After getting laid off in the midst of the most recent recession, Ravy Mehroke decided to take the plunge and open her own business.
“I had already been thinking about starting my own business, so I felt it was a huge opportunity and a huge calling to do that,” she said.
Mehroke and her sister, Amy Minhas, started Bombay Brow Bar in 2010; the business now has three locations in downtown Vancouver.
While other beauty salons offer a range of services, Bombay Brow Bar focuses on eyebrow grooming and recently branched out to offer other “above the neck” services.
The business has done well ever since it first started, but Mehroke says that success was certainly not effortless.
“A lot of people think we’ve had success from the beginning, but Amy and I worked on a business plan for a year before we even opened our doors,” Mehroke said.
“I spent a lot of time really working on the concept and making sure it was going to be something that people actually wanted, and something aligned with what I wanted to do.”
To prepare to open her business, Mehroke studied how similar businesses work – notably, Vancouver’s Blo Blow Dry Bar, which also offers a niche beauty service. She was mentored by Judy Brooks, a co-founder of that business. And she used resources from organizations like Small Business BC .
Mehroke also hired a market research firm to get information about whether there was demand for the service, to confirm that downtown was the right location for the business and to test whether customers responded well to the salon’s name and interior design.
Even with all that preparation under her belt, Mehroke recalls being an emotional wreck on opening day.
“I spent one year on it, I spent a ton of money on it … I was really scared that no one would care,” she said. “Amy came up to me and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay.’”
On the next stage of the business
“Once you’ve passed the startup phase, then it’s more about managing people and making sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s where I still am. There is an evolution of the business. … That’s something you want to prepare for. Scaling [the business] is a big part of what we did, doing things like operations manuals, [making sure] job descriptions are in place, and [hiring] good people."
