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 I’m recording this episode like floating on clouds just so amped up. If you don’t know this, I have spent the better part of the last month coaching and teaching thousands of stylists how to build and scale their business. Once every year we host a huge bootcamp. We had over 3,400 stylists participate this season and we worked through like modern marketing, guest experience, we did pricing, just everything that a stylist would need to know about how to build and scale a business in 2026. We only do it once a year. We just did it in early 2026. It was amazing. I learned so much just about what the industry is thinking and feeling and common challenges. There were so many breakthroughs if you were in there, thank you for joining me.
That was so fun to watch. Now on the flip side, I’m wrapping up if you’re listening to this in real time. I also host a series of free marketing trainings. They’re like two to three hour long classes. They’re totally free. And I host those once a year as well, also based around marketing and income growth and all that kind of stuff. And because of that, I’ve been able to like look behind the scenes of so many businesses all in one shot. And it’s always just mutually beneficial. I know that those who get to join have some great takeaways, but for me, it puts me very back boots on the ground to be looking at the backside of people’s businesses. Something that people I don’t think realize is that as a business coach, I do get to see the backend financials of the people that I coach.
I get to see their marketing. I get to see everything. And so I really understand, you know, a business might look one way on the outside, but this could be happening what’s on the inside, or I can see really quickly what structural issues would hold business back. And one of the really big, common structural issues that came up this season was really bad booking practices, like really bad, antiquated, fear-based booking practices. And I know everybody knows that online booking exists. It never ceases to amaze me how many stylists and salons will make an excuse as to why it won’t work for them or why they, you know, use a digital booking system, but they don’t allow clients to book their own appointments. And I wanna share with you how to make online booking error proof for every single client. If I have taught thousands of stylists how to do it, there must be a way to make it possible.
And yet I go in these rooms and there’s still a lot of fear and resistance. I don’t think I’ve ever done an episode that’s like this before, where we’re really looking at, from a technical standpoint, how we can make online booking like literally bulletproof. Like it’ll never get messed up, your books won’t be screwed up, clients will be messing up their own appointments, why it’s so important, especially now and building forward. So I wanna do a real deep dive into online booking, why I think it’s so important, why so many other of the like hybrid bandaid kind of systems that get put together are failing hard and fast right now. And then at the end, I wanna share some strategies that you can put into place to like truly make this seamless for you. So I wanna start with some of the lies that we tell ourselves about online booking.
I’ve heard them all before. There was times where in the salon I said them, so I deeply understand. Number one is my clients just really love the service aspect. When I book their appointments for them by call or by text, it just feels more personal this way. That is a safe proof. And what’s tricky is even if your existing clients say that and they meet it, like, “Oh, I just love it when I’m able to text you. ” Well, yeah, of course. They love it when you do all the work and they don’t have to do it. I mean, everybody loves that. Like from childhood, we love it when our parents clean our room for us so we don’t have to. Like that’s normal human behavior and I understand. But on the flip side, we have stylists who are burnt out, overwhelmed, feel like they have no life balance, and we’re glued to our phone, texting clients, answering phone calls, chasing emails.
Like we can’t have it both ways. We can’t capture our life back, but then still be living in this narrative that like, “Well, this is the personal aspect of my service.” There’s so many other ways we can do personal service for our guests. It’s actually much more meaningful than just booking their appointments for them. Make a bigger impact, get more referrals. Like there’s just so many better ways to create personal experience if that’s what you’re looking to create. I also have some statistics that totally dismantle that thought process, so that’s coming also. Number two, big fat lie. If I don’t book for them, they’re gonna book it wrong. Okay, we’re gonna dismantle that in this podcast, so that’s coming. Number three, and this is a big one and I do understand, there’s gonna be gaps in my schedule if I allow people to just book online however they want to, and I don’t want that.
I don’t want that for you either, so we’ll talk about that too. Or I double book so it’s impossible. Like the special Snowflake syndrome of like, “Well, all of my clients are super unique and their timings are different and the way I like to have things is so special and I get it. I understand like your business is unique as you are. There are ways to make this happen no matter like how special, unique, your business, your clientele is, like, it can be done.” Okay, so let’s get into some statistics, and I’m gonna start with some from Zipia, and I actually really like them as a source because they do a ton of data-backed consumer research and share those statistics with all of us. So here’s the first one. Without online booking, 59% of customers say they would consider switching to a competitor, meaning 59% of the people who check you out, if they find that you don’t have online booking, they’re gonna think about going somewhere else over half.
