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 Siva, 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 Siva, and we just got back from San Antonio, Texas, hosting our annual members event. And I was thinking about it. I think we’ve hosted five major Thrivers member-only events and additional eight smaller Thrivers-only events. So we have done this a lot of times at this point. When I say major, our first major event was Thrivers Live 2020, if you know, you know. There was just something really magical that happened those days. We hosted right before the pandemic. So it was for a lot of people the last time they got to really network and connect in person for years. And we had an incredible panel of speakers. We run professional speakers, so it was like Mike McCallowitz offer of Profit First, Jasmine Star social media expert, Lori Harder, like amazing professional speakers.
Thrivers got to speak and share. It was wonderful. There was about 300 people in the room and it was our first stab at a live event and it was great. From there we had to go virtual for the next Thrivers Live because of the pandemic. 2022 we brought it back and we almost tripled to the capacity so we had over 600 members. We had to rent out a convention center because the event grew so quickly so fast. It was also members only. We also brought in professional speakers. That was the year we spent $300,000 just on speakers. We learned a lot that year. It was an amazing event, very different than what we had done in the past. I loved every minute of it, but I also walked out of it being like, I did not get to connect in the way that I wanted to.
For me, when we are in person, it’s for me as much as it’s for the attendees and with a room of over 600 people, I don’t get to have the one-on-one conversations that I’m looking for. I don’t get to connect with our incredible members and the people I care about and hear more about their businesses. It was just a scale that I wasn’t able to connect in the way that I like. So we walked out of that event and I was like, “We’re gonna take a couple years figuring out what events feel good and then go back to it. ” So we spent 2024 and 2025 doing what we called the Thriving Stylist Tour. We did eight tour stops across the US, basically one a quarter for two years. We sold out every single one. So it was based on whatever the salon could hold.
It was anywhere from like 40 to 80 people per location depending on the size of the salon. That was really fun and I really enjoyed that group size. So I learned a lot through those tour stops and I came back and my team and I agreed, “We’re gonna keep events at under 100.” That’s the place and space. I know we can create really big breakthroughs. I get to have a moment with everybody. It’s just a very viable size. We’re like, okay. Knowing that we sold out tour stops in a heartbeat and that demand to get into these rooms is high, how can we host an event keeping it under 100, keeping it members only and have it make sense? And we said, “It’s gotta be our X club.” So our X club is our high performance students. We call it the X club because you have to either 2X or 3X your revenue to be in there or you can scale your schedule back by 20% and increase your revenue by 20%, which would be a time X award.
Or you can be a lead X leader, which means you’ve increased salon revenue by 25% and demonstrated all of these other exceptional leadership qualities. So by making this an X club only event, it’s our highest performing members. We have 17,000 members. We have probably, I’m trying to think percentage wise, probably 10 or 15% have applied to X club over the years. And so when we look at those who are doubling and tripling their revenue with us, we have solo stylists who are doing $300,000 a year and more behind the chair. Solo stylists, some with no assistant at all. Not all of these people are extension artists, like they’re just incredibly brilliant marketers. Average tickets of over $800, like stories that are incredibly inspiring. We had a table of eight multi-seven figure salon owners and everything in between. We had high six figure
We had high six figure commission salon leaders. We had incredible booth rental stylists, my daughter being one of them came into the room. So everybody in this room is performing at a high level and the tie that binds this room is they’re incredibly strategic. Everybody in here is very serious about business and there is no gatekeeping. So it’s almost like a competition of who can share the best strategy. I mean, I learned so much being there for four days and it is a rush that you cannot imagine unless you’re in the place and space. Like if you want to be mega inspired, for me this is it and it’s primarily a networking event first. We do bring in speakers. We do some really fun stuff as a group too, like shout out to the pool party in the Lazy River. That was a blast, but it’s primarily a networking event so that all of these stylists and salon owners can connect and blow each other’s minds and share, you know, connections and resources.
I was watching people change distributors in real time and like, I mean, just amazing, amazing stuff. It was really cool. So this is our second year hosting XClub retreat. We just announced that our next retreat in 2027 is in Park City, Utah, and we are at last count 86% sold out. So we announced it two weeks ago, we’re almost completely sold out. I wanted to share in this episode big takeaways from our speakers knowing that not all of our Thriver Society members are coming into this room, but some of what was shared was like really brilliant and I wanna bring it back to everybody. And also at the end, I’m gonna share some of the like live event production takeaways I had. Live event production is hard, whether you do a big scale or small scale. So if anybody listening to this is an educator or is wondering what goes into hosting an event or how much we spent on the event, I’m gonna share all of those things, so I’ll save that till the end too.
