Episode #390 – Why I Almost Shut Down Thrivers

TUNE IN: Spotify | Apple Podcasts

As you can probably tell from the title of this episode, things are about to get vulnerable here on the podcast today, as I reveal how very recently I almost gave up and completely shut down Thrivers.

In this episode, I want to share the untold story behind my darkest leadership low. From chaotic team expansion and communication breakdowns to the silent sabotage of misaligned visions, it all brought me to the brink of selling my company…

Fast forward to today, and I am at a place where I feel like I am awake again and I want to talk about hard things differently. If you’re navigating the messy middle of growth right now, I hope the leadership lessons that I learned will empower you to identify red flags, make tough decisions, and build your thriving enterprise. 

Thriving Leadership Method hands salon owners a step-by-step strategy to implement an irresistible culture and create a powerful growth path…all while setting themselves up for structure and profit, and you can join the waitlist NOW at www.thrivingstylist.com/thrivingleadershipmethod/

With Grow My Clientele Calculator, you’ll get instant clarity on how many new clients you’ll need to hit your 2025 financial goals! Enter just four numbers, and this tool will show you exactly how many new guests you need monthly and yearly to reach your target income. No guesswork or complicated math required, and you can get it now at www.thrivingstylist.com/growmyclientele/.  

Do you have a question for me that you’d like answered in a future episode like this one? A great way to do that is to head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review with your question. I’m looking forward to answering your question on a future episode on the podcast! 

If you’re not already following us, @thethrivingstylist, what are you waiting for? This is where I share pro tips every single week, along with winning strategies, testimonials, and amazing breakthroughs from my audience. You’re not going to want to miss out on this.

Hi-lights you won’t want to miss:

>>>How embracing vulnerability ultimately became a crucial step in my personal and professional growth

>>>The rapid growth of my business and how this intense scaling period intersected with significant personal challenges  

>>>My direct and results-oriented leadership style, inside and outside of my business, and what this approach ultimately leads to

>>>The critical lesson I learned about the importance of maintaining my original business vision at all times

>>>How a hiring frenzy and growth my team unexpectedly transformed my role, and not in a positive way

 >>>My biggest takeaways from this experience: the importance of keeping a clear vision, proactive team management, and generously rewarding high-achievers

LINKS: 

Thriving Leadership Method 

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 weren’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 life long 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

What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.

I’m your host Britt Seva, and apparently I’m in my like do scary shit era or something like that.

So it’s funny.

The reason this episode came to be is not by my doing.

I have a chief of creative and marketing who is pushing me more in a direction of authentically telling stories versus just sharing facts and data, right, which is my natural comfort zone.

And the reason why that’s my natural comfort zone is it prevents me from being vulnerable, which is so great.

That’s like so up my alley as if I can just stay, you know, very factual and very tactical.

And it’s, you know, honestly, it’s probably why a lot of you choose to listen to my podcast or watch my coaching is I there’s not a lot of BS.

I just get down to business and we talk about what can be done and what needs to be done.

And she was like, that’s so great.

But let’s find a way to be human, which is so outside of my comfort zone.

I hate it.

And she asked me to do a podcast episode about my low time as a leader.

And she was like, talk about a time where you almost gave up.

And I got so defensive with her.

And not because it was her, not because she offended me.

I wasn’t offended, but I did get defensive.

And I said, well, I’ve never wanted to give up as a leader.

Leadership has not been an issue for me.

I never wanted to walk away from my salon team.

The fact that I had to still haunts me.

I love the team that we have.

It just brought up this very visceral reaction.

And if you could go back and forth between the messages between she and I, it’s very obvious I probably made her so uncomfortable.

So I can’t do this.

This is not my story.

This doesn’t make any sense.

And what I realized is I very much almost gave up.

And she very much knows that.

But she’s gracious and didn’t say, let’s open your eyes and remember what we’ve all collectively lived through together.

She didn’t say that.

