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 hairstylists, 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 today we’re talking about what it would look like to take home six figures without extension clients, without assistance, or without double booking. I wanna say at the top of this episode, I don’t want this episode to land as tone deaf and in a few weeks we actually have a totally different episode coming out talking about why it’s become harder to build in the industry than it used to be. I do feel like in the last few months I’ve produced several episodes on the topic, so I’ll drop those in for you if you’re like Britt, I’m so far off from six figures, I’m like just trying to pay my rent next month. I totally get it. So I do have another episode coming out in just a few weeks that really speaks to the market as it is right now and to those who are struggling to build.
But I wanna give you a few episodes that you can look back on if you don’t wanna have to wait a few more weeks. I have a few recent episodes that I think will help too. So most recently is gonna be episode 4 0 4. It’s the 2026 predictions podcast where I really talk about state of the industry. So I would listen to that. 4 0 5 policies, the Salon Business Destroyer. Oh my gosh, if you’ve not listened to that one, like listen to that one ASAP, episode 3 81, what does it mean to be worth it as a stylist, I’d go back and listen to that one too. And then 3 79, 3 game changing strategies that will get you more clients within 24 hours. So those are four. If you’re like Bri, I’m so far off from six figures, like please speak to me, go back and listen to those four episodes, I think they’ll help massively.
And then coming up in a couple of weeks, I’m gonna do like a real talk for those who are more of the struggling stylist category and thinking about what really needs to happen to buckle down and make this industry work for you knowing that we’re in this tougher season. All that being said, it’s been a minute since I’ve done a podcast that really speaks to the high performing stylist and one of the things I’ve talked about for going on three plus years now is the state of the industry that I call the Great Divide. We are haves and have nots in a bigger way than we ever have been before. Like I’m talking 60 years of the industry has not seen a divide like this. There are stylists who are thinking about leaving the industry or leaving the industry in troves like, this is not worth it.
This is too hard. We have so much of that happening right now. You’ll see it and hear it all over the place. We’re seeing salon closures all over the place. That being said, I am also talking to so many stylists and salons who are expanding and have more clients and more business than they know what to do with and are on their third price increase for the year as per usual. And it’s like business is not slowing down for them. There’s just this huge massive split. And what we’re seeing is for a long time there was really big mainstream stylists, almost like celebrity stylist status or just like big huge heavy hitters in any given market. And then there was like the newbies in the rookies, but the majority of the industry was kind of like this middle class. And you could be like middle upper class or middle lower class, but middle class was like the majority of the industry.
It was like the average stylist. Some were more talented than others, all were relatively educated, all were making a pretty good living. Like that’s what the industry looked like. That middle class is being squeezed really hard right now and we’re seeing stylists really having to make a choice of like, okay, are you gonna get scrappy or are you gonna elevate? And we’re just seeing this massive split. So I wanted to do an episode for those who are like busting at the seam, have never been this busy before, are so grateful for the foundation they’ve laid in their business because they are killing it right now. I needed to do an episode for them. So let’s talk about why this is so important. I looked up some stats and figures kind of about what’s going on in the US right now. This was very interesting to me.
So I’ve been seeing a lot more content about the shift in just modern US households where women being the primary breadwinners is more and more and more predominant than it’s ever been before. So 16% of women are the primary breadwinners in the United States today. 16% isn’t that wild. While another 29% earn roughly the same amount as their husbands give or take 10%, which means that 45% of women earn at least as much as their husbands or more. The reason why I am talking about this is because there was a time in very recent years, I’m not talking like 30 years ago, like in very recent years, where often somebody would go into the beauty industry more as like supplemental income. Like well this definitely helps to support my family and I do what I can, but I do the step balance and to be there for my kids.
And, and you know, the reason I’m talking predominantly about women is we are a female dominated industry. Over 90% female dominance in the industry. And there was a time where it was very supplemental income. When you look at how the US has changed, the national median household income is $80,000 according to the most recent US census data. But in the largest cities in the US a single adult needs at least $85,000 to sustain a comfortable lifestyle. Not even luxurious, like $85,000 per adult is the ticket to ride and a family of four, the average is over $200,000. For a family of four man just a few years ago that would’ve been luxurious. That’s now sustaining a comfortable lifestyle. Not extravagant vacations, not big huge homes, it’s like getting by. Everything has massively changed and there is more pressure to be an achiever now than there was even 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago.
