Who Is CEO of Regis: Matthew Doctor's Rise from J.P. Morgan to Leading 4,087 Salons

A lot of people asking who is CEO of Regis might expect to find a beauty industry veteran or a longtime salon insider. Instead, they'd find a Wall Street-trained deal-maker who had never cut a single head of hair professionally but somehow became the person who kept over 4,000 of them running. That person is Matthew Doctor — and his path to the top of Regis Corporation is a pretty good reminder that business skill, more often than people think, travels across industries just fine.

Who Is CEO of Regis and How Did It All Begin

Matthew Doctor didn't grow up with any obvious connection to the beauty business. He earned a BBA in Finance from Emory University's Goizueta Business School, then did what a lot of ambitious finance graduates do — he went straight to Wall Street. In September 2009, he joined J.P. Morgan in New York as an Investment Banking Associate in the Financial Institutions Group. For nearly five years, he worked on M&A deals and capital markets transactions for specialty finance clients. It's the kind of job that doesn't leave much room for anything else, but it teaches you to read a balance sheet the way other people read a novel — fast, critically, and looking for the parts that don't add up.

That foundation turned out to be worth more than any industry-specific experience he could have picked up elsewhere. And it set the tone for every career move that followed.

Regis CEO Matthew Doctor: Building a Franchise Playbook at RBI and Kava

After J.P. Morgan, Doctor moved into the franchise world in a serious way. From June 2014 to April 2017, he held multiple roles at Restaurant Brands International — the company behind Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes. He worked his way up to Head of Global Development and Franchisee Performance for Burger King, led M&A activity across Asia, and drove Tim Hortons' expansion in the United States. He was operating at a genuinely international level, working across continents and figuring out how massive franchise systems scale — and where they crack under pressure.

Then he made a move that surprised some people. Instead of climbing further up the corporate ladder, he stepped sideways into Kava Restaurants, a Tim Hortons franchisee, joining as Partner and CFO in May 2018. From the outside it might have looked like a step down. From the inside, it was probably one of the smartest things he ever did. Running a franchisee operation rather than the franchisor gives you a completely different perspective — you stop thinking in strategy decks and start thinking in rent, labor costs, and how hard it actually is to hold onto good staff. That experience would define how he led Regis later on.

Regis CEO Appointment: From Consultant to Corner Office in Under 2 Years

Doctor came to Regis in December 2020 as a consultant — a pretty low-key entry for someone who'd end up running the whole thing. By February 2021 he was brought on full-time as Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. By December 2021 the board had made him Interim CEO. And by May 2022 — less than 18 months after first getting involved — he was named permanent President and CEO. That's a fast ascent by any standard, and it didn't happen because the company was thriving. Regis was carrying heavy debt, navigating the tail end of the pandemic, and dealing with technology systems that had fallen behind the times. Doctor walked into a genuine mess and the board decided, after watching him up close for a year and a half, that he was the right person to clean it up.

His salary as CEO reached approximately $1.6 million, according to SEC filings — a figure that reflected both his seniority and the complexity of the turnaround task he had taken on.

What the Regis CEO Actually Accomplished: Numbers That Tell the Story

Doctor's tenure at the top of Regis was defined by a few concrete wins that mattered more than any press release. In June 2024, he closed a major refinancing deal — a $105 million term loan that replaced the company's existing debt, cut outstanding indebtedness by more than $80 million, and saved roughly $7 million in annual cash interest. That single deal bought Regis breathing room it hadn't had in years, pushing the debt maturity from August 2025 all the way out to June 2029. He also oversaw a full migration to the Zenoti point-of-sale system across the network, something the company had been trying to do for a long time, and launched a mobile-first booking platform that brought down no-show rates and made the customer experience noticeably smoother.

By the time he was winding down, Supercuts same-store sales were up 4.5% and consolidated sales had grown 2.8% in the first two months of Q4 fiscal 2025. Fiscal year 2025 closed with $210.1 million in revenue, $19.9 million in operating income, and $31.6 million in Adjusted EBITDA. The company also posted positive cash from operations for two consecutive quarters — something Regis hadn't managed since Q1 2018. None of these are flashy numbers, but for a company that had been fighting for its financial life, they represented a real turnaround.

What's Happening at Regis Now: Jim Lain Takes Over

On June 23, 2025, Regis announced that Matthew Doctor would step down effective June 30, 2025, after 4.5 years with the company. The board moved quickly, appointing Jim Lain — the company's EVP of Brand Operations for Supercuts and Cost Cutters — as interim President and CEO. Lain has over 30 years of retail and franchise experience, including a senior role at Gap Inc. where he ran a $2.5 billion business across 750 stores. Doctor agreed to stay on in a support role through September 1, 2025, to help keep things stable while the search for a permanent successor gets underway. So for anyone still searching who is CEO of Regis today, the answer right now is Jim Lain. The board has formed a Succession Planning Committee and hired an outside executive search firm to find the next permanent leader, looking at both internal and external candidates. As of March 31, 2025, Regis operated or franchised 4,087 locations under brands including Supercuts, SmartStyle, Cost Cutters, Roosters, and First Choice Haircutters.

Matthew Doctor's Core Ideas on How to Build a Successful Career

Doctor never really positioned himself as a public philosopher on leadership — he was more the type to let results do the talking. But his career choices tell a pretty clear story about what he believed. He never skipped the fundamentals. Starting in investment banking at J.P. Morgan, then moving through global franchise strategy at RBI, then getting his hands dirty as an actual franchisee operator — each step built something the previous one couldn't have given him. He collected perspectives rather than just climbing titles.

He also had a consistent habit of moving toward hard situations rather than comfortable ones. Taking the Regis Interim CEO role meant walking into a company with serious debt, aging technology, and an anxious franchisee base. Most executives in his position would have waited for something cleaner. He didn't. And when he became permanent CEO, he made a point of saying he'd spent significant time actually listening to franchisees before setting strategy — not the most common approach in corporate environments, but exactly the kind of thing that earns trust from people on the ground. The lesson, if there is one, is pretty simple: do the unglamorous work, understand what it feels like to be on the other side, and build your credibility before you build your title.