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 Brit Seva, and today we are going to dive into a topic that I have been asked about, I don’t know, a dozen or so times. We are gonna talk about text to book advantages, disadvantages, misconceptions, questions, rumors, pros, and cons. We’re gonna talk about all the things text messaging as it relates to business.
Now, I always like to share, I joined the industry in 2007, which again was dinosaur times. So much has changed very radically since 2007, but the reason I share it is because I was brought up in a very traditional salon environment. We had a reception team. I think we had anywhere between four and five receptionists on staff at any given time. There was never less than two in the building. We were a high-volume salon, we had a really big team, so phones were ringing all the time.
I can remember when we first introduced the idea of online booking or email. It was revolutionary and so much has changed since then.
The reason I want to share that right at the top of this episode is to recognize the fact that change is hard. As I’m talking about this, I’m gonna give you lots of different options. Spoiler alert, this podcast doesn’t end with me saying, so this is the exact way to do it because that’s not what this one’s about. What this one is about is awareness, a huge quote I’m a real fan of these days is that “Ignorance is a choice.” We are living in the age of information. If you wanna find something, it is at your fingertips, it is a three-second Google search away.
My goal with this podcast is simply to provide awareness, to maybe open your mind a little bit, and to certainly push you outside of your comfort zone.
Now text message marketing is something that we dove into on a really deep scale this year and it’s something that was wonderful for our business and we played with it from all angles, so I will talk about that a little bit. I learned a lot along the way, and my purpose is to make you aware of the choices you’re making in your business when it comes to communication with your guests, when it comes to booking, and just to help you to make sure that you’re on the right track.
So in that vein, there is a very fine line between knowing what works and business complacency.
I’m very familiar with the old saying, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” In fact, I say that myself from time to time. The challenge with that is sometimes you don’t know that something is broken. You’re like, “Well it’s not causing us any problems so it must be okay.”
Yeah. Just because something in your business isn’t screaming at you, it’s not on fire, it doesn’t mean that it’s not holding you back. It doesn’t mean that it’s not your Achilles heel. One of the questions I’m always asking myself and I’m pushing my team to think about and that I want you as a stylist to think about and our industry educators to think about and salons to think out is, are you willing to settle for good when great could be one semi-scary decision away?
When we look at really successful companies, like let’s use Apple computers as an example, there’s no one who’s going to debate that they’ve not been successful. You can not like their values. You can not like their products. That’s fine. They are wildly successful and I’m gonna give you those stats in a second.
Going back to 2006, this is right before I joined the industry, which I called dinosaur times, but if you think about it, 2006 was only 15 years ago. That’s not that long ago. So in 2006, Apple computers did 19 billion—with a B—in revenue with a 25% profit margin. That is some money right there. The profit margin, not great, but they’re a tech company, so that happens.
19 billion dollars. They could have easily said, “Well, that B sounds pretty good.” Like 1 billion, I’d be stoked, right? 19 billion, not so bad, but they said, “No, we’re not willing to settle for good. We want to be great.” So what did they introduce to the market in 2007? Let’s say it unanimously. We all know: the iPhone.
By 2011, they were producing over 100 billion in revenue, so in a period of five years, they 5Xed their revenue and in 2021, Apple computers did $360 billion in revenue. That’s some pretty good growth over time.
Imagine if anybody at Apple had said, “You know what, we’re pretty good at computers. We shouldn’t try and mix it up. We’ve got a good thing going, this business isn’t broken, like 19 billion’s pretty rad. We’re keeping the doors open. We’re paying our people. Let’s not push our luck.”
Can you imagine? First of all, the future of smartphones would’ve been wildly different. And second, they would’ve really shortchanged themselves.
I want you to start thinking about your business that way. Do you wanna just sustain and get by and hope to keep the doors open and hope to keep your family fed and hope the competition doesn’t beat you out? Or do you want to sustain the competitive advantage?
Friends, the landscape of our industry has changed so dramatically, even in just the last two years, but over the span of my time in this industry, the last 13 or 14, it’s almost unrecognizable.
We are evolving at the same rate as like a tech industry does as far as what our guests expect, as far as what stylists are choosing to do what they’re looking for in salons, what salon owners are doing to gain that competitive advantage. We are moving fast. You’re either moving along with it or being left behind.
So as we go into these common advantages of text message booking, which we’re gonna go into right now, I want you to be very open-minded and ask yourself, “Am I making decisions out of comfort, a.k.a., complacency? Or am I really doing what’s right?”
