Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and I’m coming in today almost a little bit embarrassed of myself because I do not know how we have not hit this topic on the podcast yet.
I was actually trying to point somebody to this topic. Somebody hit me up in the DMs and was super overwhelmed and was asking me where to start and what I thought was missing. And I thought, “Oh my goodness, well, all they need to know is the five key roles in their business.” So I was looking through the podcast directory and I was like, “Oh my goodness. I really never recorded something on this.” It’s something I talk about in Thrivers Society all the time. I’ve been coaching to it for 10 years and somehow it’s never made the show. My deepest condolences to those who did not know it yet, but today that changes because we are going to dive all the way in.
Part of the reason I got into coaching for beauty professionals is that when I joined the industry, one of the things that was so glaringly obvious to me is that we were an industry of entrepreneurs, businesspeople who were massively lacking in business education. It’s so wild. And I look back now—and I’m in California, so I spent 1600 hours in beauty school and if we had maybe two two-hour presentations on business, maybe, I think that’s even a generous assumption, and then we were sent out into the world, health and safety, you’re good to go, best of luck to you.
We shouldn’t be surprised when over 90% of those who get licensed don’t stick with the career long-term. They’re not set up for success.
When I joined the industry, what worked to my benefit and the reason I was promoted to the position of salon director and was able to run the business for an absentee owner was because I came into the industry with a solid business knowledge foundation because of my previous work experience. I had worked corporate and I had specifically worked in both marketing and in special events, and so I had learned so much about organic marketing and aggressive marketing and nurture-based communication and retention and all of these things that weren’t taught to us in cosmetology school. So thankfully that life experience was able to set me on the right track, but it hit me really early when I was starting to build a clientele that the tactics people were using around me and the burnout that they were experiencing and the way they were trying to manage their lives was just not sustainable.
I’ve been coaching to this idea of the five key roles in every business since late 2012 and I really want to clue you into this concept if you’ve never heard it before, if you have heard it, I want to invite you to recenter around it and give yourself a little crosscheck of what are the areas of my business that are going well. What are the areas of my business that are going poorly and where do I need to spend more time?
So let me explain to you how this concept works. When I talk about the five key roles in a business, it’s not just a business if you’re a salon owner or only if you’re a hair stylist or only if you’re a barber. These five key roles exist in any business that you could dream up. You could decide to create an Etsy shop. You could open a bakery. You could work in corporate America. Doesn’t matter. These five key roles are critical everywhere.
The first role in any good business is that of the CEO, right? Every good business that we can think of has somebody at the top calling the shots, running the business, looking over everything, right? First we got that CEO.
Then we have the CMO, chief marketing officer. Then we have the CFO, the person who runs the finances. Then we have the COO, who is in charge of business operations. Those are the four roles in the C-suite, but like I said, there are five key roles. So what’s the fifth one? The fifth key role is called the Talent, and the Talent is the hardest-working, grinded-out key component of any business out there. However, generally speaking, it is also the lowest-paid, lowest-valued, most easily replaceable component of any workforce.
I want you to think about that for a second. Go back in time and think about maybe your first job, the first job that you ever worked. How replaceable were you in that role? Maybe you worked at a frozen yogurt shop. If you quit on Tuesday, by the following week, they could bring in somebody else who could do the soft serve pretty much as well as you, right? You were easily replaceable. You were likely making a pretty low wage. The tasks that you were doing, they required some kind of skill level. You had to have some training. There was some education needed, but you weren’t the only one who could work the froyo machine. Like you could teach hundreds of thousands of people to work the froyo machine, right? You weren’t special or exceptional in that, but it was an important function of the business at the frozen yogurt shop. Makes sense?
We think about a business like a grocery store. When you go into the grocery store, who’s the Talent in the grocery store? Pretty much every human that you or I would interact with is the Talent, from the cashier to the bagger to the person who’s working the customer service desk to the person who’s restocking the shelves to the person who’s coordinating the produce order, even to the general manager of that store. If you think about it, those are all replaceable roles, but they’re the Talent. They’re critical to the daily operations of that grocery store or that frozen yogurt shop, right?
