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:
What is up? Welcome back to the Thriving Stylist podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva, and I thought this week we would talk about how to achieve more without working more. We are still, let’s see, I guess we’re just starting Q4 of 2024, and I’ve never been able to say this before, but in my business, we are actually going to significantly surpass our annual revenue and profit goal for the first time ever. So I’m very fortunate. We have been very strategic in the way that we’ve run this coaching business for, I will be celebrating 10 years, January 2025. We’ve always achieved well, but this is the first year where we’ll actually achieve our goals at the start of Q4 versus at the end. So we’re surpassing even what we projected to do.
As I reflect on the year and I think about how we made this possible, I walked into this year knowing it was going to be very different. We as an organization really battled through 2023, and we did quite a bit of battling in 2024 as well, and man, if it wasn’t all worth it, because we did do things differently and I did shake things up, and turns out the result is fantastic. The team, truly through blood, sweat, and tears, now that we’re all on the flip side, we’re like, “Whoa, was that all worth it?” What we’re finding now is, we are achieving a lot more without working more. And that’s I think the goal for all of us.
When we talk about true scalability, it’s how do we grow our businesses without having to break our backs in the process? It doesn’t mean we get to become lazy, but it means can we grow this business without having to work 80 hours a week? Can we still just work as hard as we’ve been working but do things smarter? And for the first time ever, I get to say we did. I want to share with you, I wrote down nine strategies that I think were really beneficial to us, and I’m hoping that they can be beneficial to you as well.
So first, let’s start at the top. My big promise with this episode was how to achieve more without working more. So let me tell you a few of the things that will not get you there. Double booking. Double booking, when I first joined the industry, was proposed to me as working smarter, not harder. I mean, double booking: working smarter, not harder. It’s like it was a tagline. Even at the time, the naive me who didn’t know a lot was like, “How is taking twice as many people not working harder?” I understand you can, I’m doing air quotes, maximize production of your time because you’re serving twice as many guests. I get it. I totally understand. My issue with it is, it is working more. Even if you hire assistants to help you, okay, well, now you’re training assistants. And some people like all that. I’m not saying it’s bad. I was an assistant. I’m super grateful for the opportunity. What I’m saying is running a double column is working more. And I’m talking about the things that don’t include doing that specifically in this episode.
Working less days but longer hours. When people are like, “I’m so smart. Now I’m going to work four 10s instead of five 8s,” or, “I’m going to work three 12s and be full-time.” That is, our bodies, especially in a physical position like ours, are not meant to work that hard. We are in a very labor-intensive industry, and if you’ve not yet met a stylist with carpal tunnel, you’ve not yet met a stylist who developed a color allergy, you’ve not yet met a stylist who had a neck surgery or a shoulder surgery or a spinal surgery, you will, because this is a very physically demanding career. When we don’t take care of our bodies, they will break down. So working less days but longer hours is not achieving more without working more. That’s not it either.
Passive income. I’m a big fan of passive income. I think it’s deeply misunderstood. I think a lot of people try to start side hustles to create passive income. I have a digital education business. There is not a single aspect of my business that is passive income. It is all incredibly active income. I have an extremely large team and a seven-figure payroll to pull it off. So the idea that a lot of the things that people are doing is side hustles, that they’re thinking are passive income simply aren’t. So when you look at true passive income, it would be like investments. If you invest in the stock market or mutual funds or you have an investment property, even investment property isn’t really passive because usually there’s maintenance to be done with it. So when you literally can just set it in, forget it with your money, that’s true passive income. Having a side business is having a side business.
I saw actually a really great visual from this other educator, and he was holding this cup full of marbles, and the cup full of marbles was all the way full. And then he had seven other empty plastic cups on a table. He was like, “A lot of people are seeking passive income as a way to make more without working more.” He’s like, “When you talk to really, really rich people, like older rich dudes who have been wealthy for decades, they talk about multiple streams of income, which is why it got really trendy over the last few years to get there.” But what this educator saying is, the piece that people don’t understand is that most of these people who now have multiple streams of income had a single stream of income for like 50 years and they maximize that single stream to a place where they could invest in multiple streams.
