Komal Noordin never expected entrepreneurship to lead her back to herself. After spending time at home with her young children, she realized she wanted something that challenged and fulfilled her beyond motherhood. Through business ownership, she found a renewed sense of purpose and built Blo Germantown into a thriving part of the Memphis community.
In this episode of Built to Shine, Komal shares how her background in behavioral therapy shaped her leadership style, from coaching employees with empathy to creating a culture rooted in accountability, communication, and growth. She opens up about balancing motherhood with entrepreneurship, navigating employee turnover, and learning that successful leadership is less about having all the answers and more about staying open to learning.
You can also read a synopsis here:
Komal Noordin had never managed employees before she opened Blo Germantown outside Memphis. Her background was in behavior therapy, working with children with special needs — a world of consultation notes and clinical frameworks, not staff schedules and payroll. In her first year of ownership, she went through roughly 30 W-2s for six styling chairs. Today, several of her stylists have stayed with her for more than a year, and she credits the turnaround to something unexpected: applying the same behavioral principles she used in clinical practice to her own team.
Her approach offers a genuinely different lens on a problem every small business owner in a client-facing industry faces — how to build a team that shows up, grows, and stays.
From Behavior Therapist to Bar Owner
Noordin stayed home with her children for several years before deciding she wanted something more to be passionate about. She discovered Blo around that time, and describes the business, only half-jokingly, as having helped her find herself again. Her husband, already familiar with franchising through his own business, pointed her toward Blo specifically because of the level of operational support built into the model — a meaningful factor for someone with no prior business ownership experience.
What she didn’t anticipate was how much of the job would come down to managing people. The technical side of running a bar, she picked up quickly. Employee management — setting expectations, holding people accountable, keeping turnover down — took real trial and error before she found an approach that worked.
Turning to the ABCs: A Framework for Employee Behavior
The shift came when Noordin put her behavior therapist hat back on. In clinical practice, she used an ABC framework — antecedent, behavior, consequence — to understand and shape behavior. She started applying the same structure to her team. When a stylist was late, instead of only addressing the lateness itself, she’d ask what caused it. Sometimes the answer was as simple as trouble finding parking, solved by leaving home ten minutes earlier.
The consequence side mattered just as much. She makes a point of acknowledging the behavior she wants to see, not just correcting what she doesn’t — telling a stylist the next day how glad she is they arrived on time, or catching a new hire walking a client to the product shelf and praising it on the spot. Addressing issues immediately and reinforcing improvement immediately turned out to matter more than the size of any single conversation.
Trading Dollar Goals for Behavior Goals
The same thinking reshaped how Noordin approaches retail sales. Setting a flat dollar goal — sell $200 in product — produced steady incentives but inconsistent results. So she and her team shifted the target from an outcome to a behavior: walk every client to the product shelf, or mention one favorite add-on to every guest that day. The dollar figure never disappeared, but it stopped being what stylists were asked to track.
The change lowered the bar to something achievable and specific, which built confidence for stylists who found selling intimidating. Product sales and add-ons increased as a byproduct of consistently doing the behavior, rather than as the direct target of anxiety-inducing pressure — a distinction that maps closely to how behavioral shaping works in clinical settings, just applied to a blow dry bar instead of a therapy session.
Building a Hiring Process That Filters for Fit
Noordin’s hiring process went through its own redesign. What started as a single in-person interview followed by an offer letter became a four-step process: a phone screen to confirm licensing and availability, an in-person interview to learn about the candidate’s background and passions, a paid tryout where the candidate performs a full blowout while being coached in real time, and finally a model day where they’re evaluated against a full service checklist.
The tryout step in particular reveals something a resume can’t: how a candidate responds to feedback in the moment. Someone who resists correction during a supervised tryout, Noordin has found, tends not to be coachable once they’re hired. The extra steps take longer up front, but they’ve meaningfully reduced the early turnover that plagued her first year.
Three Takeaways from This Episode
- Address the cause, not just the behavior. Before correcting an employee, ask what led to the issue. A quick, judgment-free conversation about the root cause often solves the problem faster than a warning does.
- Set goals around behaviors you can coach, not just numbers you want. A specific, low-pressure action — like mentioning one product to every guest — builds confidence and skill in a way a dollar target alone doesn’t.
- Test for coachability before you hire, not after. A working tryout with real-time feedback shows you how a candidate handles correction — one of the clearest predictors of whether they’ll succeed on your team.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This article only covers part of what Komal Noordin shared. Listen to the full episode of the Built to Shine podcast to hear more about how she personalizes incentives for her team, sets boundaries between friendliness and management, and has turned her bar into a hub for community involvement in Memphis.