When you are working in the salon as a stylist or as a day-to-day salon owner—you ready for it? Drum roll, please. You’re showing up as the Talent of your business, as the hardest-working, most easily replaceable, and often the lowest paid member of the business.
And as I say that, if you’ve never heard me talk about this concept before, you might have even done a head tilt, like, “What is she talking about? No, I mean, I make good money behind the chair as a stylist. I’m not the lowest-paid member here.” Like maybe even you’re a stylist at a team-based salon or even a booth rental salon, and you’re like, “Uh, no, I make the most money of anybody here.” That’s fine. But making the most money of anybody in your existing building doesn’t mean you’re not the Talent. You’re still the Talent.
Here’s the cross check. If you stop showing up to do haircuts and color services tomorrow, would you still make the most money or would that money go away? Well, obviously the money would go away. It’s only happening because of the services you’re doing, the work that you’re performing, the hair that you’re achieving. That is Talent-based work.
And while Talent based work is critical in any business, I mean, heck, I’m being the Talent of my own business as I’m here recording this podcast right now. So I’m not saying you eliminate the Talent in your business. What I’m saying is the revenue in my business is not generated by this podcast. When I show up and do this podcast, it’s not the thing that’s made my business super successful. When I show up and do this podcast, when you show up and do cuts, color, chemical services, whatever, that is not what is the make-or-break on the success of your business. That is simply fulfillment.
Talent fulfills on the promise. The promise of working with you as a stylist, the promise of working with your salon is what? Confidence, great hair, great skincare if that’s something that you offer. All the Talent does is fulfill on the promise.
I need you to remember before I move on that the Talent is also the lowest paid, most easily replaceable member of the team. And here’s the crosscheck: if you stop doing hair tomorrow, would your clients just never get their hair done again? Or would they find somebody else? They’d always find somebody else. Life would go on.
So the question becomes, how do we make you irreplaceable? How do we find a way to increase your income without you having to do a higher volume of clients? How do we maximize your time so that you don’t have to work a 12-hour day to squeeze everybody in, double book, double column in order to make as much money as possible? How do we shift from a model where it’s based on volume, time behind the chair, amount of guests you’re able to serve in a day, right? How do we shift away from that?
And the way that we shift away from it is honoring the four other C-suite level roles in your business. Because that, my friends, is where the money is made, that is where the strategy comes from, and that is the most ignored piece of business.
As a beauty professional, we love to ignore the C-suite. We love to tell the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the CMO to take a backseat. The Talent is running the show around here. I don’t get time for Instagram. I don’t know if there’s enough, not enough hours in the day for that. And you know what else? I hate it. I hate it. I hate social media. I hate the game. Perfect. So then you just fired your chief marketing officer, right? They’re out. Chief marketing officer, you’re out. You’re annoying. I don’t like what you have to do. You’re out.
Then the poor CFO, the CFO didn’t even stand a chance. We’re like, “don’t talk to me about the money. I don’t want to talk about money. I do not. Taxes. Taxes is a bad word. I don’t want to talk about it.” So the CFO doesn’t get a seat at the table either. Like we’re barely managing the money for a lot of you. Not all of you. Some of you have given the CFO a seat at the table, some of you don’t have a CFO. You have the money person, but it’s not really a CFO, and there’s a difference between like, “Well, I manage the money,” and being a CFO.
If I were like, listen, you’ve gotta come in and you’ve gotta run a multimillion dollar business, would you just be like, “Yeah, I can manage the money in that.” Or would you want a CFO who knows what was up? I mean, obviously you’d want the CFO or the IRS would come knocking and your business wouldn’t stand. So you can’t have just a money person in your business. We need to think CFO, and we’ll talk about what that means in a second.
But often, like if I had a nickel for every time I asked a stylist or salon owner, like, “I don’t want to know what your top line services were. I want to know what your profit margin was last month,” less than half can tell me that on the fly, and that means you don’t have a CFO. You might have a money person, but you don’t got a CFO.
