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 numbers and metrics and money. And I know conversations like this, for some of you, these are your favorite episodes and you love them and some of you can’t stand the numbers and you wish it wasn’t a part of the industry. And some of you are skipping this episode altogether and we’ll never hear this message because this is tactical. And often my marketing podcasts are the most downloaded and the most listened to because that’s, it just feels a little bit lighter and softer and more fun versus when I start talking about the money and the tracking, it’s often a thing that we are uncomfortable about. It’s the area of business that sometimes there’s shame around. And so I want to help you and support you in being as financially confident and knowledgeable and empowered as possible without any of the overwhelm.

Something that I’ve really worked hard on in my 12 plus years or 13 plus years, I guess at this point of business coaching for stylists and salon owners is making hard things easier. One of the ties that binds us all is we got into this industry as beauty professionals not realizing we weren’t just doing hair, we were running and creating businesses, and there is no training in school for how to run and create a business. It’s just the the doing the hair part, which is at this point, if you’re listening to this episode, you’ve learned that’s the tip of the iceberg. If all we had to do was hair, everybody would be a millionaire. It’s so much more complicated than that. And this money piece in this tracking piece is the piece that holds most people up. I want to make it as easy as possible.

So if you’re listening to this episode in real time, before the content of this episode started, I shared a link that included access to a free resource and tool that’s going to help you track all of the numbers I’m about to share at the time of this recording. It’s totally free. It’s a short term release, so it’ll be out there for a few weeks. And then as this episode ages, it’s gonna be retired as a free resource and it becomes a part of our Thriving Stylist Method program. So I do have an amazing, beautiful, professionally designed and produced tool that helps to track all of these numbers and metrics in the easiest way possible. You can pull it up on your phone, you could use it on your computer, whatever you want. Very simple. It does all the math for you. It couldn’t be easier in case you missed it.

If you’re listening to this in very early 2026, go back, get the link, access the free tool. Like I said, it’s temporary only and once it’s gone, it’s gone. So we can’t re-release it. You can’t DM me to get it. The only way to get it once the free release is over is to join us in Thriving Stylist Method. So let’s dig in. First I wanna talk about a good handful of metrics and numbers that the industry is already tracking just to get those outta the way because what I’m gonna be unveiling today is a really solid handful of numbers that probably 95% of the industry isn’t tracking at all and should be. It’s the more obscure things, but also the more interesting things and the things that actually give us a better sense of the health of your business, how much money you’re making, how much money you’re going to make.

I think there’s a lot of, to be candid, garbage metrics in the industry and a lot of basic metrics. And then there’s a a short list of key metrics that actually dictate a business’s success. I’ve never shared these metrics before, so if you’ve listened to old episodes, these are fresh and I’m excited to share ’em with you. So first I wanna share basic tracking, the things I assume most everybody listening to this episode tracks. And then I’m gonna share a handful of things that some of you advanced trackers are already tracking. And then I’m gonna get into the new things that I know most of you are not tracking. So first, most people listening to this episode, I’m gonna say probably 70% are tracking every single month, how many guests they serve, how many new guests they serve, and how much revenue brought in. So I’m gonna assume that most people listening to this episode, and when I say most people, I’m gonna say around 70%, are already tracking how many guests they serve each month, how many new guests they serve each month, and the total revenue produced by their business in a month.

Now, let me explain to you what I mean by tracking. I know that 90% of you when I rattle off those numbers are saying to me, yes, I could pull those up in the back end of my booking system. That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s reporting. I’m talking about tracking. Tracking is when you sit down and you run that report and you make a note somewhere of what your business did for the month. The reason why that’s important is trust me, I know you can run a report of anything in the backend of your business at any time. Are you or is it just there? And sometimes you glance at it, but often it’s scary or doesn’t make sense or you don’t have time. So all you’re really worried about is, did I make enough money to pay my bills this month? Like that’s how most stylists operate their business.