The other statistic that was jarring to me is that in households with children under the age of 18, 40% of families have a mother as the sole or primary breadwinner 40. That’s a huge shift in the way the US economy runs overall. And the idea that you could go to cosmetology school and make a little living and you know the extra 25 grand a year is cool. That kind of vision of the industry is really, really changing. And there are more stylists and salon owners who are like, no, like seriously, I have a mortgage to pay. I have a family to feed. Like my income is critical. And this episode speaks to that. Now what I will say right at the top of this episode is that what I’m about to share is gonna be easier in some markets than others. There’s no doubt about it.
Like I shared the national median household income and this is household income is 80 grand. So the average household has an income of $80,000. When you look all across the United States, that’s the average. But when you look at larger US cities, statistics from the US census data are showing that the average family of four needs over $200,000 a year to be comfortable. So if you are in one of those larger US cities and you’re like, how do people do this? This is really for you. If you’re in a city where you’re like, oh Brit, like if our family was making one 20 a year, we’d be in good shape. These principles still apply. You could just kind of scale it down. So why did I specifically pull out extensions assistance in double booking? Because I think that there’s this misconception that the only way to make real money is to double book.
I know too many deeply successful multi-six figure stylists who do not work with assistants. So I know it’s not true. If you were at the X Club retreat that we hosted in May, you met these people, you might’ve sat at the tables with them. And so I know you don’t have to have that to make multiple six figures like I’ve seen them in real life. If you come to our events, you’ve seen them in real life. Then we look at things like double booking, a double booking for a time, not not a time for decades was the way a lot of really successful stylists and salons operated consumers today. Some have a a fine tolerance for it and some do not. And so it’s just not always a fit. If you love double booking and you love triple booking and it works for you, amen to that.
Like that’s fine for me if you’re like, I wanna make good money but I don’t want an assistant and I don’t wanna double book and I just wanna pour into my clients and offer an elevated experience and what would that look like? This is an option for you and we’ll talk about assistance at the end of this episode. Like if you’re like, I wanna do all this but I wanna do it with help, I will bring it back around, but I don’t think it’s required. The other thing is extensions. So often I pay attention to a lot of the hair forums and I look at a lot of, I get sent a lot of posts from other, uh, mainstream industry accounts. Thank you all for sending me those posts. Keep sending them. They’re so grateful. Very, very insightful for me to see everything that you’re seeing.
I love it. I see a lot of chatter around like, well they’re making good money ’cause they do extensions. Or if you wanna make good money, you have to be an extension specialist. Not true. There’s a lot of broke extension specialists, like people who got into the industry, got super duper certified, paid thousands of dollars to learn these skill sets and they’re simply not good at it. Like not all of us are good at everything. I’m terrible at cutting hair. I’ve said that 100,000 times. It’s just not for me. It’s okay to not do extensions and you can still make great money. Stylists have been doing it for decades and you don’t have to do that. The other thing is too is that extensions are very labor intensive and sometimes when a stylist throws out a figure like Oh I had a, you know, $6,000 day if a third of that was the cost of hair, it’s like, well kind of you had a $6,000 day.
Like yeah, that’s the money that ran through your credit card processor. But that’s only telling part of the story. So I wanna kind of remove those facets of what about cost of hair, what about, I just wanna strip all that back and look at more basic cutting color, just kind of getting back to basic services and how to scale those things just for a second. And if you wanna layer in extensions as the icing on the top or you wanna triple book have at it, but I just wanna look at this as the most simplest form so that you can just understand what could be possible for you. Okay, so whenever I talk about things like six figures, so the term six figures, if you don’t know it relates to a hundred thousand dollars ’cause there’s the one followed by five zeros, that’s six figures.
So when you talk about six figure stylist, the question is always is that before or after tax? Let’s say it’s take home, that’s the arena I wanna play in with you. So the goal would be for you to take home a hundred thousand dollars. I like to use simple math for things like this. So let’s say it’s a 50% take home. So you need to do $200,000 in services annually to take home a hundred thousand. Let’s just keep it super simple like that. The other thing I like to keep into account is two weeks unpaid vacation. Annually, if you were gonna slam their offers paid vacation, heck yeah, you won. But I like to pretend that everybody doesn’t and that you need to factor in 10 days that could be worked that are not worked. You can take ’em any time you want to. I think time off is critical.
