Conor Moules

I think all the good startups can be described as this.

I say it when I'm interviewing people, like, understand what you're walking into.

Like, this is a cult.

This feels like a cult.

This feels like a family meets a sports team and it's people that are all obsessed about the problem and looking after the people that we service at the end of the day, who are essentially all of our bosses, right?

I am the founder and CEO of a company called Bearspace.

We started Bearspace with the simple mission to build a true operating system for hair and beauty salons.

A system that once put into the company would allow the salon owner to almost run the company on autopilot with a system that was actually supporting the growth.

I think it's really interesting when people look at hair and beauty salons.

They're one of the only kind of verticals where the business owner, generally smaller businesses as well, right?

So the business owner is expected to work on the floor every day.

Like if you go into Bear Market Coffee today, you're not expecting Stephen and Ruth to make your coffee.

If you go into the hair salon, that salon owner is generally the MVP of the salon floor.

So we took the view that what was on the market at the minute, you either had a marketplace, which we believe is really corrosive to hair and beauty, or you had a management system that was almost like a system of record that was there to be used by the salon owner to run the business.

And what we've done is we've built the first two vertical operating system that's helping run the business on their behalf.

It's crazy, right?

A bit of a story.

Well, I left school at 16 to become a hairdresser.

So I left school and got an apprenticeship in Peter Mark.

Interesting, like, you go home and you tell your mam...