Nathan Wallace Turned $38 in Walmart Clippers Into a Mobile Barbershop

Nathan Wallace, founder of Nate Cutzzz.

A $38 Bet During Lockdown

Wallace grew up watching his dad cut yards on the side. His father taught during the week and used the lawn work to supplement the income, and the arrangement stuck with Wallace long before he had a word for it. Someone learns a skill, that skill turns into money, the money changes what's possible.

Then Covid hit. Wallace had gotten particular about his appearance and was going in for haircuts nearly every week, which costs money he suddenly couldn't earn. Instead of letting it go, he did what his dad had done. He learned the skill himself.

The startup cost was around $38 for a set of clippers at Walmart. The training was YouTube, video after video after video. His first client was his own head, which turned out to be the advantage of a nationwide lockdown.

After a few months of that, he worked up the nerve to cut his friends and teammates. His first real customer was Austin Williams, a friend from high school who saw the work and took the chance. Williams is on the Nate Cutzzz business card to this day. Teammates followed, then their friends, and the hobby stopped being a hobby.

The Barbershop That Comes to You

Ask Wallace to describe the business in a sentence and he has it ready: a barbershop that comes to you and is for you. The haircut has to be good, but the thing he actually sells is convenience. You don't drive anywhere. You don't sit in a waiting room. He pulls up.

The Nate Cutzzz brand mark, including the promise that gets most first-time clients in the chair.

Running it looks like this. Clients message him on Instagram to book. He maps the day around where people are and when they want to be cut. Then he drives the Solara to a string of bathrooms, living rooms and dorm rooms across Nashville.

He has never taken outside funding, and that was a decision rather than a limitation. The business was supposed to be a hobby, the revenue covered what he needed, and there was nothing he wanted badly enough to raise for. He can imagine crowdfunding after graduation if he decides to expand, but not before.

What makes the operation genuinely hard is everything else on his schedule. Wallace is a full-time student, an athlete and works a part-time job. The barbershop competes with all of it.

Learning to Explain a Business He Was Already Running

Wallace at Lipscomb, where he studied entrepreneurship and will return for graduate school.

Wallace had never pitched anything before the 2025 CEO Global Pitch Competition. He has entered several more at Lipscomb since, and he treats all of them as practice: a way to stand in front of judges and find out what they don't believe. The same objection came back every time. Scalability. Judges struggled to see how one person with clippers and a Solara becomes a company, and some of them couldn't see that it was already a working business rather than a proposal. His read on that is unusually clear-eyed for someone still learning to pitch. The problem was never the business. It was that he hadn't yet built the version of the explanation that answers the question before it gets asked.

That's where Jeff Cohu came in. Cohu is a faculty adviser at Lipscomb and, as Wallace's entrepreneurship professor, the person he brings problems to. What Cohu spotted was a routing problem hiding inside the business model. Wallace was taking appointments across scattered zip codes and burning time and gas driving between them.

The fix was to stop thinking about it as one appointment at a time. Cohu pushed him toward blocking off days for a single location and staying put: set up shop at a nursing home, for instance, and cut there all day. Same clippers, same skill, an entirely different set of economics.

Burnout, Grad School and a Household Name

Asked what the hardest part is, Wallace doesn't say money or time. He says consistency and burnout, and he's specific about why. When a hobby becomes a business, the thing you did because you loved it becomes the thing you have to do. Staying motivated means remembering why you picked up the clippers in the first place.

He is heading back to Lipscomb for graduate school, with Cohu still down the hall. After that he wants to give the business real attention: smooth out the mobile model, fix the parts that don't work yet, and build an app that uses AI to handle scheduling and help clients figure out which style actually suits them.

A concept rendering of where Wallace wants to take the mobile model. For now, the fleet is one 1999 Toyota Solara.

The long-term goal is for Nate Cutzzz to become a household name. What he wants after that is the part worth paying attention to: once the business is big enough, he intends to start giving back to the community that has been sitting in his chair since high school.

	The startup cost can be $38. Wallace bought clippers at Walmart and learned on YouTube. Not every business needs funding to begin, and waiting for capital is often waiting for permission you don't need.
	Practice where the stakes are low. He learned to cut hair on his own head during lockdown, when a bad result had no audience. Find the version of your idea you can get wrong cheaply.

	Losing a pitch is data. Judges kept raising scalability. Rather than deciding they were wrong, Wallace treated the repeated objection as the thing his pitch had to solve.
	A good adviser changes the model, not the pitch. Jeff Cohu didn't polish Wallace's slides. He found the routing problem underneath them and suggested a different way to run the day.