MEET ME

I’m Ali Nanne — an entrepreneur, wife, mom of three boys, and someone who has spent most of my adult life building businesses.

My path into entrepreneurship was not traditional. I didn’t finish college, I didn’t go to business school, and I definitely didn’t start with investors, a big network, or some perfectly mapped-out plan. I learned by doing, usually because I had no other choice.

Over the years, I’ve built businesses across beauty, wellness, real estate, sustainability, hospitality, home services, consumer products, and technology. Some I bootstrapped, some I built with partners, some with my husband, Lou.

I’ve raised outside capital, built physical locations, bought into existing businesses, sold multiple companies, made some great decisions, made some expensive ones, and learned that a business can look incredibly successful from the outside while still teaching you exactly what you never want to do again.

The biggest difference between me now and me when I started is probably that I’m much harder to impress with an idea.

I still love ideas. I have way too many of them. But I’m much more interested now in what actually sits underneath the idea: the economics, the operator, the incentives, the ownership, the distribution, the market, what creates value, what destroys it, and whether the thing is really worth years of someone’s life to build.

That perspective took a while to earn.

The Lash Refinery

My first business started almost by accident.

I was in 11th grade when someone asked if I wanted to learn how to do lash extensions. I wasn’t interested in beauty at all at the time. I thought I was going into the medical field, probably nursing or something along those lines, but I was open to learning a new skill, so I said yes.

I started taking clients really young and worked wherever I could make it work — eventually out of my college dorm, apartments, and my mother-in-law’s basement. I put myself everywhere I could think of. Groupon, Google, promotions, whatever might get someone through the door. I didn’t really know what marketing was yet. I just knew I needed people to know I existed.

And suddenly I was booked.

There were stretches where I was working from 7 in the morning until 9 at night, barely stopping to eat or even go to the bathroom because I had said yes to everyone. I had no idea what capacity planning or boundaries were. I just knew people wanted appointments, my schedule was full, and I was making really great money for my age.

At some point, I realized I had built a business without really trying to build a business.

What mattered even more to me at the time was the independence it gave me. I was really young and completely supporting myself. I almost never had to ask anyone for money. If I wanted or needed something, I figured out how to make enough to pay for it. I worked my ass off, and there was something about knowing I could take care of myself that became really important to me.

And if the business needed something I didn’t know how to do, I learned it.

This was before Canva, ChatGPT, AI, or any of the tools that make starting something so much easier now. I bought myself a nice camera because I knew I needed better photos, and then realized I actually had to learn how to use the camera. Then I taught myself Photoshop. I learned websites, branding, photography, marketing, copy, graphics — basically whatever the next problem required.

Looking back at my first logo now is honestly hilarious.

But I didn’t know enough to worry about whether I was qualified to do any of it. I Googled questions, watched YouTube videos, tried things, screwed things up, and figured it out.

That mindset probably shaped everything that came after.

Face Foundrie

Face Foundrie was a much bigger chapter for me. As a co-founder, I helped build the facial-bar concept around making professional skincare more approachable, accessible, and easier to work into people’s everyday lives.

The company grew quickly, and in 2020, I sold my ownership.

That sale taught me how emotional business can be. When you build something from the ground up, it becomes very easy for the business and your identity to blur together. You’re not just selling shares or stepping away from a company — you’re letting go of something you spent years building, thinking about constantly, and tying a huge part of yourself to.

Selling taught me a lot about partnerships, ownership, negotiating, letting go, and what it means to build something that has value beyond you. It was also one of the first times I really understood that being a founder does not always mean you are meant to stay forever.

With that being said, it was not easy. It was a very painful process for me, and I don’t want to look back now and rewrite that chapter as if it were simply a rational business decision that I moved through gracefully. I didn’t. There was a lot of emotion tied up in it, and it took time for me to separate what was happening with the business from what it meant about me personally.

Looking back, I can see how formative that experience was. It changed the way I think about identity, partnerships, ownership, and eventually letting go, and it taught me not to tie so much of who I am to any one business.

Today, Face Foundrie has grown to more than 80 locations nationwide, which has been pretty incredible to watch — especially remembering when the idea had just started between my business partner and me and there was no way of knowing what it could eventually become. I’m genuinely proud of what we started and of everything the brand has continued to become.

LABB Collective

After Face Foundrie, I opened LABB Collective, a beauty and wellness business offering lashes, brows, and medical aesthetic services.

By then, I knew the beauty industry well, but LABB taught me something different: not every good business needs to become enormous.

There was a point when I thought growth automatically meant more locations, more employees, more revenue, more everything. I don’t think that anymore.

I ultimately sold LABB completely, and that process taught me a lot about what a true transfer of ownership actually requires. Selling a business is not just agreeing on a price and signing documents. There are contracts, vendors, employees, systems, accounts, responsibilities, intellectual property, liabilities, and dozens of small things that matter tremendously after closing.