Another stat I thought was interesting is 40% of appointments are booked after business hours. So if you get calls or texts after, you know, 5:00 PM is probably considered when business hours end for most of the world, like the 9:00 to 5:00 out there, almost half of people just don’t have the capacity to sit down and try and book an appointment during, you know, standard business hours. So that means you’re getting calls, nights, weekends, which is to be expected. It makes sense, but if you’re trying to capture your life back, it’s kind of overwhelming. Now, there was a statistic that supported phone-based booking, so I wanted to share it, but with context. So 33% of respondents did prefer to book appointments by phone. So remember, we found that 59% of consumers said they’d look for a competitor if you don’t have online booking. 33% said, “Actually, I like to book by phone, but listen to this.
71% of those who identified as preferring to book by phone were over the age of 55.” So if your target market clientele is over the age of 55, yes, the majority of them would prefer to book by text or by phone. If the target market client you’re looking to reach is under the age of 55, almost 70% said they do not wanna have to book by phone. That’s a lot. And even if you’re like, “Well, most of my clients are over the age of 55, so this is great for me, ” you have to remember that 71% said they like phone, and 29% said they don’t. So you’re still missing out on 29% of viable potential clients by just not having any kind of online booking option. Now, this is one of the most powerful statistics, and this is from a Gallup poll, and I love Gallup as well.
The average consumer moves on from a service provider if they cannot make an appointment within seven minutes, not request an appointment, make one. And this is where stylists feel the heat, is they’re like, “I have to be in my DMs. I have to be on my phone. I know that if I make a client wait, they could go somewhere else. I know it’s irritating to have to wait for a text.” So then you’re living in this pressure cooker of how are you supposed to serve all of the clients, respond to all of the texts, get back to all of the phone calls, respond to all of the DMs, still have some kind of personal life for yourself. It’s like creating a trap, knowing that there’s this looming seven minute deadline, that is the tolerance that people today, based on survey, are willing to wait. And I just don’t think it’s even reasonable to say, so make sure you respond to all of your texts within seven minutes.
I don’t know how you would do that. I couldn’t pull that off. So we need some kind of other system. What I have found through having these conversations with stylists and salon owners over these last few weeks is that most stylists are caught up thinking about the business that they already have, the clients they already have, the new clients that they do get to meet every month, we’re thinking about those people. And you’re like, “Well, my current clients are happy and I, I see this handful of new guests every month and they all seem to be fine.” You are ignoring the actual glaring problem. You’re not paying any attention to the business that you are missing out on because a client does not like the way the system you have built operates. The clients that bounce before you even get a chance to meet them, we’re ignoring that side completely and we’re settling for good enough instead of saying, “Wait, hold on a second.
If I’m really trying to maximize this business that I have and that I’ve built as a stylist, where are the blind spots in this and could I be attracting clients to my business but then repelling them with my booking system?” The answer databased is yes, that’s exactly what’s happening. So I wanna share some math with you on this that’s gonna make your stomach upset. So if you have an average service ticket of $100 and your clients come to see you four times a year, if just three people a month check you out and choose not to book with you because they don’t like your booking system, you will have lost $14,000 in service revenue over a rolling 12 months. That’s too much money to lose. And that’s if you have an average ticket of $100 and you’re only missing out on three curious clients every month because they don’t like your booking system.
I’m gonna share a story that’s gonna blow your mind. A lot of you are missing out on way more than three clients. So we could argue it’s thousands of dollars for most people. So imagine if you were an extension artist or somebody whose average service ticket was more like $300 or $400. Do the math on that. Like if you were losing three clients every month because they did not like your booking system, it would be tens of thousands of dollars in missed business opportunity. And in the place we’re living right now, like last week on the podcast, I talked about the economy, right? And I was like, “Don’t blame the economy. You have to catch up to consumer behavior.” Clients are just moving differently. All customers are moving differently in every single purchase that they’re making. If we don’t meet them where they’re at and we’re just allowing ourselves to get exhausted by the marketing, at some point we have to blame ourselves like the marketing is not enough.
