Haylee Benton: the high-street salon saviour
Entrepreneur and Investor
Haylee Benton is founder of The Silver Fern Group, a portfolio of hugely successful beauty businesses and Pamper Pad, the TripAdvisor of the hair and beauty world. Her mission is to turn failing hair and beauty salons into high-street sensations.
Since the age of 22, Haylee has helped struggling businesses transform into multi-million pound organisations, and now she’s coming to a high-street near you to do the same.
From humble beginnings in New Zealand to creating booming business empires, Haylee Benton has helped companies across the globe rise from the ashes.
It was during this time, that my passion for business was ignited, so I studied economics and business in class. In fact, my first start-up was a company at school which personalised underwear for high school students and their parents! Our team won a young enterprise scheme award – so that really was the spark that started everything off.”
It was early in Haylee’s career that she learnt how easy it is for businesses to fail without the right management and marketing. This experienced helped shaped Haylee’s skills in nurturing companies in financial difficulty.
“My first job out of school was as an insurance consultant and then I came to the UK to work for a signage company which unfortunately had financial trouble. I watched the owner deal with that and then helped him transform the business into a multi-million-pound company in just six years, but sadly the business continued to be financially unstable. To gain extra skills, I began a degree at Warwick Business School in 2012, and after completing that I decided to set up my own consultancy to coach company owners looking for advice.
PamperPad was conceived whilst looking for a plumber online; more than 8,000 hair and beauty businesses have registered with the site so people could find top rated beauty treatments nearby.
The inspiration behind the creation of PamperPad came when I was looking on TrustATrader for a plumber. I thought why there wasn’t anything like this for beauty treatments. I couldn’t understand why my beautician friends couldn’t market themselves correctly – and the rest is history. Alongside the hugely successful PamperPad site, Haylee also created a service called Sell My Salon, where struggling salon owners can seek help.”
The Silver Fern Group – excellence in hair, skin and spa treatments.
“My proudest achievement to date is launching a portfolio of bespoke businesses in the hair, skin, spa and floristry sectors called The Silver Fern Group. Based in Berkhamsted, Marlow and New Zealand, these brands have gone from strength-to-strength and we have plans to open up more sites in 2022 and 2023, here in the UK and across the globe.”