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 very excited this week to talk about what stylists want today from a salon, from a salon owner, what the expectations are.
And these episodes are some of my favorite in that this is one that was inspired by one of my beautiful listeners. So if you don’t know this now you know, a few times a month, I try and do an episode that is based on feedback from one of you all, and I love to answer your questions here on the show. The best way to get a question to me is to leave me a rating or review on iTunes, and in the comment section under that honest rating or review, you can ask me question and I will do my best to get to it.
So this particular question comes from a salon owner, and I get questions like this a lot, but the reason this one jumped out to me is because this salon owner really thinks they’ve got it all dialed in, yet they’re having a challenge with retaining stylists.
Does that ring any bells for anybody? Are you a salon owner where you’re like, “Man, I feel like I give so much and I’m still struggling to retain,” or maybe you’re a stylist who’s like, “You know, I’ve got a foot out the door. This salon is good, but something’s missing.” And you can’t quite put your finger on it.
This is the energy in the air, in the industry right now. And so I couldn’t help but jump on the opportunity to tackle this as a podcast topic because I felt like the question was so good.
So I’m going to start by reading the question that came in to me. We’re going to talk a little bit about some pieces from my Thriving Leadership Method. You’ll get a little sneak peek there and then I’m going to break down what stylists today want from salon owners.
I want you to be open-minded as I share it because I think there’s a lot of salon leaders out there who are like, “Oh, I’m doing that. I’ve got that.” I’m here to tell you, no, you don’t. You’ve put some pieces in place that to you feel great, but perception is the reality. So what feels great to you, what you think works, might have worked five years ago just might not today.
I’m asking you to go into this ears and eyes wide, open heart wide open, and let’s see what we can come up with together.
As per usual, I’m going to read this message, but I’m going to shift it a little bit so it’s not obvious as to the identity of this person. I’m gonna change some of the details.
This salon owner says, “Hi Britt, I’ve been listening to the podcast. Love them, great teaser for your memberships. You have me hooked. I’m gonna need all of them To sum it all up, I’m feeling frustrated as a salon owner. I have had a massive salon ownership success for 30 years. I’m the owner of a top 200 salon, but all of a sudden, I’m noticing that I’m losing the next generation of employee-based stylists to chair rental. I train them. I build them. I invest in them, and five years later, they’re looking to go out on their own.”
Then this person says, “I know Britt talks quite a bit about her experience with large salons yet much of the information seems geared towards chair rental or independent stylists. Would your coaching be a fit for me? What membership should I explore?”
First of all, I’ve said before, but I think it’s worth saying again, if I was to open a salon today, it would be employee-based. It would not be independent contractor. I say that very, very openly.
For one reason, I like to do things legally and above board, and there can be some gray area in that. The other thing is too, I like systems and control. And with that control, I’m able to find the balance of freedom when I look at what it looks like to be an effective leader, which we will get into that a little bit today, but I’m not somebody who’s a proponent of everybody be independent. I’m also not somebody who’s a proponent of everybody should be an employee. I don’t think anybody or everybody should do all of anything. I think that’s the beauty of the industry, is there’s so many different opportunities.
The problem is I think the industry still classifies itself through that divide of “Well, you either are in favor of employee-based working or you’re a favor of independents.” I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.
The break happens because I think those who have employees don’t realize you can create all of the opportunity that an independent would have within your salon walls. And that’s the break. That’s a lot of what I want to talk about today.
But as we talk about what stylists are looking for in a salon today, we’re going to talk about it from the perspective of if they’re a booth renter. If they’re paid hourly, if they’re paid commission, if it’s team-based pay, if it’s whatever, all of that doesn’t matter quite so much. I’ll dive into that a little bit, but let’s really talk high-level about what stylists are looking for.
Because I’ve openly said this before, and I’ll say it again, the way the money comes in isn’t as relevant as all the other things.
And as I say that, I know it sounds false because you think, “Well, no, because my commission stylists are leaving to go booth rent to make more money.” I disagree. I don’t think so.
From personal experience, we had commission stylists who worked with us for 10, 15, 20 years. Could they have gone off in booth rent? Of course. Why did they stay? ‘Cause it was too good to leave.
When we say they’re leaving to make more money, when you look up statistically, not in our industry, but in any industry, that’s not the number one driver of why anybody leaves anywhere. Money, it’s like reason number three or four. There’s things ahead of it and they’re all culture-based. That’s where we really want to be focusing our attention and our efforts.
So before we dive into exactly what stylists are looking for in a salon today, I want to walk you through an exercise that I do share in my program, Thriving Leadership, and it’s called the Thriving Salon Assessment.
