Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hairstylist, 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 hairstylists, 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 today we’re talking about how to hire your dream team as a salon owner. And this is one of those episodes where I feel like I’ve owed this to you for a long time. In my mind, there’s a whole narrative that lives in my brain. This is like perceived value, perceptions of reality. In my mind, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I just talked about hiring.” No, I talked about hiring on episode 37, which would’ve been end of 2018. So it’s been like six years. So 1 million things have changed in that period of time, and I’ve owed you this one. And so thanks for being patient with me in the process. I’m excited to dive in because hiring has really massively changed in the last few years.
For those of you who don’t know my back story, in case you’re catching up, first of all, welcome to the show. I’m honored to have you. I am licensed in the state of California and have been since 2007. I did hair for a couple of years, and then in 2009, I was promoted to the position of salon director for an absentee owner. So the owner was not in the building, not in the business, didn’t manage the day-to-day. I did the hiring, the firing, the payroll, the angry clients, the ordering, the everything. Coordinating educators, you name it, I did it. And I hired over 100 licensed cosmetologists in my time as a salon director. We were a bigger salon and we did carry a big team and a big payroll and all the stuff. We would have at least 4 receptionists on payroll at any given time, sometimes more depending on how many part-time we had. We had, I believe, 18 chairs total, but we would have 6 assistants at any given time. So we were a staff of over 25 regularly, big team.
So hiring over a hundred people at a business of that scale only makes sense. I would also fire probably at least 10 to 12 people a year. I always followed the practice of hire slow, fire fast. So our interview process took quite a bit of time for a candidate who was coming in. And if somebody was not reaching their benchmarks or KPIs, I did not let the pain linger, I would cut people loose. And what I learned, I mean we could do a whole other podcast about terminations for sure too, very few were painful for me. I can actually remember the two that were, that really cut me deep. They will always leave a scar for me because it was people who were good people, were hard workers, they just were not right for us in the business, and it was painful. It was really difficult.
Beyond those couple, most everybody else I let go, I felt like didn’t make sense for our team, wasn’t in the right industry, didn’t like doing hair or services the way that we did them, meaning some people… We had a stylist, an amazing stylist who’s like, “I literally just want to do men’s cuts.” And I loved that, except for at the time, our clientele was like 90% or more female-based. Now, if I was the owner, I probably would’ve said, let’s make this guy a specialty. Let’s make it happen. But it’s not where ownership was, and I get it. So didn’t do the services the salon was offering. So there was a couple of people like that too. But I learned a lot in just my period of time doing that. Flash-forward to now, this company is not called Thriver Society. Our legal name is Flourish Salon Business Development.
I have 16 full-time employees who work for me. Over the course of the last nine years, I’ve had or hired a total of 24. So some people have left by choice, some people I’ve invited to leave, and that’s my nice way of saying I let them go. So a combination of different reasons why some of those people are not here any longer. All of them moved on to bigger, brighter, better things that are a better fit for them. So no harm, no foul there. But I have learned a lot. I’ve been hiring people now for 15 years and I’ve learned a lot about best hiring practice, what helps me to find the best candidates, massive hiring mistakes I’ve made in the past when I got too caught up in the hype. Or I’ve made a lot of the critical mistakes of I’ll do an interview with somebody and we’ll hit it off.
Like I love this person. I want to hang out with this person. I can spend every day with this person. That doesn’t mean they’re a good team member for me. I should just take a yoga class with them or something. Go have a coffee. It doesn’t mean that they should be an employee on my team. And that’s one of the things I’ve learned the hard way too of hiring and looking for great team members is not the same as building a friendship circle. So what I want to do is share what’s changed in hiring practice in the last few years because y’all it is a wild, wild west out there. The hiring market has really changed. So I’m recording this episode in 2024. I’ll probably have to do another one of these in about 18 months. Note to self, don’t forget. And what we’re in right now is what I call a stylist’s market.
So I always describe our industry kind of like the real estate market where sometimes it’s a buyer’s market, sometimes it’s a seller’s market. So when you look at the real estate market right now, it’s at a standstill. It’s nobody’s market. It’s a really tough time to buy, and it’s a really tough time to sell because of what? Mortgage interest rates. They are really, really high. I’m recording this in spring of 2024, and they’re the highest they’ve been in my adult years for sure. So the market’s at a stall. But do you remember coming out of the pandemic when interest rates were at an all-time low, like high two percents, three percents, massively low? The market was wild, right? It was a seller’s market big time. So were people buying houses? Yes. But how much were sellers able to make on their homes? Made a killing, right?