And I totally understand, but it’s also why the average income of a stylist in this country today is less than $30,000 a year. And meanwhile, the students I’m coaching are, are averaging more than twice that and many are in the multi-six figure per year range of solopreneurs because they’re actually tracking and they’re pacing and they’re, they’re taking a look at what needs to be adjusted to grow, right? So if you’re not already, I want you, and listen, you can do this on uh, in a notebook. You buy from Target, you can do it in the note section of your phone, you can do it on a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive. I just need you to do it. I need you to write down somewhere for all of this year, every single month, how many guests you served, how many new guests you served, and what was the total revenue produced.

So when I say revenue, revenue is what we call gross or top line, meaning the amount of money your business produced before expenses. So some of you have to buy supply, some of you are taking home a commission split. The total revenue is just whatever you were paid by clients or what the salon was paid by clients based on the work that you did for the month. Those are the numbers that I’m gonna assume most of you are tracking. I want everybody in this room to start tracking those numbers right now. Okay? Then we have advanced tracking. These metrics are okay for me. They’re not the ones I’m gonna spotlight in this episode, but I know some of you are also tracking your revenue sources. Meaning what services are producing more money than others? How much money did you produce from haircuts? How much money did you produce from color?

And then we can go deeper. How much of that color revenue was from root touchups? How much was from highlights? How much was from chemical services? How much was from styling services? So breaking it down by service revenue and revenue source. Some of you were doing that, I that’s great volume. Some of you are also tracking retail revenue. Again, I think that’s great, but it’s additional stream into your business. The way I look at retail revenue is an additional source significantly less profitable than any service revenue produced. So I have it as like a side dish. So tracking it is great. I don’t lump it into anything else because it doesn’t equate in the same way. It’s the profit margin isn’t there in the same way it would be for service revenue, but it is good to track if you’re selling retail. Then there are ratios that some coaching systems coach to retail to service ratio, things like pre-booking percentage.

The reason I don’t coach to those ratios and metrics is twofold. One, I led a salon team that was supposed to track things like that. They would do it. They did not understand what it meant and it’s not for lack of effort on my part. I sat down, I explained it, the philosophy, the reason, the, um, science behind it, the data, trust me, I did all that. I did it until I was blue in the face. All my stylists cared about was how much money am I taking home? And I was having them spin their wheels about all these metrics and ratios and, and things that at the end of the day didn’t necessarily dictate success. So if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you may or may not know. I have a really tricky relationship with pre-booking. And the reason why I developed that relationship is, is not to be anti-industry.

I am not a fan of pre-booking. Not because I don’t think you should do it. You can do it if you want to. There is no benefit As the person I have gotten to see the backend of thousands of stylists and salon businesses at this point, when I’m looking at the data, there is no strong correlation between stylists who pre-book and stylists who don’t anymore. I have some stylists who pre-book who are stuck at $28,000 a year and they’ve been pre-booking for decades. And I have some stylists who have never pre-booked and are at 180,000 a year. And that’s when I say, no correlation. Like, do it, don’t do it. If you like it, fine. But the reason why I don’t count it as a critical metric is I can’t as a coach say if you pre-book more, you will make more money. Because I don’t have data to back that statement.

I do have data that shows there is no direct correlation. I do coach some stylists who love pre-booking. That’s fine, you can do it. I coach a lot of stylists who have moved away from it and have made more. So if you wanna do it, fine. If you wanna track it, fine, I don’t coach to it because I don’t have any data to support it actually helping anybody to grow stronger or faster. So that’s my stance on it. You can track it if you want to. I’m not attached. And then there’s utilization percentage. I like utilization percentage. I like to look at it a little bit differently and that’s one of the metrics or numbers I’m gonna be unveiling in just a moment, is a different way of looking at utilization that I think becomes more digestible for stylists. So if you’re a salon leader listening to this, I wanna share with you an alternative way of looking at utilization that I think could be more impactful for you.

