What happens when a Fortune 500 software manager buys a tanning salon, and ends up transforming an entire industry?
In this episode of The Strategic Business Influencer, Paige Velasquez Budde sits down with Nash Abbas, Founder & CEO of Tan-Link. What started as a single tanning salon quickly turned into a chain across five Texas cities, and ultimately into Tan-Link, the software platform now powering some of the largest salon chains in the world.
Nash shares:
– How his entrepreneurial instincts turned a small business into a springboard for a global SaaS company
– The early pain points in the industry that inspired Tan-Link’s first features—and led to a 60% increase in collections
– Why solving problems matters more than selling features when it comes to building trust with customers
– His perspective on AI as a tool to augment—not replace—people and processes
– What resilience really looks like, from leading through COVID shutdowns to scaling in competitive industries
From corporate leader to salon owner to software founder, Nash’s story is proof that innovation starts with paying attention to real problems, and having the courage to solve them.
Want to learn more about Nash and the incredible work his team is doing? Visit https://tan-link.com/.
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Want to dive deeper into how today’s most trusted leaders grow their businesses, brands, and influence? Pre-order my upcoming book, The Strategic Business Influencer, and get the playbook for turning leadership into your most powerful business asset. Below is a transcript of our conversation.
Paige: Hi everyone and welcome to the Strategic Business Influencer, my new series for leaders who know that in today’s evolving world trust is the greatest competitive advantage. Today’s guest is Nash Abbas, a tech founder who didn’t just build software, he built the solution his industry didn’t know it needed.
Nash is the founder and CEO of Tan-Link the platform now powering some of the largest salon chains in the world. But this didn’t start as just a software company. It started with Nash buying a single tanning salon while he worked at a Fortune 500 company, realizing the technology was holding the entire industry back and decided to build something even bigger and better.
So with the background in software and a sharp entrepreneurial instinct, he has created a platform that. Automated operations improved revenue and gave owners full visibility into their businesses, unlocking growth at scale. He went on to build and sell a successful salon chain across five Texas cities, and now focuses full-time on transforming the tanning industry through innovation and automation.
Today, millions of dollars in revenue are processed daily through Tan-Link. Nash serves as a board member of the Entrepreneur’s Organization in Austin, which is one of the largest EO chapters in the country. I’m excited to have Nash on because he is a wealth of knowledge. So Nash, welcome onto the series.
Nash: Thank you so much. Great introduction, Paige. Thank you.
Paige: Absolutely. Well, Nash, I wanna start out by going back to that moment when you were working at a Fortune 500 company. You had probably a really Kush corporate job, and then you find yourself jumping out to buy your first tanning salon. What, you know, what was that decision process?
What did that look like? And then, you know, was that part of a long-term plan or just a gut instinct?
Nash: Okay. Yeah, so, um, when I was working in the company, I was managing software and hardware teams over there, and I, I was with the company for a long time, but I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mind and so I wanted to be in business.
And so my criteria, I was looking to purchase a business or maybe start a new business. And my criteria really was, uh, I didn’t want to be in pure retail. I did not want to be in the food industry. I wanted to be in the services industry, but services where you don’t need a lot of licensing to run the business.
And so I was just casually looking and this, uh, the standing salon came up for sale and I went and saw it and didn’t really know anything about tanning. And then within really a couple of weeks, I made the decision and acquired that salon. So part of this was a, was a plan on what type of business I wanted.
Uh, but part of it was just gu gut instinct looking at the salon thinking, you know, I could, uh, I could probably run this. So that was the decision to buy.
Paige: I love it. So you knew you wanted to be, you know, entrepreneurial, but you know, you just kind of found your self attaining salons and then from there, from my understanding, you grew that, you know, across multiple locations.
Is that correct? Mm-hmm.
Nash: Yeah, that’s correct, yes. Um, yeah, we had this first location and then we quickly built another location, acquired a couple of other, built more, and so within a span, uh, four years, we had expanded the chain. So, wow. Um, yeah.
Paige: So what made you realize that software would unlock growth in such a heavy brick and mortar industry?
Nash: Yeah. So, a brick and mortar industry is actually an ideal industry because that’s where all the process and everything is usually pretty manual. And, you know, the automation is generally lacking in those. And so, when I acquired Salon, I noticed a few things that were just simply completely manual processes and.
Uh, the biggest challenge with the existing way we, they were doing it was there was no visibility into the business. You could not tell mm-hmm. What the numbers looked like. It was all basically, you know, very archaic software, so you couldn’t really figure out what was happening in your business. And this was one of the things that was a requirement for me to buy a business or acquire one where I needed to have visibility into all the numbers and.