They were able to raise the prices, the values of their homes up so much. People were walking away with hundreds of thousands of dollars selling their homes in 2020, 2021, 2022 into 2023 because it was a seller’s market, and it was so hot. A home wouldn’t even go to public market, and it would already have 15 offers on the table. It was next-level mania. That was a seller’s market. Right now, we’re in a stylist’s market, meaning the stylists have all the power. The owners do not have the power right now. There are some seasons when the owners have had the power. So when I joined the industry in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, I want to say for a good stretch of around a decade, it was definitely a salon owner’s market without a shadow of a doubt. So the kind of twenty-teens were very much a salon owner’s market.
And then what happened? Studio Suites came along at scale. Now, Studio Suites have been around for 20 years, but they really came along at scale, 2015, 2016, 17, 18, kind of in that timeframe. And because stylists had another option, salon owners kind of lost some of the power. So we are still in a stylist’s market to this day. So it’s up to the salon owner to really zhuzh up what you offer. And if you want to hire dream team members as a salon owner, listen up because I hope this episode is massively helpful for you. So step number one if you’re looking to build a dream team. Now listen, you may already have a team. There’s a difference between a team and a dream team. You know how in traditional corporate world, there’s A players, B players, C players, D players.
And we don’t like to look at human beings like that, but sometimes you have somebody in your building who’s like a C player for you. There is an A player at life, they’re just in the wrong business or in the wrong type of work. Totally fine. So as a salon owner, we want to be hiring all A players, maybe some B’s, but we definitely don’t want the C’s and the D’s. We want everybody who comes in to be a 10 out of 10, and this is how you’re going to set yourself up for that. So step number one is the stuff that nobody wants to do. If you’re like, yeah, tell us how to hire. Oh, we’re not even there yet. So step number one is to set the right foundation before you even try to hire. And this is the part where owners are like, “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Because this is not the fun stuff, but this is the crucial stuff.
So when I say foundations, I have a program called Thriving Leadership Method, and we’ve got several hundred leaders in there right now up to massive things. This is not a program I talk a ton about, but most of you listening to this are familiar with my marketing funnel, my retention funnel, my hairstylist success hourglass. I also have something called the Thriving Leadership Pyramid. And when you look at the pyramid, it builds a foundation from the bottom up. Just like if you were building a custom home, you’d level the ground, you’d make sure that you poured a beautiful foundation, same thing. So when you look at this leadership pyramid, the very bottom level, base level is called the business foundation. And when we look at what lives in the business foundation, for me and in my coaching, it’s your vision, your mission, your core values. It is clarity on your vision for the salon, your clarity on your vision for the team, what you want them doing, how you want them to show up. And often in our mind, we’re like, “Well, yeah, I know what those things are.”
Okay, you have an idea of what those things should be, but often we skip the part of formalizing it. So when I mention those things, often people call those things culture. Like, “Okay, well, that’s what our culture is.” Great. So imagine you and I are sitting across from each other, I’ve flown out to meet you, and we’re going to have a full day consulting. I’m coming out to work with you and your salon team, but we’re having a morning coffee before we start, and I’m like, “Hey, tell me about your salon culture?” What would you say? I’ve done that before and I get a lot of answers like, “Well, we’re all really good people. We’re happy, we’re passionate, we’re hardworking. We’re kind of like a family, you’ll see that here. We love what we do. We’re modern, we’re upscale.” Yeah, none of those things are culture. Not one of those things I just said is cultural at all.
So when you look at the definition, company culture is how you do what you do in the workplace. So saying we’re like a family is not how you do what you do. It may be a little bit of the behind-the-scenes dynamic, but it’s not how you do what you do. We’re happy. I hope you serve your clients happy, but again, that’s not distinctual culture, that’s almost like a requirement of the job. So company culture is how you do what you do in the workplace. It’s the sum of all of your formal and informal systems, behaviors, and values. All of this create an experience for both of your team members and your customers. At its core, company culture is how things get done effectively and profitably in a effective workplace. So if you are struggling with profitability or you’re struggling with functionality or you’re struggling to hire a great team, please start here with the foundation because a lot of owners are like, “My vision is to have really passionate stylist work for me so that we all make lots of money.”
