904: LIVE From the 2024 ⁠Career Education Convention⁠ - with Jenn Lyles, Executive Director at Beauty Schools Marketing Group

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're making education your business here at CQ. That's the Career Education College and University Annual Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. Of course, my name is Dr. Joe Sallustio. I've been with you many, many times before, but I haven't been at CQ for a really long time. In fact, it's probably been 10 years since I've been at this conference.

I'm so happy to be here thanks to the incredible generosity and support of our great adult partner, Lead Squared. And I brought a Lead Squareder. He's not square, but he's a leader, right? I would say. That's very kind of you. Let's get him in right now. Here he is. He's Douglas Carlson. He is head of partnerships at Lead Squared.

Douglas, I downloaded that just for you, man. How do you feel about that?

Douglas Carlson: I appreciate that. That's a really good intro music.

Joe Sallustio: I've seen, I've heard some folks that it's like, so you actually, you know, we're friends. I like that. That's yours. I'm not going to give it to anybody else. Just so you know how I feel about you, man.

Douglas Carlson: Appreciate that.

Joe Sallustio: All right. I'm excited to be here, Douglas. Thanks for bringing us. This has been, I mean, the setup looks cool, right? Looks cool. Feels cool. We've got a cool guest that we're going to introduce here in a second, but she's got her own music. So we're waiting for it. I'm looking forward to it. All right. How are you feeling? Are you having a good conference so far?

Douglas Carlson: This is fantastic. I just co-hosted a breakout session, which was absolutely fantastic with the one and only Charlie Parker and Dylan from Stratatech and talked a lot about video, which was super fun. So I'm amped to now move from video to audio. And we're going to talk about video maybe even a little bit more. We're going to talk about visual things. We're going to talk about marketing.

Joe Sallustio: We're going to talk to our guest, here she is. She's Jenn Lyles, and that's Jenn with two N's, everybody. Don't you forget it. And she is the executive director of Beauty Schools Marketing Group. Jenn, welcome to the podcast.

Jenn Lyles: Thanks for having me.

Joe Sallustio: OK, my music was better than yours. I wait for it. It's so good. It's not that... Do you think we should podcast over this the whole time?

Jenn Lyles: I win. I win.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. There's no... I'm giving that one to Jenn. Welcome to the podcast, Jenn. I feel like I've known you. Obviously, I see you on LinkedIn and you're doing great work in the career college sector. Thank you for the work that you do to support schools, the beauty schools. There are so many students out there that are still attending beauty schools. I think it's a forgotten industry, some forgotten part of the industry sometimes. Can you tell us a little bit about Beauty Schools Marketing Group? What do you do? Who do you serve? We'll go from there.

Jenn Lyles: Absolutely. So we are most known as Beauty Schools Directory. We run the number one online resource for beauty schools in the nation. So we sell, we're a PPL vendor. We sell leads to schools. We have about a million visitors a year that come to our website looking to go to school. They don't know where they want to go to school. So we help find them one. We help match them with a school near them.

Joe Sallustio: That's pretty cool. I love how you say it. Sometimes in nonprofit, because I've worked in some nonprofit higher ed recently, and you would say something like, well, we generate leads and schools pay us for the lead. And somebody looks at you and goes, you could do that? Is that something that actually exists? You talk to somebody in the career college sector, that's how you do it. That's part of how you complement your organic marketing efforts. How's business? How's it going? Are schools growing out there?

Jenn Lyles: Schools are growing. It's a great time to be in the beauty school industry for a lot of reasons. But why I love the beauty school industry so much is that it's a passion career. So you're not just finding kids straight out of high school, which is, by the way, what a lot of schools in the career sector do. They go into high schools. They're trying to recruit these kids to not choose a community college, not choose a four-year, come to our school.

Beauty schools have been a plan B for a lot of people. So what they see a lot of is people who went to nursing school and dropped out, people who became teachers and didn't like it. Moms who, you know, just got a nine-to-five and now that their kids are in school, they finally want to do something for themselves. So this career really spans a lot of second career folks, plus the straight out of high school kids.

Joe Sallustio: I like that. Douglas.

Douglas Carlson: So Jenn, I'm really curious. I think one of the things and what I really want you on the podcast specifically at CEQ is you do an incredible job of representing this part of the industry. You're an expert in it. You know it really well. I think for some of our listeners, this might actually be a new, newer space. So could you give us kind of the lay of the land? Like what does the space look like? You know, are schools big, small, like what's the day in the life? And I'm sure it obviously spans from large to small, but I would love to just get a sense of the industry from you.

Jenn Lyles: Sure. There's about 3,000 schools across the US that offer a beauty program. So the major beauty programs are cosmetology, which is mostly hair, aesthetics, which is mostly skincare, and then some of them offer other programs like nail tech, massage and makeup and barbering. So those are, you know, sort of the all-encompassing beauty programs. About half of those are accredited, take Title Four funds. So those are the schools that usually work with us.