I’ve shared this on the podcast before it’s worth sharing again. When we do this assessment, we break you out into a four-square grid and we look at profit as compared to people. In a healthy business, you need to be making healthy profits or the business won’t survive. You also need to have a happy team or the business won’t survive. These are both the catalyst for success when it comes to a beautiful salon business, so we compare both against each other.
Deprived salons have low profits and unhappy staff, so the money’s not there. The people aren’t happy. It feels like you’re circling the drain. The doors could close tomorrow. Maybe we’ll stay open another year. Who knows? You’re struggling really hard.
Then we have those with low profit, but really happy staff, and I call that the Engaging salon. The Engaging salon has a lot of potential. I’m going to say most salons today are Engaging. I’m going to go ahead and say that. Low profits, but really happy staff, and what that would look like is the team is happy to be there. There’s not a lot of feathers being ruffled. Everybody shows up people for the most part, gets along really well.
There’s not a ton of money to go around. Like usually the owner couldn’t stop working tomorrow. If the owner stopped working, the business would really struggle. So the owner’s still carrying the financial burden and financial weight. We can’t say it’s high profit if the owner has to keep working in order to float the ship, that’s not highly profitable. You might be running the business in the black, not in the red, but that doesn’t mean you’re highly profitable.
So low profits, but the staff is relatively happy, the owner’s relatively happy. That would be the Engaging salon.
Then we have the Fragile salon. The Fragile salon has high profits, lots and lots of money, but unhappy staff, and I actually tend to think that the owner who wrote into me with this question falls into this category. I’m going to guess high profits, unhappy staff.
I know on the surface level, you’re like, “No, no, no, generally people are happy,” but they’re not happy because you’re telling me that after five years they’re leaving and if they were truly happy, they wouldn’t. This is where we get into some of our blind spots as we convince ourselves, “I’m doing everything right. People are happy,” and then we feel blindsided when one day they choose to go.
It’s because they, in their mind, were here for a time, like reason, season, or lifetime. They were just with you for a season. They had other objectives, and unfortunately, you weren’t able to fulfill their next step.
And I’m going to break down for this salon owner. I looked at your website, so I’m going to break down for you exactly why I think you fall into the Fragile salon category. But a lot of Fragile salon owners are a little confused because they feel like they’ve done it all right, yet there’s this missing mystery piece and they can’t quite figure it out. Also, Fragile salon owners are often very resentful of their team because Fragile salon owners feel like they’ve done it all. You have to have done a lot to get to the point of high profit. You’re not Deprived. You’ve busted through Engaging. You’ve done so much to get to where you are, so why aren’t people staying? What more can I give? I’m going to unlock that for you a little bit today.
But Fragile salons are also very common. I think Engaging are the most common, followed by Fragile. So high profits, unhappy staff, and unhappy staff doesn’t mean that they’re at each other’s throats or that there’s tons and tons of drama. They’re just unsatisfied and they have a wandering eye to what else is out there.
Then we have Thriving salons. Thriving salons have high profits, happy and loyal staff. The staff is happy to be there. They don’t have a wandering eye. They’re likely going to stay long-term. For the most part, everybody gets along.
We’re going to talk a little bit today about the recipe to get there as we talk about what stylists are looking for today when they’re looking for a place to make their long-term salon home.
The first thing stylists are looking for today is true leadership. And when I say the word “leadership,” it’s not boss, it’s not owner, it’s not the keyholder. It is an actual leader. I believe that even booth renters want a leader. The reason I believe that is because it’s human nature. In all of us, we like having somebody to look to. When you feel lost, do you feel much better when you have somebody you can turn to for guidance? Of course you do.
The problem is so many stylists today have never worked for an actual leader. They’ve worked for a boss who is more authoritarian or thinks they know it all. Or they’ve worked for somebody who loves to say, “Well, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and so I know that…” is not the same at all as being a leader.
Having experience does not naturally make you a leader. Leadership is a skillset in and of itself, and I believe in today’s day and age, stylists want to work for somebody who is an actual leader, whether it’s a leader of an independent salon, a leader of an employee-based salon, or whatever. It is comforting, it gives us faith in the business moving forward. That can be an X factor for you should you choose to accept it.
So when we look at the qualities of a leader, the qualities of a leader is they don’t just say they’ve done a lot of in past. They’re doing a lot presently. You should notice that about the world around you, right?
It’s funny, like even 10 years ago, what you had achieved in your lifetime’s career stood for something really deep. In today’s culture, it’s what have you done lately? Your resume doesn’t carry as much weight as the work you’ve done in the last six months because the world is changing so fast. Like what I accomplished as a stylist in 2008 hardly even holds a candle to what is going on in business right now because everything is radically changed, right?