That is just not enough anymore. There was a time when it was. In this new market, it doesn’t work like that. So that’s simply the foundations. Now, if I was literally out there coaching with you for a day, that would be step one. Then we would do purpose and culture, which is where we really put names to all of those feelings. So I’d help you define your purpose of your business. What is your culture? Let’s make it something that’s a bit more tangible than happy, we’re like a family, we’re driven. That’s not right. So we look at how to define that. Then we do level three, which is roles and responsibilities. Level four, brand standards, level five, training plans, level six, praise, level seven, trust, level eight, loyalty, level nine, leadership. And then, believe it or not, step number 10 is where I actually teach you how to hire.
So we’re kind of skipping ahead of a lot of those foundational pieces that I believe really are effective when you have them in place before you start to hire. But at a bare minimum, make sure you know your vision, your mission, your core values, your brand standards. Often when I say things like that, people are like, “Well, that’s too corporate.” When I tell you the workforce is really changing right now in our industry, it is. And here’s why. Why should somebody work for you and not in a Studio Suite? What do you offer them that a Studio Suite doesn’t? Comradery, company, energy, education. It’s like these things are much too vague. We need to really, really define what we do and how we do it. If you can’t define or clearly describe your culture, not using adjectives, you don’t have a solid business foundation yet. So adjectives are things like happy, driven, dedicated, inspired. Not like that. That won’t do it.
Okay. Step number two, we’re going to build upon that and we’re going to use that salon foundation that we’ve built, the core values, the mission, the vision, and the brand standards. The brand standards are ridiculously important. So brand standards is a part of how we do what we do, so what are people expected to do in your place and space. And that leads into culture and all of that as well. So we’re going to use those salon foundations to strengthen our salon’s marketing funnel. Now, I don’t want to give too much away, but I recently did an Instagram poll that I’m going to use for a very special project where I was asking stylists what they’re looking for in a salon, when they’re considering a salon to work at, how long do they look at it for before they pull a trigger.
How long do you think stylists kind of follow a salon before considering working for them? Months to years. So here’s the funny thing is often salon owners don’t really put a lot of effort into attempting to hire on social media until a chair is open. Oh, it’s a months long runway. Somebody is going to watch you and evaluate you for months if not over a year before deciding to work for you. So you need to be nurturing that social media all the time. And if you don’t know my marketing funnel yet, please, please search Thriving Stylist Marketing Funnel. I have a whole podcast episode that explains it. But I know social media can feel like a time suck. In my experience, it feels like a time suck until it’s A, working for you, and B, you know what to post on it.
When it’s working for you and you know what to post on it, it’s not that big of a deal. The reason it feels heavy is because we’re feeling like we’re posting content and it’s not getting us the desired results. That’s frustrating, I totally understand. So the way to overcome that is to know what to post, post it regularly, get great results, then social media is not going to feel painful to you. You might say, “I’m burnt out with social media. People aren’t using social media as much.” Both of those things might be true, but if a stylist is considering working for you, you better believe they’re going to judge you based on your social media, your online reviews, your Instagram presence. By the way, your website is a part of this. So when we talk about the marketing funnel, it’s website, it’s social, it’s driving awareness, it’s your referral program. I mean, it’s a little bit of everything.
So they’re going to look at your website. And then my question is, does your website clearly define your culture? Do I know what I’m getting into working for you when I look at your salon’s website? If I can’t clearly understand what you offer, I’m not even going to apply because I don’t even know what I’m applying to do, right? Step number three, and this is another tough one. These are just going to get a little bit trickier and a little bit trickier. Define your competitive advantage. So imagine again, you and I are sitting across from each other, we’re still sipping that same cup of coffee, but now you’re sweating a little bit and I’ve already asked you about the salon culture and you’re like, “I don’t know.” And then I’ve said, “Let’s take a look at your marketing funnel. Let’s see what’s going on here.” And maybe I found some areas to work on. And the next question I pitched to you is, what is your competitive advantage? What do you offer stylists who work for you that none of your other direct competitors can offer?
Have you heard the stats about employment? When people choose to leave any business, a salon, a corporate job, whatever, pay is reason number five. And so often we’re like, “Well, the reason stylists leave me is because my commission rates aren’t high enough. The reason stylists leave me is because they think they can make more money booth renting.” Sometimes yes, but four-fifths of the time, it’s something else. People will lose a little bit of money if it means showing up every day and literally loving how they spend every waking moment working. Running a Studio Suite is infinitely harder than being a commission stylist. I think we can all agree with that. I mean, infinitely harder.