She just said, OK, if you want to pick a different topic, go for it.

And it took me a few hours.

And I realized that when I hit a leadership low and when I almost completely shut down Thriver Society, I was in such a dark place that it was not something I could talk about, not something I’d want to admit to.

Now, recently, the place I’m at now is I feel like I’m awake again.

I don’t know how to describe it.

And because I am in such a different space, I’m able to talk about lows or talk about hard things differently because I’m so healed and I’m so far removed from that feeling of, I hate leadership.

I hate what I’m doing.

I don’t like what I’ve created.

How do I get out?

And now I see so clearly that the reason she wanted me to talk about this is because I think it’s probably very relatable to most business owners, particularly salon owners with teams and salon owners who care deeply about their team in the way that I’ve always cared about the teams that I’ve led.

And previously, I was too prideful and too ashamed, and also probably too raw to admit almost walking away from Thrivers Society in this business I built very recently.

This is not like an old story.

This is a very recent story.

But the universe is pushing me to share it now because I’m ready and I feel different and I think I owe it to everybody and I’m getting the push and it’s time.

So first things first, I’ll just start at the top and answer the awkward question.

Walking away from Thrivers Society would never have had anything to do with the money or the success of the business.

One of the things I’m very blessed with and I’m very grateful for and I never take for granted is that this business has always financially been successful since day one since 2015.

This business has not struggled in that way.

The demand to work for us is still extremely high.

We’ve always been profitable.

There’s always been a strong demand even in the hardest of times, which is what made me consider walking away as wild as it was because when somebody walks away from a business, first of all, if you’re going to sell a business, you do it while it’s high.

So if I was going to walk away from the business, like the timing kind of made logical sense.

But as a human, I was still in my 30s.

Like I have so much life left to go.

And so it would have been a really wild decision to make.

But I was done.

I was really, really done.

And I want to talk about how I got there and how I walked it back and the mistakes that I made, because the mistakes that I made in this business are the same mistakes that some of you are making in your salons right now.

And if I can prevent you from getting to the place that I was, then this episode will have been worth it.

Now, the other thing I want to make clear before I get into the story and right at the top of this episode, closing Thrivers was never about the work.

I still love the work I do.

Somebody asked me recently what my work schedule is.

I work seven days a week.

And I’m somebody who coaches to life balance.

That’s what makes me feel balanced.

I love it.

I’m obsessed with the work I do.

I enjoy it.

When I have free time, it’s what I choose to do.

I just, I really, really like it.

I love the students I work with.

Some of the students I’ve met have been some of the most impactful people in my entire lifetime.

I enjoy hearing your stories.

I love our industry so very much.

I’m so grateful for the connections I’ve built.

It’s not about that.

It wasn’t about the students.

It wasn’t about the work.

It wasn’t about the industry.

It wasn’t about the money.

When I look back now at a summary of what made me decide this was not for me, it was a combination of bad decisions, bad communication, and me as the leader of this business making decisions to keep the peace rather than support the business.

And I think that there’s probably a lot of you, salon owners listening to this, who especially with that last month are doing or have done what I did, which is being soft in your decision making to keep the peace, to not ruffle feathers, to not have to deal with adversity, and to just hope that in time things will heal, or that you can throw money at something and it will go away, or that you can work with a team member to get them to a better place.

I’m going to share with you some stories about lessons I learned in that thought process, so that hopefully you don’t do the same.

So let’s talk about how I got to the point, and let’s go all the way back to 2017.

So from 2015 to 2017, I ran this coaching business by myself.

For two years, it was just me doing all the things.

I did email support.

I did course creation, teaching, coaching.

But listen, I only had probably 500 students or something like that, and I was able to do it by myself.

It wasn’t a problem.

And then I hit this point where I wasn’t able to do it myself well, and I decided to hire a team member, and I hired St.

CT.

Anybody who knows CT, like to know her is to love her.

Building this business was she and I against the world for almost two years.