Let’s first start with the commonly recognized text-to-book advantages. These are probably the things that have crossed your mind either when you implemented text-to-book communication in your business or when you’ve considered it. So let me just talk about what I’m referring to for a second.
When I say text-to-book communication, I mean stylists and salons who no longer have a phone that rings in the business, who no longer are accepting phone calls from their clients or solicitors or anybody else for any reason.
I don’t have a phone number in my business. You can’t call us up and chat it up. That’s not a thing and we have been incredibly successful without that phone number. However, I have a very different business than you do, right?
So when I say they’ve adopted text-to-book, it means they run their entire business through text message as their one-to-one communication channel.
The reason generally that we commonly would consider doing that is, first of all, texting is the preferred communication for the bulk of people these days. It’s great for introverts. It saves energy and there’s no phone tag, right? There’s no back and forth.
The energy it takes for us to be on the phone with a guest—you know how it is, like I’m speaking to you at this tone right now. If we were to catch me on the phone, it would be like, oh my gosh, I’m so glad we’re catching up. There’s this energetic shift that happens. You wouldn’t talk monotone like I’m speaking right now. You’d have to bring it to life. You’re trying to connect. That’s an energetic spend. Whereas in text messaging, you don’t have to do all of that, right?
Also phone tag. Have you ever done the thing with a guest where you call them, they’re calling you back, you miss it again, it takes three days just to connect with somebody? Huge waste of time.
And then those of us who are introverts, it is exhausting to be on the phone, talking to people, so this is a preferred method of communication.
Now, some of you are saying, “Well, for these millennials and these Gen Zs, maybe.” Yeah, but the data doesn’t show that.
I looked at a 2019 survey by Avachto. I think that’s how you say the name. You can Google this stuff too. I’m always looking for statistics because I want to know, is it just those under the age of 40 who prefer texting or does it span the generations? In this public survey, almost two thirds, 63% of respondents would switch to a company that offered text messaging as a communication channel instead of phone because talking on the phone is too inconvenient, time-restrictive, and time-consuming.
So time-restrictive and time-consuming because you can only call during business hours. And then if you leave the voicemail, the person’s gonna call you back. But if they’re gonna call you back while you’re at work or while you’re doing something inconvenient, so it’s time restrictive and consuming. That’s what two thirds of people said. Text is just more streamlined.
Three-quarters, 75% of respondents said that they find it helpful to receive texts for appointment reminders. Now 75%, that means 25% have no interest in that, right? Something to think about, just something to consider. That’s the other side of that data.
Then the survey showed that across all generations, over two-thirds, 69% of all respondents would prefer a company to contact them via text rather than a phone call. So that was across all generations.
We’re looking at a majority there and it could be argued well, 31% or whatever would prefer a call. Well sure, but are you gonna fight for the majority or the minority? It’s just something to consider, right?
It could be argued for sure if you’re serving a clientele who’s over the age of 60 predominantly, like my parents, my in-laws, that kind of thing. I’ll be honest, they’re texting all the time, but maybe it could be argued that they prefer to be on the phone.
Question then becomes is that the kind of business you want to run where you cater to your clients in such a way, even if it’s a hindrance to your business growth and your personal life? That’s a really big question.
The reason I add that on as a caveat is because we are in the service industry. You’re a service provider. I totally get it. But to what degree, like to what line? And you have to draw the line. It’s how you find true career fulfillment in this industry. You can serve your guests well and not have it take a personal toll on your life or your energy or your free time or whatever.
Those are just some of the things to consider.
Now, another commonly recognized text-to-book advantage is receipts. Of course, right? You get those detailed conversation records with all of your clients about what was agreed upon. They show up an hour late and insist their appointment was at 3:00 PM. And you’re like, “Uh, nope. It says right here on our text chain it’s 2:00 PM.” It can’t be a well you missaid, or I misheard. It’s there in writing. And so I fully get that.
You can also send photos via text, right? They can let you know what they’re looking for. If they want a change, you can talk about it.
Having a text message consultation and having that visual, there’s no doubt is helpful. They can text you when they’re running late. You can text when you are running late and you can knock out those texts from the couch, from the break room, from wherever, and that feels much more convenient than chatting it up on the phone.
Again, it goes back to the time-consuming thing. So I get it.
