Ray Kroc has nothing on Martha. She was a pioneer in every aspect of her business and is the woman who gave birth to franchising.

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Dave Young:
Welcome back to the podcast. It’s the podcast, the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young, I’m sitting here with Stephen Semple, virtually, as we do. You whispered the name of the subject of this podcast into my ear and I’m trying to even remember it from 30 seconds ago. Martha Matilda-

Stephen Semple:
Matilda Harper.

Dave Young:
-Harper.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Martha Matilda Harper. A household name, if I’ve ever heard one. I have nothing for this.

Stephen Semple:
And she should be a household name. There should be business schools with her name on it. And she should be a woman that we are studying in business school. When I came across this story, I was shocked that I’d never heard of this woman, especially since she was born in Canada on top of all of that. And it is one of these ones that I’m really happy and proud to share because her story needs to be told. Her story really needs to be told. As you learn about her, I think you’ll be as blown away as I was. Because we often think of Ray Kroc from McDonald’s is often referred to as the father of franchising. But when you think about it, he was not the first franchiser. Singer did the first franchise and certainly the first franchise agreement. But Martha started around same time as Singer and some belief predated Singer. Some of these dates are hard to nail down.

Dave Young:
You’re talking about Singer Sewing Machines?

Stephen Semple:
Singer Sewing Machines. Yes.

Dave Young:
I didn’t know that that was even a franchise.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. It was when it first started off.

Dave Young:
So you’d be the Singer store in town.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. So we’ll probably do one on Singer at a certain point here. But 60 years before Ray Kroc came along, Martha built a chain of 500 hair salons all over the world using a franchise model.

Dave Young:
Oh, wow.

Stephen Semple:
Right?

Dave Young:
500. 500?

Stephen Semple:
500. And this is actually the model that hair salons are using today for their-

Dave Young:
Oh my God, what was the name of it? Have we heard of it?

Stephen Semple:
You’ve never heard of it, and you’re just going to have to wait for the name. You’ve never heard of any of this. It’s a travesty. I keep telling you, it’s crazy. So Martha Harper was born September 10th, 1857 in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. And she was the fourth of 10 children, all of whom shared a one-room log cabin. So they were very, very poor.

Dave Young:
Mean. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Her father was a tailor who in her words was a stern, unflinching English pioneer, too occupied with his daily struggle to pay much heed to her. So you got the flavor of what-

Dave Young:
Her and her nine siblings,

Stephen Semple:
Her and her nine siblings. And he eventually pivoted his business to renting out his children as labor. At age seven, Martha was sent off to be a house servant for a wealthy farmer. She was paid $4 a month, which all went to her dad. Five years later, she was transferred to a home of a nearby doctor whose wife died. Now the doctor is believed to be Dr. Weston Leroy Hermann. And what’s important about this is that Hermann had a special interest in the physiology of hair. In the late 1800s. There was not much interest in haircare. Hair was not washed. The soaps were crude at the time. They were made of hog fat and ashes. And they were in short supply. So Hermann studied things like scalp hygiene and the effects of hair brushing.

And he shared these interests with Martha, who was eager to learn. So you could picture him doing this stuff, and at the end of the day, sharing that with her. You could imagine that, right? When he died in 1879, he left Martha a small amount of money and a recipe for a hair tonic made from herbs. So she’s now 25 years old, and she decides to move to Rochester, New York for a fresh start. And we forget that at this time, Rochester was a booming place. Rochester, New York, at this time, was a real booming place and very, very progressive. It was a hotbed for the suffragette movement. So while Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, she’s buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester.

So that speaks to the importance of Rochester. Martha moves to Rochester and she finds work as a servant with a lawyer, and then later a wealthy woman, Luella J. Roberts. And at this time, hair care is done in the home and Martha becomes Mrs. Roberts’ personal beautician. And she’s so skilled, soon there’s other members of high society coming by the house to visit to get treatments. Martha starts to make her own hair tonic and experiment a little bit with the recipe. And she even starts a small test. She makes some bottles and she starts handing them out door to door. Sampling, right?

Dave Young:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And she senses a business opportunity. So it’s 1888. She’s 31 years old, and she invests her life savings of $360 into Harper Hairdressing Parlor. The one you’ve never heard of.

Dave Young:
I’m just thinking at $4 a month that mostly went to her dad, how long it took her to save up 300 bucks.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. A long while. So she wanted to open in the Powers Building, which is a nine-story building. It had the finest businesses in town, right? So it’s that whole halo effect, which we’ve talked about before. And she wanted to design this hairdressing parlor with a luxury feel and healthy and purity and all those things. And she even created the Harper Method. Customers were treated to the Harper Method. She named it. She made a thing and she created a brand. She named it. It’s a two-hour treatment, whether it was a facial, a head and shoulder massage, and she had all sorts of names for all the things that she did. She started to market and she used her own hair to market the services. So she had this long, chestnut colored mane. It was so long that P.T. Barnum tried to hire her.

Dave Young:
Really?

Stephen Semple:
Yep. Yeah.

Dave Young:
That’s the rest of the story.

