This Tattoo Artist Was Frustrated With His Industry's Business Model, So He Started a Studio That Does Things Differently It's not easy for mom-and-pops to take risks, because they rarely have a safety net to fail. But there are ways to innovate cautiously. Just ask the founder of All My Heart, a tattoo studio on this year's list of America's Favorite Mom & Pop Shops.
This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Imagine what a tattoo shop looks like. All My Heart does not look like that.
The Charlotte, North Carolina, studio is airy and suffused with natural light. In the reception area, there are modular chairs, midcentury couches, and a vase of fresh flowers on a Japanese-influenced cabinet. But the real surprise goes beyond aesthetics. All My Heart's owner, Graham Beech, isn't just playing with a new look; he's trying out a whole new business model.
"Historically, tattoo shops have wanted to control the clientele, and use the tattoo artist as kind of a cog in the wheel," Beech says. "What's different about our business is that the client is the artist, and they have their own individual clients."
Like many entrepreneurs, Beech was his own ideal customer: He was a tattoo artist working for a shop, wishing for a way to grow his earnings. But when he struck out on his own, he didn't just copy-paste the same old system; he wanted to create something more equitable for artists that provided more room for growth. And within two years of All My Heart opening, readers of The Charlotte Observer had voted it the best tattoo studio in the city.
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But as Beech will tell you, thinking differently comes at a cost. Innovation requires risk, and risk requires resources to try and fail. For most mom-and-pops, resources are finite. If people have been doing something the same way for a long time — whether that's running a restaurant, opening a gym, or setting up a tattoo shop — there's often a reason for that, and few incentives to push boundaries.
And yet, every now and then, the factors influencing an industry change, and someone sees a new path forward. It's thrilling, but also scary when the stakes are so personal. As Beech's story shows, innovating as a small business can be like feeling your way forward in the dark: You have to move slowly, know when to stop and get your bearings, and know when it's safe to take another step.
Beech didn't start out wanting to be an entrepreneur, much less an innovator. He just wanted to make a living doing what he loves. And he really loves it. "Tattooing is a unique medium," he says, "because I need another consenting adult to practice my art form. If I were a musician or a painter, I could just buy the equipment. The fact that people seek me out and allow me to tattoo their body, then carry my work throughout the world — I think that's a really special thing."
But in 2021, a long-simmering frustration reached a boiling point. Beech had worked really, really hard for a decade. He had nearly 40,000 followers on Instagram, a two-year waitlist, and a $250 hourly rate. But as he looked into the future at his career prospects, he says, "there was no light at the end of the tunnel." Based on the traditional tattoo shop business model, his income had hit a ceiling. He could set his hourly rate, but the shop got a 40% to 50% cut. This might have made more sense when shops were the primary way that clients were connected with artists. "But most clients are finding their artists now by doing research online," Beech says. "Social media gives individual artists a lot more power. Artists aren't completely dependent on somebody looking up a brick-and-mortar business or happening to walk by."
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Clients were often finding Beech's work on Instagram, calling the shop to book him, and being told he had a yearslong waitlist. Then they were offered another artist at the shop, and told that artist could work in Beech's style — "a contemporary take on traditional Japanese and Americana" — under his guidance. Beech loved mentoring artists, but wasn't getting anything extra from his employer, who always told him: Just raise your rate. This would, conveniently, make more money for the shop as well. But the returns were diminishing for Beech: There were only so many hours in the day. "I don't like using buzzwords, but I feel like artists are gaslighted by shop owners," he says. "It's like, No, I know that I'm part of this brand."
The decisive moment came when Graham's wife, Sarah Beech, was pregnant with their second child, and Sarah's mother — the anchor of their family — received a terminal cancer diagnosis. For Graham, the tragedy was existential. "I think he was just like, Life's short and we should take the risk," Sarah says. "It all happened at once. We signed the lease, and I went into labor the next day. My mom saw the studio at the opening party, and then she passed away a few days later. I'm so grateful she was able to celebrate it."
When Graham decided to leave his job, opening his own studio wasn't the only option. It would have been easier to rent one of the many "salon suites" that have been disrupting the beauty industry — essentially office buildings with hallways of tiny rooms that are rented out to individual stylists, who operate their own small businesses from those spaces. But this means you're working alone. Graham loved the community of a studio, and learning new things from other artists.
So he decided to start a business that offered the best of both worlds. His studio allows artists to choose their pay structure: They can either do a traditional percentage split with the studio, or pay a "booth rent," where they make set monthly payments to the studio and keep all the proceeds from their hourly rate — similar to a salon suite. Up-and-coming artists might prefer the traditional percentage split, since they don't have an established roster of clients and rely on more walk-ins. But more established artists can control how much they're making and charging, while the studio handles their tasks like scheduling, along with supplies and assistants who flip their stations.