So first I wanna share the amazing strategies that I thought were really powerful. So I was the first keynote speaker and I did a kind of like a state of the union. I did a mid-year predictions presentation and I talked about what strategies that stylish and salon owners should be focused on as far as pricing, um, standing out in the market and things that they should pay deep attention to when it comes to the economy at scale. I talked about other major businesses and things they’ve done that have completely collapsed their business in the last six months and the things that other businesses have done that have made their profits soar. So we talked very strategically about how to honestly keep their chairs and their salons like thriving as we walk into this tricky market. Something else I shared was when you look at major economists and what they’re sharing, this economy that we’re in right now could last until 2035.
So a lot of people are like, when the economy bounces back, when you look at what economists are saying, we’re in this K-shaped economy, it’s the first time the economy has looked like this in current modern time. So we’re talking decades and it’s an, a big split of haves and have nots. I was calling it the great divide and then somebody much smarter than me, like an actual economist named it something real and it’s called a K-shaped economy. You’ve probably heard of it talked about before. What they’re saying is closing the gap between the K is not gonna happen quickly. There’s nothing that could be done. They can’t decrease inflation, they can’t change mortgage rates, they can’t increase everybody’s income, like none of that will do it. And so there’s this rebalance that will happen at some point, but a lot of economists are saying it could take six, seven, eight, 10 years.
So I talked about, you know, what stylists and salon should be doing over the next several years to make smart business decisions knowing that the economy is not gonna settle anytime soon. We also shared some marketing strategy, what’s coming to Instagram, blah, blah, blah. The next speaker was Mikey Mingum. So Mike is a fiduciary, which means he’s a finance and investment expert. He came in to show us how to make our money make money. Something people ask me about a lot is, how do I make passive income? Passive income is not a myth, but it’s deeply misunderstood. Like a lot of salon owners are like, “I’m gonna start a retail line for passive income.” I’ve had the privilege of speaking to three industry pioneers who all developed their own haircare lines in the last five years. Every single one of them said it was the hardest, most expensive thing they’ve ever done.
It’s a huge headache. It’s the most work they’ve ever put into a brand and business. And so often I think things that look passive are the furthest thing from it versus Mike came in and talked about like real level investing and how to make your money make money. There was a lot of great things he talked about. One of the things I thought was really powerful was his safety net strategy. This goes against all like the Day Ramsey stuff, like a lot of the things that actually keep people in debt for too long. So what he said was, “You need to have levels of emergency funds first. So there’s a starter fund of $1,000. This is for people who are like my daughter, okay? She’s 22, she lives at home. A $1,000 emergency fund is good for somebody like her, okay? Then there’s the stable safety net emergency fund, three months of expenses.
So think about how much you spend monthly to sustain your lifestyle. I mean, pay your home rent. If you have a booth rent, pay your booth rent, buy yourself food, put gas in your car, make the car payment. Like, how much does your lifestyle cost you in a month? He says, take that times three, and the average working adult should have that much in savings all the time, okay? So I want you to think about that. So if you are living on $5,000 a month right now, what he’s saying is you need to have $15,000 accessible at all times before you start investing, okay? And for him, he believes you should have that before you start paying down any credit card debt. We’ll get into that in a second. Then he said,” If you are a business owner, meaning a salon owner, you should have six months savings at all times.
So if it costs you $20,000 a month to run your salon, he thinks you should have 120K in accessible savings for financial peace of mind, for stability of your business before you start focusing on paying down your debt and investing. “I thought that was interesting. It was different than what I had heard. And what he said was, as soon as you start investing money into things like 401ks or SEP IRAs or investment accounts, it’s money that takes longer to access and sometimes there’s pretty huge tax penalties versus if you have, you know, a starter or a stable or a secure business owner savings account and let’s say a high yield savings instead, you could access that money within hours. If you have that money in some kind of investment account, it’s going to take a lot longer than that. And he was like, ” Investment accounts are important.
