Like so many women, becoming a mum prompted Renee Vallender to rethink her career and the kind of life she wanted to build with more balance, purpose and flexibility.
“Having a child changes your perspective”, Renee says simply. “You start thinking about how you want to structure your days, what you want to prioritise and how your career fits into the bigger picture. I was interested in having more control over that, rather than simply returning to the same routine.”
“I’d spent years working in banking and finance, but becoming a mum made me think more about how I wanted to spend my time and what I wanted my life to look like. I was drawn to the idea of building something of my own that could give me more flexibility as a mum.”
And so, she did exactly that.
During maternity leave, many of us watch crappy reality TV and try to catch up on elusive sleep. Renee opted for a different route, spending ten months studying to be a hairdresser before launching The Straightening Salon, to help busy women achieve ‘good hair days’ permanently.
Over the last few years, the business has grown and cemented itself in three locations- Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sydney, with 10,000 women coming in for the niche treatment.
Renee has also expanded into haircare with her brand, EVEKO, a specially formulated shampoo and conditioner range.
Of course, from lived experience often stem the best ideas, and unruly hair was a challenge Renee understood personally.
“My hair was something I’d struggled with for years, and I’d become a huge advocate for treatments that made it easier to manage”, she says.
As a busy mum myself, I was recently invited to the Straightening Salon to experience its treatment and was surprised how much of a gamechanger it already is.
Not having to contend with frizzy hair every morning is one less thing to think about in an already hectic day, and it gave me a new appreciation for the problem Renee set out to solve.
The salon itself is an amazingly tranquil place to sit, breathe, sip a coffee and catch up on emails.
The road to flexibility
Entrepreneurship is often presented as a straightforward route to flexibility for working parents, but the early years of building a business can bring their own demands. For Renee, greater control over her working life was a motivation, not an immediate outcome.
“I think there’s a tendency to romanticise the idea of starting a business during maternity leave, but the reality is that building something from scratch takes a lot of work, and doing that while becoming a mum is a whole other set of challenges.
“It’s not as simple as deciding to work for yourself and suddenly having all this flexibility. In the beginning, you’re often the person doing everything, and the business needs a huge amount of your time and energy.
“But there’s something valuable about being able to build a business around the life you want, rather than having your entire life dictated by a job. Over time, as the business grows and you build a team, you can create more options around how you work and structure your time.”
That shift overtime has reshaped Renee’s role as a founder.
Involved in almost every part of the business in those early days, her focus now is on developing her team and overseeing operations.
“One of the biggest surprises has been how much the role changes as the business grows. In the beginning, I was very hands-on and involved in almost everything. I was learning the techniques, working with clients and doing whatever needed to be done to get the business off the ground.
“As we’ve grown, my role has shifted from doing the work myself to building a team, mentoring our specialists and creating the right foundations for the business to continue growing.”
As founders, it’s easy to lapse into micromanagement, but Renee stresses that you have to be able to “let go of some control, otherwise the business can only grow so far as your own capacity”.
Renee is unwavering in her commitment to clients, heeding their advice and taking on feedback. Her haircare brand, EVEKO, emerged from the questions clients were asking and the needs her team was seeing every day.
“I think that’s an important part of growing a business: paying attention to what your customers are telling you and being open to where that might lead. Sometimes the next opportunity comes from something you’re already doing, rather than having to come up with an entirely new idea”, she says.
For Renee, the driver has always been seeing that her ideas had potential beyond herself.
“There was no guarantee that the idea [for the salons] would work. I had to make a significant career change, learn an entirely new industry and figure things out as I went along. What made the difference was seeing that the idea had potential beyond me: we were helping more women, building a reputation and creating demand.
“Looking back, it’s incredible to think how much has come from that initial idea. It was more a series of opportunities, decisions and lessons that kept building on one another.”
For women considering starting a business, Renee’s advice is to focus on making a start rather than waiting until every detail has been worked out.
“You don’t need to make every decision at once. Start learning, talk to people who understand the industry and work out what a first step could look like. You can make progress without having every detail mapped out.”