The most expensive thing she ever did was move too fast. The most profitable was investing in people.

Maria Unali self-funded two complete salon builds using her family home as collateral, twice. No investors, no outside capital. A $100,000+ loss on a second business funded by COVID subsidies taught her the lesson she carries into every money decision she makes today.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Just because capital is available doesn't mean the timing or the structure is right. Money wants a thesis behind it.

• Apprentices look like a liability on entry. Handled well, they become the most profitable system in the business.

• People don't come for the location. They come for you. Spend accordingly.

• Good money habits done imperfectly but consistently will outperform perfect systems you don't keep up.

There are businesses built for profit. There are businesses built for purpose. Then there are businesses built from something harder to name, whether it is a sense of obligation, of love, or of wanting to prove that care and excellence can work in collaboration.

Maria Unali's business sits in the third kind.

Salon Kiin is a premium hair salon in Penrith, specialising in lived-in colour, in Sydney's Greater West. On paper: a single-location business holding above a million dollars in revenue for a decade. In practice: a woman who took everything her father built across 35 years and decided to amplify it, in the community she came from, on her own terms, without asking anyone for capital.

Maria grew up in the business. Her father founded St Clair Hairstylists in 1981 and ran it for 35 years before handing it to her. When he did, there was never a question of whether she would take it on. The harder question was what she would make it into.

"If I do this," she told him, "I'm going to do it properly."

She remortgaged her house to rebuild it as s.81 Hair in 2009. Then remortgaged it again in 2016 to open Salon Kiin in the form it exists today. No investors. No outside capital. A strong belief and as she puts it herself and no real understanding of the risk she was taking.

"I'm quite an impulsive person and I think I didn't really understand the risk involved. I had a strong belief and no choice in making it happen." - Maira

That is not recklessness. That is what it looks like when the belief is bigger than the fear.

"Money wants a thesis behind it, not opportunity for the sake of opportunity."

The most expensive decision Maria has made came during COVID. With subsidies available, she used the capital injection to open a second business. She overcapitalised on the build, and when she eventually stepped out of it, the exit didn't go to plan.

It cost her over $100,000.

"I struggle to call them mistakes. But the lesson has stayed with me clearly: just because the capital is available doesn't mean the timing or the structure is right."

If she were starting today, the build would look completely different.

"I'd start much smaller and renovate as I grew, rather than going huge straight out of the gate. After 25 years on the floor I know this in my bones: people don't come for the location, they come for you. I've watched stylists leave beautiful spaces and take their clients with them, because clients fall in love with the person, not the room."

She proved her own point. A smaller studio she opened later at a fraction of the fitout cost, is booked out with a waitlist. Better outcome. Completely different capital risk.

"Apprentices are a liability at the start, that's just the maths of it. But the return is enormous if you do it well. Put them on the right services and they generate genuine margin while building their confidence by actually doing the work."

We asked Maria what the most profitable decision she made was. The answer was not a product launch or a rebrand. It was people.

Specifically: taking on apprentices and training them properly. By their second or third year, a strong apprentice is earning back their wage and then some. On the right services, extensions, smoothing treatments, they generate real margin while building the kind of confidence that only comes from doing the work, not being protected from it.

"The only way people grow is by doing the work. That cycle of training them, watching them grow, watching them invest back into the team, that is the most profitable system I've built."

Labour now accounts for more than half of Salon Kiin's costs. Maria does not treat this as a problem. She treats it as evidence the business is working the way it should.

Senior stylist Lara is a current NSW Training Awards finalist for Apprentice of the Year. The salon has won NSW/ACT Hairdresser of the Year twice, Salon Design of the Year, and Salon Marketing of the Year and has been a consistent finalist for Salon Business of the Year and Team of the Year across a decade.

"I opened Kiin with a two-year-old, and one year later I had a newborn. There isn't a clean version of that story. There's just the version where you do your best with what you have and you keep going."

Maria was 22 when she took over her father's salon. She saw money coming in and going out. That was the extent of it.

"I wish I'd been more financially literate from the start. I wish I'd known how to allocate properly from day one, tax, insurance, workers' comp, the payments that hit hard if you haven't set the money aside. I wish I'd had a better accountant earlier, one who actually taught me, not just one who lodged my returns."

The reserve she would require before opening today: three months of takings in cash. For Salon Kiin, that is $240,000 sitting untouched before a single creative decision is made.

"It isn't sexy. It's just oxygen for the business."

The discipline she built to get there came from a decade of doing it wrong before doing it right. She is clear on that.

Why this matters to F5 Collective

F5 Collective backs women building businesses with both rigour and soul. Women for whom profit and purpose are not in tension, where the founder's values are included  into every decision, not added on afterwards.

Maria Unali is exactly that founder. A million-dollar business built on mortgaged collateral, hard lessons and an unshakeable belief that the community she came from deserved better. She has earned the right to teach what she knows and she is building a platform under her own name to do exactly that.

Follow Maria at @maria_unali and Salon Kiin at @salonkiin.