How serial entrepreneur grew businesses after starting as taxi driver
Money Singh wasn’t too happy about his move from Punjab, India, to San Francisco in 2006, when he was 19 years old.
“I was [depressed] for that one year. “I wanted to go back,” says Singh, now 38. “I was very socially lonely.”
He says he initially went to college in the Bay Area but dropped out after some of his credits from school in India didn’t transfer. His mother insisted he find a job quickly, so he worked briefly at a local pharmacy, then earned about $6 an hour as a clerk for his uncle’s taxi company, he said.
Singh spent the next 12-plus years working in the taxi industry; He first drove for himself, then built a five-cab fleet, ran his own trucking company, then founded Driver’s Network, an advertising and marketing agency for independent drivers.
DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to using AI to communicate better
In 2018, Singh decided he needed to do something unrelated to taxis. So, in addition to running Driver’s Network, 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, who owned a hair salon in India and later in Northern California.
Dandies generated $1.07 million in sales last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. ATCS Platform Solutions generated $1.18 million in revenue, according to the documents. Both businesses are profitable, says Singh, who works full-time at Dandies and spends about 20 hours a week at ATCS.
It explains how Singh built Dandies from scratch while simultaneously running another business, and why he’s not done with serial entrepreneurship yet.
‘I had to sell everything’
Going from taxi driver to barber shop owner may seem like a big leap, but Singh says he’s spent years preparing. After pressuring her mother to get her cosmetology license and open her hair salon in 2007, she helped run, advertise and market her shop.
But the process of opening his doors was tedious, and he says he spent $75,000 on start-up expenses to drive a taxi and spread out savings.
“You have to get permission. You have to deal with the city,” Singh says. “It took me a full year to even get a license to open the shop, so I was paying rent for a year before I opened the shop.”
Singh had no barbering experience, so he partnered with a barber friend to open the shop’s doors. Six months later, the Covid-19 epidemic emerged. He says his business partner left the company due to a family issue, so he closed the shop for about a year, but the rent still had to be paid.
Dandies in Mountainview, California reopened in 2021.
Money Singh
Singh says he received two Paycheck Protection Program loans from the Small Business Administration, one for $68,000 and the other for $18,000, which were eventually forgiven. He borrowed $20,000 from two friends, $30,000 from life insurance, and took on $80,000 in credit card debt. He also says he’s liquidating his stock portfolio and spending less on necessities like food “so the business can stay open.”
“I had to sell everything,” he says. “I had to eat less. I literally had to focus on eating $1 per meal to keep the business open.”
During this outage, Singh enrolled in barber school so that Dandies could serve a more diverse range of personal care types when it reopens in 2021. “As we got more involved with the community, there were so many people from all walks of life: Men, women, LGBTQ, kids. Almost everyone wanted to come to Dandies,” he says. “So we started expanding into different skill sets and wanted to appeal to everyone.”
Today Singh owns three Dandies stores, employs 25 people (15 of them barbers) and takes home a monthly salary of $7,000, of which $3,000 comes from Dandies and $4,000 from ATCS. He says he’s paid off his life insurance loan and credit card debt and is beginning to drain his remaining PPP loan, which costs about $300 a month. He adds that Dandies will become profitable in 2023.
‘I’m doing the same thing I did 19 years ago’
It takes a kind of mental toughness to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and cut back on food to keep a business afloat. Singh’s resilience, he says, stems from a childhood spent in Punjab, which was greatly affected by conflict between Sikh separatists and the Indian government.
In 1988, Singh’s father was non-fatally shot by a terrorist. In 1991, Singh says, a bomb hit outside his father’s grocery store – where the family spent more time than at home. Singh says the flood caused further damage to the store and led to even more struggles.
Thousands of miles away and decades later, Singh says he draws on the same work ethic and grit that helped him through his childhood. “I don’t feel any different. I’m doing the same thing I did 19 years ago,” he says. “I still work 15-16 hours a day. I still work hard. I still do the things I have to do… These are the habits I’ve had since I was a kid.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Singh says he’s looking forward to adding a third simultaneous business to his portfolio: an app called Barber’s Network, where barbers and their customers can reserve chairs and request appointments at barbershops across the country. He says he used some of Dandies’ profits to start developing the app, which is similar to planning apps like Booksy or theCut.
Even though he works harder than the average person, Singh says it couldn’t be any other way and he doesn’t see that changing in the foreseeable future.
“I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I’d like to work from start to finish,” he says. “It’s just what I breathe.”
Want to level up your AI skills? Sign up for CNBC Make It’s new online course Smarter, How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Communicate Better at Work?. Get custom prompts to optimize emails, notes, and presentations based on tone, context, and audience. Sign up today with coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory 20% discount. Offer valid from October 21 to October 28, 2025.
Plus, Sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter get tips and tricks for success in business, money and life and Request to join our private community on LinkedIn connecting with experts and peers.