Being a booth renter is more work than being a commission stylist. So why do people do it? Because they don’t like what’s going on in the employee environment. It’s not because they’re guaranteed to make more money going elsewhere because they are not. So often when I say, what’s your competitive advantage? They’re like, “Oh, well, we pay 55% commissions.” What else do you got for me? Our rent is the cheapest. Oh, you’re the low-price leader? You’re going to attract a very specific stylist to the low-price leader. And if our goal is to hire a dream team, they’re looking for beyond the money. Trust me, they are. Dream team stylists, receptionists, salon managers are looking for so much more than the money. Do they want to be compensated well and fairly? Absolutely, everybody does, but they’re looking for more.
So what else do you got? Education. Okay. A lot of people do education. What else do you have? Salon amenities. So does everybody else. What else do you have? Free back park. It’s pretty standard these days. What else do you have? So you would tell me your competitive advantage, and I’d rifle through with you and say, “Okay, that works, this doesn’t work.” You need to understand what your competitive advantage is. One of the things I always like to say is let’s give them something to talk about. You need to have a marketable edge to fill those chairs. So why should a stylist choose you over the salon down the street? Great stylists are not going to choose mediocre. So you need to be exceptional. And here’s what we can’t do. We can’t say, well, our future plan is to, or once we have a full team, what we’re going to do is, or once we have the budget for it. Promises, promises. You can’t make empty promises and hope to hire a dream team.
Go back and listen to, I have an episode called Be-Do-Have. And the idea is that often for all of us, we’re like, “Well, when I have the right staff, then I’m going to be in a position where I can do all these other things.” Mm-mm. Instead, you have to take action first. And this is where successful people take risks. You have to live as if you already have the dream team in order to attract them. And that’s tough because it is risky, but it’s also what must be done. Do you think dream stylists are going to be like, “Well, I’m a 10 out of 10, but I’m going to go to the salon that’s a six because they say one day they’ll be as good as me?” They’re just not. If you want to hire nines and tens, you have to be a 10 or an 11. That’s what it looks like.
Okay, step number four. So once we have a solid business foundation and our marketing funnel looks right and tight, meaning our social media, our online reviews, our website, all those things are a 10, we know what our competitive advantage is, and we’re advertising that competitive advantage on our social media effectively, on our website effectively. And by the way, when I say advertising, I don’t mean doing a social media post that says, come work for us because here’s the six things we do, that’s really cheesy, but effectively using messaging consistently to show that you are the clear choice, the clear dream salon in your community. Now, step four is we can find amazing team members.
So if you go back and listen to episode number 37, which like I said, launched in 2018. At that time, I said, now is when you can start traditional hiring. You can go to Craigslist, you can go to Indeed, you can run Facebook ads, you can run Instagram ads, you can do posts on social media. I would not do any of that anymore because it’s just not the game. It is not the game. That all worked when it was more of a salon owner’s market, when they could throw a line into the ocean and catch a dozen fish. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Now amazing stylists are constantly eyes wide open. They’re constantly looking for where is my next opportunity. Am I happy where I’m at? Is this right for me, or is there another opportunity that may suit me and my clients better? And salon owners, I know when I say that it’s uncomfortable to hear. A players are always working to ensure that they’re setting themselves up for success. So if you start to slack, you do run the risk of losing your A’s, even losing your B’s.
So you have to be the place to be. And A players are always looking around, eyes wide open of where could be my next opportunity. It’s simply the way they’re wired. It’s the way their minds work. You can’t change it. So instead, it’s kind of like this is almost a little bit of a if you build it, they will come. If you have built solid foundations, you have amazing brand values, your marketing funnel looks stellar, and you have a competitive advantage, trust me when I say, A players will find you. They will. Because I coach plenty of salon leaders who are living this, and they’re like, “It’s such a game changer.” One of the things I like to humblebrag about, but it’s not even humble, it sounds like a brag. So I’m just going to call like it is. One of the things I liked to brag about was when I was a salon director, I had my resume drawer, and I would literally maybe have to let an assistant go.
I wouldn’t have to do a job posting. Very rarely. Very, very rarely would I have to do a job posting. Instead, I would open my drawer and I would have, I don’t know, 40 resumes that had been dropped off to me in the last 90 days. And I would just pull some out and start interviewing people. And this was the days before social media. People were dropping resumes off at our front desk, emailing them in to me all the time because they knew working for us was a dream opportunity. That still exists today. When I talk to top-performing salon owners, they’re like, “Oh, we don’t even try.” Or they’re like, “We do one Instagram story saying we have a chair available and I’ll get 16 DMs about it,” because they’ve laid the foundation for it.