As far as chains go, a lot of people know Paul Mitchell's and Aveda's. And of course, Empire. Empire is the biggest chain in existence today. There are 76 schools. You're right. There used to be more than that. There was about double. So right now they have about 76 schools and Paul Mitchell's and Aveda's, those are franchised. So other than that, it's the small schools, it's the mom and pops. That's usually what people choose. It's like a two or three campus school. A lot of these campuses are one campus. The population is less than 100, which is really great. You get that one-on-one.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah, super intimate. Sure. Well, and the other thing I've, it's funny, I love this podcast because there's all these questions I want to ask and like when we hang out, I just don't ask those questions. So it's silly of me. And I should, but one of the questions that I was always wondering is how does a relationship with the Paul Mitchell and Aveda, those are also huge brands, but they're also huge consumer brands. How do those two things interact with each other?

Jenn Lyles: I mean, I think when you want to go to beauty school, a lot of people know those brands, so they choose to go to those websites, right? Like they go straight to the Paul Mitchell website, they go straight to the Aveda website. Those do okay on a directory like ours. But what we see, especially in the smaller towns, is sometimes those schools are oversaturated and that people want a more boutiquey feel, especially for like...

Douglas Carlson: That can be kind of intimidating. Big brands can be... Is there a cost difference? Big time cost difference?

Jenn Lyles: No. Cost is around the same for all of these schools. And that's what the schools will always look to the Paul Mitchell's and Aveda, see what they're priced at and usually match that. Unless you are not accredited, don't have Title IV, you're about half the price.

Joe Sallustio: Tell them like it is. What about hours? A lot of people don't know about the hours part of this. Little known fact, I don't know if you knew this, I used to work for a career college. That's where I cut my teeth in higher education. I was there for 12 years and we offered esthetician, massage therapy, cosmetology, a missing one. Did I say massage? Barbery nails? No. Makeup? No. Maybe that was it. We had personal training, but that was, but it was beauty and health.

So I've sold those programs before to students and there, I will say there are big time passion careers. Like these are people, a lot of them want to start a business.

Jenn Lyles: And you want to - I'm so glad you said that.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, they want to start their own business. Also, it's a hustle to do that. So they get help. But it's right. So but the first question is, and a lot of people don't know is, I'm just going to go to school. I'm going to go to beauty school. I'm going to get my what certification. But you have to have a number of hours. You have to practice home and you have to practice. You have to have people come in and you have to cut their hair and sometimes not well when you're new. So you got to learn how to do it. And you have to have people from the general public a lot of times come in. And so those businesses can also make money with a salon, right? So talk about the model a little bit.

Jenn Lyles: Yeah. So for a cosmetology program, they're anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred hours, which takes you about nine months to a year to graduate. So, you know, you're in school for about a year, depending on what state you're in. Every state has different hours that you have to abide by. Aesthetics is about half that time. So yeah, you're coming in for those first few weeks and you are learning theory. You are learning how to hold shears. These kids have never even held scissors. Like do not put them on the floor to cut someone. And they know that.

So, you know, after after they've been in the classroom, they practice on mannequins. Even the shaving. This is my favorite. Barbers, they, you know, they get a straight razor. That's the difference between a barber, barbers are allowed to use a straight razor on a man's face. They practice on balloons. So that you know, you pop them and -

Joe Sallustio: So if you could do it on a balloon.

Jenn Lyles: You could do it on a balloon. You're not going to cut my face. Yes. Because essentially that's - And then they will shave each other's arms. Like they're not going to go straight to someone's face. So they're building up that confidence and that skill level. And then yes, they start taking clients. And if you know the beauty school biz, you are not - I would not go to a beauty school to get my hair done. I would have in college. And so there are the, you know, it's that demographic that knows it's going to take longer, but it's going to be cheap. And I know I'm going to a school and yeah, they, they support the small business and they can get their hair. They can get a full head of highlights for like 30 bucks as opposed to 200 as long.

Douglas Carlson: Well, I'm really glad. So these are exactly the conversation. What I have is like, I just learned so much from you. And also, I love a straight razor shave, there we go, I said it correctly. But it's a little bit terrifying if you've not built a relationship with that person up. And so that's the distinction from a barber. That's really important to know. So I want to go back to Joe's comment about kind of the next step for a lot of students. So it sounds like there's quite a bit of small business entrepreneurship. There's also potentially joining some of these chains and other groups. Can you speak to a little bit about that?

Jenn Lyles: This is something we need to talk about because obviously with the gainful employment lawsuit, it's really, really hurting beauty schools the most. It's why AACS, the American Association of Cosmetology Schools is suing the Department of Ed over it.