Then we have the chief operations officer. The chief operations officer is like your eyes on the ground. They are looking at what’s up in client experience today. As a beauty professional, client experience today is night and day from what it was even five years ago—heck, it’s night and day from even what it was two years ago. It is so different. What people mean by amenities is different. What people mean by exceptional experiences is different. What clients have come to expect from you is so radically different and your COO is on the pulse of that.
Your COO cannot get complacent. Can’t be like, “Well, this has always worked for us.” That phrase is doomsday for business. “Well, this has always worked for us before.” That’s famous last words and the COO was on the ground saying, “Nah, I know, I know that worked in the past, but I feel like we’re missing the mark.” Or “I feel like we can do better,” or “listen, I was looking, and this is what’s emerging. We should consider this.” These are the things the COO does.
Then we have the CEO and the CEO is living right up at the top, right? The CEO can also be called the visionary. So you listening to this, I don’t care if you are a commission stylist, a booth renter, a salon owner, an educator, a barber, a makeup artist, a tanning professional, or a dog walker. You are the CEO of whatever you chose to do as a professional. 100%. You’re the visionary of that. You got into this profession of this industry with a vision. You knew what you wanted out of this lifetime, a hundred percent. All of you did. And you thought about what your career could look like and who you would serve and how you would serve them and the lifestyle it would provide for you. So the CEO is working to ensure that all of those things happen no matter what, like come H or high water, like that’s going to work out. The CEO is making the hard decisions to ensure that that happens.
If you’re a salon owner, the CEO is the person that fires people or makes a judgment call, and the COO can help you with that because the COO was on the ground in the day-to-day operations. And they can say, “Listen, this person’s not working out. It’s not looking good. We have to make a decision.” But when the COO can’t, the CEO comes in and follows what we like to call in my business as the enterprise commitment.
With the enterprise commitment, sometimes you have to make decisions that break your heart, even though you know it’s what’s right, because the survival of the enterprise, the survival of the business is a number one. And this is also one of the most difficult things in our industry, especially because we’re in the relationship business, right? We have these deep, impactful relationships with our clients. We have these deep, impactful relationships with our stylists. We have these deep, impactful relationships with ourselves and our family, and so we tolerate a lot of nonsense for way too long, because we worry about who’s going to get hurt in the process.
Successful business owners don’t think that way, and it’s not about being selfish. And this is where you get to remove yourself and say, “This is not about me being a bad person.” You might love the person that you have to let go, but with the enterprise commitment saying, “But if I keep this person, or if I allow this behavior to continue, the business won’t survive. We’ll have to shut our doors,” then you’re not being in alignment with the enterprise commitment.
When you start thinking through with that enterprise commitment, it becomes a filter for everything.
Remember that chief marketing officer that you fired a few minutes back, ‘cause you were like, “Instagram is the worst. I hate social media. I don’t have time. I would take pictures of my clients, but I don’t have time to do it.” So basically you fired the chief marketing officer. No smart CEO on the planet would be like, “You know what we’re going to do? We want to make more money. We want to continue to sustain what we have, so let’s fire the marketing person.” No logical business would ever do that.
But in our industry, we allow that to be the excuse. Marketing is too hard. Same with finance. “I’ll manage the money as much as I need to so that the IRS doesn’t come knocking, but money is too hard.” The unfortunate thing about that is we got into this industry to make money. Can I get an amen? Anybody who says, “No, I just got into it for the fun of it,” get serious though. Then choose an awesome hobby that doesn’t pay because this is our career so it actually does need to make money.
Your CFO, like my CFO is helping us to choose where to invest, is telling us, like will force me to spend on marketing. He’ll be like, “You’re underspending on marketing. You’re overspending on this. You need to watch this margin,” like having those conversations.
Now, as I’m saying this, some of you 15 minutes in are lost and you’re like, “Britt, I’m never going to hire these five people.” You are these five people.