I think anybody who’s taking less than two weeks time away from their job every single year is probably burnt the heck out. And the reason why we do that is we’re too scared. We’re like, financially I can’t afford it. If I take too much time off, I won’t be able to pay my bills. That fear is so real. But the way to overcome that fear is having systems and structure in place. So all the math I’m about to give you is based on the idea that everybody is taking two weeks unpaid vacation annually. So you’re working 50 weeks a year and we’re gonna look at what it would be like if you worked three days, four days, or five days a week. So with those two weeks unpaid vacation annually, you would need to be producing $4,000 a week in services to do $200,000 in services annually.
And in the simplest math form you’d be taking home around a hundred thousand dollars a year. So if you worked five days a week, your daily service total target would be $800 a day, four days a week would be a thousand, three days a week would be 1300. The way the market is set up right now, if you really are in a bigger city, like an area where you really do need the 200,000 for a family of four, those would not be overly challenging numbers to meet at all. I’m saying one more time, five days a week, it would be $800 a day in services, four days a week, a thousand dollars a day, three days a week, 1300. So basically you’d need to be producing between a hundred and $165 an hour in services depending on how many days a week you work. So if you worked five days a week, you’d need to be producing a hundred dollars an hour in services.
So a hundred dollars for a haircut style will get you there. If you were doing eight cuts a day, a hundred bucks a piece, you’d be at $200,000 a year in services. If you were offering $200 root touchups, it would get you there. With the average timing, $400 plus blonding services, the average blonding specialist can pull off a couple of those a day that’s gonna get you there too. So when you start to look at the math like that, it starts to become very doable. So ten four hundred dollars blonding services in a week is $4,000. $4,100 haircuts. So that’s eight cuts a day, five days a week, that gets you to 200 KA year. And that’s how barbers are pulling this off. I know some barbers who are making bank right now and you talk to barbers like I think in a traditional salon setting, which is the majority of my podcast listeners, haircuts are booked, you know, 45 minutes or an hour.
When you look at barbers, they are producing really high quality work faster, and so often they’re doing haircuts in under an hour and they’re really raking it in. It’s pretty incredible to see what they can pull off without an assistant, no double booking, just working hard three or four days a week and then enjoying life the other half. So there is a stylist Thriver that I deeply admire. We have a few high multi-six figure solo stylist that I’m just gonna speak to. One of them does over $300,000 a year in services. No assistant, no extensions working four days a week. So let’s look at what she might have to be doing to do that. So $300,000 in services in a year, two weeks vacation a year, four days a week, that’s $6,000 a week in services. That’s $1,500 a day. So that would be eight $190 haircuts in a day, or five, $300 root touchup clients.
So when I mention things like $190 haircuts, for some of you, you’re like, oh my gosh, that would never work in my market. Okay, is the cost of living in your market set up so that you would need $200,000 as a family to live comfortably? Yes or no? Right? And that’s where I say scale this back if you need to. I know markets where there’s people charging double that for haircuts and people are lined up to pay and people are super successful. And this goes back to perceived value and demand and market position and all kinds of stuff. I’m not saying that anybody listening to this should like ramp up their prices to one 90, but some of you are already charging one 30 and then when I start rattling off numbers like this, it makes you realize you’re just like not that far off.
So talking about, you know, this high performing stylist that I deeply admire, she’s hustling to make it happen. There’s no doubt. Like the four days a week she’s in the salon, she’s working really hard. And that’s to you. Like if you were able to do $300,000 a year in services working four days a week, but the days that you worked you’d have to grind, would it be worth it for you? And that’s the question of like what kind of game do you want to play? I know for me personally, there’s been seasons of my life where I’m like, I will grind until my fingers bleed. Like I will do whatever it takes. And then there’s seasons where I’m like, I have to get back to like basics for a year. And so I think that’s the nice thing about the industry too, is you can turn the faucet on and off.
Like if you’re in a season where you’re like, we are gonna buy a house in the next two years and I’m gonna grind and I’m gonna market my butt cheeks off and I’m going to position myself well and I’m gonna work, work, work, work, work. But we know that in two years we’re not that down payment for the house and then I’ll be able to breathe for a second. That is okay. Like that is such a human decision. That is the power of the industry versus I’m watching a lot of people right now who are like, this industry’s too hard. You can’t make enough money. I’m gonna go be an executive assistant somewhere. Okay. And then you know, good luck on saving enough for that down payment. You can’t just turn the faucet on when you want to. You can’t say I’m gonna work twice as hard, can I make twice as much?