Okay? So everything I just rattled off to me is basic or standard advanced. I wanna get into the seven things I think you should consider tracking if you’re not already. So first I wanna talk about the three targets that I want you to be setting for yourself every year. So total pre-tax income goal. So what is pre-tax income? Pre-tax income if you are a booth renter is the money that you are allowed to spend on personal expenses that does not take into account taxes. So meaning all of your business expenses have been paid for, your rent has been paid. If you’re a colorist, your color has been purchased, any education you’re investing in has been taken care of. Any tools that you need to buy, all of that has been taken care of. Whatever is left over the gap that exists between what all the clients paid, what all your expenses were and what you’re leftover with that, what your leftover with with pre-tax.

I want you to set a goal for that. If you are an employee-based stylist, that pre-tax income goal would be your what you get after commission split. So if you’re a stylist who does a hundred thousand dollars in services and you have a 50% commission, then your total pre-tax income would be $50,000, right? A hundred thousand, 50% of it, $50,000. So I want you to set a total pre-tax income goal for yourself, meaning the money that’s yours to do with what you want to and what need to legally and above board, then your total service revenue needed. This target is tricky because I want you to think of the math that I just shared. I just said if you want to take home $50,000, you actually have to produce a hundred thousand dollars in services ish. The reason why it’s an ish is there’s a third target that I want you to add as well, which is total gratuity revenue needed.

And the reason I like that is gratuity revenue is an offset. So I think, I don’t think I know this industry has an interesting relationship with gratuity. Often gratuity feels like free money. It’s like fake money. It’s the money we don’t claim sometimes. And so it’s like funny money, it’s like it’s there, we like it. It’s how we pay for a lot of our lifestyle, but we don’t include it. It like lives in its own category. I was just reading this study like last weekend that was saying every consumer, the average consumer, if we were to do a test and half of you were to be given a hundred dollars bill to shop with and the other half were to be given credit cards and we were to say go in and buy groceries, those of you with the a hundred dollars bill are going to be very methodical.

You’re going to make strategic choices because you’re operating within a budget and you know you’re limited. And there’s something about holding that a hundred dollars bill. Some of you might actually say, you know what, with this a hundred, I need to spend 60 on groceries and I’m gonna save the other 40 and spend it on gas. That’s our relationship with cash versus our relationship with a credit card is swipe it, swipe it, swipe it, add the lucky charms to the cart. Like credit card money doesn’t feel like real money. And the way that a hundred dollars bill does, we do that with tips and gratuity. The way that we look at that money, particularly when it comes in the form of cash, is it lives in like this other category in our brain. The thing I like about gratuity is it is much more profitable than any service you do, whether you are commissioned or independent.

So if you, even if you claim all of your gratuity and it’s all taxable income for you, it’s taxed on the 100% of the gratuity you received, right? Versus with service revenue, there’s always gonna be something that’s taken off the top. You know what I mean? Like a portion of the booth rent, you have to pay a commission percentage. Some of that went to covering cost of color, whatever. No matter what your profit margin is, you’re always losing a bit to covering cost of your business. With gratuity, it’s all gravy. So what I like to do is have stylists I coach, create a service revenue target, a pre-tax income goal target, meaning how much you’re actually gonna take home and then a gratuity revenue target because the gratuity revenue actually offsets the service revenue needed and makes that goal feel so much more tangible. I have run this as an exercise, I’ve seen it to be true.

It knocks that number down. Then you’re like, wait a minute. That doesn’t seem so far fetched and it’s incredibly motivating. So again, if you’re listening to this episode in real time and you do have access to that free resource we’re giving away for a short period of time, we have a tool that’s gonna run all that math for you. If you’re in Thriving Stylist Method, it’s available for you in the calculator. But I like to have those three targets of pre-tax, income, service, revenue, and gratuity all mapped together. And I like to do that the start of the year, but there’s no bad time to start that. Start that any time. Creating targets for yourself is only ever a good idea. Okay, so then let’s look at metrics. So something I like to look at is called abandoned revenue. And abandoned revenue is a concept that was taught to me by a business coach many, many years ago who said, Brit, for every dollar you bring in, you’re leaving three more on the table.