Compound interest is critical, but if you’re not taking care of your living expenses first, investing feels like a punishment. “So that went back to, he was talking about people were saying,” How much should we invest? “And what he said was, ” You want to take a look at your burn rate, meaning how much you need to spend to sustain your lifestyle every single month. So let’s go back to using that $5,000 example. Let’s say for you to pay your home rent, buy yourself food, put gas in the car, pay for the kids to go to school, whatever. It costs your family $5,000 a month. He calls that your burn rate. What he wants you to do is increase your revenue by 20% so that we can invest 20% more into compound interest style investment accounts. So he sees investing the way I see investing. I have never asked a student of mine to spend less on their lifestyle.
I don’t think it’s realistic. I think it can be really harmful to people’s mental state. So instead we say,” How can we increase your revenue fast? “And then we do that. So 20% more for somebody making $5,000 a month would be about an additional $1,000 a month. I can teach somebody to make an additional $1,000 a month in 90 days or less. That’s easy. So we learn how to do that. All of that additional thousand goes into an investment account. That would have somebody investing $12,000 a year and what he said is if you’re able to invest $24,000 a year, so $2,000 a month and allow that to compound for 30 years, you would be a multimillionaire time of retirement. So compound interest is really the key and he talked about different ways to invest in insurances versus brokerage accounts versus individual stock investing and what’s risky and what’s smart and all the things.
He broke that down for us in a Q&A. But the other thing he said is when you’re investing and when you’re choosing to have your money make money, knowing that the compound interest is critical, like you can’t just do a savings account or put into your retirement account even and then not choose how to invest it. Like a lot of people are saving for retirement but aren’t being strategic once the money gets there, huge misfire. Just putting it into the investment account is step one. You have to make that money make money and you either have to have a fiduciary help you to do that or you have to be very smart and sophisticated in making sure that that money that you’re investing for your one day retirement is producing at least an 8% rate of return. A lot of people are getting more like 21% right now with the way the market is.
So making sure that your money is actually making money when you’re investing it. That was huge. Now on the flip side, we also had the amazing Michelle Cook CPA come in and speak at the event and it was really fun to have both a CPA and a fiduciary because often CPAs and fiduciaries or CPAs like investment brokers will fight because they don’t see things the same way. Michelle Cook only does things legally and above board and she walked away being like, ” I was actually really impressed with Mike’s presentation. He didn’t coach to anything that was like tax evasion or shady, which if you’re working with the wrong investment broker, they can really do you dirty. And so it was nice to have Michelle in the room who was kind of like a second set of ears and eyes and she was like, no, his advice was all really clean.
That was great to hear. So Michelle Cook talked about taxes and being smart with your money. The big takeaway that I actually got from Michelle came from my daughter. So my daughter was in the room. She is a booth renter. She’s been booth renting for six months after being a, at a commission salon for just over two years and she walked out of the room and was like, ” Whoa, talking about money kind of blew my mind because I’ve been going into the salon just like taking clients and making money and feeling good about it. “And she’s like, ” And when you, when you hear people talk about investing and really generating wealth, it makes you think of it differently. “And I said,” Totally agreed. “And she said,” Michelle Cook is a tax lady and I thought it was gonna be all about taxes but it wasn’t.
My daughter’s big takeaway from Michelle is that my daughter wasn’t sure what target she should be seeking for. Like everybody wants to make more money, but the question is like, how much money do I need to be making to do well? My daughter walked away knowing that exact number and she was like, ” It completely changed my motivation, my mindset, my focus. So Michelle gave this formula that was like, okay, if your commission is this or your booth rent is this and you have to pay this much on expenses and all of these different things, she was able to give a target as to what the stylist needs to be producing behind the chair to live the lifestyle that they want. Like she was able to reverse engineer it backwards in a way that my daughter was like for the first time ever really made sense.
So my daughter found out if she does $90,000 a year in services, she will have enough to live the lifestyle she wants to live and invest at 20% and now she knows the target. So she was pacing to do around $75,000 in services this year and I told her, I was like, “Okay, so girl, you have to do like another 1500, maybe $2,000 a month, let’s just do it. ” So now she’s got this amazing target that’s gonna help her get to where she wants to be faster That was huge. I think a lot of us get lost in the sauce when it comes to the numbers and to have somebody like Michelle come in and be like, “Well, no, let’s just like reverse engineer it. Let’s look at your lifestyle, let’s look at your expenses, let’s look at what your business looks like now and just figure out how much more you need to do to get to where you wanna go.
