Our Experts
Greg Milner, President & CEO, Worldwide Salon Marketing
Chris Sanders, Director, Worldwide Salon Marketing (New Zealand)
Catherine Hanson, Director, Worldwide Salon Marketing (Canada)
Deb Pilgrim, business advisor and founder www.debprilgrim.com
David Velasco, hair color expert and trainer
Julie Piantadosi, millionaire salon owner, trainer & speaker
After a 23-year career in print and broadcast journalism, documentary-making and as a magazine feature writer, Greg Milner left the mainstream media world in the mid-1990s to enter the business and marketing world. In 2004 he founded Worldwide Salon Marketing in a spare room in his house, after seeing an urgent need for ‘direct’ marketing for salons & spas that avoided expensive ‘brand’ style advertising.
The company grew rapidly, attracting salons & spas from all over the world. In 2009 the company was named a finalist in Business Review Weekly magazine’s ‘Fast 100′ list of small to medium companies.
Greg continues to write and advise on marketing for salons & spas, as well as occasional consulting projects for businesses outside the salon & spa industry.
Chris Sanders and his wife Rachael D’Aguiar are owners of a successful Auckland salon, as well as coaches and mentors for Worldwide Salon Marketing’s many member salons in New Zealand.
As a direct result of her coaching work with salons, Chris and Rachael developed their own specialist coaching system, the Elite Salon Staff Coaching Toolkit.
Chris and Rachael have a baby daughter, Emerson. They continue to run their very successful salon D’Aguiar Hair Skin Body, as well as coaching and mentoring salons the length and breadth of New Zealand.
Catherine Hanson owns and runs a multi-million dollar salon & spa, City Looks in Winnipeg, Canada, while living full-time with husband Rick at their home in Victoria, British Columbia.
Catherine’s success in the salon business attracted the attention of some of the industry’s heavyweights in the USA, and she was recruited as a Business Coach for salons throughout North America. It was one of her coaching clients, the owner of small salon in Vancouver BC, who introduced her to WSM and the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit.
Catherine immediately not only enrolled in the WSM Inner Circle program to get her hands on the Toolkit, she and Rick bought the Canadian rights to the entire system to ensure as many Canadian and US salons as possible could achieve the results her salon achieved since joining the program.
With nearly two decades of business building experience, Deb Pilgrim has worked with senior business leaders and entrepreneurs all over the world. Due to the results Deb achieves with women entrepreneurs, she has now specifically redesigned her business to support woman in small business.
Deb is the trust authority to women in business, and it is through the work that they do together that these women are able to take their business from ordinary to extraordinary.
She does this by taking her clients through a step-by-step process that is specific to their individual goals. This systematic process teaches them how they can consistently grow their business, whilst creating the lifestyle they want. This all starts with knowing that: your clients are your business!
Prior to founding DebPilgrim.com, Deb worked with executives at some of Australia’s largest corporations. In these roles she provided coaching, training and development to senior managers through important leadership and business development challenges across a range of industries.
Deb was a lecturer in the Faculty of Business at the University of Technology, Sydney and prior to this was a serving member of the Royal Australian Air Force.
She is a highly sought-after business mentor, public speaker and consultant. She is regularly featured in Dynamic Business Magazine, NZ Small Business Magazine and on NineMSN. She has also been awarded a Masters of Coaching Psychology and Human Resource Management from The University of Sydney.
Julie Piantadosi is known as the ‘Tabitha’ of Australia – an outstanding coach, sales trainer, speaker and owner of a multi-million-dollar chain of hair of beauty salons stretching from South Australia to New South Wales and across the Pacific to the USA.
She is regularly in demand as a speaker at international beauty and hair conferences. Famously, Julie left school at 13 to become an apprentice hair stylist, owning her own salon by the time she was 17. By 19 – completely oblivious to the nuts-and-bolts requirements for running a successful business, she was bankrupt.
It was such a shock to the system that she stayed away from the industry for several years. But the passion was still there. Older and much, much wiser, Julie started a new salon in her home town of Adelaide. It grew and grew. Soon there were more salons, and with the support of her husband, she found herself not only the mother of three pre-school children but in control of more than 500 staff across Australia and the USA.
All that knowledge had to go somewhere. Today, Julie is a passionate, non-nonsense speaker and trainer, and in conjunction with Worldwide Salon Produced the definitive ‘how-to’ salon & spa Policies and Procedures system – Total Salon Solutions.
This system is now available at www.totalsalonsolution.com
David Velasco is one of the world’s foremost hair coloring experts – and a Member of the WSM Inner Circle program. “Most Cosmetology schools and apprenticeship programs that hairdressers are required to take during their training are very inadequate in teaching haircolor,” says David.
Based at his award-winning salon in Doylestown, PA, David travels North America teaching ‘How Hair Color Really Works’.
David says he doesn’t teach the latest haircolor trends of techniques, ‘because they’re in one day and out the next’. He says “Because of my background of working with two of the largest haircolor manufactures in the world and actually doing it every day behind the chair for nearly 40 years, I was able to write a program that teaches haircolor theories and strategies at a very deep level but in a very simplistic way.”
