What a Full-Day Retreat Taught Us About Hair, Money, and Getting Out of Our Own Way

Every January, Anna does something a little unexpected for a hair salon owner: she invests in her team's minds.

Not just their technical skills. Not just their color theory or cutting technique. Their minds.

This year, she found Hannaka Antonelli — discovered, very appropriately, through the Boston Businesswomen's Facebook page. Anna interviewed four or five coaches before choosing her. The reason? Hannaka understood something that not everyone does: that what holds us back at work and what holds us back in life are usually the same thing.

Limiting beliefs don't clock out at 5pm. Old stories about money, worth, and what's possible don't stay neatly in one lane. And if you want a team that shows up fully — for each other, for their clients, for themselves — you have to actually address that.

So that's what the retreat was about.

The team spent a full day together working through mindset around money, around career, around the quiet ways our past experiences have a habit of showing up uninvited in our present. They built accountability partnerships — a buddy system designed to last well beyond the retreat itself.

It wasn't surface level. It was the kind of work that's a little uncomfortable, a little revealing, and entirely worth it.

This wasn't the first time Lola has done something like this. Last year, the team worked with Michelle Wax on vision work, astrology charts, and connecting past and future selves — which, yes, sounds a little out there, and also the team got something genuinely valuable out of it. Anna has learned to trust that.

Because here's what drives all of it:

Anna wants her team to have everything. Not in a vague, motivational-poster way. In a real, specific, watching-it-happen way. She notices when someone quits their second job. When they sign a lease on their first apartment. When they buy a house, start a family, or simply — finally — stop stretching themselves thin.

She doesn't take lightly that her team spends a significant portion of their lives at Lola. That means something. And she wants it to mean something good.

The philosophy is pretty simple, even if the execution takes work: when stylists feel supported, grounded, and clear on what they want — clients feel it. The care runs all the way through. From the newest team member to the most senior, from the chair to the front door, it shows up in how people are treated and how they leave feeling.

Technical skills matter. Of course they do. But a stylist who has done the inner work? That's someone who can hold space for a client going through a breakup, a reinvention, or just a Tuesday that needed to feel better.

That's the standard Lola is building toward. Every year, a little more intentionally.