It was a really brilliant exercise and the way she made it simple was just incredible. Then we had Coach Nine’s presentation, which was wonderful. She was talking about elevated guest experience and she gave a gajillion different examples of how stylists and salons can create an experience that would not compare to what other stylists and salons are up to, like how to be more than competitive in your market basically. And she talked about the three phases of guest experience. So we consider that to be pre, during, and post. We coached to all three in Thriver Society and she talked about the difference between baseline requirements and differentiation ideas. So baseline requirements is the stuff everybody should be doing but doesn’t make you fancy or special. Like it makes you a stylist. <laugh> Like it’s not special. It’s not like, “Yay, I’m doing it. ” It’s like, uh, yeah, that’s your job.
So the things that she talked about that were pre-visit experience baseline were a seamless booking process with no barriers like deposits or credit cards. I have to tell you, we had dozens of people in the room in real time who were like, “Britt, I took your advice. I pulled out the credit cards. I pulled out the deposits and now we’re making more money and our demand has increased.” You guys, I don’t know how many times I gotta say it. Like it is a barrier for you. You think it is preventing people from canceling and protecting your revenue. When we see all of the social media posts about stylists struggling and suffering, the first thing I do is I go to their booking process and policies and it takes everything in me not to DM them and being like, “The reason why your business doesn’t look like you want it to is because your processes and your policies are drowning you, drowning you.
I was in a room full of like the fastest growing people in the industry and they’re not doing things like that. Pull them back, okay? She talked about the four part confidence sequence that we coached to in Thriving Stylist Method through email or through text and then appointment confirmations. Those are like basic baseline, everybody should be doing it, not fancy. Then she talked about differentiation. So some of the things she talked about were collaborative Pinterest inspiration boards pre-visit or during visit. Personalized welcome videos from the stylist. I will say we did personalized welcome videos for every single one of our guests this year and the feedback was phenomenal and it was one of my favorite things I did for the event. Shout out to Lauren from my team who insisted on doing that. It was like such a smart concept. Assistant introductions before arrival, don’t let your assistants catch them by surprise.
Like prepare them for everything. Make this sound like a five star rollout. Detailed parking instructions and suite location maps. Interactive color cost estimator, that was a really cool thing we’re seeing a lot of our thrivers start to incorporate into their business and on their websites now. We’re just seeing a more concierge level of client onboarding and a lot of stylists and salons are like, it’s just feeling like we have to do a lot to stand out now. Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard. Like the pressure on our industry is different. We need to make more money. The cost of doing business has gone up. We can’t run a passive business. Like the business has to elevate for the revenue to stay competitive. There is no other way. So nine did a great presentation. I just gave you kind of some of the takeaways from the pre-visit, but she also talked about during visit guest experience pro tips, post visit guest experience pro tips, like so much good stuff.
Then we had Low Wheeler Davis. She is the owner of Wheeler Davis Salon. She is like a celebrity stylist. She does a lot of Olympic surfers, like professional surfers, hair. She has clients who are flying in from Hawaii to see her. She is deeply specialized and has been for over 13 years. She talked very transparently about the highs and lows of salon ownership and a lot of the owners in the room were like, “I’ve never heard an owner talk like that before and be so relatable.” So she was very open. She said, “We’ve basically restarted our salon five or six times.” She’s like, “We’ve done commission. We’ve done booth rental. We’ve done hybrid. We’ve gone back and forth. I’ve had assistants. I’ve not had assistance. I, I’ve been an educator. I’ve not been an educator. I did digital education, then I canceled the whole thing.” Like she talked about all the pivots she’s made in her business and why she made them and it was huge to see somebody break down what works and what doesn’t beyond the high Instagram follower count.
Like she just demystified so many things, brand partnerships, good ones, bad ones, how to get them. Like she really got into the realities in the industry, but one of the things she talked about that was a huge takeaway, I kept hearing salon owners talk about it was this idea that her salon journey is almost like seasons of a TV show and she is always asking herself like, “Who is the cast in this season? Am I the main character right now or am I playing a supporting role? Am I the director or am I, you know, the best supporting actress?” Like the way she sees herself in the business has changed over the years, the way she sees her team has changed over the years and it was very freeing, I think for a lot of owners. A lot of owners don’t ever want to lose a team member.
