A few years after Charles Penzone launched his first hair salon, his attorney took him aside for a serious talk. "My attorney, who is still my attorney, he would talk about long-term planning," Penzone said recently. "And I said, 'In my industry, you're only hot for three years. Let's not plan that far ahead.'" Penzone chuckled. "Well, here we are." Half a century later, Penzone, now 73, is still in the business.

"I'm a second-generation Italian-American," he said. "It was very common for us to go into barbering, beauty, construction, grocery. I had three male cousins in the industry as well. So it was just a natural segue — I was right out of high school and three weeks later was in cosmetology school. It was a normal thing." It might have been natural, but it wasn't easy, at least not in the beginning.