So for me, I would be interviewing all the time, collecting resumes all the time. Because correct me if I’m wrong. If you had a dream team member, like a 10 out of 10, A player, amazing stylist who applied to work for you, even if your chairs were full, wouldn’t you almost want to find a way to make it work? How can we make this work? And so the idea that like, oh, we’re not hiring right now. If you look at really smart businesses beyond the industry, and even in our industry, they’re never like, oh, sorry, we’re not taking A players right now. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And having a pipeline of great candidates coming in all the time only is smart for you. So you should not be interviewing just when you have chairs open, you should be interviewing 365. Okay?
Next, we have the actual interview. Win me over. I want you to stop using the word interview and start using the word sales pitch. I know that makes everybody so uncomfortable. I totally get it. The reason I say that is because we are in a stylist market. You got to sell yourself. You got to sell your opportunity. So one of the things I learned, I actually did a full podcast episode on interviews. You can go back and listen to it if you missed it. My daughter last summer, she’s a cosmetologist now too. She’s working at a true dream salon. I mean, 10 out of 10. And one of the things I learned a lot was some of the interviews she had were amazing. Some of them, I was like, “Oh my gosh, that was the interview.” Like abysmal, pretty bad. And what I learned was she was very much evaluating the salon based on how the interview went. The interview could have done every single thing I just mentioned right and given her a bad interview. And she was like, “Oh, I’m over it,” in a heartbeat. It was wild to see.
And my daughter is an A player. And so what I think you need to remember is that when someone comes in to interview with you. I remember when I was hiring in, I guess it would’ve been more like 2011, 2010. Oh, I was in the driver’s seat. It was all up to me. I could run the interview however I wanted. Now, when I interview, I have to be winning you over with every question I ask. I have to be asking you questions that you’re going to be able to find valuable. The game has totally changed. You need to be asking the right questions. You need to be showing up in the right way. You need to be selling yourself to this person sitting across from you as much as you’re evaluating if they should be a part of your team. Okay?
Next, we want to have a 90-day onboarding plan. So let’s say you’ve done all these things. You’ve found somebody who’s an amazing candidate. When you look at strong stylists now, and I don’t care if they’re a booth renter, I don’t care if they’re an assistant, I don’t care if they’re an hourly paid stylist. I don’t care. I don’t care if they’re a receptionist, salon manager, you name it. They’re coming in to help support you with salon maintenance. Whatever role you’re hiring for, a 90-day onboarding plan seems to be pretty much the standard. What are my next 90 days going to look like? What does training week one look like, 2, 3, 4? What are the things I need to keep in mind? Do you have a handbook? When are we going over that? At what point do I learn the brand standards? When are we sitting down together? When’s my first evaluation? These are the things people want to know.
By the way, a little pro-tip, if I was hiring booth renters today, I would never hire a booth renter on anything more than a 90-day lease to start, because you don’t really know a person even at 90 days, but you have a much better idea of who they are than you do at day one. And so the first 90 days are really critical. And having a strong plan for that, I think is just absolutely necessary. And last and final step, create a nurture format. So going back to what I said, yes, the first 90 days are critical, but everything that happens beyond that is critical too. One of the things I learned, like a critical leadership mistake that I made, was that assuming happy employees were just happy.
And what I’ve come to find is happy team members can still have frustrations and challenges and giving the opportunity to have those questions and get curious and connect and deeply understand. Maybe we’re good, but how can we be great? Maybe we’re great, how can we be exceptional? Maybe we’re exceptional. How can I make this salon so good that you would never even dream of leaving it? And we don’t know those answers unless we’re really talking to our people. And so imagine you’re a stylist looking for a dream salon, and the owner says, and you and I are going to sit down even if it’s twice a year, whatever makes sense for you. And all I’m going to do is listen to what are your hopes, dreams, and wishes for this salon, what would make working for this salon a continued 10 out of 10 for you. Has a salon owner ever done that for you? Just being seen and heard I’ve come to realize is something that our team members deeply value and something that there’s a lack of.
So I hope this is helpful just to get your wheels turning more than anything. Lots more leadership trainings to come. If this brought up any questions for you, please feel free to leave me a rating or review on iTunes. Ask your question there. That’s where I get all of my inspo for future episodes. And as I always like to say, so much love, happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
