Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
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Kind: captions Language: en she had she was about five feet tall her hair was down to the ground she had this like majestic chestnut hair that was just hey Zack welcome back hey Brad so this week you have a really interesting piece about a female entrepreneur who’s one of the pioneers of the franchising business model not many people have heard about her how did you find out about it so her name’s Martha Matilda Harper and she was kind of she created this phenomenal business and long before Ray Kroc McDonald’s and the whole franchise model took off she was kind of one of the early pioneers in this space in the late 19th century and her story was kind of forgotten and it’s for for many years it’s a footnote in history until this woman Jane Jane a historian resurfaced her story in the late 90s and early 2000s and really made a push to get her more into the spotlight but even now today I think relatively few younger people know about her and she’s just got kind of a very interesting story so tell us a little bit about her business and how she found her niche yeah so she she started out of life in the mid-1800s in Canada and she was kind of born into a lower-class family at the age of seven she was sent away to be a house sterben by our family and for 25 years she was house servant and eventually she served at the house of a physician who studied a hair follicle science and kind of some of the early science of hair hair treatments and he bestowed upon her this this hair tonic and she took that with her to Rochester New York and eventually found her way into certain circles saved a little bit of money and launched a successful franchise of hair salons at a time when it was very difficult to even launch a single business a female entrepreneur she ended up growing this into a chain of 500 stores and was was in spirit and inspired many other women to fall in her path a lot of the franchise owner she hired were other a woman who who didn’t come from upper-class backgrounds she empowered a lot of people with similar backgrounds to her and gave them some freedom to run their own franchises she sounds like a really inspiring story to any anything you want to share just any fun details about the business and in the in the hair salon industry that she was was created with yeah so she she actually invented a number of things like the reclining shampoo chair a sink with a little hole cut out for the neck just little things you see in salons today that you don’t really give much thought to but unfortunately she didn’t secure the patents to a lot of these inventions so it was very difficult for her for a woman at the time to get their name on a patent but the other funny detail is if you if you look at there’s one old kind of iconic photograph of her that exists she had she was about 5 feet tall her hair was down to the ground she had this like majestic chestnut hair that was just like a flowing mane like something like nothing you’ve ever seen and that was actually her greatest marketing asset is that she’d serve for these high-class woman is a house servant they would always ask her about how she how her hair was so nice it was like this incredible head of hair she had and she used that to sell her tonic to start her business and that was kind of one of her one of her chief marketing licenses use what you have your advantage and she certainly did that well there’s a lot more to this story you guys are going to love this one please please make sure you open your emails on Sunday and thanks again for joining us Zach thanks you [Music]