ASHLAND—The Grooming Lounge, Ashland’s newest barber shop, opened last year. After a year of extraordinary success and expansion, the shop recently received recognition with Heritage Ohio’s Downtown Affiliate Business of the Year award.
Behind this flourishing business is one highly determined woman, Acacia Leasure, and a handful of people who supported her dream. Stepping away from the chaos of work and mom life, she shares her story of becoming a thriving entrepreneur.
“It was a five-year plan,” Leasure said, that took her from an unhappy employee to becoming her own boss.
Growing up, Leasure spent summers with an aunt who lived in Cuyahoga County and owned a hair salon. She dreamed of owning her own shop one day.
“I would go to her shop and sweep hair and run the errands for the girls, so I knew from the time I was like 11 that I wanted to do hair,” Leasure said.
Leasure lived with her grandparents and mother. Her mother went to school to become a nurse and worked third shift, setting an example of perseverance Leasure would one day mirror. She graduated when Leasure was a young teen.
As a high school junior and senior, Leasure took cosmetology classes at Pioneer Career & Technology Center in Shelby. She secured a job before she graduated. “On the days we didn’t have classes, I went to work,” she said.
After graduating from Galion High School in 2011, Leasure worked for different salons in the Richland area. One day, fed up with being overworked at a highly stressful salon job with poor management, she decided to quit. Sitting in the parking lot afterward, she immediately started calling potential employers.
Great Clips in Ashland was hiring, so Leasure went to get an application and had her initial interview. Two days later, she returned for her technical interview, but they were very busy. She jumped in to help with haircuts and was hired on the spot.
New to Ashland, Leasure quickly noticed there were not many barber shops in town. She saw an opportunity to open her own shop and decided to return to school at the Ohio State College of Barber Styling in Whitehall.
“I worked three days a week, and I was at school three days a week,” Leasure said. “I had little babies then, a 2-year-old and a baby.” She lived with her mother, who helped with the children and made it possible for Leasure to go back to school.
Clients soon learned Leasure was attending barber school and suggested she reach out to William Gebhart, a local barber. “I went and talked to him,” Leasure said. “I bugged him like every week just so he knew I still wanted to come there when I graduated.”
Leasure was transparent with Gebhart from the beginning about her plan to eventually open her own barber shop. “He’s a very laid back man,” she said. “He was fine with it.”
When she graduated, Leasure started working at Gebhart’s Family Grooming Center and built her clientele there for three years. Early on, she would walk around Ashland University’s campus on her lunch breaks, handing out business cards to students and asking for a chance to cut their hair.
“As soon as you get someone in your chair, that’s your one shot—one shot to give a good haircut, a good experience, and then they’re yours,” Leasure said. “Eventually I didn’t have to go to [the campus] anymore because everyone was just telling their friends.”
Leisure’s dream was getting closer. She needed a clear plan forward, but she didn’t have mentors in the business world to ask questions. She started with the basics.
“I was like, you’ve got one shot and you cannot mess this up. I have to figure out what I’m doing,” Leasure said. “I just Google ‘business plan.’ I Google everything.”
With the business plan she created on her own, Leasure went to meet with Chris Coffy, the owner of the building where The Grooming Lounge now resides. Coffy immediately supported Leasure’s vision and wanted to help.
“I came in with a binder … I had all these ideas and my little three-page business plan,” Leasure said of her first meeting with Coffy. Coffy advised her to reach out to Michalina Lacey, director of the Small Business Development Center at Ashland University.
Lacey, too, wanted to help Leasure succeed. “It was a vision she’d had since she was a young girl, so she was very motivated to make things happen,” Lacey said. “A lot of people just say, ‘Oh, I want to start a business,’ but they haven’t really thought of the financial aspect of that.”
“I was quite impressed. She’d already been working with clients at a different barber shop, and she had figured out, by tracking her clients for so many months, that she had enough clients to potentially sustain a business,” Lacey said.
“She helped me so much,” Leisure said. “I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know the first thing about a business plan. When she got done with me, my business plan was like 25 pages.”
Equipped with loyal clientele and a plan to create a barber shop like nothing Ashland had seen before, Leasure was ready to take the next step. She knew she could start a successful, economy-boosting business, but she needed one more thing: money.
For months, banks repeatedly denied Leasure’s applications for loans. It seemed like an impossible feat. “I get it. I had more debt than I had income,” she said. “I don’t have money laying around or family that’s just going to give me money.”
“I am a woman. I’m Black. I was a single mom then,” Leasure said. “There are so many women or even just people of color who have awesome ideas, but how are we supposed to be successful if we don’t have access to the funds to make us successful?”
The women familiar with Leasure’s vision already believed in her, and they had an idea. Lacey, along with Kathy Goon with Economic Development, encouraged her to contact Erie Basin in Norwalk, a nonprofit organization that helps with downtown revitalization.
Leasure’s first application for funding from Erie Basin was denied, but Goon and Lacey continued to advocate for her. “(Lacey and Goon) kept pressing them,” Leasure said. “They were like, ‘You have to give this girl some money. She will be successful.’”
Despite rejection, Leasure did not lose hope. She surrounded herself with mentors and kept trying. “She was very keen to just surround herself with different mentors, either barbers or barber shops and business support systems like myself,” Lacey said.
Eventually, her perseverance paid off, culminating with an act of generosity from a friend of Coffy’s who Leasure had only met once.
“When I met with her, she gave me $5,000,” Leisure said. “With that extra $5,000 to add on to my working capital and the fact that my mom co-signed the loan for me, I was finally able to get (the loan).”
Leasure felt satisfied once she had the check in hand and worked even harder. “I would work from 9 (a.m.) to 6 (p.m.), and then I would go to The Grooming Lounge and set things up. I’d be there till like midnight,” she said.
While preparing to open her shop, Leasure also met her future husband, Marc Leasure. He was working on a project for his employer in the alley near Gebhart’s.
“One of the things I loved about him was he would drive by the shop at night—probably like 8 or 9 o’clock—and he’d see that I’m in there trying to do all this stuff by myself,” Leasure said. “He would always come help me.”
The Grooming Lounge opened, and they were slammed with business right away. “Every single day, we were booked from 9 (a.m.) to 6 (p.m.),” Leisure said.
Four other women work at the shop now, and Marc starts barber school this December. He recently quit his job and has been able to watch the children during COVID shutdowns, enabling Leasure to continue running the business as smoothly as possible.
“We’ll work for ourselves. We’ll have flexible schedules and do what we need to do,” Leasure said.
The Grooming Lounge is one of the only barber shops locally to offer a straight razor shave, and they also do lashes, brow tinting, waxing, facials, makeup and hair coloring. As a result, their clientele is very diverse.
“It’s just somewhere anyone can feel comfortable,” Leasure said. “Male, female, young, old—we go from 11 months old to our oldest client, who is 94 years old.”
A new dream is on the horizon for Leasure once her husband graduates. “I want to open a barber school in Ashland,” she said. “I think Ashland is a central location. I know it can be successful.”
Leasure’s story demonstrates the value of supporting the dreams of others. She brought talent, perseverance and a plan for success to the table, and with help from family and business mentors along the way, she achieved her lifelong dream.
For anyone with a business idea feeling unsure where to start, Leasure advises to write it down first.
“Put it on paper,” Leasure said. “Someone’s going to invest in you if they believe in you and they see the plan you have, the dream you have. So just don’t stop.”
