Wayne Grund and his wife Debra started Surface Hair Care in 2008 and today the Saskatchewan-based company has more than 50,000 salons in the U.S, and Canada featuring its products.

As it celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, it will also celebrate having sold more than 20 million bottles of hair care. And a recent partnership agreement with investors will fuel additional growth for the company.

“We manufacture products primarily for the professional salon. They’re inclusive of all hair and scalp types. We have categories within and we provide the business resources to help salons help their guests be very successful,” said Wayne who is the company’s Chief Inspiration Officer. “There’s education and business support that we provide.

“Our commitment is to completely formulate with personal health being respected as well as the earth. We were founded in 2008 and we were clean and green before clean and green was even cool.”

Secondary sales channels are through Amazon Professional and DTC. Surface is currently expanding into Europe and Latin America. 

The company’s head office is in Saskatoon but it manufactures in five different locations in the U.S. with a warehouse in Kansas.

“It gives us the smallest carbon footprint possible for fossil fuels in shipping in North America,” said Grund.

Grund will be a panelist during one of the discussion sessions at the Alberta Business Transitions Forum on May 1 in Calgary.

The session is called Tales from the Trenches: Hear the Good, Bad & Ugly Sides of Selling a Business from Entrepreneurs Who Have Been There.

In 2021, Wayne and his wife were nominated for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year. It was through that connection that the story of the family-run company’s journey to include investors really began.

After being courted by 30+ international companies, in February 2022 Wayne and his family welcomed a private equity partnership with Roynat Equity Partners and PFM Capitol Inc.

“Without purposely thinking of M&A we had structured a company that was perfect for growth and transition,” said Wayne. “A couple of the keys to it was first of all, all of our family members including myself were at an even pay scale for the industry. So we were on par if we were to hire for that position. Absolutely every position had a trainable support structure to it.

“All of our lead team members, family and outside, do a document called What I Do. I’m sure a lot of other family companies grew like ours. I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the stuff my son was doing to make it happen. What my daughter was doing. Or some of our lead managers in the States. We just hired the right people. And people really makes our company.

“With that we were able to structure this is What I Do. And then I thought if I had to hire somebody new to go into that, how do we train that? We put that training down to video, we put it down to a written format. Our biggest area of growth in people right now is what we call salon growth managers. And they work with our distributors and such to help open up salons, help those salons be successful. And everything we do is based on the philosophy of win-win. Everybody that we connect with has to win. We have a training process for that.”

Surface Hair Care was able to show on paper for potential investors that if any position became available it could be replaced.

“My goal through all that was how do I become irrelevant,” said Grund.

The company was founded when the Grunds were 50 years old. They mortgaged their home, they mortgaged their lake house, to begin Surface. In the structure of the company, the Grunds wanted to have a strong family culture even with the people they hired. The top leaders initially hired are still with the company. As they grew, the training element continued as did the philosophy of win-win.

“I have made myself available to people that have been looking at putting their companies up and the first question people have is what do you think is most important. My answer to that is you need to know who your best prospective purchaser may be,” said Grund.

“I never dreamed of this. When it came down to the final, there were companies throughout the world that came and did an interview process. We had like 20 companies that actually came to the table from Italy to China, throughout North America. I would have never dreamed that we were going to be acquired by a Canadian group.”

In the partnership, the Grunds were able to remain a substantial partner.

“Even though I’m going to transition out of the business myself I’m working as Chairman but my son now is CEO. I’m excited for that because he can put his thumb print on the next turn of the business,” said Grund.

“The one thing it has done for the business is complete financial awareness in black and white . . . With the financial structure that we did, and under the guidance of Roynat and PFM, we gifted our top leaders some shares. We were always accountable but we were accountable on paper to the decisions that we were doing. The number one benefit is accountability to ourselves and the whole ownership group on paper. I always thought we were doing pretty good planning with it. They helped guide us really where our five-year plan is.

“There’s two points I would bring to the table. Personal accountability as it ties to the company as well as long-term planning.”

One of the attractions of the business is that it had a very strong ‘why’. Why would consumers want to use their product? Why would salons and businesses want to do business with it? Ultimately, in an acquisition, why would somebody want to buy the company.

“To remove your emotions from that I think is really important as a founder. You really have to analyze the why behind it,” he said.

An international award-winning hair stylist and salon owner of 45 years, Wayne’s salon ‘Visions’ is located in Saskatoon and has received the honors of North American Salon of the Year and Retail Salon of The Year as named by top industry trade magazine Modern Salon.

Visions was named three times in Canada’s top ten salons by Chatelaine Magazine.

His work has been featured on NBC, ABC, CNN, CBS, CTV and Britain’s BBC.

(Mario Toneguzzi is a veteran of the media industry for more than 40 years and named in 2021 a Top Ten Business Journalist in the world and only Canadian. He also made the RETHINK’s global list as a Top Retail Expert 2024)