Low talked very openly about how a lot of her stylists had become deeply successful and have gone on to open their own salons or gone into suites or whatever it is. And she was like, “I can be really proud that they grew up here and went on to do their own thing and I’m learning to not take it personally when they leave me and to instead look at it as they were cast for another role, you know? ” Just like you would have to do if you’re the cast of friends and then somebody goes on to take on another bigger part or when you look at the office, the reason why Steve Correll walked away from the office is he wanted to do big movies and it could have crippled the show and instead that show learned to just adapt without him. Like Low Wheeler is taking the same advice for her own business and it was just very freeing to hear somebody talk about it like that.
Then we have Lauren Carnes come in. She is the owner of Fox and Jane Group. It’s actually the lead better company is the parent company now. She owns 17 salon locations and she does salon leadership in essentially like a business partnership model. So she has these 17 locations and she promotes leaders to each individual location who run and operate all 17 of these salons, some are spas all throughout the US and she’s essentially an advisor to them, helps them to lead their team. She has an HR person on staff, she’s got an education director on staff, all these different roles that are able to support these individual locations and it gives somebody a chance to lead a location without taking on the financial responsibility of investing in a salon. So think about it like this. Some people are able to open salons and either take out loans to do it or they have several hundred thousand dollars to open a location.
A lot of people would love to open a salon but they simply can’t afford it. So Lauren said none of our brand partners, the people who run each individual location have made any kind of financial investment. So they’re almost like a shareholder. Think of it like if a location has a good year, they make a really nice bonus. On the flip side, they make a super high commission for the services they do behind the chair and they get to mentor and give back and educate. And for a lot of people, they want to be a salon owner but not have to deal with the nitty gritty HR, how am I going to afford things this month? Her brand partners, her leader locations don’t have to have the same financial pressure. They do get to mentor, they do get to teach, they do get to hire, they do get to educate, they do get to promote.
They do get bonuses when it’s been a good year. They do make incredibly high commissions, which are some of the perks that a lot of salon owners make, but they don’t have to have that financial burden or pressure. It’s like a very hybrid way of empowering team members. It was so innovative and what she talked about was how she finds good leaders. One of the things she said was like, “Not every amazing stylist is meant to lead a team.” And kind of what she looks for in qualities of people who can lead a team and who would be a good educator. That’s the other thing she said too is some people are very talented stylists and terrible educators. And she talked about identifying like key qualities in her team that she delegates to, like the administrative side of all of her locations and how she prioritizes finding the right people for every single role so that she could delegate.
She could step back from the chair and continue to scale her brands. Anybody who is looking to open up even just one additional location, I strongly suggest you study what Lead Betterco has done, what Fox and Jane Group has done just from a logistical standpoint, even if you don’t want to do like the brand partner thing she’s done, even if you’re like, “Nope, I’m just going to own all the locations and operate all the locations.” She did that too. For seven years, she opened multiple locations herself and she was the person leading every single one. She just has a lot to share about what that experience looks like and one of the things she openly talked about is when she was trying to lead all the locations, the culture failed. It wasn’t until she went this other direction that the culture was able to sustain.
She wrote a great book called Culture Fox. Anybody who’s looking to learn more, that’s a great place to start. She was incredible. Then we had Camille Moore come in. So Camille Moore, look her up on Instagram if you haven’t already. She is a social media expert and what she does that I love is a deep dive into what mainstream brands are doing. So Aloe or Road Cosmetics or she talked about Coachella and do y’all know like what Justin Bieber did at Coachella from a financial standpoint has never been done before. So she studies like the brands and marketing strategies on the backend and explains how we can implement those concepts into our businesses. So there was a couple things she shared that I thought were great. Statistic was 86% of purchases start with social media search in all demographics, not just Gen Z. So I want you to think about it like that.
86% of all of your potential clients are gonna look you up on social media. So for those of you who are like, “I don’t like social media, social media’s on the back burner, I can’t find a way to prioritize it, ” you’re potentially losing 86% of your potential customers. Maybe you’re capturing the remaining 14%, but if you’re growing slower than you’d like, that could be why. The other thing she said that was a huge takeaway from me is most small businesses have brand problems, not social media problems. How many of you have done my Thriver Society program before? What is the very first module I have you do? Branding and target market. It is by far and away the hardest module in the program and it’s the very first one and a lot of people go into the program and they’re like, “Whoa, this is harder than I thought.” Most people don’t know what it takes to make a persuasive brand and it’s truly the pitfall of most independent stylists and salons.
