The BigTalk Story: A Barber is Born

The roots of the BigTalk story started in an apartment bathroom in Bethany Oklahoma 2012. I was studying an Exercise science degree and playing soccer at a college in Oklahoma, USA! I’m 20 years old, on a student visa (which means no working and no money!), living in a town where if you don’t have a car it’s not that easy to get around. Getting a haircut was like being a movie that’s the love child of Lord of the Rings trilogy and Mission Impossible 1 through to 6!

So ... the only logical thing to do was to, “do it myself”.

There I am, standing in front of a bathroom mirror, my Walmart brand hair clippers in one hand and my iPhone with the camera on reverse in the other hand and I start to have at it. At first it wasn’t too bad. I started with a number one on the sides and back, nothing too hard about that, until it came to lining up my sideburns and neck. I had seen it done before on YouTube and gave it a shot. It was then that I earned the nick name number 7! I had cut them on a right angle that represented exactly that! It was not a good look and my friends, they noticed!

Close up: “7/10 “- Rotten tomatoes

My first experience of cutting hair wasn’t the best but, given the circumstances that wasn’t going to stop me and I continued to get better. Until one day one of my teammates asked me to do it for them. And that was my first experience of cutting someone’s hair.

I came back to Australia in 2013 and continued to study the same degree, I had gotten a job as a personal stylist, which I loved, and cutting hair took a back seat.

Then out one fateful night I’m standing in a line to get into a bar and a guy yells out from 5 people in front of me, “Hey bro!” I look around and this guy staring at me. I turn to my friend and ignore him. Then again, “Hey! Bro!” I look forward and iv made eye contact, there’s no escape now! He shuffles out of the crowd, runs over and says “hey bro! I love your hair, where do you get it done?”. I say, with a smug look on my face “I do it myself”. “No way! Can you do mine he says” and after a couple of drinks that sounded like a good idea to me. I pause… he say’s “I’ll pay”, I pause again and say “hell yeah bro, id love too!”.

A week later, I’m sitting on my bed and I get a Facebook message, “Hey bro can I come and get that cut today?” I quickly look up some YouTube videos, Google some “How To’s”, rush to the shop to get some clippers and before you know it this guy that iv met in a club is in my back yard and I’m cutting his hair…. The beginnings of my barbering career had started, and I didn’t even know it yet.

Left: Best $120 I ever spent Right: One of my first victims

Next thing you know I’m doing freebies for family, friends and friends of friend’s hair on my days of and my cousin says. “your pretty good at this you should start charging”

And from that sentence my first barbering business was created “Joel’s Dapper Cuts”.

I started a Facebook page ordered some business cards and everywhere I went, clubs, restaurants, bars, shops, wherever I met people id hand one of these bad boys out and added them to the page.

Best $12.50 ever spent

Word started to get around. After 2 years of studying, and in my final 6 months, I realised that I couldn’t see myself working in the field of exercise physiology for the rest of my life. I was stressed, anxious about studying, and I wasn’t doing that great either.

I went on holiday to Melbourne for a couple weeks and coming closer and closer to having to come back home I knew I had to make a choice. It was at that moment I decided not to go back to University.

On the last day on the holiday I’m sitting on the hotel bed and my friend messages me, she was looking for a job and in doing that she stumbled across an ad for a barber position at a street culture retail shop, the biggest in Australia! I think to my self and my first thoughts are “I have no experience working in a shop, I have no credentials of education history, there’s no way they’d hire me”. After all that I came to “I got nothing to lose so why not” and I applied.

My email went something like this:

“To whom it may concern, my name is Joel pinto, I am a self-trained barber, I have no experience in working in a barber shop and I have a decent client base who came to see me regularly for haircuts in my backyard. I am currently working as a personal stylist in retail, I think ill be a good asset because I love people and love doing what I do.”

….  2 sentences!

A few hours later and to my surprise I am invited to a trial to do 2 hair cuts in 1 hour!! And I’ve never done that before in my life! I called two of my guys and say to them “bro! can you come to the city at 8am for a free cut” and both said yes (This is the most surprising day of my life so far).

Back to Perth that night, wake up the next morning drive to the city and I’m at the trial, im standing there in a tall shell of a building (they were still doing the fit out) and there’s a chair a mirror against a wall. Iv got my tools, the boys are here and its time. The trial comes to an end and all I get from the headed barber is “you’ll hear from us soon”.

A week later I get a call, the guy on the other end says (in an NZ accent) “hey bro, thanks for coming down aye, can you start on Monday week?” in fear, adrenaline and almost without thought I answer “yeah sure”.

Fast forward one week and I’m starting my first day. There are five other professional barbers  and me. Im daunted by the thought on being on this stage in such a short amount of time and its my turn to jump on the tools. Those next few months were the most formative of my barbering career. I learnt scissor work, refined my technique with fading, cut hair for celebrities such as  *links* G-Easy, Lil Yachty, Simeon Panda and more, most of all I got to work with great teams and some of the best barbers I’v met who became family.

6 months went by and the position for head barber opened. I had developed a lot of my barbering skills by this point and thought to myself, “what’s next?”. I had had vast and extensive training in customer service and sale from my previous jobs which attributed to me the ability to connect with people, educated them with products and how it could make a difference to them, managed teams and it was time to put all of that to work. I was up against the best in the bizz for position, but in my mind, I was without a doubt the perfect fit. I got the job!

This opened some of the biggest breakthroughs and breakdowns for my career. Dealing with staff, having to innovate new ideas, having those ideas shut down or empowered, resolving conflicts with management, and having to have the tough conversations. It was all about the team and the business and not my personal gain for once. That was both the hardest and the best part to grasp and develop myself in, but in that I discovered who I could be as a leader.

Fast forward almost 2 years later the barbershop was doing great. We had a strong team, some of the best barbers in Perth,  we had built a barbershop that had won award given by the company and went on to be one of the most accomplished out of all the barbershops in the companies franchise. Again, I asked myself “what’s next?”.

A few months later I’m in Sydney, sitting at the dinner table with me and tow of my closest friends, and were talking about what all of our futures looked like, who we were and what we wanted to be up to. I decided to rebrand myself as a barber, I wanted a name that would spark conversation.

I always found the social dynamics and psychology of communication to be fascinating how a simple word could create an entire future for people. Can’t vs can, and vs but both interchangeable in a sentence but cause completely different outcomes. The difference between seeing a possibility for themselves and not one at all. I discovered that conversation is the key to creating anything in life. I wanted to create a culture and community around people creating the best version of themselves and it all starts with the conversations were a part of.

And from that… BigTalk Barber was born.