To drive. So that’s what made me realize that a lot of other salons in the industry are essentially flying blind, and that’s what’s really holding back the business from growth. And so, so once I started noticing those processes, processes, I knew that I, I would be building something.
Paige: Mm. And I love how you just took those pain points that you were experiencing firsthand to create a new product.
And so I’m curious, what were those early moments or features that you made sure were in Tan-Link to really set it apart from any other software on the market?
Nash: Yeah, so, the way I’ve always looked at it is to see like what are the problems in the business and how they can be solved and maybe technology is part of it.
So one of the very early features that set us apart was telling Salon is a really membership based business. And so when we sell memberships, invariably there declines on credit card transactions when we charge the monthly membership. And so the process in place for the salon was that a manager would come in the morning.
And look through the declines and then basically pick up the phone and start calling the customers to, to collect those payments. And this process. Now these, these managers that we have in place, that they’re the type of people who are happy to see customers and they’re selling tenant services and products.
Now, right in the morning they have to come up, come in and do this really difficult and not very rewarding job of picking the phone and calling customers to collection and then get, getting all the payments manually. And so the first thing we did was automate this entire flow. Where when a customer’s automatically billed a text would go out to them with a, with a link to make the payment online.
It was really a non-intrusive process. And we also, through that mechanism, offered them to, uh, wa get the decline fee waived if they paid it the same day. And so our collections went up by like 60% because it was such a simple. And non-intrusive process. Uh, and nobody wanted to be really make the call or receive that call.
And so, uh, those were of the early, early features that, uh, you know, now you think about it, it seems kind of, kind of straightforward that that happens, but it really didn’t there and that was a big, big thing there. And another related to that was just numbers. Uh mm-hmm. All of the software was very weak on providing enough information to actually run the business, you know, so it was, if you needed to make some key decisions about strategy, you just couldn’t do that.
So that was innovation and talent where we had these scorecard. Look at your data and helps you make those decisions. So, so, so the biggest thing was better control of your business. That was the whole pitch point with Talent Link is you can manage, you can view everything online, and you can manage the business.
From wherever you are. So that was a key, key differentiator.
Paige: Yeah. That visibility is, is huge in terms of how you make decisions moving forward. But also 60% jump with collections is just insane. Mm-hmm. I love that. You know, SaaS companies, as we’ve talked about before, they often struggle sometimes with adoption in more traditional industries, but you’ve really earned a lot of deep trust in the tanning salon space.
And so how did you build that credibility with other owners and operators who weren’t necessarily tech forward? They kind of had their way of doing things. Mm-hmm.
Nash: Yeah. So, the way I did this was instead of trying to figure out what the technology is going to do for me, I wanted to figure out what is the problem, what are the pain points that the business has and what would be really an ideal solution to that problem?
And, uh, I figured that some aspects of it would involve technology, but I never looked at technology to say, well, here’s a feature. You know, that is gonna do X, Y, Z. It was more like, here’s a problem, here’s how we solve it, and here’s how technology can bridge that gap for you. Uh, and that was, uh, you know, that was really easily received because the proof was in the solution.
Like once this was implemented and people saw that they could collect more, I didn’t really have to, there’s no other credibility needed. It was just the proof was right there that the solution worked. And so as, as we had more of those solutions, the credibility just came from. Plus me being part of the business, you know, I was very close to learn to these pain points.
So, uh Right. They knew that I was facing similar challenges, and so my solutions were scalable to them.
Paige: Yeah. And I I’m sure it did help that you were, you know, in the same seat that they were in. Mm-hmm. In approaching it that way, with that mindset in, I love how you said we’re not just putting out features.
It’s really all about, you know, how it’s solving problems for their businesses, which is great. How do you think about. Integrating technology in a way that makes businesses more efficient and scalable because I feel like you have a talent NASH of being able to do this in almost any business model.
Nash: Mm-hmm. So I think the same thing is I’m, I’m not looking at technology as this solution. I’m trying to figure out what it is that is holding the business business back, you know, growth or some processes that don’t work properly or some flows that really are not efficient. And so, so then I work backwards from that to figure out, okay, what is the solution?
And then what parts of the, what parts of this the technology can help. And sometimes the solution is not just replace everything with technology, it’s about replace, replacing parts of it with appropriate flows and appropriate automation so that it bridges the gap and the process doesn’t entirely change, it just becomes more efficient, um, more efficient, more automated, and basically less error probe.
That’s the other. Benefit of the automation technology is like if you’re making a lot of errors, you can use technology to really get a handle on that. So that’s really important part of that.