You make a cute logo, you make things clean, you make things polished, that is not the same thing as a brand. And so we spend for a lot of those who take our program several weeks in actual brand development to make a persuasive brand that will actually make clients wanna walk through the door. And I totally agree with Camille, like you don’t have a social media problem, you have a branding problem, which is why your social media is failing. Totally agreed with that. The other thing she mentioned is if you’re posting only sales content or primarily sales content, you’re gonna lose followers every single month. So for those of you who are posting retail stuff or good hair, good hair, good hair, you’re gonna lose interest. It has to be more entertaining, grippy. I have to fall in love with your brand, which goes back to the branding.
The other thing that I thought was interesting is she said, “I want everyone in this room to start thinking about social media as a website.” That was actually a really great reference point for me. When I go to your social media, I should know how much your services cost. I don’t know why we’re so mysterious about our pricing. When I go to your social media, I should know what city and state you’re in. When I go to your social media, I should know what your name is. These are things a lot of people don’t even have on their Instagrams and they don’t even realize it’s missing and it was such a great reminder for her to be like, “Your social media is comprehensive. Don’t just have it be an overflow, don’t just have it be pictures. It needs to act as a huge arm of your business.” I thought that was a really great takeaway too.
Okay. For those of you who were hanging on to hear about the kind of the lessons learned from event production this year, like I said, this was, I think, our fifth major live event. If we don’t count the Thriving Salons tour, which was eight smaller production events, this was a biggie for us. So this event cost us $400,000 to produce. I like to share There are numbers like that just to be transparent. I think there’s a lot of mystery in the industry and like everything is so top secret. I don’t love that. And so I prefer to just be very open and honest about what it looked like for us. And then for us it was $400,000 to produce. A lot of that goes to rooming. So we covered the rooms for our attendees. The rooms alone were I think close to $150,000 to secure.
Food was well over $100,000. So we had 86 attendees plus I had I believe 11 members of my staff and a few contractors plus we had to feed all of our speakers. So it was just over 100 people and it was well over $100,000 for the food that we provided. So if you were there and you were like, “Food was better this year.” Last year I think we spent about $70,000 on food. We increased it to 100,000, just over 100,000 and that was significant. So it costs a lot to feed people <laugh> something that we have learned. We spend another, I think 40 to 50,000 on decor and swag and attendee experience. When you look at speaker payments, on any given year, we spend between 40 and 80,000 dollars on speakers. That includes speaker rate. It includes their flights, their hotel. Some of them have additional expenses we have to pay for too.
So they’ll come with writers and, you know, you take a look at what they’re asking for and decide what works. We always take care of our speakers. I think speakers in our industry are deeply underappreciated, undervalued and underpaid, so we always do our best to take care of everybody. Anywhere between 40 to 80,000 dollars is our average spend. We will spend about that much in 2020. We’ll spend on the higher end of that in 2027 for our speaker. At Thrivers Live 2022, we spend over $300,000 on speaker. So it varies for sure, but 40 to 80K is our average spend. So if you wanna know like nuts and bolts of the financials, that’s essentially what everything looks like. We have yet to run an event profitably. We basically spend as much as we get in ticket sales and usually have to infuse some business revenue to pull the event off.
Live events are just expensive. It’s just such a bigger expense than you could imagine. I selfishly do them because I really like to connect with my community deeply. I really believe in the power of networking. I know how much that has impacted my business and to give back that opportunity to our industry in an elevated way that I’ve never seen done before feels like part of my work’s mission in this lifetime. So we’re gonna continue to do these X club retreats, come into Park City, Utah next year. When I look at some of the mistakes I made or the challenges we had, I do think I was much better this year and the several attendees said they felt it and they saw it. In years past, I’ve spread myself way too thin. I really try and make time for everybody and be there for everybody.
