The speaker (Matan Hazanov) recounts founding his first company as a teenager in Israel — buying barbershop equipment at 17, transforming it into a mobile and multi-location barbershop service that served small villages, and selling the business at 19. He describes rapid demand (starting from a town of ~7,000), scaling to dozens of locations (13 permanent, 18 part-time), a buyer approaching as a customer, and an initial negotiation where a buyer offered a first deposit of 180,000 and the seller had previously quoted ~25–30,000 (per location implied).
Questions this video answers
Started at 17; sold at 19.
About 7,000 people.
13 permanent locations and 18 part-time locations.
Around 25,000–30,000 (currency not specified).
180,000 (currency not specified).
Chapters
My parents, naturally, as with most immigrants, struggled considerably. Had motivated interest to start making money early, partly to help them. Started my first company that had any real equity value at 17 and then sold it at 19. So what was that first business? So I was in Israel at the time. In Israel, there's a couple times during the year where Jews cease from cutting their hair for extended periods of time, and it's just one of those. Was coming to a culmination that Sunday, and I saw a barbershop chair and a barbershop equipment on sale. And I lived in this little community of about 7,000 people. And it just hit me like a brick that two days from now, 7,000 people were going to need haircuts, and there was no barber anywhere nearby. And so they were going to have to go to one of the big cities. I said, well, there's got to be at least 20 schmucks there. They just do not care about how bad their haircut is. It's cheap and cheerful, but just somebody will do it for them. And if I could pay down the cost of this barbershop chair and this equipment, then all of a sudden, I end up where I started. Now I have an asset to my name. Anyway, it was kind of a funny story. We ended up advertising it as the worst haircut that you will get. We ended up putting ads up. Scissors were being stuck in the hair, wacky mohawks, ears being cut off, all kinds of weird things. Who knows what happened. Anyway, there's like a lineup out the door on Sunday morning, and that lineup did not stop for days, and it just continued. And all of a sudden, after a while, it was still busy, but. And people would start to come from other little villages across Israel. And it sort of dawned on me that there was all these little communities that were demographically too small to have a permanent barber shop. And so there was an opportunity to kind of come in and soak up some of that demand. And, you know, over time. So I started to put myself and other barbers on trucks and go drive across Israel, soaking up the demand. And over time, we had dozens of barbershop across the country. You know, the person that came in to buy the business actually walked in. He was one of our customers, and he said, I'd like to buy your business. So he says, what do you want for it? I start thinking about the cost of the leases, the equipment, the space, the rentals. I'm like, well, what if I just broke even? Could I just get all that back? You know? So I gave him a number. 25, 30,000, something like that. No, no. And then he says to me, oh, that's it. And I was like, it just dawned on me that I made a colossal mistake. And I'm like, oh. I mean, per location, of course. And he's like, how many locations do you have? I'm like, Well, I have 13 permanent locations. We have 18 part time locations. And da, da, da. And he's like, oh, oh, geez. And he's like, oh, okay, okay. And then he walked away. I'm thinking to myself, like, you greedy little bastard, you should have just taken. I was gonna shut down the thing. Anyway, a week later he showed up. It was like a scene out of a movie with like duffel bags of cash. And he's like, I have 180,000 as a first deposit. Will you take it in installments? My gosh. And I'm sitting here, I'm like, okay, don't say the wrong thing. Don't say the dumb thing. So I start to negotiate with him, and I said, that will be okay, but on one condition. That I get every penny of our earnings until the day I leave, and then I'll accept your payment plan. It was pretty wild.