To be a leader, innately people have to choose to follow you. If people aren’t choosing to follow you, you’re not leading and no one will choose to follow you if you don’t seem to know what you’re doing. And if you’re not building the things we talk about in our Thriving Leadership Pyramid, which is trust and loyalty and systems and culture and processes.
A lot of these things I know we say like, “Well, independents don’t want that.” Yes, they do. Humans innately want that. Don’t you feel better when you go into a business for the first time when there’s natural order to the business and you’re like, “Oh, okay. So clearly I check in here, I line up there. I’m probably going to head over here next.” That feels great.
Have you ever walked into a business or a building and it just feels like chaos? There’s a lot of moving pieces and maybe people are even happy, but you can’t tell where to go next?
Or here’s another one. Have you ever been invited to a house party? Like maybe a house-warming party or a party for a coworker you’re just starting to get to know, or maybe it’s a party for a coworker of your spouse or partner. So you show up to the party and you’re already like a little nervous ‘cause you don’t really know anybody, so you go in and you’re like, “Oh my gosh.” And you’re like, “Okay, where’s the bathroom? Where’s the kitchen? What are we doing? Are we supposed to be dancing? Are we eating yet? Or are we holding off on eating? Who are the people I might get along with?” And it can be anxiety-ridden just trying to read the room. That’s how independents feel when they’re not being led, whether they know it or not.
We all as human beings feel better when there is a natural order to things. Order doesn’t mean tons and tons of rules. It means effective leadership. You don’t have to be a micromanager and a leader. The two things don’t have to go hand-in-hand, but being a boss, being an owner, doesn’t innately make you a leader.
I truly think that stylists today want to work for a badass leader. I do. I think it builds their faith. I think it’s somebody they want to be in alliance with long term and it makes you somebody who’s really difficult to beat.
The next thing that stylists today want is unlimited growth potential and not unlimited growth potential on the owner’s terms. On their own terms.
This is one of the things I learned the hard way when I was a salon director many moons ago is that growth potential looks different to the eye of the beholder. Growth potential to me versus growth potential to you could be totally different things. Maybe growth potential to you is making, you want to make 400 grand in the next five years. Like you want to do $400,000 in services, which P.S., there are stylists today nationwide who are pulling off numbers like that.
Maybe you’re like, “Okay, I want to earn $400 gross in services within the next five years.” Great, so maybe that’s growth for you.
Maybe growth for me is I only want to have to be working two days a week. I want five days a week to be home, to homeschool my kids, and I still want to be making 75 grand. We could still both be growing to get our objectives met, but growth does not look the same to both people.
When we try to cram stylists or human beings in general into a generalized view of growth, that is a recipe for disaster. So when you say “My stylists go independent and I don’t know why,” were they allowed to chase their own vision of growth? Or was it your vision of growth? What you think is best for them or what somebody’s told you is going to be best for them, right? ‘Cause that’s not gonna work.
So when I looked at the website of the salon owner who reached out to me, it looked very much like a lot of other salons that have done so much and have accomplished so much, and they feel like they’re hitting the nail on in the head and they can’t figure out why it’s wrong.
When I looked at what it looks like to be a team member here, which first of all, props to you for having this on your website. If you own a salon and you don’t have an employment page, meet the team, join us page on your website that is thorough and in-depth and breaks down exactly why you’re exceptional, you’re fully missing the mark. So that would be step number one.
But this person does have a page where I was able to see what it looks like to be a team member there, which is great for coaching and also great for attracting a team. So this salon is building what they call a career path. However, I think it’s like career boxes and this is not what stylists today are looking for.
It says (I’m gonna change the verbiage on this to make it anonymous), “We have entry-level stylist, approximately one to two years, junior-level stylist, approximately two to four years, senior stylist, approximately four-plus years, master stylist, seven years plus.”
So you’re telling me I can’t be a master stylist for seven years. What if I want to be a master stylist in two? In your system, I’m not allowed to do that. So you’re not giving me unlimited growth potential. You’re forcing me to go on your timeline rather than mine and in a system like this, it’s based on what I call reps. So how many haircuts you’ve done? How many guests you’ve serviced? That used to work when I joined the industry, that’s what it was all about ‘cause there was no other way to get the experience. We were living in a different world and a different time. It doesn’t look like that.
And if, as I’m explaining it, you’re like, “Well, okay, that’s how we generalize. But yeah, somebody can grow as fast as they want to.” You think someone’s going to look at this information or read between the lines on that? They’re not. They’re going to take it for face value, and if that’s how you’re positioning it, that’s how people feel about it. The perception is the reality, right?
