You want to open a second salon. How much can you borrow against the first, and what kind of loan is right?

A barbershop owner describing a second location needed about $100,000 to secure the lease, renovate, and hire before the first client walked in. A salon owner who funded it from the first shop's profits reported the second breaking even at six to eight months and turning a profit at twelve to sixteen. Those two numbers — what it costs to open, and how long before it carries itself — are the whole financing question.

The second one is the one people underestimate. The lease, the buildout and the chairs are the visible cost. The invisible one is six months of rent and payroll at a location that is not yet full, and that is what most second salons run out of.

Nobody lends against a salon that does not exist yet. What a funder reads is the first location's last six to twelve months of deposits — card settlements, booth rent, retail — and lends against that. A salon depositing $35,000 a month can expect offers from roughly $17,000 to $50,000 from revenue-based funders, and a bank or SBA lender will look at the same statements if the salon has two years of clean returns behind it.

The bank route is cheaper and takes weeks; an SBA loan is the cheapest and takes months. If you have the time and the two years, use them. If the lease you want is available now and the landlord will not wait, the revenue-based route funds in days at a higher price, and the honest comparison is against losing the location.

Chairs, stations, shampoo units, dryers, a color bar, the backbar: equipment. Financed over three to five years with the equipment as security, at pricing far below any working capital product. The vendor is paid directly. Do not put $30,000 of stations on a short-term advance.

Lease deposit, buildout, licensing, signage, the opening stock, and the first months of rent and payroll before the book fills: working capital. A line of credit is the ideal shape — drawn as the buildout invoices arrive, drawn again for month-three payroll, repaid as the second site's revenue arrives. A term loan is the simpler alternative if a line is out of reach.

The ramp is what the line is for. Budget it explicitly: six months of the new location's rent and payroll, minus the revenue you realistically expect in each of those months, is the number.

A stylist roster for the new site with names, not headcount. A signed or near-signed lease. The first salon's statements showing growth, not just stability. And a plain one-page plan that says what the second site costs to open, what it costs to run per month, and when it breaks even. An underwriter who sees those four things is reading a business, not a hope.