Patrice ‘Sway’ McKinney Turns Salon Suites Into A Blueprint For Black Wealth

The Encore Salon Suites founder is helping beauty professionals move beyond the chair.

For generations, Black beauty professionals have helped power a multibillion-dollar industry, building loyal clientele, shaping trends, and influencing culture. Yet participation in the industry has not always translated into access to ownership opportunities that create lasting wealth.

Patrice “Sway” McKinney is working to change that equation.

As founder and CEO of Encore Salon Suites, McKinney has expanded her influence far beyond the barber chair, building a business ecosystem centered on franchising, commercial real estate, education, mentorship, and economic empowerment. Her mission is rooted in helping beauty professionals see themselves not only as service providers, but as business owners, franchise operators, landlords, investors, and wealth creators.

Her path to entrepreneurship was anything but conventional. McKinney moved to Atlanta to pursue barbering, earned her Master Barber-Stylist license, and eventually opened her first salon while navigating the financial and operational challenges many first-generation entrepreneurs face. What began as a career behind the chair ultimately evolved into a much larger vision.

Today, Encore Salon Suites has grown into a franchise and educational platform, where McKinney says her work has reached more than 80,000 aspiring entrepreneurs. Through that work, she is pushing a simple but potentially transformative message: Black beauty professionals should not only participate in the industry. They should own more of it.

BLACK ENTERPRISE spoke with McKinney about her transition from barber to business mogul, the economics of salon suites, franchising, building scalable systems, and her mission to create new pathways toward Black ownership and generational wealth.

What gave you the confidence to take that risk, and when did you realize you were building something much larger than a career behind the chair?

A lot of my confidence came from knowing I didn’t want to spend my life building somebody else’s dream. I left corporate America, went to barber school, moved to Atlanta, and bet on myself. I was scared, but I was willing to work through the fear.

The real shift came when I discovered the salon suite model. I realized I could create something much bigger than a career behind the chair. I could help other beauty professionals build their own businesses while creating an asset that didn’t depend on me doing every haircut. That’s when I knew I didn’t just want to be a barber. I wanted to be an owner.

Why do you believe the salon suite model can serve as a powerful wealth-building vehicle for Black entrepreneurs, and what should aspiring owners understand before entering the industry?

I call salon suites real estate in the beauty industry. You’re creating a commercial space where independent beauty professionals can run their businesses while you build an asset around them. For Black entrepreneurs, that can be powerful because ownership changes the conversation from, “How much can I make doing hair?” to, “How can I build something that creates long-term value?”

But salon suites are not easy money. You have to understand leasing, construction, permits, occupancy, marketing, and your break-even point before signing anything. I want people to enter ownership prepared, not just excited.

What mindset, financial, and operational shifts must happen for beauty professionals to move from earning income behind the chair to building an asset that can generate long-term wealth?

The biggest shift is understanding that income and wealth are not the same thing. Behind the chair, your income is tied directly to your time. Ownership requires you to ask, “How do I build something that can generate revenue without me personally performing every service?”

That means knowing your numbers, understanding your expenses, documenting your processes, and investing in systems, people, and technology. If the business only works when you’re there, you haven’t built something scalable. My goal became working smarter, not just working harder.

As the first Black woman to franchise a Black-owned salon suite brand. What barriers did you face while entering the franchise industry, and what did that milestone teach you about the difference between building a profitable business and building a scalable enterprise?

One of the biggest lessons was learning that a profitable business is not automatically a scalable business. Franchising forced me to take everything in my head and turn it into systems, processes, training, and documentation that someone else could actually follow.

I learned a lot through mistakes, from contractors and permits to business partnerships and operations. But those lessons made me a stronger businesswoman. Franchising taught me that scalability is really about duplication without dilution. The model, experience, and standards have to work even when you’re not the one running everything.

Your business extends beyond salon suites into education, mentorship, real estate, live events, and franchising. How did you strategically build these different components into one ecosystem, and how do they work together to create multiple pathways to ownership?

Everything I’ve built comes back to ownership. I didn’t plan all of these businesses at once. They developed from understanding what people needed at different stages of their journey, whether that was education, coaching, opening a salon suite, expanding into real estate, or franchising.

The bigger vision is creating an ecosystem where beauty professionals don’t have to stop at providing a service. You can own the suite, the building, the brand, the education platform, or all of it. I want to create pathways that help people keep moving forward.

You have helped educate and empower more than 80,000 aspiring entrepreneurs. What recurring mistakes do you see Black founders make when trying to grow, and what systems should they establish early to avoid building businesses that depend entirely on their daily labor?

One of the biggest mistakes I see is people trying to scale before they’ve built a solid foundation. They want multiple locations, a big team, or a million-dollar business, but they may not know their numbers, have proper accounting, contracts, SOPs, or systems in place.

The other mistake is trying to do everything yourself. You have to delegate, use technology, and create processes other people can follow. And stop confusing visibility with success. Going viral is not a business model. Build the backend, know your numbers, create repeatable systems, then market the hell out of it.

When you think about the legacy of Encore Salon Suites, what do you want your work to prove about Black ownership, economic mobility, and the future of the beauty business?

I want my legacy to prove that beauty professionals can be business owners, real estate investors, franchisors, and wealth creators, not just service providers. There is so much opportunity in this industry, but you have to understand the business behind the beauty.

For me, this is bigger than building Encore. I want the next generation to see what I’ve done and understand that they can build, own, franchise, and create wealth too. At the end of the day, I don’t just want to create successful entrepreneurs. I want to create owners.