“If you can do it for plumbing, you can do it for barbers,” LaRon, the company’s CEO, says. But thanks to the success of companies like Carpinteria, California-based Procore (software for construction sites, now publicly traded at a $13.8 billion market cap) and Los Angeles-based ServiceTitan (which makes apps for plumbers and other tradespeople, valued at $9.5 billion), the idea is now mainstream. Just a few years ago investors were skeptical about developing technology for small businesses and blue-collar workers.
“One of the knocks against vertical software companies is, ‘Really, how big can these businesses become?’ We think really big.” “A lot of us realized that-wait, a barbershop is very different from all these other industries and there are these different needs for different software,” says Yoonkee Sull, a partner at San Francisco-based Iconiq Capital, which invested in Squire. The company, which has raised a total of $143 million in equity, made the cut for this year’s Next Billion-Dollar Startups, our annual look at 25 fast-growing, venture-backed companies we think likely to reach a $1 billion valuation. In July, Squire raised $60 million at a $750 million valuation, in a round led by Tiger Global. It’s on track to triple that figure, to more than $12 million. The firm brought in some $4 million in revenue last year despite waiving subscription fees during the pandemic, when nearly all barbershops were shuttered. The startup is now exploring expanding into financial services, offering debit cards (in partnership with startup Bond Financial Technologies) and testing distribution of supplies like razor blades and ammonia bottles. It can automatically manage the payouts of tips, as well as handle payments for chair rentals.
Squire’s software (which shops typically rebrand with their own logo) offers not only basic booking and payment services, but it can help divvy up the receipts among a shop’s many barbers.
Each pay a monthly subscription (ranging from $100 to $250 per month per location), plus additional transaction fees. Today, New York City-based Squire sells its software and services to more than 2,800 barbershops in the United States, Canada and the U.K. You are creating something that doesn’t exist and bringing it into the world.” “Being an entrepreneur and being an artist is similar. LaRon and Salvant realized they had to rework Squire from a glorified appointment app to something that could handle all the nitty-gritty headaches of running a very particular type of small business. But behind the scenes are the complexities of a business in which barbers may rent chairs from the shop or receive different cuts of revenue, tips may be in cash or credit, and each barber may set their own schedule and their own prices. From the outside, a barbershop looks simple: Book an appointment, get a cut, pay with cash or a credit card. It was a crash course in how barbershops really operate.
They didn’t cut hair (which requires a license in New York State), but they did pretty much everything else: Ran the front desk, swept hair off the floor, ordered supplies, talked to customers.
“That gave us a test kitchen to develop the software,” recalls Salvant, the company’s president. So, in 2016, they made a gutsy move: They spent $20,000 of the $60,000 of cash they had on hand to buy out the lease on an ailing barbershop in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market. Neither LaRon, a 37-year-old corporate lawyer, nor Salvant, who is 36 and worked in finance, had worked in a barbershop before-or run a small business of any sort.