And it’s really stuck with me in that no matter how successful any of us are, there’s always other opportunities that we don’t see, didn’t take advantage of, opted out of whatever. That’s just how the world works. There’s nobody who’s missing out on opportunities. Literally everybody is. For some people, it’s they’re trapped at a price point that doesn’t make sense. They’re making excuses for why they’re not building their business. They block themselves off when they could have made $400. There’s a gajillion reasons. Some of those things we do by choice, but there’s this abandoned revenue factor. An abandoned revenue occurs when there is a block of time on your schedule that you could have taken, a client would’ve loved to have taken a client and didn’t for whatever reason, you have low demand and nobody booked it. Somebody canceled at the last minute. You called out sick, whatever, it’s revenue that could have been there, could have been yours, but didn’t actualize abandoned revenue at the end of the year ends up being a really terrifying number.

You’ll be shocked and amazed. So what happens is most of us are living our days as stylists, and you go through the week and maybe you have a busy week, you look at your week and you’re like, wow, I am busy and you’re working four days and you have a good block of clients, and there’s really only like four hours worth of gaps in your days, which means you’re taking clients, let’s call it 30 hours, you’re booked for 30 hours. You only have four hours of gaps. Most of us would be like, that’s amazing. Really good. Well, if you’re a stylist who has just the four hours of gaps, and on average you’re doing about a hundred dollars an hour, that is $20,000 a year in abandoned revenue. How many of you just had a jaw drop moment? 20,000 I didn’t stutter. And that’s only if you take two weeks off a year.

If you don’t take two weeks off a year, it’s actually more abandoned revenue is this weird thing that we don’t look at and we ignore, and it will eat your business alive. Some of you have more like 30, 40, $50,000 in abandoned revenue living in your business right now. You would be shocked and amazed. So that’s one of the metrics I really like to track. I think it’s really important if you are a salon leader, showing that metric to your stylist is incredibly eye-opening, especially the ones who are like a little less motivated. They’re getting by, they see the gaps, but they don’t care. They use it to take a walk to get coffee, and they’re feeling pretty good about it. Seeing abandoned revenue is eyeopening and mind blowing. That shows you your potential in a really different way. So abandoned revenue is a metric I really like to track with.

That comes number two, which is average hourly revenue produced. This is a really easy one for most of us to get. So in any given business, there is an average amount of revenue that’s being produced by the hour. What I’ve found is for a lot of stylists I coach, they’re actually revenue per hour is higher than they thought. And when they’re not making the money they wanna make, they come to realize it’s less about the price point and more about the demand, which is why we always focus on demand first. But when we can figure out like, okay, this is about how much I am averaging per hour revenue produced in my business on any given month, you’ll start to see patterns in your business and you’ll see like, wow, in a cut and styling heavy month, my average revenue per hour produced reduced by 30% versus when I’m doing more color services, it increased.

You’ll be able to see those patterns in a really different way, and it will help you to make really smart decisions about your business. You’ll have a better guesstimate every single month about how much money you’ll end up taking home. Like if you do have a cutter style heavy month, you’ll be able to be like, that’s okay, I’m booked, but I’m probably gonna make a little bit less because my average hourly revenue produce is gonna take a dip. It’s a really good metric to know and understand and adds to the predictability of your business. Next percentage of new clientele, this one I’m really passionate about. So I coach a lot of stylists who will message me and be like, Hey Britt, I need your help. I’m actually very blessed. I don’t have to take a lot of new clients. I’m super booked and I’m looking to scale.