Joe Sallustio: Yikes!

Jenn Lyles: It is very scary. There's a lot of stuff going on right now with gainful employment in the beauty industry. So let's chat about that. If you work in admissions and ask a prospect, why do you want to come here? What do you want to do when you graduate? 99% of the time, they're going to say, I want to own my own business. I want to own a salon. That's what they all say. 100% of them say that, really. It's not even 99% of them. They all want to own their own salon. They all want to own their own spa. And so...

I mean, the fact is a year is not enough time to just jump into entrepreneurship. You aren't learning business skills, you are learning practical skills. These schools are not teaching. They don't have the hours, the time to teach them how to run a business and how to open up an LLC or an S Corp and how to do your taxes and they don't know what they're doing. And so there's a couple different models though. There's the suite model that is the most popular. So you don't just have to straight up own a salon that has 15 chairs in it. You can go to like a Sola Salons, which is a suite where it's literally just a room and you just design your own room and you can do that. The problem is they don't have time to build up their clientele.

So what schools should be doing and what I believe they're doing is when you graduate, go work in a salon. Go work in a spa, learn it for a year or two. Start building up your clientele, work underneath someone, really hone in your skills, because you are not ready right out of graduation. And it does hurt job placement if they don't do that. And it really hurts them, because this generation of Gen Zers, if they're not good at something, they quit. And so what we are seeing is these kids are going straight to working for themselves. They don't know what they're doing. They can't pay their taxes when it comes, you know, time. They didn't put enough money aside and they're not successful. So they quit.

Joe Sallustio: Well, let's start the insanity. They leave the industry and that's not what we want. We want them to stay in the industry.

Jenn Lyles: Well, it's not only churn that you have to worry about from students graduating, but it's really churn from the industry as well. It is. And schools are doing a really good job bringing in guest speakers to speak to that. People who own salons to be like, guys, I didn't do this straight out of graduating from here. Like I worked in a salon for four or five years. I built up enough clientele to do this. You know, they have the job fairs. They're constantly having, you know, different salons and spas come in there to try to recruit the kids. So I say all that to say when they come in as a prospect, they all want to own their own salon. And I will tell admissions, it's not up to you to kill their dream. It's up to the teachers to kill their dream. It's not up to you.

Joe Sallustio: Attention. So once, you know, once they're in school, they will learn, OK, maybe I'm not ready to do this yet. And that's OK. Do you think, so another little known fact, both my mother and father-in-law are from Italy. Born and raised in Italy, came over here like 35 years ago. Both are hair Italian hairdressers, I say, right? So my father-in-law, in particularly, he did color correction. They just both retired. But for 40 years, he worked in a salon, his own business, and they had the Italian music playing in the background. I bring this up to say, in Italy, being a beauty school graduate is a very high credible esteemed career. And when they came to the US they noticed that it's not perceived the same way as it was in Italy. Maybe because Italy is more stylish. Is that possible? Would do you think?

Jenn Lyles: Yes. I mean, I would say that.

Joe Sallustio: Do you think that the career itself receives the right amount of I don't know the right word, panache or respect.

Jenn Lyles: I know exactly what you're saying. And I will, if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would say absolutely not. These kids are laughed at. Their parents are saying this is not a real job. They're embarrassed to say it in front of their friends. Today, I believe it has completely reversed. And I'll tell you why. It's because of social media and celebrities. Any celebrity out there is going to tag their makeup artist, their hair artist. They're going to tag the person who did their nails. You get so much respect. Always. You get so much recognition now by celebrities. It is not something like everyone knows it's a real job now. So yeah, maybe even five years ago, people were like, this is like a part time. Who's the makeup artist? Who's the hairstylist? They're probably in the back doing nothing. When you see those videos, they're real. I mean, they're doing real hard work. And that's by the way, what everyone wants to see. Like the number one search thing on YouTube is how to, and it's usually how to do makeup, how to do hair. And so what we're seeing now with Gen Z, which I love this for TikTok, I love this for Instagram, is we are having kids who want to come to school because they follow influencers.

Joe Sallustio: That's interesting.

Jenn Lyles: And they want to be an influencer. They don't like, that's a, that's a whole new job now that no one's teaching. I'm teaching that by the way is.

Joe Sallustio: I think you can make a lot of money on TikTok.

Jenn Lyles: I am making money on TikTok. I am personally monetizing TikTok. And I'm only doing it so I can teach people how to do it. So I can teach students how to do it.

Douglas Carlson: Yeah. You're not just teaching it. You're doing it and you're being able to teach it. Well, and let's continue down this because it's such a powerful tool. How can you educate us a little bit about how TikTok and other tools are being used in the beauty school space? What's working, what's not, who's doing it well, maybe who's maybe not.

