Alli Webb was a stay-at-home mom for five years when she realized she needed to get out of the house more. So she started a mobile hair business. She’d go house-to-house and offer $40 blowouts to moms in LA, something that pretty much no one was doing at the time. A year later, she opened her first brick and mortar and called it Drybar. And in 2019, Alli sold the company for more than $200 million. All without a college degree or formal business training.
In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Alli shares:
The sunshine and beach-haired days of her childhood growing up in Boca Raton
How having parents who operated a small biz gave her life-lessons in entrepreneurship
Why it felt intoxicating building and scaling Drybar, plus the mental cost that came with it
How her divorce, son’s visit to rehab, and burnout led to her book, “The Messy Truth”
Why she felt intimidated when fundraising + curating the Drybar board – and how she got through it
On The Power of Having Parents as Entrepreneur’s
Alli: My parents had a business and it was called Flips. Flips is all we ever talked about, all we ever heard about. I get it now because my kids certainly have that. They grew up with Drybar. I watched my parents and got such an education that I didn't know I was getting, watching them build their business, grow their business. Of course, I didn't ever think I'd have a need for it. I didn't think about it one way or the other. And it was such a great foundation to grow up with. I didn't really aspire to be an entrepreneur when I was younger or even older. I was very happy to work for other people and didn't really know where my life would go. I realized that I knew about growing a business, customer service, and how to treat people. So that was quite a gift that my parents gave me that I didn't know at the time.
On Developing Self-Awareness to Face the Music
Alli: When my first divorce fell apart and my son went to rehab, my life was so bananas. It caused me to do so much work on myself. It was the softer version of myself. That kind of work helps you have more awareness. The awareness is what gets us to realize: we've got to face this sh*t. Versus what we do we all do – which I did which is – is use something else to cover it up not face it. Dance around it.
On the Detriment of Being Overly Obsessed with Perfection
Alli: My goal was that you would have a really great experience at Drybar no matter where you were. Even though it was a different hairstylist. Creating that and getting that to work consistently across the board was very challenging.I was always convinced – and this was like to the detriment of my mental health – that if one thing went wrong in one store at one time, the whole thing was going to fall apart. I now know that didn't happen and that's not the truth. It's a fine line because you don't want to be so flippant about it that you're not reacting to problems. But you also don't want to make yourself sick about it with worry, which I did. I would get so upset all the time and it did feel like a badge of honor. I mistook passion with being kind of a b*tch because I was so enamored with it being perfect and certain way.
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