Leading Ladies: Beauty salon adds to Strafford’s street of women-owned businesses

With a decade of experience in the hairdressing industry, Beth Edwards chose her hometown of Strafford as the place in July to launch Beauty Bar Hair Salon LLC.

It’s not the first ownership venture for Edwards, who ran Allure Salon LLC for eight years in Springfield. However, she sold Allure last year for an undisclosed price to Cory Drake and Chrissy George – a decision she made to downsize her business amid the coronavirus pandemic and be closer to family in Strafford, where she’s lived the past 15 years.

“I started falling in love with this town whenever my kids got more involved in the community,” said Edwards, a mother of three. “That’s where my heart was telling me to be. The shutdown gave everybody the opportunity to reevaluate which direction you’re being pulled in life and what’s important to you.”

Beauty Bar Hair Salon at 105 E. Pine St., Ste. B, is the newest female-owned business on the central stretch of retail for the town of roughly 2,100 residents. But it’s hardly the only establishment on the street run by a woman.

Beauty Bar’s next-door neighbor is a Shelter Insurance office, owned by Terri Frerking. She took over the business last year from Jay Anderson after he was promoted to district manager.

Directly across the street, Beauty Bar faces a trio of buildings all owned by women. Michele Eden has owned 100 E. Pine St.’s Common Grounds Coffee & Cafe LLC since 2014. She added retail shop Pine & Picks LLC to her portfolio last year in an adjacent building at 106 E. Pine St. Next to that, at 112 E. Pine St., is Wandering Wild Boutique, a shop started four years ago as an e-commerce business by Amanda Alexander. She rents out space in the building to home decor and furniture store Thee Quaint Market, as well as photography business Lasting Memories by Karen – both of which also are women-owned.

Eden said retail was largely absent from Pine Street when she started Common Grounds in 2014. She estimated spending $135,000 in startup costs, which included purchasing the former Strafford Farm and Feed store building and renovating it for a year, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. Another $235,000 was invested to open Pine & Picks in July 2020, she said. Prior to opening, the shop’s building underwent extensive renovations after an August 2018 fire heavily damaged the then-vacant structure.

“Our buildings are old,” Eden said, noting the Common Grounds structure was built in 1906, while the one occupied by Alexander is 118 years old. “But they’re cool.”

The businesswomen say they didn’t set out to work in such close proximity to one another. It happened organically as opportunities arose in the small town, which straddles Greene and Webster counties.

Within a month of launching Wandering Wild, which sells women’s clothing and accessories, Alexander said she was out of room at her home.

“I paid out of pocket and just started with $1,000 of inventory and worked off of profit,” she said. “My office had gotten taken over and my husband was like, ‘You’ve got to do something about this.’”

Alexander then rented a tiny 275-square-foot space on Pine Street for a year. During that time, she purchased her current building, a 5,000-square-foot structure that needed extensive repairs before it could be occupied. She estimates investing around $20,000 to rehab it, noting her father, Billy Joe McNeil, did all the work himself. Wandering Wild fills one of the building’s four units.

On the other side of the street, Frerking, who was born and raised in Strafford, took over the insurance office in March 2020. She was able to keep it open as an essential business during the early part of the pandemic when widespread shutdowns were taking place.

Frerking said she’s licensed to sell insurance in Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas, and wants to add more border states. It’s part of Frerking’s five-year plan that has helped her build a $1.6 million book of business.

“You can’t climb Mount Everest in a year. Even Mount Everest has stopping points that you need to check into, and that’s where I’m at,” she said, noting she doubled the book of business started by her predecessor within 12 months. “Right now, I’m above where I was wanting to be.”

Sense of pride
Edwards, Alexander, Frerking and Eden say they registered their ventures as women-owned businesses with the state but did so as a matter of pride rather than a necessity for gaining business. Edwards didn’t register Allure Salon when she owned it, but quickly decided to do so with her Strafford business.

“It was important to me when I was opening Beauty Bar that this was registered as a minority-owned business,” she said, noting she is registered through the Missouri Office of Equal Opportunity. “It’s basically for bragging rights. I’m really proud of it.”

Frerking said registering the business made her feel empowered.

“With Shelter, there’s a lot of men in the role of insurance agents. There’s very few women,” she said, noting the Columbia-based company’s president and CEO role is now filled by a female, Randa Rawlins. “I did have to climb my way up there to get where I’m at.”

According to the latest State of Women-Owned Businesses Report, commissioned by American Express in 2019, roughly 13 million U.S. business ventures are owned by women. That was an increase of 21% since 2014, while all other businesses increased just 9%. The women-owned businesses generate over $1.9 trillion in revenues and employ around 9.4 million people, according to the report.

Making changes
Both Eden and Alexander have business changes on the horizon.

Eden said by November, Pine & Picks will transition to an event venue, Pine & Picks Place Downtown. At Common Grounds, she’s offered room for events, including baby and bridal showers. But demand is high as space has been booked every Saturday since June, she said.

“I had to turn people away,” she said. “I thought, ‘Why not have a place for them?’”

Eden is in the process of clearing out Pine & Picks’ inventory and expects she’ll only need to invest around $8,000 in furniture to prepare the venue. Capacity will be around 130, she estimated.

Meanwhile, Alexander plans to exit her shop to pursue other interests.

“I’m in the process of selling the business to focus on real estate full time,” Alexander said, adding she’s an agent with Old World Realty.

“Hopefully, it’ll be transferred over at the start of the year,” she said, declining to name the future owner.

Edwards said there’s a real camaraderie among the quartet of female owners, adding she’s known some of them for years. The foursome even recently participated in a charity golf tournament in Springfield, registering their team as The Ladies of Pine Street.

“I’m just so blessed in Strafford. The women here on Pine Street, they want you to be successful and are encouraging,” she said. “I admire all of these ladies so much.”