It was just she and I and all of our beautiful, amazing Thrivers for a couple of years.

And then end of 2018, beginning of 2019, we were both like, OK, we need some help, not full time help, but we need to start bringing on support because the business was growing so fast.

So we hired one more person and then another and another and another.

And by the end of 2019, there were five of us.

And then by the end of 2020, we had hired six more people.

And heading into 2021, we decided we still weren’t done yet.

So by the beginning of 2021, we were a team of 13.

So in 2019, 2018, 2019, we had a team of one or two.

By beginning of 2021, we were a team of 13.

So we hired and scaled very, very fast.

And we did it because the business had these needs and, you know, you don’t want to burn people out.

And so we just kept hiring and growing and training.

And we loved everybody we worked with and nothing to do with that.

So then 2021 happened.

And for those of you who are like loyalists of the show or longtime Thrivers or you’re like Brenda, who sends me a card every single year in May, 2021 was the most pivotal year I’ve ever had in my life.

Some of you are probably very familiar with the personal reasons as to why.

I’ve shared those a few times over, but that wasn’t the only reason why 2021 was so pivotal.

So ears open because I’m going to tell you my 2021 timeline.

It started off like a normal year.

We were still recovering from COVID.

When 2020 happened, I was a coach who decided to double down.

I wasn’t charging for anything.

I wasn’t selling any programs.

I didn’t create a course on pandemic support and try and sell it.

Nothing like that.

I just leaned it and I coached for free a ton, because I wanted to support everybody.

May of 2021, my very best friend passed away.

She was in her 30s.

She left two kids behind.

It was sudden and unexpected.

And it’s very shallow for me to call her my best friend.

You had to have known us to understand, but she was my entire family.

I don’t have a family.

And so it was it.

Like she’s the person who’s known me since childhood.

She’s my rock.

Now she’s gone.

I didn’t expect it.

That’s May 2021.

June of 2021, I rerecord all of Thriving Stylist Method for the first time in two years, because it’s time.

We’ve just come out of 2020.

Everything has changed.

It was due.

It had to happen.

So May, she passes.

June of 2021, I rerecord Thriving Stylist Method.

July of 2021, I create a course called Scaling Stylist Method, and I record all of that.

August of 2021, my mother-in-law passed away, and she was like the fifth member of our family, like core critical.

It just destroyed us.

September of 2021, I did a huge launch for both Thriving Stylist Method and Scaling Stylist Method, which had just been rebuilt.

It was the largest influx of students we have ever taken on in the history of this company.

September of 2021, we had never taken on so many students all at once before.

So massive, massive.

October of 2021, I launched the new wealthiest year yet planner.

November of 2021, I re-recorded, actually, I didn’t re-record, I recorded for the first time ever Thriving Leadership Method.

December of 2021, Thriving Leadership Method goes on sale, launches and takes on hundreds of students.

June of 2022, Thrivers Live 2022 took place.

If you don’t know this, it takes just over a year to plan an event like that.

So in the middle of all of those things I just talked about, we are also creating in this business a $1.3 million event in one year.

That’s what my 2021 looked like.

And as I was typing this out, I’m like, why didn’t anybody stop me?

I just was on this bullet train.

And it’s like life and the universe was trying to be like, what are you doing?

And I just would not listen.

So I had this really intense experience where I’m experiencing more loss than I’ve ever experienced in my life and also this new level of professional success.

And I’m deeply committed to not letting anybody down.

Nobody in my personal life, nobody in my professional life.

I have this huge team I’ve built.

I’ve got 13 employees relying on me.

I cannot hit pause in this business.

I’ve got a massive payroll.

I’ve got all these students who have chosen to work with me.

There is no time.

So I’m going to keep pushing.

So a little bit of insight is to me as a leader, just in general, a leader in any organization.

If I’m a leader in a volunteer organization, the leader of Thrivers Society and this business I’m in, I’ve never been known as being a nice leader.

I’m a tough leader.

