How serial entrepreneur grew businesses after starting as taxi driver

Money Singh wasn’t excited about his move to San Francisco from Punjab, India, at age 19 in 2006.

“I was [depressed] for that one year. I wanted to go back,” says Singh, now 38, adding: “Socially, I was very alone.”

He initially attended college in the Bay Area, but dropped out after some of his credits from school in India didn’t transfer over, he says. His mom urged him to find a job quickly, so he worked a short stint at a local drugstore, then as a dispatcher for his uncle’s cab company making around $6 per hour, he says.

Singh spent the next 12-plus years working in the cab industry, first driving for himself before amassing a five-cab fleet, running his own dispatch company, then launching Driver’s Network, an advertising and marketing agency for independent drivers.

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In 2018, Singh decided he needed to do something unrelated to taxis. So, in addition to running Driver’s Network, which is now known as ATCS Platform Solutions, he teamed up with a local barber to open Dandies Barbershop & Beard Stylist in Mountain View in June 2019. He got the idea from his partner Joypreet, who suggested that he follow the example of his mother — a hair salon owner in India and, later, Northern California, he says.

Last year, Dandies brought in $1.07 million in sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. ATCS Platform Solutions brought in $1.18 million in revenue, documents show. Both businesses are profitable, says Singh, who works at Dandies full-time and spends about 20 hours per week on ATCS.

Here’s how Singh built Dandies from the ground up while simultaneously running another business, and why he says he’s not done with serial entrepreneurship yet.

Going from cab driver to barbershop owner might seem like a huge jump, but Singh says he had years of preparation. After pushing his mom to get her cosmetology license and open her hair salon in 2007, he helped her run, advertise and market her shop.

But the process to opening his doors was tedious, and he spent $75,000 in startup costs from his taxi driving and dispatching savings, he says.

“You have to go through permitting. You have to go through dealing with the city,” says Singh. “It took me a solid year to get the license to even open the shop, so I was paying rent for one year before I could open the shop.”

Singh had no experience as a barber, so he partnered with a barber friend of his to open the shop’s doors. Six months later, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. His business partner left the company due to a family matter, so he closed the shop for about a year, but rent still had to be paid, he says.

Singh received two Paycheck Protection Program loans from the Small Business Administration — one for $68,000, and another for $18,000 that was eventually forgiven, he says. He borrowed $20,000 from two friends, another $30,000 from his life insurance and took on $80,000 of credit card debt. He also liquidated his stock portfolio and spent less money on necessities like food “so the business could stay open,” he says.

“I had to sell everything,” he says. “I had to eat less. I literally had to focus on eating $1 per meal to make sure the business stays open.”

During that downtime, Singh enrolled in barber school so Dandies could serve a wider variety of personal grooming types when it reopened in 2021. “As we got more engaged with the community, I had a lot of people from every aspect of life: Men, women, LGBTQ, kids. Almost everybody wanted to come to Dandies,” he says. “So we started expanding into different skill sets and we wanted to cater to everybody.”

Today, Singh owns three Dandies locations, employs 25 people — 15 are barbers — and takes home a $7,000 per month salary, including $3,000 from Dandies and $4,000 from ATCS, he says. He’s paid off his life insurance loan and credit card debt, and is starting to chip away at his remaining PPP loan, which costs about $300 a month, he says. Dandies became profitable in 2023, he adds.

Going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt and cutting back on food to keep a business alive requires a certain kind of mental resilience. Singh’s resilience stems from a childhood in Punjab that was heavily impacted by conflict between Sikh separatists and the Indian government, he says.

In 1988, Singh’s dad was nonfatally shot by a terrorist. A bomb fell in front of his father’s convenience store — where the family spent more time than their own home, says Singh — in 1991. Floods further hurt the store, leading to even more struggle, Singh says.

Thousands of miles away and decades later, Singh taps into the same work ethic and grit that helped him through his childhood, he says. “I just don’t feel any different. I’m doing the same thing that I was doing 19 years ago,” he says. “I still work 15 to 16 hours a day. I still work hard. I still do the things that I need to do … Those are the habits that I’ve developed since my childhood.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Singh says he’s looking forward to adding a third concurrent business to his portfolio: an app called Barber’s Network, where barbers and their clients can reserve chairs and request appointments at barbershop locations across the country. He’s started building the app, which is similar to scheduling apps like Booksy or theCut, using some of Dandies’ profits, he says.

Though he works more than the average person, Singh says he wouldn’t have it any other way, and he doesn’t see that changing for the foreseeable future.

“I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I would want to work all the way through,” he says. “That’s just what I breathe.”

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