Paige: Yeah. Do you have any questions that you would encourage entrepreneurs to ask themselves about the business to get started with that type of mindset that,
Nash: I think it would be.
I think that the strategy is the same, uh, where you, you think about the problem and you know, if you could just wave a magic wand and there was a solution, like what does that look like? And generally from that you can kind of figure out, here are the pieces that technology can help me with. But there’s always, you know, now with new technology, with AI as well, uh, you know, there are more tools to do this.
And so, you know, I think the, the strategy is the same, is to figure out what is the problem, what would ideal solution and what technology exists today to help me, uh, really get there.
Paige: Yeah. And, and you mentioned AI tools, so I wanna zero in on that a little bit mm-hmm. With you. You know, AI is the big buzz right now.
Mm-hmm. It’s getting louder and louder. What do you think most founders get wrong about ai, whether it’s an operational workflows. Or where do you see the real opportunity is?
Nash: Yeah, so AI is definitely a game changer, major advancement on the tech side, obviously. And the way I see AI is again, another tool in our tool belt of technology.
And I don’t see AI as just completely replacing something. I see it augmenting a lot of the things that we, that we do today. So I think, uh, I think what sometimes. Founders will, will think about AI as a, as a all in one, you know? Mm-hmm. Uh, silver bullet to solve it. And that’s not really what it is. However, uh, you know, if you’ve done well, you know, it is going to be a game changer in replacing parts of the process and parts of the flow.
There are tedious, uh, that are heavily dependent on people, those flows. The AI is going to be. Really excellent at, but it doesn’t replace people. It, it, it just makes their job a lot easier to do, a lot more efficient, enjoyable, even, and then less error prone, you know, those flows, those certain flows.
I see AI taking over. And just improving, you know, uh, as an, as a new tool, just improving the entire process. That’s how I see ai.
Paige: Yeah. Well, well thank you for sharing that. I love how you say, you know, AI is gonna augment, it’s not gonna replace and I think that’s really powerful way to think about it.
Uh, I wanna talk about, you know, your shift, you know, from being CEO and founder of two. Completely different types of businesses. So, you know, you had the tanning salons, um, that successful chain, and then you turned around and built a software company now that those chains depend on. And so what’s one mindset shift that you had to make from going, you know, from probably heavier on the operations as an operator to now more of a tech founder?
Nash: So, um. The change in my, before I talk about change in mindset, the mindset it carried over from corporate to a, a, a attending salon business to software was that in the end, we are always serving a customer, and so, mm-hmm. The mindset was that ultimately the customer has to be successful. So, for corporate, it was my, you know, my, my company, the salon, it was to make people feel great about themselves and then the software.
It’s about delivering a solution that increases the value of that business. And so that’s the mindset. Mindset that I carried over the shift was when I you know, I was managing a team of engineers software and hardware engineers in corporate. And when I moved into the tanning side, I was like, how difficult can this be?
And then that was the most challenging mindset shift that I’ve ever had in managing people from, uh, engineers to entry level. So, mm-hmm. Uh, that mind shift was something that was really significant. And being able to adjust that was crucial to being, being successful on the attending side and then being successful on the software side.
Paige: What would you give to, you know, what advice would you give to someone that’s trying to scale in a more one to many, you know, type of business?
Nash: The one, uh, advice that I, I followed myself and, and have failed to follow sometimes and seen, you know, results from that is when you have a small business your problems are small and any process issues you have.
You can kind of put them under the rug because you are all in and you are the one man team and you can, you, a small team maybe, and you can just, just muscle through it. But then when you start to scale, that just doesn’t work because your element of being able to solve a process claw no longer scales because you’re just one person.
And so the advice is to really. Be tight on the process and flow as early as possible. Mm. Get those things out of the way because those things, as you scale, everything scales, revenue scales, and the problems also scale and your process flows that are broken. They just become more and more difficult to solve.
And also it can result in, you know, loss of revenue, loss of credibility. And so that’s the one thing to do is make it so tight that when you scale that tight processes scales along with you.
Paige: Yeah. That, that’s so smart. I think it’s, in EOS they talk about the importance of even just documenting processes really clearly.
Yes. Uh, you know, to, to have that accountability and have that clarity amongst everybody on the team, which is so powerful. Absolutely. I, I love, I love Nash, how you broke down, you know, your, your chapter as a, a corporate leader, salon owner, and then now you know. Tech leader or tech founder I, I wanna know, which chapter do you feel taught you the most about resilience or taught you the best lessons in leadership?
Nash: The COVID time when I owned my chain was probably the toughest time in business for us, and this was a time where we were really challenged to find a way out because on one end we had no revenue. On the other hand, we have a staff that depended on a paycheck. To be able to survive basically. And and then we have all of our other obligations like rent that is due.