If you ask anybody who’s worked for me and enjoys working for me, it’s because you get a deep feeling of achievement when you work for me.

I care for everybody who’s on this team in a very, very deep, real way, deeply.

I care about their families.

I care about them as humans.

We are here running a business and I have never, in either of the businesses I’ve run, lost sight of that.

And at the end of the day, the business has to win.

So whatever has to happen for the business to win allows for everybody who works in the business to continue having a livelihood.

That means I have to make hard decisions and I have to do hard things.

It’s the only way good businesses survive for the long haul, but it’s not easy, okay?

So the reason why I’m sharing this is because you have to understand that I’ve always been a little bit of a hard ass in the way that I lead.

I’m well aware of it, but it produces incredible results.

And my teams will never rave about me being a loving, nurturing, amazing leader in that sense because I’m not, but my employee retention for high performers has always been flawless because life is really damn good if you’re a high performer in any business that I’m running.

Okay.

So 2021, I hire a team member in this hiring frenzy fury that we’re having.

And this person has a strong corporate background.

She was hired for inbox support, but she was really beloved by the team, like in a new way.

We’ve, it’s been a long time since we’ve hired a team member that the team didn’t really like.

We’re pretty good about hiring for culture, but this was like different.

She just was like instantly the love, the heartbeat.

Everybody loved this person.

And she was more corporate.

And so she’s coming in at this time where I’m kind of going through this weird stuff.

The business is moving really, really fast.

But again, I’m not really self-aware.

I’m so not aware in 2021 of everything that’s going on.

So she gets promoted and she gets promoted to a really significant role in the business.

And as she’s promoted, she’s telling me and convincing me and convincing other people in my team that my job in this business is to be the leader and the CEO and I need to trust the team to own their zones and get it done.

And she would tell me, and she was right, you hired these people, they’re good people, don’t micromanage, let them do their thing.

And her narrative became the company narrative.

And this happened slowly and it happened over time.

But what happened was the point of view she had and the vision for my business that she had became everybody’s vision.

And now I look back and I can see it so clearly, but when it was happening in real time, I didn’t see it.

I don’t think the rest of the team saw it either.

And here’s the thing I want to be clear, I don’t think she was doing it to be manipulative or maniacal.

I don’t think that at all.

I think that I was not in a good place to hold the reins of my own business.

I had this high performer come in.

I was not in a good place.

It kind of allowed me to let my guard down and breathe a little easier because I had this performer who was going to take the weight off.

Has anybody ever given control to a senior stylist or had a salon manager who came in and seemed to have all the answers?

And so you don’t want to deal with the problems anymore.

And you’re like, you know what?

This is perfect.

They’ve got it.

Or I don’t want to lose this high performer, so I’m going to make sure that they’re happy and I’m going to do whatever they say.

Most of us as leaders have done that.

We did that in the salon for sure.

There’s some high performers who got away with murder, who were stylists because we didn’t want to lose them.

And they knew it.

And of course, I mean, that’s just human nature, right?

They’re not bad people.

It’s just human nature, right?

So I gave blind trust to not just her, but my whole company, because her vision became the company vision.

And the company vision was, Britt needs to be quiet and just let us do our thing.

And I think that there were lots of little conversations that took place that made it seem like I was a problem in my own company.

And you know what?

Hindsight, maybe I was at that time.

Like maybe I was not in a good place and just couldn’t see it.

Maybe that was true.

But I just went with the flow on that.

And she had her own vision for what the student experience should look like.

And I went for it.

And she had her own vision for what my next launch should look like.

And I listened.

And I listened because I was mostly so scared to lose her and all the other people who had decided she was the smartest person in the room.

And my business became this very fragile thing that had never been before.

And I was terrified.

Fast forward.

She unexpectedly quit.

And at the time I was devastated.

And now, man, I feel so thankful because I went back into the department and I looked at what she had done, allegedly to improve guest experience.

And she had peeled back everything that was good and special.

