Alex Bilal-Spring
speaker
1,400 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Alex Bilal-Spring’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And as always, thank you so much for spending the past hour or so with us.
Together, we grow.
Being a business owner ain't for the weak.
The expectations are just different.
It's always a win.
Cade Mila-Faucha.
100,000 welcomes to the Forest FM podcast brought to you by Forest Software.
I'm your resident host, Alex Bilal-Spring.
This industry we love and are a part of has always been a pillar of local communities.
Jobs, apprenticeships, vital self-care, vibrant high streets.
And fundamentally, that still rings true.
But in the UK and Ireland, there's been growing trouble beneath the surface.
Signs of strain have been eroding confidence and consuming headspace, wrote Sarah Russell, head of marketing for the UK and Ireland at Forrest in a blog published earlier this year.
In 2025, UK and Irish reports published within the industry increasingly spoke of the crippling conditions closing in on hairdressers, barbers, and beauty professionals across their respective sectors or markets.
What Sarah put words to was this.
The strain isn't coming from a lack of clients, but rather from things like retention feeling harder to maintain, motivation taking more effort, commercial leakage, diary fragility, financial uncertainty.
None of it catastrophic in isolation.
But stack any one of those challenges against a difficult economic climate and ever-changing regulation, and when you ask owners for their reaction to the UK's 2025 budget, you get answers wrapped in a coat of heaviness.
Contextually speaking, the video series for which we captured the clips you just heard, featuring Sarah Schumark, Sammy McDonald, and Andrew Vorobjovas back in January 2025, wasn't only about getting an insider's look at external pressures they might have been facing.
The four-part video series, Lessons from the Salon Floor, filmed at the Forest Summit 2025's UK Welcome Event, had been made to inspire, empower, and entertain with lighthearted moments sprinkled throughout.
Showing 301–320 of 1,400 · page 16 of 70
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