It’s the system and structure that the marketing attracts the client into that’s gonna actually seal the deal, right? So I also have to dismantle a couple of popular hybrid systems. So first and foremost being appointment request forms, and we’ve seen these evolve over the years. So when I first started coaching the Thriver Society online, which would’ve been 2015 is when I first launched the program, from 2015 to about 2019, maybe even 2020, we had an option in the program and I said, “Listen, if you don’t feel comfortable going full online booking, what you can implement is a booking request form where a client can submit a form and as long as you respond within 24 hours and you can fulfill the appointment request, it’s good enough.” And at the time, it actually was good enough. We saw a real collapse of that system coming out of COVID, 2020, the pandemic, that system collapsed and we pulled it out of Thrivers real quick.
So that has not been an option in Thriver Society for many, many years. But what also happened was it became very trendy from 2021 to 2023 to do this like client screening process. That did not get popular pre- 2021. Something happened in 2021 where we were like screening clients and making them apply to be a part of our business and trying to decide if they were a good fit and we’ll get back to you within 48 hours and let you know if we can get on our books. And by the way, that worked for a while. That worked for about two years. And then our industry went through a reset in 2024 and that system started fading hard and fast. And I’ve been very vocal about my concerns around that system. Well, in this bootcamp, we had a whole lesson dedicated to it and one of the bootcampers, they’re probably listening to this right now, I will not say you by name, message me, and said, “Oh my gosh, I was hooked on having this appointment request form, and I’ve heard you say before, we gotta get rid of it, but I really liked it, and my stylists really like being able to see who’s coming in, and we like screening the clients, and we like being able to custom book everything because our appointments are so particular, and it gives us a level of control, and we love it.
” And she’s heard me for years say, “It’s holding you back.” And she was like, “No, no, no, we love it. It’s working for us.” And by the way, this is a stylist, I’m gonna use simple numbers. This is a stylist whose salon is getting 40 new guest requests a month. So it’s not like they’re totally just up a creek without a paddle not seeing new guests. Like that felt like really good demand. They’re a smaller team. It felt really good. And she was like, “We’re good with our demand.” Well, she went back and looked at how many people had started to fill out the appointment request form and abandoned it, and it was over 2,000. And she was like, “We lost out on 75% of the people who considered working with us because of the form.” She did the math and it was hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She’s like, “It’s gotta go. ” And I would guess that most people with forms, and she hadn’t either. And she was like, “I’m learning a lot and I’m, I’m having to realize that maybe some of the things that felt good and felt comfortable are not in my best interest if the goal here is to make money, like for herself, for the team, for everybody.” And I just thought that was such a, like a beautiful share of like, just because it feels comfortable, just because it makes me feel in control, it doesn’t mean that that’s in the best interest of the business. It was very poignant and I thought it was worth sharing. The forms might feel good. If you want your revenue to grow, it’s the first place I’d be looking, okay? Then we have text to book. Again, it gives us that level of control and most of us are like cool with text.
Like a lot of people, it’s of a generation, right? Like Gen Z, millennials, we don’t super love to hop on a phone call for anything. And like the data supported. Like clients over the age of 55 have no problem doing it, but as soon as you get under that, like people start to get a little phone shy. We were in the age of texting and so we’re like, “Oh, texting. Everybody likes texting.” Let’s say you only book 20 appointments by text every single month. Let’s say that your exchanges are pretty efficient. So it ends up being 10 minutes per client, bouncing dates back and forth, getting them actually on your books. Maybe it takes 10 minutes per guest, and you’re like, “It’s not a big deal. I can totally manage it. ” That’s four hours a month you’re spending texting clients back and forth. And arguably, when I talk to stylists and I’m like, “When are you texting to book?” It’s nights, it’s weekends, it’s when they’re eating their lunch.