Stephen Semple:
So like a lot of businesses that are a brand new idea, at first the business was slow. Sounds familiar, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Because her high-end clientele still wanted to do home visits. There was this opposition to this idea of going to a public salon. There’s real resistance to that. But here’s where the breakthrough happened for her. Music teacher opened next door to her, and this music teacher had no waiting room. So Martha offered her salon. She said, “You can use my salon as a waiting room.” So guess what started to happen? Women would get hair treatments while waiting for their kids to finish their piano lessons.

Dave Young:
Perfect.

Stephen Semple:
Right? And this was at a time where customer service was still a bit of a foreign concept. And Martha continually worked to make the experience better. Here’s the thing she invented. The first reclining shampoo chair.

Dave Young:
Nice.

Stephen Semple:
You know that special sink with the cutout for the neck?

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
She invented that. Right? She invented a whole pile of things. And shortly, word of this exotic new salon concept started to spread amongst the elite in Rochester. And the salon was a three chair shop and was soon being visited by people from other cities. Word got out there. Martha would start getting requests to open shops in other cities.

Dave Young:
Nice.

Stephen Semple:
And she refused until a certain number of women signed a petition to open because she wanted to make sure there was a market there first.

Dave Young:
Sure. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Brilliant. Right?

Dave Young:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Here’s the other thing she decided to do, and it’s interesting, Ray Kroc should have learned from her. Because it took a long time for Ray Kroc to learn this. If you remember, Ray Kroc, his first franchises were rich people and it didn’t work. It wasn’t until Ray Kroc started figuring out to speak to blue collar, hardworking folks that it worked. She decided right out of the gate she was going to hire women like her. Lower class servants and maids.

Dave Young:
People that know how to work hard that just need a plan.

Stephen Semple:
Right. People who had the drive but lacked the money. It would’ve been easy to do this with the leap but it’s not always the best thing. Again, Ray Kroc learned this experience the hard way. Had he gone to a business school with her name on it, he would’ve learned from her. But they didn’t have money. These people didn’t have money. So what she did is they would pay a fee that was done as a loan and they would agree to buy the brushes, tonics, chairs, all the stuff they needed from the salon from her. She chose each location, controlled signage and advertising. Does any of this sound familiar, Dave? Kind of sounds like a franchise, doesn’t it?

Dave Young:
Absolutely it does. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Right? So in 1891, she opens the first location and it’s in Buffalo. And it’s really one of the first real franchise models where it’s the whole idea. I select the location, control the signage, control the advertising. You pay an upfront fee and you buy products from me.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
The only thing that she did is the fee is a loan.

Dave Young:
And all named the same?

Stephen Semple:
All named exactly the same. And it’s so successful that 13 years later in 1914, she has 134 franchises in 128 cities, including some in Europe.

Dave Young:
Man, that’s amazing.

Stephen Semple:
Martha Harper becomes the first female member of the Rochester Chamber of Commerce. 1920 to 1921, she went from 175 shops to 350. She became so successful that her clients included Susan B. Anthony, Woodrow Wilson, Joe Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, Lady Bird Johnson. These are the people who were her customers. When she passed in 1950 at the age of 93, it had grown into 500 shops, and her estate was estimated to be worth about $11 million.

Dave Young:
Ah, that’s terrific.

Stephen Semple:
Isn’t that terrific?

Dave Young:
That really is. It’s a beautiful story. How did the business schools miss this?

Stephen Semple:
I have no idea because here’s the thing. Normally our lessons in this is people see this idea in another business or another place and apply that knowledge in a unique way. What’s so brilliant about Martha Harper is she didn’t do that. She learned all of this on her own. Figured it out on her own. Saw these challenges of, okay, well I want to expand it, but I want to do it this way. How do I do this? She innovated like crazy. Long before guys like Ray Kroc came along. What a trailblazer. And yes, how do we not know about this woman’s story?

Dave Young:
When you mentioned all the famous people that were her customers and customers of her stores, there’s no doubt that she planted the seeds of innovation for all kinds of franchises, right? There’s just no doubt in my mind that her systems set a standard for how to do this kind of thing. It’s so many innovations that were sparked by women, men just came in and took credit for it. This happens in science all the time.

Stephen Semple:
There needs to be a business school in her name. And in fact, you know what we should do, Dave? After we publish this podcast, we should reach out to our tribe at the Wizard’s Academy and we should raise money for a plaque at the Wizard Academy in her name.

Dave Young:
That would be fantastic.

Stephen Semple:
We need to do that because this woman deserves recognition. Her story needs to be told and not lost, because first of all, at the time she grew up with the very few rights that women had and grew up dirt, dirt, dirt poor. My admiration for her is just … Yeah, her story needs to be … And when I researched it, I was like, we are telling this story to the world.

Dave Young:
What I think is a lasting thing, more than a hundred years later, you still hear people talking about going to the beauty parlor. So the word parlor associated with this, that had to have come from her.

Stephen Semple:
I had not even thought of that. Yes.

Dave Young:
It became a part of the language. It may actually be named a spa. Right? But people talk about going to the beauty parlor.

Stephen Semple:
And spa is really a more modern iteration. Great observation. So yeah, as I mentioned earlier, there really should be a business school somewhere with her name on it.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks for sharing the story of Martha.

Stephen Semple:
Martha Matilda Harper.

Dave Young:
I mean, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s worth remembering. Martha Matilda Harper.

Stephen Semple:
That’s right.

Dave Young:
Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:
Thanks, David.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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