Another big common recognized text-to-book advantage, I think, is that a ringing phone is distracting and overwhelming for both you and your guests. If we’re sitting there having a conversation and my phone is ringing over and over and over, it’s distracting. There’s no doubt about it. So that gets eliminated.
Then, of course, that conversation history. So beyond the receipts, you can go back and see how long a guest has been seeing you for, what their communication is like. You can see everything. It’s this paper trail of what the relationship has looked like.
Those are, I think, a lot of the primary advantages. Let’s get into the commonly recognized disadvantages.
Not all guests are gonna do it and we talked about that, right? 31% said, no thanks, I wouldn’t prefer it. So there’s no doubt when you shift to a method like that, you’re losing clients.
My challenge with that disadvantage is, hi, I’m raising my hand. I know you can’t see me. This is an audio training. I am of the millennial generation. I will not pick up a phone to book an appointment. You can say whatever you want to say about that. If I cannot book it online, I’ll beg my husband to do it for me, my 18-year-old daughter to do it for me. I just, I won’t. I have my own bag of social anxiety that I deal with and it is out of my comfort zone to waste the time, pick up the phone, hope somebody answers, leave a message, call me back. You won’t catch me cause I’m doing stuff, so you’re gonna lose me.
So when you say, “What about all the people who don’t want to do text? Phone is good for everybody.” Phone is not good for me. I’m part of that percentage who will leave a business to go somewhere where texting is an option. So you just have to remember that there’s two sides to that coin and you have to decide what you want to play.
Another text-to-book disadvantage that it is what I call virtual umbilical cord. Think about it. When you text somebody and they don’t text you right back—let’s say you text somebody and they don’t text you back for four hours. What are some of the stories you tell yourself in your mind? “I know they saw it. I know they saw it. They’re just choosing not to respond to me. Am I not important? Let’s see if they respond to me after work, I know they get off at 6:00 PM.”
If I don’t hear by 6:30, I’m mad. Then I’m going to send a reminder text and it’s going to have an LOL at the end of it, about how I’m kind of busting your chops. So you haven’t gone back to me yet, but secretly I’m angry, right? It’s like there’s all of these layers of texting because we know that people have that smartphone within an arm’s reach at any given time.
I truly—and my team will joke about it and tell you, even my husband will joke about it and tell you, I never have my phone. I don’t check it. I’m very hard to reach, just focused in other areas. But the conception is that phone is with you. You’re choosing to ignore me. It can leave a really poor taste.
The other thing is, how many of you who do text to book have gotten a text at 1:00 AM on a Sunday, 3:00 AM on a Saturday? Whatever time anybody wants, they’re able to do it. And it’s often like when somebody’s laying in bed at the end of the night and their mind is winding down, they’ll think to shoot off the text. They wake up in the morning, over their first cup of coffee, they shoot off the text. It’s whenever it’s convenient for them. You’re at the movies with your family and here comes four text messages.
The trick with that goes into our next commonly recognized disadvantage. If I see texts come through when I’m at the movies with my family, I’m very liable to forget them, right?
Have you ever had a guest text you and like two days goes by and you’re like, “Gosh darn it. I’m meant to get back to them”? Anybody who says no, I just really question the fact. I’m a perfectionist, but we all make mistakes, so we have to recognize that. Things are going to slip to through the cracks. And if you say, “A voicemail could go unanswered too,” sure, but I’m not gonna fight for voicemail on this podcast. I’m gonna fight for other things.
But just think about what that additional pressure is to not forget a text, don’t forget, they responded to me, all those kind of things. It’s another layer and facet to your business.
The next commonly recognized disadvantage is that your relationship can change with your guests in a lot of ways. There’s something about text messaging that really does shift the dynamic. We love it because it feels easy, but also because it feels easy, it’s a very slippery slope.
Text-to-book commonly has a much higher cancellation rate. It is so much harder to have to call somebody verbally and tuck your tail and say, “I know my appointment’s in two hours, but I’m not gonna be able to make it.” It’s so much easier to text that. It’s a way to get out of it. It’s so much more awkward to actually have to face the person.
When I send a text, it feels like a one-way comment. You will respond to me, but I feel like I don’t have to wait around for your response. You have time to put your words together. It just feels less pressured and it shifts the dynamic a little bit, so you cross over to that friend zone.
