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And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
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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 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.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
I’m your host Britt Seva.
And this week, we’re talking about the nine numbers that measure growth potential in a stylist business.
And I’ll be the first to say, I’m not a fan of traditional metrics.
So, these may be different than what you’re currently working with.
If you work for a salon leader, these might be different than what your salon leader is evaluating you on.
That’s totally fine.
One of the benefits that I have in the business that I’ve built is we’ve coached over 17,000 stylist and salon owners.
And so, I’ve gotten to see a lot of back-end numbers, a lot of data on visit frequency, coast to coast and around the world.
I’ve seen a lot of data on salon profitability.
I’ve seen a lot of patterns in what allows a stylist to grow quickly versus one that stalled out.
And I know the metrics that matter and I know the metrics that don’t.
And those are the things I want to speak to.
I’ve spoken on to this on the podcast one previous time.
It was episode 319.
So, it’s from a few years back.
My point of view has actually changed.
So, we’re going to share updated metrics and numbers and talk about why those numbers matter the most.
A question I get asked a lot, a lot, a lot is, how do I know when this is enough?
And enough is a really complex word.
Sometimes it’s, how do I know if I have enough clients?
How do I know if I’m making enough money?
How do I know if I have enough new guest requests?
How do I know if one of my stylist is seeing enough clients?
A question I just got actually asked last week was, is there a calculator that can show me if my team has enough demand?
And it would be very challenging to make a calculator for that, specifically because every person on your team works differently.
Some members of your team work three days a week, some work five.
Enough for somebody who works three is going to be a much smaller number than somebody who works five.
You also might have somebody who works three days a week who makes 20 percent more revenue than somebody who works five.
So then what does that mean to enough?
The other thing about enough is sometimes you have somebody or you’re a stylist who is working behind the chair for more like supplemental income.
The work that you do is important, the money that you make definitely makes an impact, but it’s not the foundation of your family’s well-being.
Versus some of you, you are the well-being of your family, like you live and die by the money you make behind that chair.
So enough for even those two different people is going to be different.
That’s why I’m not a fan ever of coaching systems and coaching models, where every stylist needs to reach the same level of metrics in order to be deemed as successful.
A lot of the more dated strategies make it so that somebody who works more part-time could never really make a robust income.
For me, I would much, much, much rather have a stylist who’s working behind the chair two days a week, making $40,000 a year, than somebody who’s behind the chair five days a week, making 60.
That two-day week person is actually much more valuable to me, but most systems and most metrics would never reward that part-time person.
So what I like to look at when I’m looking at metrics and numbers and data that predict if a stylist is growing well, if a stylist is going to be successful, there are things any stylist needs to change in their business, whether you are a booth renter or a studio suite owner or commission stylist.
There’s nine things that when I look at these 17,000 sets of data, when there’s magic in these nine data points, somebody will be successful.
Those are the numbers I want to focus on today.
I’m also at the end of the episode going to talk about the numbers I left out and why I chose to leave them out.
I’m going to go step-by-step of the metrics I want you tracking monthly.
The first metric we want to be keeping an eye on every single month is obviously going to be our total revenue received.
It never ceases to amaze me when I talk to a stylist and I say, how much revenue did you do last month?
They say, I don’t know, but I could look that up.
You better believe.
I know down to the penny how much money my business makes every single month.
This is not our hobby.
This is our business.
Another thing that always surprises me is when I talk to stylists, independent stylists, so booth renders or studio suite owners, and they don’t have a business bank account and a personal bank account.
If you still have all of your revenue just dropping into your personal bank account, I sincerely hope you never get audited.
It will be incredibly challenging for you.
You want to have all of the revenue in your business going into a business bank account and you want that business bank account to have bookkeeping done every single month, every single month.
There’s software that can do this for you.
You can hire a bookkeeper if you’re at a revenue place where that’s possible.
Generally speaking, when you bring on resources like bookkeeping and CPAs and things like that, they pay for themselves.
They save you more than they cost.
But there are really incredible low-cost digital resources as well to manage your books.
You should know every single month how much revenue your business brought in.
It also surprises me.
When I talk to commission stylist, I’m like, how much revenue did you produce last month?
They’re like, I don’t know, but my paycheck was $4,500.
But they have no idea how much the service revenue was.