She had peeled back everything that made Thrivers Magical.

She had, I think, tried to scale and streamline.

But it was like we had lost the heartbeat.

And it killed me because it happened under my watch and I just wasn’t behind the wheel.

And I didn’t see it coming.

And I inspected too late.

And the bottom line in this lesson was I had completely trusted the wrong person.

And this was a kind person, a beloved person, somebody that the team loved.

Had I fired her, the team would have hated me, okay?

This was an experienced person.

She just had her own agenda that did not fit my business vision.

And I did not stick to my guns on my vision.

And that was my fault.

None of what she did was her fault.

Not a single thing.

It’s my fault.

Because me as the leader did not stick to my vision and did not have the hard conversations that needed to take place and did not sit down and dig deep into my own business and say, wait, why are things feeling weird?

I was just so relieved to have somebody else doing the work.

I let it happen.

I see someone’s doing this all the time.

You’ll flex your decision making or your compensation plan or your scheduling guidelines so that a big dog doesn’t get mad.

One of the biggest leadership lessons learned I’ve had in the last couple of years is you adjust the room to fit the vision, not the vision to fit the room.

And I had adjusted the vision to fit the room.

And let me tell you again how I did that.

So she’s gone and I can see that she’s dismantled a ton of my vision.

So we’ve got this huge rebuild to take place.

And we’ve got 13 team members here at this time, but now we’re down to 12 and there’s more work to be done.

And everybody’s saying they’re at capacity and can’t do anything else.

So what do we do?

We hire three more people.

So now we’re a team of 15, and I’m spending less and less time coaching and creating and nurturing and learning.

And I’m spending most of my week in meetings.

And I tell myself, well, this is what leaders do.

This is what CEOs do.

They just put out fires.

And it’s funny, it’s not what I had ever done in the salon, but apparently now this is what I’m doing.

I’m just meeting and talking about gossip and troubleshooting and conflict management.

And I’m just doing all these like very heavy things, but I’m like, okay, this is must be what it looks like.

So we’ve got drama and gossip that wasn’t there before.

And I’ve still got this capacity issue where work is telling me they can’t get everything done, or the team is telling me they can’t get everything done.

And now people are mad and they’re getting resentful.

And I know that people are chitter-chattering amongst themselves about how hard everything has gotten.

So we bring in communication coaches and operations experts.

And I start changing policies and lightening workloads and gifting time off.

And I’m living in this narrative that this industry must just be hard.

Digital education must just be hard.

Leading a team like this just must be hard.

It must just be a battle.

Like I’m a warrior.

I never fail at anything.

So I’m like, OK, I’m just going to keep pushing through and pushing through and pushing through.

We can do this.

How many of you have done that in your salon as a leader?

And you’re like, the industry is hard.

This is just hard.

Leading a team is hard.

Let me tell you, wrong.

I was so wrong.

And it’s not that owning a business is ever easier, that leading a team is ever easy, but it shouldn’t be that freaking hard.

If you are going home every night resentful for the business you’ve built and you wake up every morning dreading going there, something is not right.

That is not normal.

And I needed to snap with it so much faster than I did.

So I’ve got this team that’s saying, it’s too much work.

I’m laughing because as I tell the story, I’m like, oh my gosh, what were you thinking?

And now I’ve got, you know, I need to pour support back into this community because I had this person who undid all of it, but I’m spending my whole week leading these crisis situations, so I don’t have time.

So what do I decide to do?

I decide to hire because this is what I do apparently.

And I hire four coaches and I’m already at just operating on fumes.

I barely have any time to pour into these beautiful souls, but I hire them at the end of 2022.

So, you know, a year after this chaos is taking place, not even, and I start working to train them.

And I’m asking myself at going through this, I have always been good at leadership.

I was the girl at, I won the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay.

I was the youngest person in the history of the Ritz-Carlton to win Five Star Employee of the Year.

Like, I am an effing good leader.

I know that about myself.