I get asked all the time by stylists, how do I get out of the friend zone with my clients? I have a couple podcasts about it. You can go back in the files and listen. But that’s a question I get all the time, like “I know my clients like me, but I almost feel like we’re at this place where they’re taking advantage or they expect things of me. That’s not really what I want to be doing.” And it’s like, well, that was partially a product of your creation. It always is.
The way our clients behave with us is a product of the clientele we’ve chosen to build, period, because if somebody mistreats you, then you should stand up for yourself. But we don’t. So when a relationship gets a little iffy, of course we play a part in that. It takes two to tango. So text can make the waters a little bit muddy.
Then lastly, the text-to-book disadvantage that I think is the biggest is the fear of change.
So the reason why we choose not to offer text message communication with our guests is we are too scared to do it. We’re like, “I like my landline. My clients are used to it. We’re just gonna stick with it.” I think that the reason why those who have shifted to text message booking and are afraid to really modernize and go that next step is also the fear of change.
I think fear of change will force us to do really unfortunate things in our business. They’ll hold us back because that’s fear’s job is to keep you really safe and to prevent you from doing things that could potentially cause harm.
I share this in other podcast episodes, fear is something that’s hardwired into our brain. We needed it when we were living out in the wild and we didn’t want to be eaten by lions and tigers and bears. It was to keep us safe so that we didn’t do irrational things.
But now when you’re making business decisions, the fear monster comes up and you’re like, “Well, if I pull away text-to-book, Sarah’s gonna be mad, so I better not do it.”
Oh, so you’re scared of Sarah.
“Well, no, but I really like her business.”
And her business is contingent on texting you. Is that really the business you’re creating? You just have to think it all the way through and listen, she might leave you if you pull away text-to-book.
I just said, if I have to hop on the phone with you, I’m not coming in to see you, but that’s because we haven’t gotten into all of the other options you have besides handing out your phone number and allowing 24/7 constant communication with you, right?
And my suggestion is not, “Just get a personal Google number for business.” It’s so much more complicated than that. Like, yes, definitely have a business phone number if you’re going to allow guests to text you, but it’s so much deeper than that at this point.
That was the advice back in like 2015, 2016, like Google voice is awesome. That’s five-year-old advice. We have to evolve as the times change. So just make sure that you’re really running that business phone number wisely if you have one.
Let’s get into the common misconceptions and this is where it gets interesting. We’ve talked about the common pros, the common cons, the advantages, the disadvantages, the fears that everybody has crossed their mind. I probably didn’t blow your mind very much with anything I just shared, so let’s get into what I see as the misconceptions.
Text-to-book saves time. “I save so much time allowing the text communication to happen instead of phone.” Maybe. I definitely think it saves you energy. It saves a lot of the back and forth. There’s no doubt about it. I don’t know that it saves you that much time.
If you spend an hour a day running your business through your phone, that’s seven hours a week. That’s 28 hours a month. That’s over 300 hours a year. Are we really considering that to be saving time? I’m just not so sure. There’s so many other things that we can do.
I mean, 300 hours in a year is 12 24-hour days, so it’s like, do you want to do texting with your clients or do you want to take a two-week vacation? That’s like real math on that one. You could have that much free time back in your life if you weren’t texting with your guests all the time. So think about is it actually saving you time or are you just reallocating time in a different area? Just something to think about.
Another misconception is this is what clients want and the reason why it’s a misconception, I just told you, I’m not going to pick up the phone to call you to make an appointment. But what I want is not text-to-book for me personally because it also irritates me when somebody texts me. You know why? Because for me—and I don’t think I’m the minority in this. I think a lot of people are wired this way. When I look at my phone and there’s six text messages waiting for me, it feels like, oh my gosh, there’s six more people who want a piece of my time. It feels a little intrusive.
Has anybody else started to get bombarded with text message marketing? I get, I don’t know, seven or eight texts from big companies every day. It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. So you have to think about while it’s convenient, is that really what the client wants?
That goes back to clients say in a survey, I’d rather have text to book rather than phone, but that reminds me of the Henry Ford quote, “If I ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” like nobody could have even dreamt up an automobile at that time.
So when we ask our clients, “Hey, do you like text communication?” Well, yeah, they like it better than phone and you haven’t given them mystery option C, so they don’t know what else is out there.
So often we say, “Well, this is what the people want,” well, they don’t even know what the options are. So yeah, sure. It’s better than maybe what they did 10 years ago. But we can’t just assume that this is what they want.