I learned lessons through that process that I now think about while I’m building, not after I’ve decided to sell.

Arch Salon & Suites

Arch was born from a gap I saw in the beauty industry. Talented professionals were ready to run their own business but not ready for the cost and complexity of opening a full salon. We built the infrastructure to make that possible, private suites and booth rentals designed to give beauty entrepreneurs a place to own their craft without owning a building.

I co-founded Arch and remain an owner today. In building it I learned what it really takes to scale a service business across multiple locations, manage real estate, create recurring revenue, and build systems that work for the people inside them. It also taught me some of the harder lessons in business, about partnership, structure, and what it means to build something that outlasts any single role.

Those lessons have shaped everything I have built since.

Gypcycle

Lou and I later became 50% partners in Gypcycle, a drywall recycling company originally founded by our business partners.

The way we got involved is actually very Lou. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and fertilizer markets started getting disrupted, he went down one of his late-night research rabbit holes trying to understand what was happening and why. Somewhere in that process, he started learning about gypsum — how much drywall ends up in landfills, the value of the gypsum inside it, and the different ways it can be recycled and reused, including in agriculture.

That curiosity eventually connected us with the family who had founded Gypcycle, who we now consider close friends as well as business partners. They had created something really interesting, and it became fascinating to watch what happened when we brought very different backgrounds and strengths to the same business.

They knew the product and the operation. Lou has this ability to get completely obsessed with understanding an opportunity, see where it could go, and think much bigger around it. And we were able to bring experience from building companies, branding, relationships, growth, and the other pieces that come with taking a good idea and helping it become a larger business.

Gypcycle has been a really good reminder for me that not every opportunity has to start with us. Sometimes the better opportunity is recognizing something someone else has built, respecting what they already know, and figuring out what can happen when the right people bring very different strengths to the table.

It’s also one of my favorite examples of how random entrepreneurship can be. One night Lou was researching the effects of a war on fertilizer markets, and somehow that eventually led us into drywall recycling.

The Poconos Club

One of the biggest projects Lou and I took on was The Poconos Club, and honestly, the way it started was kind of ridiculous.

A friend of ours, who runs Rise Capital, had somehow come across a piece of land for sale through what I think was basically a random email. It was 409 acres in the Pocono Mountains, including an existing golf course, and the township was selling it through a bidding process.

He brought it to Lou, and we decided to take a gamble on it.

We really did not think we were going to win. We were bidding against experienced hotel developers and people who, on paper, probably made a lot more sense for the property than we did. The bid itself had to be physically delivered by a deadline, so in true fashion, we literally flew someone there to get it into the mailbox on time.

Then came the city council meeting.

Lou and I were sitting at one of our son’s baseball games, listening to the meeting virtually while they read through the bids. The adrenaline was insane. We knew there was one bidder who likely would have beat us, but somehow their bid did not make it in on time because of vehicle issues — which is still funny to me because, I mean, Uber exists — and suddenly it felt like we might actually have a shot.

Right as they were getting to our bid, the virtual meeting dropped. So now we are sitting at a baseball field, completely panicked, trying to figure out if we had just won 409 acres in the Poconos or not. Eventually the meeting came back online, and we found out we had won.

And just like that, what had started as a random opportunity suddenly became a very real and very large project. The vision grew quickly from there. We began looking at the property as much more than a golf course — residential development, hospitality, commercial space, events, and the potential to create an entire destination around it.

It was also one of the first times I really moved away from my instinct to bootstrap everything. A project of that size required outside capital, so we brought in investors and I had to learn a completely different side of business: capital allocation, development risk, ownership, and the responsibility that comes with making decisions when other people have trusted you with their money.

As the project evolved, we and our business partner began to see the next phase differently, particularly around where investor capital should be focused and what deserved priority. It was not really about one side being right and the other being wrong. We simply had different convictions around what the project needed next. Eventually, selling our interest to our business partner made the most sense.

In roughly one year, we were able to walk away having nearly 6x’d our original investment, which I’m incredibly proud of.

That experience changed the way I think about ownership. Earlier in my career, I probably would have felt like I needed to be the person who carried the entire vision through simply because I had helped start it. The Poconos Club taught me that sometimes the best decision is recognizing the value you created, taking the return, and being willing to put your time and capital toward the opportunities where you have the strongest conviction.

Waterloo Turf

After moving to Florida, Lou and I also bought into Waterloo Turf in the Palm Beach market. What has made Waterloo interesting is that we approached it very differently than I would have approached an operating business earlier in my career. Our goal was never to buy ourselves another full-time job.

Granger became our General Manager and a major part of the business operationally, and Waterloo has reinforced something I believe much more strongly now: giving the right operator meaningful upside can completely change a business. Owners can become so protective over percentages that they miss the bigger picture. Owning 100% of something you have to personally carry is not automatically better than owning less of something where an exceptional operator is genuinely motivated to grow the value.