I’ve been acknowledged.

I was a great salon leader.

Like, I know that it’s in me to be a good leader.

In any community thing that my husband and I get involved in here, I get nominated to be the leader.

Like, it’s just the thing that we do.

And I’m like, this is just not adding up.

For some reason, I can’t do it here.

I don’t care what the heck is wrong.

And a real low for me was I remember, I’ll be curious to see if my team remembers this.

We were on a team meeting and it was getting heated.

People were frustrated and you could see tensions were building and eyes were rolling and people were mad.

And I turned my screen off and I muted myself and I cried.

And I don’t think my team knew that part, but it was this…

I’m sure they thought, oh, she just has to go or she’s getting in her car.

And I was like, I can’t believe that this is what we’ve become.

Like, I’ve literally lost my way as a leader and I’m trying to get it back.

So I get out this meeting and I cry.

And couldn’t have been two months later, I got an offer to buy my business.

And if you would ask me five years ago, would I entertain an offer like that?

I would have been like, hell no.

This is my baby.

I’m going to ride this till the wheels fall off.

Hopefully, my daughter takes it over one day.

I just had such a different vision for the way that it was going to go.

And then November of 2023, I got another offer to buy the business.

And after that second offer, I was like, this is it.

This is what the universe wants me to do.

I’m reading the signs and the signs are like, this is not going well and I need to make a leap.

And it was my sweet, sweet husband who was like, you might be misreading the signs, like hold tight.

I really think you’re making a decision when your emotions are really high and you just want to get the F out.

And he was right.

And I was looking for an out and outs were being presented to me and it was very difficult not to take it.

So I told him, if not that, I need to figure this out.

I cannot keep living this way.

And he was like, I totally get it.

So January of 2024, I did two things.

One, I hired an independent business operations consultant.

This is somebody who has worked with businesses that look similar to mine.

So there are those of you who were like, I want that for my salon.

She probably wouldn’t take, actually, I know she wouldn’t take you.

Your business doesn’t look the way it would for her to want to come in and do the work that she did for us.

But I basically hired somebody to come in and evaluate our business completely unbiased.

She doesn’t know any of the people, any of the players, any of the roles, any of the responsibilities.

She just comes in and looks.

I wanted to get her feedback.

It was such a gift.

I cannot even express enough, such a gift.

Around the same time, I had signed up for this new educational experience, and I took a trip down to Malibu, California.

It was the spring of 2024.

The combination of those two things, the independent business operations analysis and the trip down to Malibu without going into too much detail, because I don’t think at least at this crossroads it’s necessary or it would be helpful.

I will share with you the outcome of those two things.

It became very apparent that the reason why we were struggling is I had been avoiding having critical conversations.

I let underperforming team members stay too long.

I let toxic team members poison the minds of good ones.

I let top performers who didn’t share my vision stay too long.

I didn’t deeply celebrate the ones who were doing the most and carrying the vision out in the fullest biggest way possible.

And I had just thought that my problems were normal and they were so far from normal.

There should not be that much turmoil in any business.

And it was my own doing.

I’m the leader of the ship and I had completely lost control.

So June of 2024, I decided I needed to get back behind the wheel, get back to my vision and do things the way I always wanted them to be done.

I said to my team, we need to re-record Thriving Stylist Method and Thriving Leadership Method.

I had this realization that they were both recorded in the most challenging period of my life, the most intense, the world had changed.

We had just been through a pandemic.

My world was completely upside down.

I wasn’t thinking clearly.

And with Thriving Leadership Method in particular, we had so much room to truly shift the entire industry.

And I just hadn’t been in a place where I could take it to that level.

What we created was good.

It wasn’t revolutionary.

So a new Thriving Leadership Method launches this summer.

It’s going to shake shit up.

The new Thriving Leadership Method is truly revolutionary.

It’s, I think, the first of its kind.

It’s a way of running business as a leader that benefits both the leader and the team in a very deep and profound way.