Like that structure doesn’t exist. So it’s kind of making a choice of what is the lifestyle you’re seeking and what is it worth to you? So what if in any of these scenarios you did wanna hire an assistant, you’re like, you know what? I wanna be the stylist who’s doing $200,000 a year in services three days a week and I could do $1,300 a day, but I, I’d have to double book and I’d have to have an assistant to make that happen. Okay, that’s fine for me, but I want you to watch the impact of that decision. So if you were to hire an assistant, generally speaking, when you’re looking at assistant compensation coast to coast, you’re gonna end up paying that assistant somewhere between 20,030 $5,000 in wage at a minimum. What I will say is it is very challenging to right now to find an assistant who wants to work ultra part-time for you.
I am talking to a lot of salon owners who are like, they want guarantees, they want set hours, like they want structure, like they’re just like, just like us and they want to know what’s going on in their life. And a lot of times when I talk to salon owners and they’re like, my assistants are flaky, I’m like, are you flaky though? Or like are you super consistent? Is the education consistent? Is the expectation consistent? Is the training consistent? Is the compensation consistent? ’cause if you’re not consistent, they’re not going to be either. So if you’re consistent and you’re all in and you’re like, this stylist that I know who’s doing this, extremely profitable, extremely in demand business, she would need a full-time assistant. So she’d probably be closer to the $35,000 in wage a year. So just about 10% of her revenue would go to paying this assistant.
Now, when you have an assistant, if you want someone who’s like dedicated and a workhorse and so do is really gonna pour in it and be your partner in this whole thing, they want education and they want quality education. They don’t wanna watch videos, they don’t want you to just shadow you and learn catch as catch can. They want dedicated education and mentorship time with you. So this stylist would have to wanna dedicate 4, 5, 6, 10, 12 hours a month on top of their existing schedule to educate this mentee that they have. This stylist I’m speaking to specifically doesn’t wanna do any of that kind of stuff. They’re raising a family, they wanna be in the salon, the hours they’re in there, they don’t wanna worry about anybody else. They want, don’t wanna have an assistant that maybe calls out sick, which rightfully so. They just don’t want the logistics of it.
They want it simple, they want it streamlined. They wanna have one client in their chair at all times hyper-focused on that person. It is a personal choice. I know that I talk about double booking and assistance and I always say it in a way that makes it sound like I don’t love it. If I was to open a salon right now, we would 100% have assistance. I love assisting programs. What I don’t love is poorly managed assisting programs. I think that they make the industry look bad. I think they slow down the growth of new and incredibly talented stylists. And I think that what works in assisting programs has changed so radically in the last few years and most salons haven’t caught up. And that’s kind of my hesitation right now and being like, yeah, hire an assistant. It’s rare that I talk to a salon owner where I’m like, your program’s badass, that that is like one in a hundred.
It’s so, so, so rare right now. I see a lot of work in progress. There’s a lot of, we’re trying to get there and I love it. I appreciate the effort so much. We have a lot of episodes dedicated to that too. We have training on that and thriving leadership for sure. The bar has to be raised the way that trades are gonna work over the next several years. It just has to. It has to. It has to. And so if you are willing to pour into an assistant and really mentor somebody in a very deep way and build business together with them, heck yeah, I’m here for it. You can double book, they’ll be dedicated. You pay them well, you train them well, I’m here for it. It’s certainly and can increase your overall revenue. It’s a heavier lift. It’s more parts and pieces, it’s more logistics, it’s more organization and it’s more time if you’re willing to pour in those things.
Absolutely. I cannot deny the fact that there is potential to make more money doing all of that. It’s also more costly it time and money as well. And I just think that if you want to make multiple six figures, the math doesn’t lie. We see people doing it coast to coast all the time. It is possible for those who are willing to pour in and do the work. So if you are a stylist who works like this and you wanna share further details, you can always find me in the dms. I have some new exciting projects in the work, so I’d love to hear from you, love to hear more about what’s working in your world and working in your business. You can find me on Instagram atva at any time. And as I always say, so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
