Atlanta Nurse Kept Her Hair Salon Alive Through COVID and Staff Theft

A Ghanaian nurse in Atlanta lost part of her salon's client base when COVID-19 forced a shutdown of three to four weeks — and she says that was the single biggest setback of her entrepreneurial journey. Nana Akua, a US-based Ghanaian health worker and salon owner, recounted the experience on GhanaWeb TV's Diaspora Connect, in conversation with host Mr David Antwi.

"My biggest setback was during COVID. You know, during COVID, we had to close down the business for about three to four weeks. So, during that time, I lost some clients," she told the host.

She has kept the business running while continuing to work full time as a nurse, with her aunt stepping in to manage the salon whenever she is on duty.

What does COVID shutdown mean for a small salon?

For a service business built on repeat customers, a month-long closure is not a pause — it's an erosion of the client list. Nana Akua's account puts a concrete frame on it: three to four weeks of mandated closure, followed by client attrition she is still working to recover from. Customer retention, she noted, ranked alongside staff loyalty as the toughest hurdles in establishing the salon in Atlanta.

The dual-career structure she settled on is worth noting for any practitioner weighing a similar path. Rather than choosing between nursing and entrepreneurship, she delegated day-to-day salon operations to a family member.

"I'm still doing nursing full time and, as a matter of fact, my aunty is the one managing my hair salon," she said.

The staffing problem: braiders poaching clients

The deeper operational challenge, she revealed, came from inside the business. Nana Akua said she had to dismiss several braiders over concerns they were obtaining customers' phone numbers under the pretext of receiving tips — and later contacting those customers to offer home-based braiding services, effectively diverting salon clients to their own side businesses.

"I had to get rid of a lot of braiders because some of them would steal your client," she said.

The picture isn't uniformly grim. She also noted that some workers demonstrated genuine loyalty, encouraging customers to hand tips to the salon owner rather than pocketing the money themselves.

Those experiences, she said, taught her patience and the importance of care when recruiting and managing employees — a lesson that came at the cost of repeated firings and lost customers.

Her advice for Ghanaians starting out in America

Beyond staffing, Nana Akua stressed two fundamentals for anyone building a business in the United States: discipline and a strong customer base. She cautioned aspiring entrepreneurs against relying on encouragement from friends and acquaintances, arguing that moral support rarely converts into revenue.

"It requires discipline; you have to make sure you have a good clientele base. Sometimes those who will encourage you to go into that business may not even patronise your service," she said.

She also advised Ghanaians with vocational skills who intend to establish businesses in America to take time management seriously, pointing out that punctuality carries real weight in the US market.

"I will advise anyone who has a skill and would want to establish a business in America that they should be disciplined because, in America, they don't joke with their time," she said.

The wider takeaway for diaspora entrepreneurs

nHer experience maps the standard pain points Ghanaian entrepreneurs encounter abroad: retaining customers through disruption, managing employees who may compete with the business, and balancing operations against another full-time profession. For practitioners watching from the sidelines, the model she landed on — a trusted family manager running the salon while she keeps her nursing income — is one answer to the juggling problem. Her next test is whether the client base rebuilt after COVID holds as the salon scales beyond family labor.