So often we’ve created what we feel like are these great, beautiful growth systems, but to our team, it actually feels demotivating. And then what if the package you’ve put together when I become a master stylist isn’t even what I want? You have created a path for me based on your idea of my success, not my own, and that’s not what stylists today want.
That’s where I think the misconception of “Well, stylists today are more lazy or stylists today don’t want to work.” No, none of that is true. They do want to have a beautiful career. They don’t want to work like people worked in 1992 and I think that’s fair. We’re in a different time, so things have just really shifted and changed and that’s the evolution.
There’s another stylist I’ve been coaching for several years who’s now a salon owner, which is a story I could tell about a lot of people, and when I think to these stylists who chose to leave their salons, none of them were at terrible salons. There was none of them where I was like, “SOS, get the heck out of there.” All of them were at really great salons, but over the years, almost always what forced these top performers to leave was an invisible glass ceiling where the owner would be like, “You’ve done it. You’re our top salon stylist. You’re amazing. You’re the best. You’re our leader. You’re our mentor. You’re our whatever.”
High achievers don’t always want to be the best person in the building. They want to be challenged. They need somewhere next to go. They need to feel like there is still a next step for them, and if you don’t create that, they will create it for themselves.
So when you’re losing good team members, for me, I think they’re creating their own next level because you weren’t able to do it for them within your building. And the reason you weren’t able to do it is because you are trying to conform them into your idea of growth instead of understanding what theirs would be.
Now, the other thing stylists want today is what I call true culture. When we look at today’s most desirable salons—let me tell you how you know if you’re a desirable salon. You’re looking to hire a team member, you do one Instagram story and a post on social media, and you have six applications within 48 hours. That’s how you know.
And that’s the experience today’s top salons are getting and if you’re not getting that, there is something wrong in your positioning. You can justify it however you want to. You can say, “We’re just more selective,” or “Not everybody’s a good fit.” And yeah, I agree. Not everybody is a good fit, but when you look at salons where it is a no-brainer to want to work there, they have found a way to bridge the gap. They can still have very high standards. They can still have a very established culture, but they’ve got that X factor where it is so crystal clear that why would you go anywhere else? This is 100% the most desirable place to be and the most desirable place to be long term.
So when we start talking about culture and what it means and what all it encompasses, the definition I share in Thriving Leadership is that culture refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s team members and management interact and handle interactions with clients and outside vendors. So it’s how people interact with each other, within the building and also how they handle interactions with clients and outside vendors. Or if you brought in an educator or anything like that, right?
When business culture is implied but not defined, a subculture emerges, and subculture is very, very dangerous. Subculture is created from the naturally cumulative traits of the people in the building, so it just happens, right? Right. We all hire people with different personality types, which is great because that’s what makes the world go round. But if you don’t lay out very implicitly and then make sure that you are building a business around a defined culture, it’s going to create itself.
Nobody wants to work for a salon where the culture has been created by the people who randomly are in the building. How come? Because that means it is constantly changing. If Jerica leaves, whomever her replacement is going to shift the culture. Nobody wants that.
You want a culture that stays stable. It’s predictable. It’s why people stay long-term.
Often, we think as leaders like, “Well, rules equals culture.” No, it doesn’t. Culture is much more complex than that and if you are not actively engaging in your culture and enforcing your culture ‘cause it’s enforceable, people aren’t going to stay. You’re going to lose good people. It’s just one of those things that’s so critically important.
When you look at salons today who are doing super well, not all of them are overly fun. Not all of them are party salons. Not all of them are super serious salons. There’s all different salons where the team is really happy and is doing really, really well there, and there’s always a solid leader in place. There’s always the opportunity for unlimited growth potential, and there is always true and enforced culture. That’s the recipe for success. And as soon as you start to lose those things, you’re going to start to lose good people. If you don’t have all three facets in place, it’s like you’re sitting on a stool with only two legs. It’s only a matter of time before it all starts to fall apart.
I encourage you to really, as a salon owner, review what you have in place for your stylists today. Notice in this episode, I didn’t talk about things like amenities. I didn’t talk about things like cost of booth rent. I didn’t talk about things like make sure your commissions are set up a certain way, ‘cause it’s not about that. Things have really changed.
Are those things important? Sure is. That what’s going to make or break your salon. I’m here to tell you it’s not. Because I know some salons with incredible booth rental, amazing amenities, great commission structure that lose good people and it’s for these three reasons. So I encourage you to really take a good hard look at yourself. Really think about your blind spots and ask yourself am I really hitting the nail on the head or do I have some room for improvement when it comes to attracting and retaining an incredible team?
If you need more details on how to be an exceptional leader, you can head to thrivingstylist.com, check out my Thriving Leadership program, and as always so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
