Sean Casey may have started his barber career almost by chance, but every move he’s made since then has been carefully thought out. That includes reacting to one particular blindside that threw him for life’s biggest loop.
Casey — the award-winning owner of the Florida barbershop franchise TwinCutZ, Andis Global educator, platform artist, brand founder, and author — seems to have the golden touch in everything he attempts. That includes recently opening his new barber school, Barber Academy by Sean Casey.
But looks can be deceiving. Casey sat down recently with American Salon to talk about his long and winding road through career success, while rolling with some brutal left hooks along the way.
AS: You’ve been in the business about 25 years. Was entrepreneurship on your mind back when you were in barber school trying to get licensed?
SC: I didn’t even think seriously about becoming a barber until I suddenly had to figure out fast what I was going to do with my life.
My son was born when I was in high school, and let's just say there were no colleges really after me at that time.
I was scared and lost. I had this crazy responsibility. My father asked me, what are you doing with your life? What do you want to do?
I really had no idea. But, through high school I’d had a little wannabe beard and I didn't want to pay the barber, so I got a little trimmer and I'd use it to do my little thin beard. And then I started doing some line-ups on my friends. And I did enjoy the atmosphere of the barbershop.
So I said to my dad: maybe barbering? I just threw it out in the air. And he said, well, you’ll need to go to school for that.
I went to barber school in New York City and I just fell in love with all of it. I loved the art of it. I connected with the other students. I developed this strong passion that I definitely didn’t expect.
AS: How did you go from being a guy working behind the chair to that first business venture?
SC: I lived and worked in New York for a while but my son was living in Florida, so I was going back and forth.
I was a kid myself. I'm maturing, he's maturing, and I felt the need to be closer. I decided to move to Ft. Myers, Florida in 2006. When I did, I knew my career path was going to be very different than in New York.
There, I would work freelance. In the shop and I also had the opportunity to work for movie productions and things like that. That doesn’t exist in Ft. Myers.
So I gave myself a 5-year plan to open up a barbershop. It was pretty successful out of the gate, and I give a lot of credit to the experience I had in New York.
In New York, I had a couple of clients who owned a record company and a touring company, and I interned with them. I really had a passion for music and entertainment. I would be the kid holding the camcorders, picking up bags, standing on 42nd Street handing out flyers. And I’m thinking, this is fun, it’s a hobby, but it's not gonna take me where I need to go.
So I didn't hold onto that that for long. But when I moved to Florida, all those small things that I was doing in New York had been little seeds developing me to understand how to market and build relationships.
I got out there marketing my barber shop the same way a record company would market an artist. That’s how I was able to create a strong brand name for myself.
I was doing an open mic night in Ft. Myers. Then I started doing Saturday nights and bringing in my clientele. I was doubling, tripling the capacity of the events with my clients. Then when I opened up my shop and had my brand name TwinCutZ in those nightlife promotions. It took off and that name started to become a household name here in Southwest Florida.
I wouldn't say starting a business is easy, but I think I set myself up with good preparation. Networking and building a relationship with the right people, and creating a strong brand, helped me get a bit of a fast-forward jump towards having a successful barbershop.
AS: What’s the most valuable thing you had to learn as a business owner in order to get to or maintain that level of success?
SC: Like any new business owner, you make a few desperation hires because you want to pay these bills. You realize you brought some people in not looking at the long-term, but just trying to settle for right now. That can create certain cancers within the business, and that could start creating the downfall.
So I learned from that very quickly. I stuck to my guns, made those adjustments when I needed to, and created a system that eventually I was able to copy and paste throughout my businesses.
This success helped me win the South Florida Small Business of the Year Award, eight years after I opened up, in 2018.
AS: What was the template that you set up for your businesses?
SC: One of the first things was adapting a uniform dress code. I like for all of us to wear black. I want to create a visual separation between the barber and the client.