It’s so dangerous.
Though we have our wealthiest year yet planners where stylist and salon owners can be tracking metrics like that.
But if you don’t have something like that, you have to be tracking it somewhere.
It’s too important to just ignore.
Assuming you’re tracking it somewhere, how much total revenue received is enough?
When we come to the enough metric, what I always say is the economy in the US is growing by about 3% a year.
That means the cost of living is going up by 3% every year.
You change nothing, the cost of living around you goes up by 3% a year.
Because the average stylist makes about 50% profit off the services they do, our service total needs to increase by 6% year over year for our lifestyle to stay the same.
If you make the same money in 2025 as you did in 2024, your lifestyle is actually decreasing.
It needs to increase by at least 6% that total service revenue year over year or your lifestyle is declining.
For your lifestyle to improve, we like to see that numbered at least 15%.
15% growth year over year.
Now, month over month, it doesn’t have to be 15% month over month.
Generally, it’s going to be incremental.
But looking at that total revenue received every single month is going to help you to know if you were there.
Then we have total guests you see every single month.
So how many guests did you see to make that revenue happen?
This number is important.
It’s not as important as some of the other metrics to me.
I will say total guests you see each month is mostly important in determining your price point, and it does come into play when we look at retention.
But as far as the other metrics, total guests you see each month is actually one of the more irrelevant ones to me.
So it’s important, I would track it.
Like I said, if you have a Wealthiest Year Yet planner, which is our business organization tool, you can jot that in there.
We have a space for it.
If you don’t, mark it down somewhere.
We want to know volume of how many guests you’re seeing each month.
The more important thing with that one is if you start to see a radical decline.
Like if you see, this is so weird.
I’m making less money month over month.
Is my client count going down or is maybe my average ticket going down?
That total guests you see each month metric is more good in case you see variation in other metrics you don’t understand.
But for me, I don’t really care how many clients you see in a month if your revenue is increasing month over month, if that makes sense.
The money counts twice.
So if guest count dips, but revenue increases, you’re winning.
That’s called scaling.
So we don’t put a ton of weight into that one, but it’s important to know.
So I want you to track that too.
The third metric I want you tracking is total new guest requests that you get every single month.
Now, when I’m tracking new guest requests, I actually don’t care if you see them or not.
I care if they’re calling asking for you.
So I was having a great conversation with a super successful stylist the other day, and I said, hey, how many new guest requests do you get every month?
She was like, I honestly have no idea.
She was like, I’m so booked.
This stylist was booked for like six or seven weeks out.
She’s super successful.
It was interesting to me, she wasn’t quite sure even how many people were trying to get in to see her that she was turning away.
That’s a really important metric in your business because it shows your current demand.
When we’re looking at demand, it deeply impacts pricing, it impacts how much we need to put into marketing, so many other things.
So I’m actually much more interested in the metric of total new guest requests you receive every single month, than I am in total guests overall, if this makes sense.
The new business is much, much more important.
So going in order of importance, right now, we have total revenue.
Number one metric, most important.
The second most important is probably the new guest demand, and then the third most important is total guests you see overall.
Then we get into utilization.
The utilization is going to be metric number four.
Some booking systems will give you this data, which is great.
One of the tricky things by utilization, depending on what booking system you use, is making sure you’re filtering out things like locks for lunch or if you’re stretching out appointments that don’t really need to be stretched, it can skew utilization.
But what it’s meant to show is what percentage of every day is actually revenue producing.
So if you have a stylist or you are a stylist who has lots of gaps in your schedule, you could be working five days a week, but only operating at 30 percent utilization.
That’s very dangerous.
So we want to say, you know, of your available time, how booked and busy are you?
That’s going to be metric number four.
Then metric number five is existing guest retention.
This is huge and critical.
So while we all want to be getting new guests every single month, and the big thing that I coach to is marketing funnel and getting more clients in the door and all of that.
And that’s the piece that we focus a lot on.
If you are not keeping them, it doesn’t hardly matter.
So existing guest retention is extremely critical.
On average, a stylist retains 30% of the new guests they meet to visit number three.
Meaning 70% of the people who come in to see you will not stay with you for three visits.
70%.
That’s dismal.
For the amount of energy and effort we put into marketing, we want to make sure that we’re pushing that number up as much as we possibly can.