So what he did is, he takes this cup full of marbles and he says, “But what the young naive entrepreneur does is try to create multiple streams of income too fast,” and he starts pouring the marbles into the cups on the table. He says, “What happens is you end up with two, three, four, five, six, seven cups that are not nearly full and you’ve got seven half finished projects, none of which are producing an abundance.” And that is a huge problem with the entrepreneurial market today, whether you’re a stylist, a salon owner, you’re a digital educator, whatever, is that you’re spreading yourself so thin thinking that the more things I’m involved in, the more money I’ll make. No, the more burnt out you’ll be.
But generally speaking, the grass will be greener where you water it. If you go all in on one thing, literally burn the ships and just say, “This is the one thing I’m going to do. I’m going to go all in on it. I’m going to see all the opportunities here,” that’s where you’ll find massive success. So we’re not going to talk about passive income, we’re not going to talk about double booking, and we’re not going to talk about working less days but longer hours.
So, step number one, get clear on what it is you’re trying to achieve. So often, if you’ve ever reached out to me for coaching in the DMs or in Thrivers office hours or anywhere else, often when you ask me a question, and it can be a long, long, long question with all this details, often my response is one sentence response and it’s usually like six to 10 words. It’s super short. And I’ll be like, “Okay, so to sum it up, what is it you’re looking for?” And people really struggle to answer that question. They’ll say things like, “I want to grow.” That is so vague. What are you talking about? You want to grow. What does that mean? You want to be more educated. You want to have more money. You want to have more clients.
And then people say, “Well, I want all of those things.” Okay, why? Why do you want more clients? Do you want to work more hours? “Well, no, I don’t want to work more hours.” Okay, so then maybe we don’t want more clients. Maybe you just want more money. “Yeah, I definitely need more money.” Why? What will the money do for you? “It will allow me to be able to buy a house.” Perfect. So what you don’t want is to grow. What you don’t want is more money. What you don’t want is more clients. You want to be a homeowner. “Oh.” This is the way my wealthiest year yet system is designed. If we can center your aspirations and your focus around the why, the tangible results, I can coach you to get good results.
Most people, most entrepreneurs, most stylists, most salon owners focus on the money, focus on the clients, focus on the metrics. I had somebody message me in the DMs just this week, and she was like, “What retail to sales percentage should I be coaching to?” And I was like, “Forget the retail to sales percentage. Literally throw it in the trash can.” That doesn’t matter. We hyperfocus on these metrics that don’t actually get us to where we want to be. So focus on what truly you’re trying to achieve and allow that to be what I call the North Star.
Number two, identify the key priorities. So we want to focus on the tasks that contribute to the most revenue growth, most customer acquisition. So one of the things that’s really helpful to me, I love this exercise, is to do, have you heard the importance in urgency grid? Have you heard of that before? This is not something I made up. I don’t know who did, but I’ve used it for years. You take a sheet of paper and you divide it into four. You do one line top to bottom and one line left to right, and you mark the top of each box. One of the boxes is going to be marked high importance, low urgency. In that box, you’ll list all of the things that really have to have but don’t have to happen right now. Maybe I would list Q1 tax prep. Okay, that definitely has to happen. It’s super important, but it’s not urgent right this second. I’m still at the top of Q4, so I have time. It has to happen, doesn’t have to happen right now.
Okay, prepping for my end of quarter quarterly conversations with my team: has to happen, doesn’t have to happen right now. So that might go in that box. Then you have low importance, high urgency, so stuff that absolutely has to happen but is not that important. So maybe it’s get back to the emails that were sent to me today. How many of you are hyperfocused on checking your inbox or logging into Instagram to check your DMS? Low importance but highly urgent. Those things are just screaming at you. You need to make note of those things. Those are actually also things that we’re going to table because they’re low importance, even though the ask, they feel highly urgent. Okay?