Next, we steer away from tools like online booking because it can be problematic. We say, well it’s too hard. Our clients always mess it up. It’s confusing. My service menu is complex. We have multiple service providers. I’ve heard it all before.
The thing that it comes down to for me, because I’ve seen online booking just done so beautifully. When online booking doesn’t work for your clientele, your clientele is not broken. You are. There’s an issue with the way you’ve set it up. It could be a communication problem. It could be the way your services are set up.
You could say like, “Well I double book.” That’s totally fine. Your online booking system can manage all those things for you. If you say, “Well I don’t want gaps in my day,” that’s cool. There’s online booking systems now, Rosie being one that comes to top of mind, that does cluster booking where you would never be booked with a gap. It’s almost like magnets, everything touches something else. So the technology is really advanced.
I’ll agree that 10 years ago it was clunky, but it’s not 10 years ago anymore and it’s advanced so much that the technology really can work for you, not against you now.
If your clients are messing it up, it’s like saying it’s frustrating to me that my toddler doesn’t clean their room. They don’t know how yet. They’re new to this world and they’re trying to figure out all the pieces. It’s unrealistic to expect a guest to use something they’ve never used before and use it flawlessly unless you’ve taught them.
Then the argument can be made, “Well, that’s so nice for existing guests, but what about new guests?” Everybody who’s in Thrivers Society has a system for making sure that both new and existing guests are taken care of without anybody having to send a text or hop on a phone, so there is a better way to do it. It’s just about putting the system into place.
Next, online booking is less personal. I get it. Online booking can feel less personal in some ways, but this is why for the past several years, I’ve coached to the pre-visit experience.
When we look at what a guest needs in order to feel comfortable coming in to see us, they need to have an incredible experience with you long before they set foot through the door. The pre-visit experience is crucial. That’s something I started incorporating into Thrivers Society when we did our 2020 updates. It’s been quite some time.
So pre-visit has been around for a couple of years now and it’s less likely that online booking is not personal enough and it’s more likely that you don’t have a pre-visit experience component baked into your world. That’s the challenge. We have a whole segment dedicated to it in the Thriving Stylist Method because of it.
The impersonal—when you say like, “Oh, but text makes it feel personal.” Not really. It makes it feel very transactional and it’s much more convenient, but there’s actually a lot of ways to make a connection feel so much more personal. We’re saying that because it feels more personal than maybe hopping on a phone call. But the reality is there’s so many other tools that make it even more seamless.
Another misconception: you have to offer a phone line if you have a bigger team. I don’t buy into that at all. You definitely have to have better systems, but it’s not like, “Oh, there’s too many people. We must have a phone.” I don’t know why the volume of business would dictate that.
What it sounds more like is that there’s a structural issue because if there was the structure to have in place—in theory when you’re scaling, you continue to grow and you don’t reach this breaking point where a system that had once worked now falls flat on its face and you slip back to old technology. That would be like devolving the business instead of evolving it. Something odd would be happening there.
What likely is the case is you need to streamline and structure, which we’re going to actually talk about in an upcoming episode, so we’re going to get there. But it’s less about the fact that my team is too large, it’s not an option, and more that I have this big, beautiful team, we get to really streamline and structure now so that we can use all of these incredible digital tools that are at our fingertips to give our clients an even better pre-visit experience.
That’s what it actually looks like. I think too that, when we have a bigger team, we picture like a reception team or your stylists all sharing one cell phone, texting people together, but that is not how large format business do text support or booking at all.
Like I shared at the top of this episode, we use text in my business and we use it in multiple forms, so I say one-to-one and one-to-many. We have a text message marketing system. It’s mostly to communicate with my existing Thriver Society members, so my existing students. Rather than it be for mass marketing, we mostly use it to say, “Listen, we’ve got one of our free Monthly Meetups.” “Here’s the educator of the month.” “Here’s where you’ll log in,” or whatever, sharing information. “Britt is going live today.” That kind of thing, so it’s more like don’t miss it. People can opt-in or out. That’s one-to-many.
Then we have one-to-one. If somebody has a question, they’re locked out of their portal, they don’t understand how to use something, they have the capability to text message with myself or my team. Sometimes I hop in there and I’m answering too. It just depends on who you get, but there’s no cell phone. It’s not like “Who has the phone?”
I have a fully virtual team and we just use the technology that makes it applicable to have this phone number that allows for the texting, but it is so much more streamlined.