Not like we're going to come in and all wear the same polo or whatever. You could be a rocker, urban, conservative, whoever you are, and still fit the dress code. But let's make the distinction between the barber and the client.
Another thing I was always strong about was communication and greeting people. In the first year of my barbershop, I made that important.
Everyone walked in was greeted and spoken to. Let them know how long they’re going to have to wait and all that. This is before the booking systems were popular. You create a sense of comfort and trust with the person you’re meeting.
I made sure everyone walked away with a great experience. Through my actions I was able to demonstrate those qualities to the other barbers, and like everything else, the ones who were really strong became my core team.
That’s how I was able to make the type of changes that allowed me to keep scaling up.
AS: Is there a relationship between the skills you need to be a good business owner and the skills you need to be a good educator?
SC: Definitely. I was teaching part-time at a local barber college, and that helped me really develop a leadership quality I was able to bring back to my barbershops.
Because being an entrepreneur and being a business owner, you need a lot of the same qualities. You speak to people under different circumstances, you identify with people's different learning patterns. You know not to expect everybody to do everything the same or move at the same speed.
You know there are people who have undiscovered talents, but you have to dig through the layers to get to what they're great at. And you know everyone has the potential to be the best version of themselves. That's what teaching is about, right? It’s probably my biggest passion in life.
AS: What do you love about it?
SC: I can educate anyone at every level, but at heart I am the educator for the beginning person.
To instill in them the basics. Before you even put the tool on someone’s head, there are 7 steps you need to follow. How you hold it. Body ergonomics. Mindset. Visioning the outcome before you begin.
When you see them grow, and they see their confidence get stronger because they are adapting and learning — that's what I love about it.
AS: What inspired you to write your book, The Barber’s Journey: From Student Shears to Shop Owner?
SC: Instead of writing a guidebook for students, I wrote this.
Us barbers, many of us do not like to read, right? So this is a short book. It's 7 chapters. It's a fictional book that uses elements of my own learning experience through the journey of the main character.
His name is fictional. The people in the book are fictional, but there are elements of people who have touched my life, who helped me to be a better version of myself.
This is available not just for barbers, but for anybody who wants to take a risk and start something new. There are elements that can help anyone. This is not a book of rules that say first you need to do this, then this, then this. This is a kid’s journey. Like today's my first day in school. I'm excited about that.
Then he finds a mentor and starts following his guidance and building trust. Doing a haircut for the first time and being nervous. Learning the importance of community and giving back, and how that's a big reflection of yourself.
Building a professional image and applying it for your first job. The experience at your first job. Building on what you learned there and taking on the responsibility of opening up your own business.
So it's just a short, step-by-step story about starting something new, being inspired, learning from that, and building something lifelong.
AS: You’ve also created your own line of razors and shears. How did that come to happen?
SC: Entrepreneur strategy. Someone told me you should always have something to sell. You give people the sizzle and then you can sell them the steak.
I can bring 50 of those with me to a class of 100 students. Let’s say 10 of them like what I’m doing and buy the razor. Now I've taken my class rate and make a little bit of extra money behind that because I'm selling a tool I believe in. I love these razors.
AS: Let’s go back to 2018, when you won the Small Business of the Year Award, you were a successful educator, appearing at trade shows, everything’s going great. And then — boom. You got the rug pulled out from under you.
SC: Oh, it was going good in 2018. I was traveling with Hattori Hanzo shears. I was doing shows with Andis Clippers. I had my online academy. My two barber shops were completely booked and I was fully booked myself. I was working part time at Paul Mitchell's school as well. My schedule was crazy, but money was better than ever.
I was at the gym one day and I touched my neck and I felt this knot.
I went to the doctor. I remember the look on her face, and how I thought wow, this is going to be serious. They did tests and blood work and a PET scan.
I had blood cancer all throughout my body. It was just at the stage of going into my brain. The lymph nodes started popping up and that’s when caught it.
