While driving through L.A.’s famed Beverly Hills a few years ago, LMU alumnus and budding entrepreneur Adam Dishell [MBA ’03] spotted a “for lease” sign in a store-front window and thought, “We’ve got to find something to put there.”
Not long after, Dishell got a call from his friend Bill Sanders [CBA ’88]. “I was in New Orleans and got a shave at this old barbershop, and no one is doing this [in L.A.],” Sanders told his friend. “What do you think?”
Dishell’s response: “I know just the place!”
The two decided either there could be a huge market opportunity for the type of establishment they had in mind – or it wasn’t going to work. “Luckily, it was the former,” Dishell says.
The collaboration resulted in the “The Shave,” a men’s luxury barber, shave and retail shop. At the “upscale barbershop with an old-school vibe,” men can get everything from the traditional shave and haircut, to the less-expected “uni-brow surgery.” Clients can listen to Frank Sinatra, watch ESPN or even enjoy a cocktail while they wait.
The Shave attracts a diverse clientele, including some famous faces. Among those who have been spotted there are Al Pacino, Ben Affleck, and Jessica Alba and Cash Warren.
Men who come in for their signature service – the shave – first consult with a licensed esthetician who looks for sensitive spots and impurities. The barber is then able to provide a specialized service to fit the client’s individual needs.
“The reason we’ve been so successful is that it’s not just a shave – that’s just marketing,” Dishell explains. “Our shave is a skin treatment and we’re really focused on skin care.”
To that end, Dishell and his partner are working with skin care experts to develop their own product line, as well as developing a barber college to properly train barbers in their method so they can expand their business. And because the business continues to thrive, expansion is in the works.
“’The Shave is a lifestyle and there are a lot of men living it,” Dishell says. “And I believe we are having an impact in returning to the roots of men being gentlemen.”
Dishell says his LMU education played a key role in The Shave’s success. Planning, critical decision-making, and the ability to implement multi-tiered strategic initiatives -- lessons learned in his MBA courses -- are skills, he says, that were crucial to the development of his business.
“We would have opened, but I think we would have had a longer learning curve and we wouldn’t have been as successful,” he explains. “And I might not have had the confidence to go into an entrepreneurial venture if I didn’t have my MBA and if I didn’t know how to speak to a banker and understand what he meant.
“I believe we’re successful because we had a firm, well-developed plan; we stuck to it, we monitored it and we adjusted it, and that’s all MBA 101.”