Somebody who is super booked and doesn’t have a lot of new clients is very challenging to scale. You have to have new clients in order to scale. It’s impossible to do without it, even as you’re scaling your schedule down, which is what we coach to do. So when somebody comes to me and says, I wanna scale when somebody says that our project together is to reduce their schedule and increase their income, by definition, that’s what scaling looks like. I cannot help you do that if we don’t have demand. Demand has to be there, which is why demand comes first. Every healthy business today, literally every single one, I don’t have an example of any healthy business that is not actively taking new clients all the time. Can you think of any? The example people give often when I share that is physicians. Like sometimes you’ll, you’ll want to get in with a physician.

I actually experienced this with a veterinarian recently too, and on their website, or even when you inquire, sometimes it’ll be like, oh, you know this doctor’s no longer taking new patients. When you talk to doctors, sometimes they’re at the point where they’re not taking patients publicly. There is no deeply successful medical professional today who is not accepting stellar referrals. When you look at, by the way, even when we talk about the profession of a doctor, there’s some doctors who are making $130,000 a year, and there’s some doctors who are making $4 million a year, right? There’s a whole scope of doctors, just like there’s a scope of stylists and salon owners and whatever. When you look at those who are running deeply successful businesses at profit and they’re serving really well, there’s always an opportunity to get in. I promise there is. So when you look at really successful businesses, it’s not a flex to be like, and I don’t take new clients, or I don’t see a lot of new clients.

We want to look at percentage of new clientele, and there should always be a bit of new clientele in your business. So when we’re saying what’s a good target, somewhere between eight and 10% is pretty good. Why did I choose that number? Because when you look at retention, we’re shooting for a 90% base clientele retention, knowing that the average stylist loses about 10% of their clientele a year. So if on average we have an eight to 10% new clientele ratio, you are filling the gap. If it’s higher than that, sometimes it’s good. It is a indicator of demand that can be still a really healthy thing, so long as overall your revenue is growing month over month, over month. If your percentage is higher, let’s say you’re somebody who has 50% new clientele and 50% base clientele. If you’re a new stylist, that’s a really good thing.

That means your demand is good. We do wanna see that percentage shift over time, and more importantly, we wanna see your revenue increase month over month. If it does not, it means what you’re doing is what we call bleeding out, which is yes, new clients are coming in, but they’re not sticking around. But we don’t know those things unless we’re looking at these metrics and numbers. Okay. Lastly, pacing towards annual goals. So this goes back to the very first thing I said at the beginning. When we’re setting those targets for how much money you want your business to make, how much of that you wanna be keeping where you want that money coming from. I like to be able to see month over month, am I on track? If by June I’m not halfway there, I have to ask myself, okay, what am I gonna do in the last half of this year to make sure that I can still pull that off?

Do I need to kick it into high gear? Do I need to change strategy? What do I need to do? So often stylists don’t realize what their financial position’s gonna be until like October. That’s way too late. You can’t change all that much in eight weeks. But if you know by June that things are looking wonky, you have six months to figure something else out. Knowledge is power, right? So the metrics that I encourage you to start tracking, our total pre-tax income goal, total service revenue needed, total gratuity, revenue needed abandoned revenue. That’s a really sexy number. You’ll love that one. Average hourly revenue produced percentage of new clientele and pacing towards annual goal. Again, I know this is such a tease for those of you not listening in real time, we’re always gifting free resources as much as we can. But if you are listening in real time at the very beginning of 2026, listen back to the very front of this podcast episode.

We have a link available where you can download a tool and resource that allows you to track all of these things. It’s gorgeous, calculates everything for you. You’re not having to figure out the abandoned revenue number yourself, the calculator, spit it out. Same thing with your average hourly revenue produced monthly and annually. It’s gorgeous. If you’re listening to this and that free resource is not still available, you can still snag it in Thriving Stylist Method. It’s available there. If you have any additional questions about numbers, money, metrics, it’s one of my favorite topics, leave me a rating or review on iTunes. I’m happy to dig in with you. As I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.