It had been four months since I had visited a barber – It was time for a haircut. As luck would have it, I had a consultation with Dylan, the owner of Bee Studio and Barber Lounge, coming up in a few days. There's an art to a perfect fade that no AI can replicate, but I was very much looking forward to finding ways in which AI could help Dylan run his business more effectively. When I met with Dylan, I learned that he shares his place of business with his wife, who also works in the beauty business, specializing in hair and makeup. After working several jobs since graduating from high school, Dylan decided to begin cutting hair 7 years ago, realizing that what he loves the most is being creative and working with his hands.
Dylan works as the owner, manager, and sole hair stylist at his shop. I wanted to know how this impacts Dylan's time management and ability to run, or potentially scale, his business. With such a large number of barber shops and salons in San Luis Obispo, I asked Dylan what he believes makes some successful and others less fortunate: "I think other than providing quality service, it comes down to customer service. I think this creates the best kind of natural promotion, or word-of-mouth, for a small business like mine." On the topic of customer service, Dylan said that he deals with appointment bookings mainly through phone calls, but also receives customer inquiries through his website. Dylan was quick to diagnose a problem he has with this booking process: "Responding to online appointment confirmations is a time suck, is there a way AI can automate this for me?" This is something that I've now heard several times from small business owners, most recently with Battle Axe. Customer inquiries for appointments are a common feature on websites. However, without a complex solution like having an API integrated into their website (which is unreasonable for a small business without support staff), there isn't a great way to respond to these messages while maintaining quality customer service. To address this, we created a customer service response template for Claude on my iPhone, showcasing the convenience of having a high-powered LLM in your pocket.
Dylan had never used ChatGPT or any AI tool before, so I was eager to provide demonstrations that could offer real benefits to his business. To avoid overwhelming Dylan with complex prompts, I showed how we could craft simple, targeted requests that could directly assist his operation. Dylan mentioned that his wife primarily focuses on hair and makeup for bridal parties. Using this information, we asked ChatGPT's reasoning model, o3, to develop a joint marketing strategy that would target both bridal parties and bachelor parties, creating a unique "wedding prep package" where the bride and bridesmaids could get hair and makeup from his wife while the groom and groomsmen could get haircuts from Dylan. The results were impressive – o3 generated cohesive marketing materials including social media posts, digital flyers, and newsletter content all tailored specifically to San Luis Obispo wedding venues and seasonal trends. o3 incorporated local knowledge about popular SLO County wedding destinations like Santa Margarita Ranch, suggesting targeted partnerships. This demonstrated real strategic business thinking, showing Dylan how AI could help unite both aspects of their family beauty business under one marketing approach. What made this particularly effective was o3's reasoning capabilities. Unlike standard language models that simply predict the next word in a sequence, reasoning models like o3 can think more deliberately through complex problems, allowing them to develop more sophisticated strategies.
After our session, it was time for Dylan to return the favor and get me right with a fresh cut. When I sat down in the chair, Dylan's focus on providing a unique customer experience became clear. I've always felt that most barber stations have a severance sort of feel to them – fluorescent lighting, certificate on the wall, and not much else. Dylan's station was different, doubling as an extension of his personality. This led to natural conversations that wouldn't normally occur. We jumped from his passion for Star Wars and why Revenge of the Sith is the best of them all, to his lifelong love of guitar and classic rock, and perhaps most notably, stories about being classmates with Zac Efron at Arroyo Grande High School! Dylan's wife was actually in theater with Zac Efron, which is practically like being on the same high school basketball team as a future NBA star. Our consultation proved to be a win-win: Dylan discovered practical AI applications he plans to implement immediately with Claude, and I walked away with a great haircut and a new barber!