It’s like when you finally get a minute to yourself, you’re like now texting and logging into your booking system. And then again, we say, “We have no downtime.” It’s like, well, yeah, because the system you have doesn’t allow for it. So I understand like text can feel comfy, cozy, easy, but when you look at the time set it’s creating and potentially like the barrier to book, it’s hard. For me personally, I would not text a business owner to get on their books. Like first time visit, for me, it’s a no. I’m sure some people do it and I’m sure if you’re like a text a booker, you’re like, “Well, it works fine for me. ” Again, I go back to like think about the people who you’re losing. I’m searching you’re gaining, otherwise you would have scrapped this system a long time ago. You’re not thinking about the people who wouldn’t go there and it’s simply a missed opportunity.
Something that’s trending right now is the AI receptionists. I think it’s interesting technology. I think if I can be candid, I’m personally doing quite a bit of research and it’s research and probably I’m to be doing for the rest of my career, if I’m being honest, looking at the impact of AI specifically on our industry. And the thing that I do feel good about is that because we are in the personal care and personal service industry, I think there will be a pretty significant delay of our industry being negatively impacted in a way where tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of us are out of a job. I think we’re a long ways away from, from that, which is great news. I have shared very openly the AI formulation technology is coming in hard and fast. Like anybody who specializes in like color formulation, your specialty is gonna be the first to get hit because the formulation, like I’ve seen some formulations created by AI, they’re impressive because formulation is a science and AI is able to lean into math and science and that’s where it’s strong right now.
So anyway, when I think about industry disruption, that is the first place I go. When we look at AI receptionists, the world at large is still relatively scared of AI. And so I think when you put in like AI robots to take on your phone calls, I think it’s like really not what clients today are seeking and looking for, especially for like personal care services. I think if you were booking like somebody to come out and install your internet or something, it’s probably fine. But for like the personal human services that we provide, I would not go there. So I understand like automation’s exciting. Let’s do online booking. Like if we really wanna automate, like let’s do it smart and in a way that our clients are ready for, versus jumping the gun into a technology that at large at scale, when you look at like surveys amongst Americans specifically, there’s still so much fear around it, I think it’d be a turnoff versus a turn on.
So how do we make online booking work for us? First things first, if you haven’t looked at the capabilities of online booking systems recently, in the last two years, the technologies that many of these systems have come up with are incredible. Years ago, there was only one booking system that I could promote that had what I called cluster booking, where they made sure that all the appointments touched. Now there’s several booking systems who have it. So what I mean is, let’s say I was looking at your calendar and there was a random Wednesday and all you had was a haircut at 20 PM. What the system can do is on your online booking, if I were a client and I went to book, you know, a root touch up with you, it wouldn’t say, “Oh yeah, Brit’s available anytime between 9:00 and 5:00 except for this one spot in the middle.” What it would say instead is, “Yeah, Brit can do your root touch up.
Do you want an 11:30 or a 3:00 PM?” And it would only offer me times that would butt up perfectly to that haircut. There’s several systems that have options for that now. If you’re in Thriver Society, you can look at our salon software guide, we break all of that down for you. There’s great options for that, and there’s a lot of customization in the technology. It’s actually not a feature I think everybody needs. Like if you have big huge gaps on your schedule, clustering your bookings and reducing gaps is the least of your worries. You need more demand, but if you really are an in- demand stylist and you’re like, “Brit, like the gaps like kill me, like I need all the room I can get. ” Software takes care of that for you now, and there’s really, really amazing systems that make it seamless.
Number two, you have to have a website. You have to, you have to, you have to. I’ve been coaching the websites for quite some time now. I know it’s one of those things where it’s like, it feels like climbing Mount Everest and it feels like, does anybody care about websites anymore? It’s the only piece of the internet of business owns. As we step into a time where distrust in social media has never been higher, yeah, the website is for a local business, a local service-based business, it is the most trustworthy thing you have next to your Google reviews. So here’s what happens when you just have like Google reviews linked to a booking site. Instagram, Linkin Bio goes to a booking site. The messaging that gets received by the person who has just found your business, whether it be through reviews or Instagram or through a referral or whatever is, “Hi, nice to meet you.
Give me cash.” There’s no, like, slow introduction to get to know me. Here’s what, a little bit about me. This is what my space looks like. Here’s who we are, here’s who I am. It has to feel like a softer landing. When it goes from you found me on social media, go ahead and book an appointment. It feels incredibly transactional. So going back to, if you’re the stylist who’s like, you know, I like booking by phone, it feels more personal. Your website can handle so much of that when it’s designed properly. When people say, “Do clients care about websites anymore?” They don’t care about garbage websites. I totally agree with you. Like if your website is formatted poorly, it will do absolutely nothing for you. But when you have a website that’s designed correctly, it’s the number one salesperson in your business. It will change everything.