Giving the right person a piece of the pie changes the relationship. They think differently when the outcome matters to them differently. It creates a level of ownership, responsibility, and alignment that you simply cannot manufacture with a job title. Of course, it has to be the right person. But when it is, it can be a game changer.

Waterloo has taught me a lot about incentives, trust, delegation, and the difference between owning a business and needing to personally run it. That model has become much more interesting to me as I think about what I want ownership to look like going forward.

Faceletic

Faceletic is probably the best representation of how differently I build today.

I started developing the company in 2024 while I was still very much in the beauty industry, but this was different from anything I had built before. I wasn’t opening another location or creating another service-based business. I wanted to build a product I personally wanted to exist, and for the first time, I wanted to understand what it really meant to manufacture something from the ground up.

That has turned Faceletic into a completely different kind of education for me.

This is the first time I’ve truly been involved in creating and manufacturing a physical product from the very beginning — starting with an idea in my head and then working through formulation, ingredients, testing, packaging, manufacturers, costs, ownership of the formula, and all of the decisions that happen long before a customer ever sees the finished product.

I’ve learned very quickly that having an idea for a product you would personally buy and actually turning that into something real are two very different things.

There is a much easier version of this business I could have launched already. I could choose a stock formula, put it in beautiful packaging, create a great brand around it, and probably get it to market much faster.

I know how to do that.

But that isn’t what I want Faceletic to be.

I’ve become almost annoyingly curious about every part of the process. Why is this ingredient in the formula? What is it actually doing? Who owns the formula once it is created? What happens if I ever need to move manufacturers? Is the packaging going to perform the way I expect it to? Can the margins support the kind of company I eventually want to build? Can the supply chain actually scale?

And probably most importantly: is the end product actually good enough that I would be excited to buy it myself?

That has made the process slower than I originally expected, and at times honestly pretty frustrating.

I’ve changed directions, questioned formulas I thought were close, looked at different manufacturers, reconsidered packaging, gone deeper into ingredients than I ever thought I would, and had plenty of moments where I’ve wondered why I’m making this so difficult on myself.

But I also know that I don’t want to build something just so I can say I launched another company.

Faceletic is still in development, so there is a lot about the brand and the products that I’m intentionally not sharing yet. What I can say is that this process has pushed me much deeper into product development and manufacturing than anything I’ve done before, and it has completely changed my appreciation for what it takes to create a physical product from scratch.

It has also made me realize how many decisions get made years before a customer ever experiences a brand that can ultimately determine how valuable — or difficult — that company becomes later.

The current plan is to launch in 2027.

Faceletic has probably tested my patience more than anything else I’ve built, but I think a lot of that comes from building it at a point in my life where my standards are much higher.

When I was younger, one of my biggest advantages was that I didn’t know enough to overthink everything. I would see something I wanted to build and just start figuring it out.

Now I know more.

I understand why margins matter. I understand why ownership and IP matter. I understand how important the right manufacturing relationships and partnerships can be. I know that decisions you make early can either create real value later or turn into very expensive problems.

The challenge with Faceletic has been figuring out how to use all of that experience without letting it take away the part of me that was always willing to just go build something.

I’m still figuring that balance out, and honestly, I think that is part of what makes this chapter so interesting for me.

Where I Am Now

I don’t really think of myself as belonging to one industry anymore.

I like understanding businesses — why some become incredibly valuable and others simply become incredibly exhausting.

I like seeing something inefficient or outdated and asking whether there is a better business underneath it. Sometimes that means starting something. Sometimes it means buying something. Sometimes it means finding a better operator, giving away more equity than your ego initially wants to, raising outside capital, or selling.

There is no shortage of things I could build. The much harder question now is what deserves my time, money, attention, reputation, and years of my life.

Face Foundrie taught me about ownership and identity. LABB taught me what truly selling and transferring a company involves. Arch taught me to look underneath an industry. Gypcycle taught me that I could build outside of what I already knew. The Poconos Club taught me about capital, alignment, and return. Waterloo taught me the power of putting the right operator in the right seat and giving them meaningful upside.

And Faceletic is making me use almost all of those lessons at once.

Why I’m Sharing It

I’m not particularly interested in teaching people how to “become an entrepreneur.” There is plenty of that already.

I’m much more interested in what happens once you’re actually in it.

Is the idea worth pursuing? Is the business you already own actually a good business? Should you scale it or keep it small and profitable? Are you protecting your ownership percentage at the expense of building something bigger? Do you need to be the operator? Should you raise money? Should you sell? Are you still pursuing something because the opportunity is strong, or because you’ve already given too much of yourself to it to imagine stopping?

Those are the questions I care about now.

Because starting something is no longer the interesting part to me.

Knowing what to build, how to structure it, who to build it with, where to put the money, when to keep going, and when to move on — that’s the part I think is worth talking about.