"Is this business model innovative? Yes," says Caroline Daniels, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, when she hears about Beech's strategy. "It is innovative. But the challenge in any new venture is: What do we actually do? What's the other person's responsibility? How do we grow? And also: How much do we really want to grow?"
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These are questions that Graham and Sarah — who does much of the administrative work, on top of her full-time job as executive director at a consumer insights company — have been grappling with in their first few years in business. "At first, it was just Graham and one other artist," Sarah says. "We knew we could keep the lights on as long as Graham worked around the clock, basically. But we needed to iron out the front-of-house before we started adding people."
As exhausting as it is, Daniels says this phase of starting a business cannot be skipped. "When you make the transition from stylist to entrepreneur, one of the essential things you need to do is understand the scope of your managerial capabilities," she says. "You can't hire somebody and hand it off in the beginning. You have to know those processes in and out before you teach someone else to do it."
As Sarah and Graham wrapped their heads around operations, they gradually started bringing on booth rent artists. Graham was picky, having worked in enough tattoo shops to know that the mix of personalities can make or break the vibe. "I wanted a bright, positive, harmonious feel in the space," he says. "Not only does the artist need to be incredibly talented, but they also need to have a wonderful bedside manner and get along well with the other artists." He adds, "It can be a bit much for people who are historically kind of nonconformist."
Building the right team has outsize importance when you're breaking norms in an industry. You can change the business model, but if the people you hire aren't interested in evolving, that's an issue. One way Graham has dealt with this is by hiring artists who might not fit in at other tattoo shops. "You would think that an industry made up of misfits would be a little more inclusive, but historically, that hasn't been the case," he says. "I've worked in tattoo shops where the owners have strong feelings about the age and gender and cultural background of the people working there. So we're eager to have a diverse group of people — and I'm proud to say we really do."
Daniels says that for new small businesses, having a vision for the culture you want—and building slowly enough that you can maintain it — is crucial. "Culture is invisible, but it's the single most important thing in innovation." Daniels recalls how, when a business school professor told her this years ago, she'd been dubious. "I thought, Oh, that's just HR. But he was right. The way you innovate with your culture, given resource dynamics and all that other stuff, is the real innovation. But that also means knowing all of your constraints."
For All My Heart, the single biggest constraint has been finding a capable, long-term front-of-house manager. "Our artists are wonderful, we don't have turnover there," Sarah says. "But when it comes to front of house, we have really struggled. We are looking for this unicorn who can take some of the workload off Graham and I."
They've had turnover in this role every eight months, so the cost and time of training someone new is significant. They've also realized they need more of a professional manager than a traditional receptionist. In addition to scheduling, they want someone who can tackle administrative tasks like taxes and QuickBooks — and, ideally, managing new revenue streams. "To entice qualified candidates," Graham says, "we want to offer benefits like health insurance and 401(k) options, which is very atypical for the tattoo industry."
Of course, benefits are expensive, and the studio needs to grow in order to afford it — but they also need help in order to grow. They now have six full-time artists and two part-time artists, and want to bring on more, but don't have the bandwidth on their own. There are other revenue opportunities, too — if only they had somone to manage them. Piercing, for example, would be a great add-on to the studio's offerings. They were offering monthly drawing sessions with live models for a while, but paused those because organizing was too much. They've also been approached by local breweries looking to collaborate, and reality shows wanting to film in their space. Plus, there are plenty of partnerships to be had with national brands like Harley-Davidson, Red Bull, and Mountain Dew.
"It's a bit of a conundrum," Graham says. "We want to bring in additional revenue, but we need somebody to alleviate some of the current pressures so we can get there."
So for now, they're standing still.
But according to Daniels, this is exactly what they should be doing right now. "You have to master one idea before going on to the next," she says. "The time to grow is when you've done one thing well, and you've got everything under control. Then you take another step."
And anyway, what's the point of building something if you never take time to admire your handiwork? In the midst of raising two small children and grieving Sarah's mother, the Beeches built a business with a 4.9-star rating on Google and over 100 glowing reviews. Most importantly, they built the place where Graham wants to work.
"That internal drive of never being satisfied is a double-edged sword," Graham says. "It's an incredible tool for an entrepreneur because you'll continue to grow. But if you can't notice the achievements and celebrate the little things, it sucks the fun out of it."
Even so, Graham keeps a toe in the water. He's been feeling around for their next step — pondering pay structures that might incentivize a manager to take initiative and seek out opportunities for the studio.
Ultimately, his recruiting and business strategies are one and the same: create a place where people feel welcome. "I want this to be a space where people don't get treated poorly for not being the right type of misfit," he says. "We're trying to be the change we want to see in the industry. And we don't want to completely divorce ourselves from traditional tattoo culture — we love that culture. But we're trying to look forward."