So that’s going to mean new guest retention.
Then we have existing guest retention, and existing guest retention is of the clients you’ve already built great relationships with, how many are sticking around year over year?
So even the best stylist, the most successful stylist, the most in-demand stylist that I’ve ever met in my life, don’t have 100% retention.
Nobody does.
So when somebody is like, I retain over 100%, you’re probably doing the math wrong.
Actually, you’re guaranteed to be doing the math wrong.
You don’t.
You can’t retain more than the amount of people that were already seeing you like it doesn’t work.
Exceptional base clientele retention is 70%.
Exceptional.
So if you’re losing 10% or less of your clients every single year, you’re doing great.
Why do we lose clients?
Clients move, your price point changes, your price point doesn’t change, your service menu changes, your service menu doesn’t change.
So it could be because your clients are feeling more or less aligned with your business.
There’s lots of different reasons why clients leave.
But what we want to know is with your clients who have been seeing you historically on a regular basis, and regular can be varied, right?
Regular can be every six weeks, every eight weeks, every 12, twice a year.
All of those could still be your regular clients.
How many of those are you keeping?
And when I run retention, this is a metric I actually like to do quarterly.
I think it’s a little bit healthier done that way.
So like you’ll see if you do have a wealthiest year yet planner, you’ll see in there we run every year’s tracking in what we call sprints.
That’s basically three month quarters.
And at the end of each quarter, what would be a very smart thing to do is run your retention.
And there’s two different mathematical equations.
We have an equation that we use for base clientele retention, and then a different mathematical equation that we use for new guest retention.
So what we’re hoping to achieve with new guest retention is that at least 30 percent of clients who see you one time make it to the third visit.
When we’re looking at base clientele retention, we want to see a rate of 90 percent.
Now, whenever I talk about retention, people say, well, my booking system does that for me.
Okay, great.
So what range, what span of time is your booking system looking at when it’s calculating retention?
Is it going back six months?
Is it going back 90 days?
And then what is the visit frequency it’s scanning for?
And then what’s the math it uses when it’s judging new guest retention versus base guest retention?
And if it only has one metric and the metric is called retention, I promise you it’s wrong.
So, we coach to doing these numbers manually so that you know correctly what they are.
You don’t have to do them all the time, but I like to do them four times a year.
So, that’s going to be metrics five and six for us.
It’s going to be your new guest retention and your existing guest retention.
It’s important to get new guests coming in, but if we’re not keeping the guests that we had been seeing long term or we’re not keeping the new clients that are interested in working for our business, all the marketing in the world can’t save you.
And you could actually be feeling like you’re running on a hamster wheel and doing as much as you can.
And why doesn’t my money increase?
And why isn’t my clientele growing?
If you’re losing them on the retention side, that’s what I call bleeding out.
It’s one of the most dangerous things you can do in your business.
And we have to fix the bleed or stop the bleed before we can even focus on the marketing.
OK, so new guest retention and existing guest retention.
Next is going to be metric number seven, which is new Google or Yelp reviews.
I believe there is nothing more important than Google and Yelp reviews in your business today when it comes to growing fast.
As we see all the shifts changing in social media, as we see AI enter the conversation, Google and Yelp reviews have never been more important.
So while all the other social media platforms are important and you don’t just get to take your foot off the gas there, getting new Google and Yelp reviews every single month is critical.
I would be tracking every single month how many people are leaving you reviews.
I just did a keynote presentation for a booking system.
It was so much fun.
And one of the things I talked about was the power of online reviews.
And I got to look up some new stats.
There’s a new stat that came out for 2025 that said that 70 percent of review readers only trust reviews that were left in the last 30 days.
So if I were to go to your Google and your Yelp and your reviews are from six months ago, people are like, I don’t even care.
Recency of review is like this new metric that matters a ton.
So you want to make sure that every single month you’re getting more of those Google and those Yelp reviews.
Then we have total expenses.
So how much did you spend this month?
So if you are a commission stylist, for me, what I would do is I would track my total gross service revenue.
So how much I did in services in the month.
Under total expenses, I personally would write down how much the salon kept as their portion of the commission split.
Then that leads to metric number nine, which is total profit.
So if I’m a commission stylist, my total profit is the amount, the net pay that hits my paycheck.
