LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Stephanie Ryder officially opened her business, Squad Beauty Professionals on March 7th. The business is a one-stop-shop for beauty services including facials, waxing, lashes and photos. Then on March 17, Gov. Sisolak ordered the shutdown order of all non-essential businesses.
"I just felt that this can't be a bad thing, everything's going so great," Ryder said about the shutdown. "This has to be something good for me. I'm going to make this something good for me."
Ryder spent the majority of the next two months at home creating content and developing systems to ensure when she reopened, everything would run smoothly.
"A lot of the times when you're working in your business, you don't always have the time to work on your business," she said.
Ryder has actually been working on Squad for the past two years, starting it after she spent 13 years serving our country in the Air Force. What started as a kind of pop-up beauty business - where Ryder and her team made house calls - evolved into Ryder renting space in another salon. With her client list built up, she decided it was time to expand.
"I want to not just own my job, I want to own a business," she said. "I want to build a business that still runs when I'm not around so I was like, I'm going to do it!"
In her own space, reopened, Ryder's mission is to not only provide professional working women a balance between their professional and personal lives and free them from any beauty insecurities, but also grow professionals like her. She said many people have talent and skills when it comes to providing services but need to be empowered on the business side.
"I just found that my favorite thing is not just building my successes but ultimately sharing them with other people. I was like, you know guys, we have a space for us we can do this, we can do that, and it's just nice to see everyone else's businesses growing as well," she said.
And the best part is? Ryder said since reopening, the clients have been coming back - catching up on what they couldn't do during the shutdown.
"People I guess appreciate what they couldn't get during COVID and so everybody is like running back. It's amazing."