Then the next box is going to be low importance, low urgency. So it’s not really that important and it’s not really that urgent. That’s the stuff we’re probably not even going to think about right now because it doesn’t matter that much. And then the fourth box is going to be high importance, high urgency. Okay, that’s the stuff you probably need to get done in the next seven days, or depending on what the project is, the next 30 days. But whatever goes in that final box, high importance, high urgency should take 80% of your focus. The other 20% of your focus can go more to low importance, high urgency, or high importance, low urgency. But that low, low, that double low should get none of your time.
What you’ll find is, often the things that go into high importance, high urgency is the shit you don’t really want to do. It’s like the work, you’re like, “Oh, but that’s the hard stuff.” I know, but often the best results live on the other side of the hard stuff. We as a business have found, it’s called eating the frog, if you eat the frog and do the hard stuff that is not as fun, not as sexy, not as exciting, the payoff and reward is really huge. And we’ll get to more of that in just a moment.
Number three, you structure whenever possible in your business. So for stylists specifically, standardized pricing, for those of you who still have one price point for new clients, another price point for these other clients, the price changes based on the ounces of color that I use, the price changes depending on the situation. The more complicated it gets, the more overwhelmed you’re going to be, the harder it’s going to be to achieve, the harder it’s going to be to have predictable revenue every single month.
Online booking. It still bewilders me why people are fighting online booking. I see a lot of people who are shifting away from online booking in the name of having more control over their business. If you have a very high demand, high luxury business where you don’t really need new clients, fine, no worries. If you have a business that is already making more money than you even dream possible, you’re already working your schedule and you want to screen every guest that wants to come into your chair, by all means you do it. If that is not your reality, why you’re making it so hard to sit in your chair as a stylist, I will never understand. I don’t think that is the season of consumer behavior we are in right now. And I think that it’s causing you more work and is holding you back from achieving maximum income. Looking at guest experience systems, if your guest experience isn’t standardized, and by standardized, I mean pre-visit, during visit, and post-visit, we are missing out. So more systems, more structure.
Number four, admit when you need help. This was a big one for us as an organization for sure. So what I have found is, DIY is cheap but slow. I am the queen of do-it-yourself. I don’t need help. I don’t need anyone. I can figure it all out. YouTube University. I started this business on that, and I did okay with it for a while, but what I found was there’s a real glass ceiling. We were having some issues within our business where I was like, “I feel like we’re hitting a wall. Something’s not right.” We brought in an external advisor, and within 90 days, everything had completely turned around.
What we had to do was realize we were good to get ourselves to a certain point, and then we needed to bring in somebody who was smarter, wiser, more experienced to take us to the next level. DIY is cool, but it is cheap and it is slow. To go back to this number four point of admitting when you need help, when you’re trying to achieve more, especially without working more or especially if you’re trying to achieve more faster, investing in education, buying templates, bringing in a coach is always going to save you time and save your sanity.
Number five, be adaptable. Consumer behavior is changing extremely fast right now. Staying stuck and frustrated will not work. So how many of you have hit roadblocks in your business where you’ve had to take a break because you’re like, “I just don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. What used to work isn’t working anymore”? And then what happens is we end up getting bitter and resentful. We’re like, “I’m so frustrated with my clients. I’m so frustrated with my network. I’m so frustrated with the cost of goods.” We blame all of these external factors.
One of the things I’m seeing is, one of the biggest Achilles heels for stylists and salon owners right now is their lack of ability to be adaptable. And I think it’s because we are, as an industry, very tired. We’ve been running on a hamster wheel for a really long time thinking that relief was coming, and unfortunately, we’re heading into another season of grind because consumer behavior is very much changing in real time right now. I’m having to adapt to it as well. So I get it. If you choose not to be adaptable, this industry will eat you alive in the next three years. So it’s critical to stay inspired, stay networked to try things and fail.