And I’ve talked to a lot of salon owners who are like, “Man, Britt, I didn’t realize how important websites were until I had a client move out of state and I had to try and find a salon for them.” It is scary out there. And sometimes it does take putting yourself in the shoes of being a client, again, trying to find a business you can trust, it’s hard and a great website does solidify that trust. Next, on that website, you want to have a service page with a full breakdown of your services. So not lots and lots of verbiage and confusion and a massive service listing like that’s gonna create overwhelm. But one of the things that I do in all of these classes is what we call funnel reviews or brand audits where I go in and I pull up somebody’s website and I, I find the blind spots and there was somebody who had put, there was Root Touchup as a service and then there was another service that was called like All Over Color.
It was phrased something like that. And Root Touchup was one price and all over color was like 70% more. And I was like, see, as a stylist, I could argue with you what the difference is between those two services. You have to imagine a client is the one looking at your website and you can call that all over color, whatever you wanna call it in the back end of your business. In the front end, as I’m a client trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with you, your verbiage has to be clear. And this is the exact point where stylists usually start to say to me, “Yeah, see, Brit, this is why I can’t do online booking because clients don’t understand my language.” So speak a language they understand. The change comes from us as service providers. I agree. Clients are never gonna understand how our business operates.
It’s not their job to. I’m not an auto mechanic. When I go to the car place, I just say, “Hey, this is a symptom. Let me know. ” And they don’t explain to me like, “Well, Brit, let me teach you why we call this part this part. Let me share with you why it’s named like this. Let me teach you how to pronounce this thing.” No, because they know it. It’s none of my business. They’re the expert. “Here’s the result I want. Here’s the problem I’m facing. They’re the professional. They solve it. “That’s how we have to look at our business. They don’t need to know the fancy terminology. Our website and our service page needs to speak to them like clients. And if you can meet them where they’re at on your website on that service page, they will A, not mess anything up and B, be like, ” Finally, here’s a stylist who understands me and doesn’t expect me to be some kind of expert or read their mind.
They’re meeting me where I’m at. I trust this person and that starts to build that initial trust. “Next, clean up your online booking system. Again, when I go and look in a lot of online booking systems, I can see why y’all built them the way that you did. They make sense to you and you’re like, ” Well, I like it when it shows up like this or sometimes I need clients to book like that or I have this service in here when this specific niche comes up. And then again, we wonder why clients are like butchering our online booking systems. “We, we wanna format things where, yes, it does service you as the business owner. It has to. I totally get it. But if you have so many services in your online booking system that I can’t even tell what’s up and what’s down, yeah, the chances of me messing it up are pretty high.
So in Thrivers, specifically, we have a system that shows you, you know, how do you title services? How do we package services so that it’s dummy proof? Like nobody could ever mess it up. It’s so easy to understand and so simplified that you as the stylist will always have the time you need. You’ll always get full rate, you won’t have any gaps, no one’s gonna mess anything up. It can be done. Lastly, having photos on your services page and your booking page that demonstrate the services you’re talking about massively impactful. So often, I end up going to a services menu page where there’s no photos at all. It’s just text. Clients are highly visual, and that’s why they like seeing us on Google or on Instagram is because they can see our work, they can see the visual. Make it easy for them using visual clues.
I hope that this has just gotten your wheels turning a little bit. I know there’s probably still lots of structural questions you can DM me on Instagram. If you’re listening to this in real time, the week of March 2nd, 2026, you can sign up for one of our marketing classes that are happening this week. If you’re listening to this after that, no worries. We’ll be back with more marketing classes in 2027, or Thriver Society is always available to you. I want you to just think about what your booking process is like for both you and your clients. If you’re potentially living in the narrative that your clients love it and you love it simply because you’re averse to change, when is the last time you looked at the online booking systems out there? Could there be something that would really work for you and your clients?
And let me just throw this out there to you. If switching to online booking can make you an extra $14,000 this year, would you do it? Something to think about, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
