AERN home > Success stories > A Kut Abuv, Tuskegee, Alabama, Summer 2007
Hair Stylist Continues a Family Tradition
For some, a small business can mean the road back to roots--a way to continue the traditions, memories, and practices that make a person's place on earth unique. So it is for Patricia Carlisle, Tuskegee's newest native stylist.
After a jumpstart of support from the Alabama Entrepreneurial Research Network (AERN), Carlisle's salon, A Kut Abuv, is bustling. Carlisle and her brother, Jerome Mount, opened their first Tuskegee salon in the late 1970s. D and P Headliners and the siblings who ran it became known as "the trophy winning team." One after another, they claimed cosmetology competitions, jerry curling, and cutting with speed and precision.
Eventually, Carlisle cut loose and moved to Georgia. But carloads of her lady clients from Tuskegee followed their hairdresser faithfully to her salon near Atlanta for the 11 years she stayed there. When family responsibility called Carlisle home, times were tight.
"I always wanted to open another salon back home, but I just didn't see how I could come up with the money," she says. Then one day she visited a young man from the old neighborhood who had opened a corner store. That young man was Elisha Ligon, a local entrepreneur who also got help from AERN to launch his Super E Quick Stop.
"Are you serious? They have people to help?" Carlisle's voice draws up into an excited and high-pitched whisper when she remembers finding out about the center.
"After four and a half hours of AERN business research I was so excited. I remembered the old salon and I thought "We can do this again!" Mr. Finkley (Carlos Finkley, executive director of the Tuskegee-Macon County Community Development Corporation, fondly known as Tusk-Mac) guaranteed me he would have my back from beginning to finish. And he has," she says.
When she was a girl, Carlisle picked up some hair-cutting tricks from her brother Jerome. jerome had learned a lot about clippers from working at a neighborhood barber shop after school. She watched as he sometimes cut hair for all the neighbors on the back porch of their home. Her mother protested, but didn't intervene, when Carlisle put her own sister under the snippers.
One afternoon the barber got busy at the shop where Jerome worked and the owner handed Carlisle a pair of clippers. "What do I do?" she asked. "'Just cut it all off,' he said."
"He believed I could do it," she remembers now, as though she can still hear him. Today, after almost 35 years in the business, Carlisle has the credentials and business experience to get her new salon up and running Tuskegee.
Carlisle's childhood included Alberta McMullen, a neighbor down the street who had a small operation out of the back of her house. At Christmas and Easter, Carlisle's mother would take the girls there to get their curled. It wasn't long before Ms. McMullen handed the curlers to Carlisle, too.
There were three things blocking her dream when she moved back to Tuskegee: start-up funds, some new furniture, and a building. The Tusk-Mac CDC helped her get a loan, which took care of two obstacles, and Finkley helped her write a business plan, using AERN resources provided by a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission.
"Ms. Carlisle had a dream of owning her own beauty salon to serve a steady, upscale clientele," Finkley recalls. "She was determined to do whatever it took to make her dream come true. After the first few days of consulting with her, we knew we had a winner on our hands. Form concept to logo to atmosphere, Ms. Carlisle knew exactly what she wanted to do with her salon, and we used Business Plan Pro software provided by AERN to organize everything."
"We trudged through the market analysis and other items related to the feasibility study and eventually secured a location in downtown Tuskegee. Finally, we assisted Ms. Carlisle with a $10,000 small business loan from our revolving loan program."
As for the building, it was yet another gift from God, as far as Carlisle can tell. Everybody knew the location of the former Gerry's Restaurant in downtown Tuskegee. Carlisle was the FOR RENT sign in its window and dreamed of painting the interior purple. "Or lavender-not dark, deep purple," she says. "My other favorite color is white."
She went in to see the space. "Come to behold the place was the color I had planned to paint it"-purple on the bottom, a white line splitting the wall midway up and lavender up on top. "'Mr. Finkley, I said, 'I've got my building.' He said 'We got to get busy now,' and we did."
In mid-May A Kut Abuv rings with constant activity. At 9:30 in the morning, three ladies wait their turn for weaves, cuts, curls, relaxers, and manicures. Carlisle does it all.
She plans to put in new furniture and expand the salon to include massage and spa treatments, services now offered only as close as Auburn or Montgomery.
"When I had to come back home because Mom was sick, it was fine by me," she says. "I always knew I was coming back home to serve my community, and there, nothing like it. We have beautiful people here, and i like to put smiles on their faces. I just thank God for all that."
She's also keeping the business in the family. Carlisle's sisters, Yvonne M. Redd and Flora Mount, can also be found at A Kut Abuv. Flora has been with Carlisle since the day she finished beauty school, traveling to Georgia and back home again.
Now it is those Georgia ladies who cross the state line. Each month, seven of them pile into a car and head westward toward Tuskegee.
- Contributed by Amanda DeWald, Knight Fellow at The Teaching Newspaper, a UA/Anniston Star partnership
From AERNews, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 2007