I want you to look for patterns in the data. So shake things up with the way you ask for online reviews. Shake things up with the way you post on social media. Shake things up with the way you foil your clients. Shake things up with the way you do blow dries. Literally shake things up and pay attention to what gets you a good result. What gets you good feedback? Staying stuck and stagnant, I am telling you what, is not going to get you there. We do have to eat a little bit of humble pie as we do this, but it’s going to be critical.
The other thing is to pivot as needed. If you do something and it’s not working, rather than continuing to be stubborn and say, “It’s always worked before, this is how I want to do it. This is the kind of work I want to do. These are the kind of clients I want to serve,” when it is not working, don’t be afraid to just try something else. Worst thing that can happen is you try something else, it fails, and you can go back to the thing that was working mediocre. It’s okay. I’ve rebranded this business of mine like seven times. I’ve shifted target market more than once, and we still live to tell the tale. So it’s okay if things need to shift and change in your business. Being adaptable is going to be one of the cornerstones of growing faster without working more.
Number six, network and collaborate. So if you are not well networked with others who are trying to achieve what you are trying to achieve, this will be hard. So one of the things that I was very specific about doing this year is networking with a totally new network. So I have had my same ride or die business friends for the last nine years. I love them dearly. They’ve become a part of my world and I’m super grateful. But what I realized is I was only seeing this very specific, very narrow point of view. This year I decided to hire different mentors. I took I think nine different courses and just educate myself very differently. I am now exposed to a whole new network, a whole new world that I didn’t even know existed. And my mind is blown at the way that other people are doing things very innovatively that I had not been exposed to before.
If you are not surrounding yourself with other high achievers who are doing big things, you are playing small, you’re missing out. You want to be a part of not just groups of other stylists, groups of other owners. Groups of other stylists, owners who are doing bigger and better things than you are, it’s absolutely critical. Even if you’re like, “I’ve got my people,” just know there’s a whole other group of people who are shaking it up in a way that you are missing out on. I’m an introvert, it’s really scary for me to put myself out into new groups. I am so glad I did because my mind has been massively expanded.
I think we’re on number seven. When you hit a roadblock, challenge yourself to power through instead of taking a break. Never, ever, ever take a break. That’s one of the things I really learned this year, because a break is like doomsday. It’s like a momentum killer. One of the things I used to be really big on before I became pregnant with my sons, we’re talking about years ago, I had a high risk pregnancy with him, so I had to stop, but I was a really avid runner. One of the things I learned is that as I was training for any kind of run, if I got to a soreness at a mile four, let’s say, I started feeling achy, but I was trying to do a six-mile run that day, I would push through it for eight minutes. That was my mental mark. I don’t know that there’s any science to that eight minutes. And if after eight minutes I was still uncomfortable, I would call it and be like, “Okay, this is not for me. I can’t do it. I got to go back. Something’s wrong.”
I think I can remember one for sure, maybe two times, I actually had to stop. But when I pushed through and just hydrated myself and got my mind right, the pain would go away. Because I wasn’t actually injured, and I knew that I wasn’t working through an injury, it was a minor temporary discomfort. Had I let that temporary pain stop me, I wouldn’t have gotten to mile six and I wouldn’t have trained to be a runner who could do 12 miles at a sprint, or not a sprint, in a shot. So what I want you to do is, when you feel aches and pains in your business, when you are working on your website and you just can’t figure it out, when your social media is not working anymore, rather than throwing your hands up and saying F it, reach out and get help. That goes to my point of admit when you don’t know how to do something, admit when you’re beyond your set of knowledge and ask for help.
The other thing that’s really helpful is to set a timeline with benchmark goals. So I’ve shared this tip before, but if I’m working on something, especially something hard, my team is good about this too, they know when I procrastinate, they’re like, “Your hard deadline is next Friday and you have to do it no matter how painful it is,” and I will get it done. Sometimes you have to set yourself hard, painful goals and not allow yourself to take those breaks, because the most success lives on the other side of the hardest things you’ll do in your business.