It doesn’t really matter that mm-hmm. The business is closed, the rent is due. So that chapter really taught me a lot about leadership and being resilient because it really pushed our boundaries and we had to come up with other solutions. So that’s the other thing I learned through that time is that business has to be able to.
Adjust and, you know, change their sale and you know, if there’s headwinds. And so one of the things we did when all the businesses were closing and there was a requirement for six foot distancing, we made our salons remote. We had people, we had a check in system in the software where people could come in and drive in and just check in.
And then we had somebody on the screen. Our, one of our staff member on the screen able to unlock the doors, let the customer attend. So we had to come up with a really innovative way to proceed. And so that’s one of the things Wow. The business, uh, kind of a field that has to do, uh, when it’s basically, you know, kind of at the dead end.
Mm-hmm. Um, so that’s what I really learned about resilience. And then about, you know, in software you know, the other thing about leadership I’ve learned is. You have to be able to accept when you make mistakes. And I think until you’re able to really accept a mistake and say, maybe I did so this wrong, it’s coming done better.
You, you’re not really a true leader. And so that I’ve been in positions where I had to say, yeah, I should have done this differently. I should have done this better. And so, yeah, those, that’s what I learned about my time in tanning and now. In the software world. Mm-hmm.
Paige: Well, the fact that you, you know, recognize that and voice that I is huge.
I think that’s hard for a lot of leaders. And you talk about the resilience piece. You know, I don’t know if any other tanning salons were doing this remote check-in during COVID that’s so innovative. But, you know, do you have any advice or thoughts on, you know, how to reset. You know, for entrepreneurs that are having just a really rough day or really rough couple of weeks, just any mindset hacks.
Nash: So you asked that because, uh, very recently I’ve gone through some of the challenges and software and had to really. Think about what I wanted out of it. And it was a challenging time because you, you, you know, you try to, you think that you just just give up, but as a business owner, as a leader, you just, you just can’t do that.
Right? Not any particular advice except that you have to keep focused on what, what is at the end, the result is going to be, and you have to have a thick skin and just kind of muscle through some of the tough times. And, uh, that’s just part of, that’s just part of being, being a leader. Like those challenges are gonna come and, uh, you have to to work through it and look at the end, end game and just work, work towards that.
And just realize that every entrepreneur goes through it. I don’t know anybody who has not had challenges in business. So that’s, that’s what this is. I mean, you are going to have those challeng.
Paige: That’s right. I think they, uh, call it a lot of times the school of hard knocks, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. Well, Nash, there are two questions that I love to ask every entrepreneur, and I’m excited to hear your answers. So the first question is, who are you in addition to being a CEO?
Nash: In addition to being a CEO I’m a father to two. Two great, awesome teenagers. I’m a husband to my lovely wife, Ted. I’m an adventurer.
I’m an explorer. I’m also a risk taker. And I think that’s kind of part of being an entrepreneur. If you’re not a risk taker, entrepreneurship really is not the way to do it. ’cause every, every day you wake up there is a new challenge on the horizon, something that you’ve never really experienced. And so, uh, risk taking has to be a natural quality in an entrepreneur because otherwise it would be draining and, uh, not, not very fun place to be in.
Paige: That’s right. That’s right. Um, and then the next question I have for you is, what is the impact that you wanna have at the end of every day?
Nash: The impact I wanna have at the end of the day is being able to deliver something of value to my customer. And so, again, you know, in the telling world, that meant making somebody feel great.
In my software world, that means. Providing a service provid that that helps the business in whatever aspect, uh, it can. So with sales, with management, whatever aspect is. So I think at the end of the day, I feel good when I learned that one of our tools or one of our services resulted in our customer being successful.
And that’s really what what makes my day is did we do something of value? Did we bring any value to whatever the, whatever the service or product, um, that we’ve delivered. So.
Paige: That’s so good about, that’s what
Nash: makes my day.
Paige: Yeah, well it’s all about the customer. It’s all about making them successful and I’ve seen that that through line it sounds like, throughout your entire career, so that that’s incredibly special.
Well, Nash, if anybody wants to learn more about you as a leader or wants to learn more about Tan-Link, where can they go?
Nash: Well they can go to 10 link.com or I have my website, which is nash abba.com. So that’s where I can be reached at.
Paige: Amazing. Well, thank you so much Nash, for being on today. I know that your time is so valuable, but I know that everybody listening or tuning in has just gotten so much insight from you.
So I appreciate you sharing your stories and your experiences with us all.
Nash: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Paige: Yeah. Thank you. All right, y’all. We’ll see y’all next time.