I think it overcomes a lot of the objections that Stylists are currently having working at their existing salons.

It’s taking into account all the things I’ve learned recently as a leader, all the things I’ve learned working with salon leaders, all of the things that I experienced as a salon leader way back when.

All of the things I hear, Stylists and salon leaders feeling challenged by now, and now I’m in the place where I could do it properly.

Last summer, I decided all of these things needed to happen.

We made a very bold and scary decision.

My team was terrified, but I decided to take our team from a team of 16 to a team of 10.

I did not realize so many people knew that I had done that.

I thought we did it really quietly, but I guess people know, and that’s fine.

That’s great.

I might have even mentioned it at some point, but in the last week or so, it’s come up a lot like, okay, you scaled and it came up at the retreat too.

Like Britt, you scaled from 16 to 10.

What’s been challenging?

Nothing.

It was the best decision I ever made.

We don’t have drama.

We have maybe 15 percent of the meetings we used to have.

I don’t have conflict resolution.

I don’t have underperforming team members.

I don’t have team members who say their workload is too high.

Everybody’s workload is, I think, more balanced than it’s ever been before.

It’s not that we don’t work hard.

This will always be a company where we work hard.

But I don’t think anybody’s missing out on their personal life anymore in a way that they were.

I don’t think people are feeling overwhelmed by their work anymore or resentful of their work anymore.

Everybody knows their role.

Last year, I closed out last year being able to gift my team a $70,000 bonus because I’m now able to be so generous with my high performers.

I’m in a better place.

They’re in a better place and we’re able to reward for that.

The capacity issues I had and the challenges and the drama and the gossip and all of the things were because I had the wrong people doing the wrong work.

They weren’t bad people.

They were great people.

I had them doing work that was not for them.

And if any of you hired stylists who are just not happy and they stink up the whole salon or receptionist who work for you because they can’t find any other job and they talk about it all the time and they don’t do a great job, but they’re not the worst.

And so you just let them stick around rotting.

I mean, they’re not happy.

You’re not happy.

It’s not everybody’s feeling negative about it.

The salon is talking about these people.

And what happens is you start to poison your own well.

You had a good thing going, but you let things rot because you were not having the conversations that needed to be had.

And you let the vision go.

At least that’s what happened to me.

So I want to share with you the biggest takeaways I had and how it brought me to a place of, I will never fucking sell this business.

And thank God I didn’t back then because I was so close because I just wasn’t willing to do the leadership work that needed to be done.

And I am so thankful that I took 2024 to educate, to bring in people to help me to have that operations consultant give me the hard truth that I wasn’t feeling or seeing anywhere else and for regaining the trust with my team that I had lost.

And it was all on me.

It was all on me as the leader.

I had lost their trust and to watch come back in the last year has been beautiful and amazing and makes my relationships with all the people so much better and just, man, if life isn’t good.

So my biggest takeaways, have a clear vision for your business and make sure every single team member respects your vision.

If they don’t, they can’t work for you.

Don’t be scared of letting high performers go.

Be scared of letting the wrong ones stay.

Have KPIs, expect achievement.

When a person can’t achieve, let them go on their way.

It’s all good.

They’re just not happy here.

Compensate your high achievers generously.

Always don’t change the vision to meet the room.

Change the room to meet the vision.

Stay open to adapting forever.

So to those of you who hung with me through my messy, messy middle from 2021 to 2024, thank you.

I’ll be forever grateful.

I’m on the flip side and I’m excited to shake shit up in a huge way yet again.

Your girl’s back.

The new version of Thriving Stylist Method is out now.

The new version of Thriving Leadership Method with our new leadership iceberg that you all are going to lose your minds for, opens up this summer.

Waitlist is available now.

You can go to thrivingstylist.com/thrivingleadershpmethod/one.

And big updates coming the wealthiest year yet.

We’re doing big, big stuff around here.

I’m excited to have you be a part of it.

As I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.