Number eight, I want to remind you of the enterprise commitment. This is something I’ve talked about before. The enterprise commitment is something I learned from somebody I consider to be a mentor of mine. His name is Les McKeown. He is the author of a book called Do Scale and Do Lead. They’re both incredible reads. I highly recommend both of them. One of the things he talks about is the enterprise commitment. To sum it up, it means you put the success of the business above all else. That is something that most of us struggle to do. Whether you have a team or don’t have a team, often we say, “I would do the guest follow-up stuff, but I don’t have time for that.” That’s not putting the business first. “I know that my payroll is too higher, but I don’t want to let any of these team members go.” That’s not putting the business first.
What’s hard about the enterprise commitment is it does cause you to be head-centered instead of heart-centered. It causes you to sometimes have hard conversations with your family, hard conversations with your friends, hard conversations with yourself, but what lives on the other side of the enterprise commitment is achieving more without working more. And I found that out in a really huge way this year, and it was not easy. But being on the other side of it, I can confidently say everybody came out a winner. So really thinking about what decisions need to be made to make sure that this business is as successful as it can be no matter what, knowing that the business is how you feed your family, is really, really critical.
Last but not least, really love what you’re working on. So finding a way to fall back in love with your business again. What I’ve found is, there’s a lot of people in this industry who are kind of bored with the work that you’re doing. One of the things I want you to remember is, for your clients, you are a huge part of their ecosystem. I’ve shared this before and I’ll share it again. The funeral of the stylist I saw from my late high school years into my early 20s is still the largest funeral I’ve ever attended, and I’ve attended some big powerful funerals. This woman spanned generations of touching people’s lives and in the community in such a huge way. And I think, as stylists, we sometimes underestimate the impact that we have on our clients and our communities, on our families.
Clients open up to you in a way that they don’t feel like can open up to anybody else. You change their lives, you make them feel more confident, they trust you. And often we minimize what we’re doing. If you’re falling out of love with your industry, I encourage you to wonder why. Is it the clients you’re working on? Is it the services that you’re doing? Is the money you’re making not feeling worth it? It’s usually one of those things. Oh, or are you not surrounded by a team that makes you happy and brings you joy? Are you being weighed down by responsibilities you don’t like anymore? Things to think about.
But one of the things I encourage you to ask yourself is, when’s the last time you were so excited about something you weren’t even able to sleep? Remember being a kid on Christmas Eve? Or if you don’t celebrate Christmas, maybe for you it was New Year’s Eve, or maybe the night before your birthday, and you would lay in bed and you would try so hard to fall asleep, but you were so excited to wake up at what was waiting just beyond the night’s rest you had to have.
For some of you, you are hooked on going to the gym. You absolutely love it. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not hard. It’s super hard. You have sore muscles and you sweat and you have to count macros and all these different things, but you love the results, and so you do it. It’s a part of your routine, it’s a part of your habit. It’s your lifestyle, right? Some of you love cooking, or you love baking, or you love volunteering with your kid’s classroom, or whatever it is for yourself. Oh, my goodness, somebody that I know listens to this podcast loves to paint. It’s like their outlet. They can talk about their painting and their inspiration for days. You have to have that kind of love for your business. For some people, I think what happens is they get stuck in a rut and they don’t continue to sustain the passion or fill their passion tank to continue to love it.
I have been coaching for, let’s see, almost 12 years now, I’ve been hosting Thriving Stylist for 10. I love this business more than I did 12 years ago. I wake up every Monday morning excited to start the week again. I love every, every single thing I get to do in this business. Some days are hard. I don’t always love the little projects and meetings and nuances, but every single aspect of this business and the people I get to serve, I’m obsessed with. I’m obsessed with my team. I’m obsessed with the work I get to do. You need to love your business that much as well. If you don’t right now, I want you to ask yourself why. Is it that you’re not achieving enough? Do you not like who you’re surrounded with? And what are the things we can do to change it? So if you want to achieve more without working more, I hope these nine tips help you along your way. And as I always like to say, so much love, happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
