Barbershop and hotel owner fine-tunes local experiences with technology

[News Bot]

For some people, it takes a long time to figure out what their life’s passion is going to be. Jonathan Morris started his journey as an entrepreneur in the fourth grade, when he sold sports-team themed bookmarks to classmates. Much later, in 2014, he channeled that enterprising spirit into opening his first official business – a barbershop in Fort Worth, Texas. “It’s in me to take ideas I’m fixated on and cultivate them into experiences that other people get to share as well. My hypothesis was that other people are likely to feel the same way,” says Morris, who grew up in Denton, Texas, but moved to Fort Worth (a half-hour west) 10 years ago from Dallas. “At that time, I saw a resurgence of barber culture and I saw it happening all over the world. But not in the town I live in. I wanted to create the barbershop that I’d want to go to.” A similar motivation led to his second business in Fort Worth: the Hotel Dryce, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary.

An avid traveler, Morris likes to stay in independently owned/boutique establishments. “These are places that give me a sense of place and tell me where I am in a really authentic way, and again, I looked around my town and I didn't see anything like that. I don't think that people know how creative our city is. We're often marked as just being a town steeped in western heritage. We're more than just a bunch of cowboys down the street from Dallas. We're a town full of incredible artists and innovative entrepreneurs who are building toward the future and developing a more inclusive and diverse Fort Worth community than ever before.” Morris gives a taste of that through virtual tours on Instagram and explains how there is a line that connects the two businesses, and his approach to life, too. [caption id=attachment_177933" align="alignnone" width="1024]https://blogs.windows.com/wp-content/uploads/prod/sites/2/2022/12/JM1-white-space-1024x904.jpg Portrait of Jonathan Morris (photo courtesy of Jonathan Morris)[/caption] Hotels and barbershops, he says, are businesses that have been around for a long time. And with them come old-school ideas on how to operate them. But he wanted to adapt those institutions to more modern ways of doing things. “One of the things that I find particularly important is to be able to take those really basic services and layer tech over top of them. That's what I've done in my entrepreneurial life. For nine years now, I’ve taken things that have been done forever and introduced them to my communities in a way that meets them where the world is moving and the way that people are interacting,” says Morris, who saw the opportunity for online and mobile bookings early on for the barbershop and later, with his hotel, integrated SMS communication between his guests and staff to provide better experiences. Find out more about him, his businesses and Fort Worth on Instagram. Lead photo: Portrait of Jonathan Morris (photo courtesy of Jonathan Morris)

 

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