Yeah, I got that news leaving the International Beauty Show in Las Vegas, heading home. I was walking onto the plane. We're boarding. The doctor calls me: Your results came back. And you have lymphoma throughout your whole body.
My first thought was death. My daughter was starting kindergarten. My son was in high school. I thought wow, I won’t live to see what they're going to do in life.
I feel bad for the person sitting next to me on the plane. I was fighting tears the whole time.
But I thought, what else do I have at this point? I'm not going to let my kids see me in a state of depression and sadness. I’m not dead today. I won’t be dead tomorrow. So don’t let them see me in a dead mind state.
I thought, there are people who would trade their best day for my worst day. Hey, I'm leaving a trade show in Vegas. I was given so many great opportunities. I thought of the phrase, be better, not bitter.
AS: Tell us about the months that followed.
SC: It was 10 months of chemo, very aggressive 8-hour sessions. And I worked through it. I traveled through it. I would get chemo on Wednesday for eight hours and I was in the shop on Thursday.
I didn't work as many hours, but I did do what my body could handle. I would get up and I would move. I educated myself heavily on nutrition so I could eat the right foods to stay strong.
When I got to the very last cycle, it put me into the ICU. I had an extremely low white blood cell count, a 0.04 count. When I got out of that ICU, I had to sit home for 6 weeks. They told me, you're not going to work. You're not allowed to do anything.
At that time, having to stay home like that was worse than being at the hospital.
But I took that time to revamp TwinCutZ. I was making calls and designing flyers and catching up on some missed opportunities that I didn’t have the time to do before.
And you know what? The barbers in my shops were fine. I didn’t go out of business. All the things I was afraid would happen without me, didn’t happen.
I realized that wow, you really can delegate this to other people, as long as you create a strong structure and stay on it.
You don’t have to kill yourself working so much. You can find that balance between home and work. And I think that was the healthiest choice that I made. Now I’m six years into remission.
AS: You even started a nonprofit from that. Tell us more about it and how that came about.
SC: Well, I didn’t have health insurance for the first time ever. When they raised the premium, I thought I’ll just pay out of pocket, and two months later I have to go get chemo.
It was like a $70K bill, and that’s with a lot of things I was able to get reduced because I had to.
People said I should do a GoFundMe. I didn’t want to do that. I thought, what if I make a shirt with a white ribbon? And people can color the ribbon to the cancer they’re fighting, and we sell it amongst our industry and our clients.
That was the start of my non-profit organization, FadeCancer. I was able to raise money through the shirts to help pay for my bills. And on top of that, I gave proceeds towards St. Jude's Children’s Hospital and Hairstylists for Hope, which is a local grassroots movement.
It’s important for me as an educator to teach young barbers that giving back to the community is a big part of this career. We did a campaign for a week with my barbers and some local barber students and we cut anyone fighting cancer for free.
We sold the shirts there, and all the proceeds from that went to a local cancer hospital here in Ft. Myers.
And now we sell shirts all year long and donate the profits to cancer organizations.
AS: And you really never stopped growing your brand all through this.
SC: Right. I just opened my school in September. I’m a full-time teacher with a great team overlooking my shops. I'm doing trainings at my school now where I'm inviting my barbers to take continuing education courses.
So my work hub now is at my school Monday through Friday, and I'm full on teaching there mixed with all the other content and creatives.
I'm in a good place in life. I'm learning. I'm building. I'm getting better.
But being in a good place as an entrepreneur doesn't mean I have it all solved. Every month is a new learning lesson and something new to take on.
I'm excited to be teaching at big events like the International Beauty Show. I love presenting on stage. I love speaking with people. I always love meeting back up with the barber community.
Sean Casey will be teaching "Textured Perfection: Crafting Movement in Men's Haircuts," "The Modern Gentleman: Sculpting the Perfect Fade," "Master the Classics: Precison Men's Haircutting with Clippers" and will be educating on the show floor as well at the International Beauty Show-New York from March 23-25, 2025. Register here.