So even if you have a large reception team or a huge business—I have a significantly-sized business. I have 19 employees in all these moving parts. We are still able to manage the texting, no problem, right? We have over 5,000 students right now and if we can handle our volume, I’m just a little confused as to why the bigger the salon, the more impossible it would be to do.
Generally, we’re just maybe not using the right tool or the right system to make it work at the scale that our business runs at. But it is feasible. It’s about getting the right tools in place to make it possible.
As far as what I coach my students to, I want to give you the hundred-foot view, and then I’m going to shift into advice.
What I coach to in my programs is zero text-to-book, but a fully digital, phone-free experience.
Digital booking is either traditional or non-traditional. I share a lot of different options when it comes to digital booking. If you don’t want to allow clients into the back end of your schedule, I’m totally okay with that, but they need to have a digital experience for the person like me who is not going to pick up a phone to call you and chat about it. You need to have a different alternative available, so email or other tools and resources we have to make that digital experience possible.
We always include a pre-salon phase, which includes the digital consultation, photos, refining, what they’ve had done recently, how long has it been since you’ve had your hair done, what kind of products do you use, all that stuff. And we break that down in Thriving Stylist Method.
Then when we get into Scaling Stylist Method. We talk about the texting app services that would allow you to text from your computer, set up automations, have your number turn off/turn on so that you’re not getting texts on Sundays if you don’t work on that day. You can really streamline the experience now.
The other nice thing about being able to text from a computer is you can then download the photos and upload to a client record card within a digital booking system rather than use up all your phone storage, which is what you’re doing. If you’re allowing your client’s text messages to essentially be the database like the CRM or customer relationship management software, that’s not what text messaging is meant to be used for. You’re using a ton of space on your smartphone.
What if the unexpected happens? Like we always think like, “Well, I like it because I can always pull up my phone and have what I need.” If 2020 didn’t teach us that life is unpredictable, something should.
I can’t tell you every single month I’ll have a stylist who was like, “Oh my gosh, something happened. I’m out of the salon for 12 weeks unexpectedly. What do I do?” Are you going to give your smartphone over to somebody?
Then we say, “Well, I can manage my clientele from home.” Not always, not always. I always say like when my husband had a really bad accident in 2019, when that happened, I was able to drop the entire business on a dime and my team was able to pick up without me. That’s what you need. I could not have been in the hospital with him also text messaging my students. It was not feasible.
And so we say things like, “Well, if something were to happen, I’d still manage to contact my clients.” You can’t. You don’t know that. You have no idea what could happen.
Not having an external space where somebody, a trusted friend, a peer, anybody could hop in and start to help you manage is risky. Having some sort of organized system is going be critical for that.
My advice? Don’t believe that the way you are doing things right now is the best way. Be open-minded. Don’t believe the myth that only certain demographics do certain things. You can’t generalize like that.
I think text-to-book can actually be great if you have a smaller clientele and by smaller clientele, I would say that you’re making between 20 and 30 grand a year. As soon as you get above that, you’re going to be looking to scale your business and you get to a point where those methods aren’t scalable anymore, so if you really want to scale and grow, it is something you’ll outgrow over time.
The more systematized your business is, the easier communication always is. That starts with your website. So for those who are like, “You know, it’s easier. We like to have these in-depth text consultations,” it’s likely you can do that, and you can do that beyond text.
There’s so many great tools now, but I really want you to ask, “Am I giving all the information up front? Is it easy for my guest to find what they’re looking for?”
It’s like—I always share this example—if you were browsing on an online shopping site and you found a sweater, you loved, but you had to talk to somebody back and forth and back and forth just to find out what the price is. It’s like, forget, I’ll just buy a sweater somewhere else.
A lot of times we say, “Well, my clients like the digital consultation through text.” Some do, but what about the 14 people last month who decided not to even reach out to you at all because they didn’t love your system?
We’re always thinking about what is working for those who choose to accept our system, but what about those who were left behind? You have to think about the opportunity that you might just be missing if you were to look at other options.
Now we cover how to set all of this up in my Thriving and Scaling Stylist Methods. The best way to get started with either is to check out Prep School. You could always check that out at www.thrivingstylist.com, where you can learn more.
I would love to know your take on text-to-book. Let’s keep the conversation going, take a screenshot of this podcast, share it in your Instagram DMs, tag me in, and let me know what is working for you, not working for you, and what actions you might take after listening to this episode.
Y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