It’s very difficult with 86 people to give quality time to everybody over four days. I did the math and for me to give five minutes to every attendee would take 7.5 hours. We looked into the option of me spending an entire eight hour day just spending five minutes with everybody, almost like Mickey Mouse and people are kind of running through and it, it just didn’t feel quality. So I spread myself a little too thin this year. I did much better. Things like spa day. I know some people were like, “I did the spa day, Britt was there, but I thought we were gonna do business consulting or I was gonna get more time with her.” I was in the spa for I think an hour and a half and there was 20 something people there and some people just wanted to talk about Texas and some people want to talk about kids or ask me about my family and some people wanted to talk about business and it’s hard in an environment like that where some people are really there just to zen out and some people really did want to have like a business consultation and, and I understand that.
That was one of those things where it’s like, “Man, how do we make that cohesive?” It was tough. And so I think spreading myself thin in ways where I’m like trying to be high touch, but maybe it’s not doable in some situations. Those were some of the things that we learned for sure. Two of our speakers backed out within weeks of the event. This happens. This is part of live event production that people don’t talk about. We have had speakers change, schedule, or back out of events every single time except 2025. Our 2025 speaker, Joey Coleman, was a gem. He was flawless through and through perfection. This year we lost two speakers within weeks of the events. You would be amazed at how often that happens. One of them backed out for medical reasons, uh, another one backed out for personal reasons. There was nothing I could have done to change the decision.
It just was what it was. What we chose to do is pay $20,000 to bring in an emergency speaker. In hindsight, I should have just hosted their sessions myself. I should have pivoted the content and done my own thing. When I looked back at survey data, people were like, “We wanted more Brit. We wanted more funnel reviews. We wanted more eyes on our business. I could have done deep dive strategy shares.” So in hindsight, I should have just kept it in the fam. We got feedback coming out of 2025 that people wanted to kind of see a variety of speakers, so we tried that this year. Juggling six speakers is hard. And so we’re taking that lesson into 2027. You guys wait until you see who we are bringing to 2027. It’s insane. So lesson learned, too many speakers, too backed out. The pivot I did wasn’t my favorite.
I would do something different next time. I also should have pre-approved every single keynote to make sure they were high level enough. Some of our speakers did an amazing job of that. There was some feedback and I even felt it too, that some of the keynotes just didn’t feel sophisticated enough. I want everyone to know I reached out to all of our speakers ahead of time in writing and said, “This is a high performance room. You have to push it. This is a bigger conversation than most any other room that you’ve been in. You have to be strategic. You have to give real examples. Don’t stay high level. Get detailed, get nitty-gritty, try and blow minds, try and overwhelm people. That’s the level of sophistication you have to have. 95% of rooms these speakers speak in can’t handle it. This is such a high performance room.
In hindsight, I should have gone through every speaker’s keynote and made sure it was high performance enough. My bad. And I hate to micromanage other professionals. That’s annoying, but because this room is so sophisticated in the future, I will have to do that. And lesson learned from me, like, you’re a badass room of individuals and I will rise to me your occasion. I totally get it. Things that we did differently that were a huge hit, photo ops. Oh my gosh, the photo ops were huge. So something we’ve learned in years past is people would want to get a photo with me or a photo with each other or a group photo. And of course, some people, you know, wear their favorite outfit on the day they don’t take the picture or on the day they do get the picture, they don’t feel their cutest or whatever it is.
We had structured photo times and we shared those photo times at the beginning of the event. So I shared on day one when the group photo was gonna be. Everybody had individual times to have a photo with me if they wanted photos from themselves and we had a professional photographer there and we would have these like mini photo shoots. They would only take like 20, 30 minutes and we got photos of everybody. And at the beginning of the event, some of the attendees were like, ” Well, I’m not gonna come to my photo. I’m not into it. “By the end of the event they were going so well, we only had one person choose not to do it. Like it really was such a slay and we scheduled the photos around times when lighting was gonna be best and people were gonna look fresh. Like first thing in the morning or when lighting was at its peak, that’s when we did the pictures and the proof was in the pudding on that.
Like if you’re hosting any kind of live event, scheduled photo ops so people can come hair and makeup and, and camera ready, like whatever they wanna look like, that was a genius idea from Lauren on my team and it worked really, really, really well. Okay, that’s your X Club Retreat recap. If you wanna learn more about the event and our X double one, that looks like you can just Google search Thriving Stylist X Club and you can look that up. For those of you who are X Club members, I hope to see you in Park City, Utah next year. For those of you who are just looking to level up your business and wanna learn more Strategy Thriver Society is always available to you and as I always say so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