Jenn Lyles: Not a lot of people are, not a lot of schools are doing it well. Lots of students are doing it well. And can't we say that for every single industry? Sure. The best TikTok channel out there in the school space is T-Spa Georgetown. I tell everyone to follow them. They're really good at seeing what's trending on TikTok and then they will do videos to match that trend. So if everyone is doing a certain lip sync, a certain dance, or if there's just something funny in pop culture that's trending, they will do a video to match that. The schools that suck at TikTok are the schools that are like, "Hi, I went to this school and it was so great and I love it." I don't think so. All you're gonna do is swipe right past that. Like I might even get two seconds into that.

So schools that understand TikTok do it well. There's just not a ton of them that are doing it well. That said, the students are killing the game. Your students behind your back are on TikTok and they are the face of your school and you probably don't even know it.

Douglas Carlson: What advice would you give for schools to come up to speed? And I think you nailed something, right? The individuals will always be ahead of the trend. It's just like they can move faster. It's the company is harder. But what advice would you have to have schools come up the learning curve a bit?

Jenn Lyles: Give them what they want. I created a training that teaches kids how to make money on TikTok because, and I did that specifically because there was always a gap in funding. Yeah. And I'm like, we need to teach students how to make money to fill this gap. They are taking a year off of school. They're having to quit jobs. A lot of them are parents, right? A lot of them are moms and dads and they have kids at home and they need money. And so why not teach them how to make money while in school and why not do it on TikTok?

Joe Sallustio: That's brilliant. What else do you want to say? Have an open mic for your business. Plug what you do. What else do you want to say? What haven't we asked you?

Jenn Lyles: Aside from me working for Beauty Schools Marketing Group, which I love, I absolutely love, love, love my job. If you just go on my website, jennlyles.com, I have every webinar I've ever recorded is on there. I have my TikTok training on there. I have a lot of free information. So a lot of people don't have money to pay for things. That's okay, especially Beauty Schools right now. Put all your money in marketing and just watch all my free content.

Joe Sallustio: That's a good way to put it. Where should we find you? Can you give us your handles? Do you know them off the top of your head?

Jenn Lyles: Sure. My handle is always the same. It's Jenn, J-E-N-N underscore Lyles. That's the same on Instagram as it is on TikTok. Jenn Lyles. That's that's Jenn with two N's. Like you said at the very beginning, find me on LinkedIn. I post every day on LinkedIn, but can I just tell you why I'm passionate about this?

Joe Sallustio: You have the microphone right now so you can do whatever the heck you want.

Jenn Lyles: I grew up, I mean, I grew up with not a lot of money. My parents didn't put any money aside for me for college, and I don't blame them for that. They just didn't have the means for it. I've been hustling my entire life. And one year, my husband and I had five W-2s between us while I was in school full-time. I've just always been hustling and to try to make money, to try to make money. And money has never been so easy as it is on TikTok. And I just feel like I want to scream it from the rooftops, like, go do it yourself, students go do it. It's so easy. I can teach you how to do it. That's I literally do it because I've been successful at it and I want other people to be successful at it.

Joe Sallustio: Elvin Freitas, if you're listening this of course co-founder of the EdUp Experience podcast, you and I are gonna be meeting with Jenn Lyles so we can figure out how to monetize TikTok because that's one space we have not been playing around with but I think we could. We have enough content for it, God knows. I like that Jenn and I like your passion for the industry, for career schools, and particularly for beauty schools. I think it's unfair sometimes, the amount of regulation and the amount of scrutiny. These are legit careers that people have long lives. It's funny that you say you brought up solo salon and all that, because my current hairdresser, I say hairdresser or barber, I don't know what you would call her, but she was in a salon. That's where I found her. I moved randomly to St. Louis, found her and it was with her for a year. And then she went to one of those spaces. She wants to start her own business, but she's now in, I guess there's like 28 rooms in this space. And so she's got a room. I go into the room, she cuts my hair for me, I leave. And she builds up her clientele first. She's building up her clientele so when she goes.

Jenn Lyles: She didn't go straight into doing that, exactly.

Joe Sallustio: That's a great tip and I think so many of us want to start our own business, but there's so much more to it than just wanting to do it. Thanks for the tips, Jenn. Douglas, do you have anything else you want to add?

Douglas Carlson: No, that is exactly what I was hoping. You delivered in spades, Jenn.

Joe Sallustio: Did anyone doubt that she... no, there was no doubt. But this is an important thing to know about the space. And no, I'm glad we highlighted it. There she is, ladies and gentlemen. She's the one and only Jenn Lyles, Executive Director of Beauty Schools Marketing Group. What TikTok influencer extraordinaire. Jenn, thanks for being on the podcast.

Jenn Lyles: Thanks for having me, guys.

Joe Sallustio: And of course, he's Douglas Carlson. He'll be back, so we'll cut it short. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed up.