If I am a booth renter, my total expenses are how much I spent on rent and on color, and if I had to buy new combs or I went to a class or whatever, those are all your expenses.
Then the profit is what is left over after you take a look at how much you did in services, how much you spent to run the business, what is the profit.
You all should know these nine metrics every single month.
You have to.
They’re really, really important.
I’ll go through them again.
Total revenue received from the business or your chair, whatever it is.
Total guests you see each month.
New guest requests for the month.
Utilization percentage.
New guest retention, existing guest retention.
New Google or Yelp reviews.
Total expenses and total profit.
Those are your nine metrics.
So what did I leave out?
I left out total retail sales and retail to service percentage.
If you are a salon owner, I would track those things every single month.
We have some tools that can help you do that too.
What has been interesting is we just launched some new tracking tools for sales and patterns, and what some salons are finding is that while they’re selling retail and they’re moving pieces, because of reinvestment and because of commission split, what they’re left with at the end is relatively minimal.
It’s much lower than they thought it was.
So often when we’re looking at retail sales, we’re just kind of focused on that top line number of like, wow, I moved $8,000 worth of product this month.
But when you start to look at, yes, but how much have I spent year to date on stocking these shelves?
How much have I paid out in commissions?
What did retail tax look like?
When you start to look at all those things, the picture is very different.
So just make sure every single month you’re tracking retail sales and retail to service if it’s a part of your business.
The other thing that I didn’t say was a critical metric to track monthly is pre-booking percentage.
I used to coach the pre-booking very openly.
It used to be a part of Thriving Stylist Method.
It’s been many, many years since I included it.
The reason why I removed pre-booking as a critical metric is because I stopped seeing a correlation between stylist to pre-book and stylist to grow faster or make more money.
There was a time when you could make a direct correlation like, listen, those who pre-book are much more likely to grow fast.
It’s not so much the case anymore.
You’ve probably felt it, but I don’t know if you’ve put a finger on it.
When you look at how many clients have to reschedule or end up canceling or got to move things around, the amount of admin time you spend managing your clients’ schedules is so much different than it was 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago, when everybody walked around with a paper planner in their purse, and they would never dare change their standing appointment every eight weeks with you because it would be impossible to get back on.
The world has simply evolved and changed.
We the people are like moving faster, life is going faster, and trying to sustain a schedule has become harder.
What we’re finding is just because somebody is pre-booked, doesn’t mean they’re coming.
A lot of times people are pre-booking out of guilt and then canceling later.
It increases no shows sometimes depending on the stylist.
It definitely increases the frequency in which appointments need to be moved around.
For a lot of people, they don’t know what they’re doing 8, 10, 12, 14 weeks from today.
They can make a guess, but the odds of that, Wednesday afternoon or Saturday night, staying open and available for a hair appointment, likely going to change.
Cool, you pre-book them, but then they’re still going to push their appointment out in a week and a half when they couldn’t show up to the original appointment.
It’s like, is it worth it anymore?
You can track pre-booking if you want to.
I no longer have tangible data that proves if stylist pre-book, they will make more money and grow faster.
It’s not that it’s the worst, it’s that I don’t have data that shows it positions you at an advantage.
For some of you, it ends up locking down your life in a way that you’re actually operating at a disadvantage because you have less flexibility and freedom.
If you call in sick, you end up in a bind because there’s nowhere to move people.
The reason why I left off retail to service pre-booking and total retail sales is when I’m looking at successful stylist, somebody can be extremely successful producing a ton of revenue and vary in demand and not sell any retail.
Somebody can be super successful, vary in demand, growing fast and not pre-book at all.
So you can track those things, but what I’m saying, what are the numbers that we look at that let us know, is this stylist going to be successful or aren’t they?
We can boil that down to total revenue received month over month and is their growth, total guests you see each month, new guest requests demand every single month, utilization, new guest retention, existing guest retention, Google or Yelp reviews, total expenses, and total profit.
If we’re seeing growth in those areas, month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year, we’re probably in great shape.
Again, if you need a tool to keep this all organized, please check out our Wealthiest Year Yet planner.
You can head to thrivingsylist.com/wealthiestyearyet.
As always, if you have another podcast topic, you can leave me a rating or review on iTunes.
So much love.
Happy business building.
I’ll see you on the next one.ext one.
