Angela Hines has had her eyes on the prize from a young age.
“I used to sell Now and Laters in the fourth grade,” recalled Angela Hines, owner and CEO of BGM Science of Beauty and Business while speaking to The Dallas Express. “I would go to the store and buy them for a nickel, then sell the ten pack for five cents apiece. I was always trying to figure out ways to make money.”
As the years passed, and with the lessons in business through candy sales under her belt, Hines developed a love of grooming and beautifying fingernails.
“I have loved nails since I was in the fourth grade,” Angela Hines said. “While growing up, my mother used to polish her nails and toenails red every Saturday morning. Even though I was never a girly girl, I always wanted my nails done. I would pretend to make press-on nails with Elmer’s glue. We would rub it in our palm, make a mold of a nail, and then put it on our nails to make a press-on nail.”
Hines’ passion grew the semester before she went to college. Hines asked her professional nail tech to teach her how to do nails, and after mastering the technique with her nails, she wanted to learn more, so she asked her mother to allow her to attend school for nails. The following year in college, she was able to do her friend’s nails and started making good money.
“My worst week I made $500, and that was thirty years ago,” said Hines.
After getting her teaching degree, Angela Hines worked as a full-time teacher while doing nails out of her home in Kansas City, Missouri. Eventually, Hines left Missouri so her children could practice cheerleading in Texas.
“That was a huge step for me to move here,” she said. “I was the baby of the family, I got everything I wanted at home. My dad was an assistant deputy director for the State of Missouri. He was three people underneath the governor.”
Getting everything she needed and wanted was not satisfying enough for Hines; she wanted something different.
“People said, ‘You are leaving? No one will know you there,'” she recalled. “I said, ‘I know.’ I was up for the challenge, and I was ready for someone to tell me, ‘No.'”
It has been eight years since Hines moved from Kansas City to Dallas. Because she was not certified to teach in Texas, Hines went back to school for a BA in history at Texas Tech while at the same time working at a Preston Center salon.
“I started telling people my story, and the more personal I was, the more they enjoyed my story, and my tip money grew,” said Hines.
After finishing school, Hines went back to teaching full-time, leaving her clients to find another nail tech.
“They asked, ‘Are you willing to be mobile,’ and it wasn’t just a matter of me doing their nails,” Hines said. “My clients live a different life, and they loved my story.”
Hines said most topics were on the table during conversations with her clients. She would share her family life, the books she was reading, and anything else she found interesting.
“I would go to their homes, and after a while, they would refer me to other folks,” Angela Hines said. “So, my mobile clients grew, and my confidence to ask for the money I was worth grew.”
Hines said her clientele has generally been people who owned their businesses and companies, so she would use the time she spent with them while doing their nails to soak up as much as she could about how the world of business worked.
Hines then combined her love of teaching and nail manicuring with her teaching background by launching a one-of-a-kind school in September 2020. The curriculum consisted of skin and nails, right in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, which Hines insists was great for her because people had to do all their grooming.
The timing was perfect for Hines as she could service people who became interested in owning their businesses.
“The good thing about when the pandemic happened,” Hines said. “Is that Texas allowed for one hundred percent online instruction, so being a schoolteacher, and understanding how to read between the lines, I opened it up to people all over the world. They would get licensed in Texas, but then they filed reciprocity and could get licensed in their home state.”
Hines’s BGM Science of Beauty and Business opened as culture started to change. People decided to go back to school and learn specialty careers to cater to a hungry population that looked to patronize small businesses.
“One of the biggest things that I was up against,” says Hines, “was people saying they don’t learn anything in nail school, but me being a school teacher of 25 years, I was like, somebody comes here with me, they’re going to learn something.”
Her “scientists” — the moniker Hines calls her students — are learning it all. Not only are they learning esthetician and nail services, but Hines opened a second school in Garland that added lash extension instruction. This industry has grown in recent years, with some technicians currently making up to $9,000 per month.
More than offering students a chance to create their own businesses, Hines is changing mentalities and teaching her “scientists” how to know their worth.
“If the student comes to understand their value and go out and charge what they are worth, the precedence is set across the board,” she said. “But when people who are not licensed do bad work or charge twenty dollars for services, the whole industry suffers.”
With BGM being the only school of its kind, Angela Hines feels she is on her way to setting a new industry standard. She currently has “scientists” who have completed her program and now teach and serve as directors for her schools, allowing Hines to strictly stick to teaching the building blocks of owning a business.
As for the future of BGM Science of Beauty and Business, Hines says over the next two years, she wants to turn her skin school into a med-spa, create an event space, and in three years, she wants to get another larger space that will offer classes in Vietnamese and Spanish.
Angela Hines wants to share with anyone building a business, “Understand that growth is needed and do not be scared. Put yourself out there and grow!”