Now at this point in this business, I’ve been coaching for a decade, so yes, I am blessed to have these roles filled in my business and have people supporting me with them. They’ll all tell you, if you asked them, I sat in each of these seats. I did the marketing alone for years. I did operations alone, finances alone, CEO alone, and I did the Talent stuff, right? I did the videos. I did the podcasts, all the stuff, all alone, and this is what I want you to resonate with. This is the mind-blown moment. If you are in a suite, if you are a booth renter, if you’re a commission stylist, no matter how you work, you need to do all five of these key roles because the enterprise, the business you have chosen as a beauty professional does not care that you’re working by yourself. Every successful business today is putting focus on all five of those key areas: the vision, the marketing, the money, the operations, and the facilitation, a.k.a., the Talent. You must have all five grinding at all times.
And when I say grinding, I don’t mean hustle. I’m actually the anti-hustle movement and I’m more figuring out how to work less, better. So when I say if you join Thriving Stylist Method or Scaling Stylist Method especially, one of the things we talk about is I’m like, “How fast can I get you to scale back your schedule as a stylist?” I want you working behind the chair definitely no more than four days a week and ideally more like three so that you can have eight to 14 hours a week to be the CEO, the CFO, the CMO and the COO.
Let me just ask the room for a second. Do you feel like there is plenty of work to be done in marketing every single week? Plenty of work that could be done? Like for those of you who are making excuses about, “Well, I’m not very good at building up my Google My Business,” or “I haven’t figured out the new app for it yet,” or “Instagram’s confusing.” “I can’t figure out TikTok.” How many of you are making excuses around marketing ‘cause you don’t have time? You need to make the time. Your chief marketing officer needs a seat at the table.
For those of you who can’t tell me, I can tell you right now my profit margin of last week. You need to be on the pulse of your finances. If you don’t know where you’re overspending, underspending, what’s going on financially in your business. And especially for those of you, if you’re a booth renter and all the money just comes into your personal checking account and you don’t have a business checking, you need to get the CFO going stat.
And remember what I said, I don’t mean hire somebody. I mean get a grip on your finances yourself.
Chief Operations Officer. Our industry is moving at lightning speed right now, lightning speed.
It has never been evolving faster because people are becoming more business-minded, which makes my little heart so happy. It’s a beautiful thing. But because of that, business operations are changing incredibly quickly and you need to be on the pulse of staying modernized or clients will leave you, a.k.a., leave the Talent to find somebody who’s doing it better.
And listen to what I just said. When businesses rely on just the Talent, it’s when the empire starts to crumble. So when we look at think about it—I’ll date myself if I talk about it, but like Mervins was a big department store when I was a kid. Mervins went out of business a long, long time ago, many, many years ago. But when I was a kid, that’s the place that a lot of us went to get our clothes or our shoes or whatever, because that was the department store.
The unfortunate thing is Mervins from the top up got lazy. They got complacent with their finances. They got complacent with their marketing. They got complacent with their operations, a.k.a, inventory. And the Talent still showed up every day and tried to sell the clothes. But because the other key components were not pushing forward, the business went bankrupt and closed, right?
These are the things that you need to be keeping in mind when you are building your business as a stylist or salon owner. If all you’re doing is focusing on the Talent, taking great classes, learning to do better hair, learning to do consultations, all that kind of stuff, formulation. It’s not that it’s not important. It is important. It’s also replaceable, right? Any client today can find—there’s truly a million beauty professionals in the U.S. right now. You’re one in a million, so you need to figure out what makes you irreplaceable. And I promise you what makes you irreplaceable is the work that you do visionary as the CEO, financially as the CFO, operationally as the COO, and marketing-wise as the CMO.
And I don’t expect you to work nights and weekends on that. I expect you to systematically shift your schedule so that those chief positions, those critical roles get the time that they desperately deserve.
If you need help setting that up, Thriving Stylist Method is a great place to start, but as always keep listening to this podcast because I’m sharing strategy about operations and money and marketing and vision all the time.
I invite you to really think about your business differently. I invite you to think about the opportunities differently, and I invite you to ask yourself who is starring center stage in your business as it stands today. And if it’s the Talent, it’s time to let your C-suite take the front seat. All right, y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
