like, being thankful and trusting, the divine to make the right choices, to make good choices like this.

BERMAN: It’s like a mantra almost.

WEBB: It’s like a minute, like this, like, you know, the way I start most of my days with a reminder of trusting the divine. And, it’s just this beautiful, kind of setting me up for success.

And every night I go to sleep to a meditation, I don’t know, I go to Stretch Lab a lot. That’s probably something people don’t know because I feel like that is as I get older and like more crickety, like getting somebody to stretch you is like the greatest thing. I have no affiliation to that company, but I love it.

BERMAN: Amazing. Great. Thank you, Alli. Awesome.

WEBB: Thank you for having me.

BERMAN: Alli Webb’s scale story is extraordinary. She went from being a stay-at-home mom who started driving around doing at-home hair care, to the head of a business with thousands of team members nationwide. 

Her steadfast belief — that being the best at one thing is better than stretching yourself beyond your expertise — has paid off big time. 

Alli’s figured out how to rinse and repeat those lessons with her new massage business, Squeeze. And I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next. 

Also: Alli’s book, The Messy Truth, has evolved into an online community — The Messy Collective — so make sure to check that out if you’re craving more unvarnished conversations about navigating work and life. 

I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening to Masters of Scale.