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 today’s episode is gonna be a little bit different. No frameworks, no metrics, no strategies, no models. I’m going to speak to you heart to heart. If you’re a salon owner, I wanna talk about how you’re probably feeling, what you’re probably thinking, and give a little hope to the future and maybe a little clarity and context to what’s running through your mind, bubbling up in your belly, beating in your heart, so we can have an understanding of what’s going on in the industry today. I wanna read to you a couple things, and these are real sentiments pulled from DMs, pulled from comments on my Instagram post, pulled from Facebook groups that I see when I’m scrolling Facebook and looking at other industry communities. I’ve changed the details like I always do, but the heartbeat of all of these messages is exactly as I see them.
First quote is, “I can’t do anything right anymore. Every decision I make feels like a backfire. I’m so tired of hearing that the industry is changing. If one more person tells me I need to do something different, I’m giving up altogether and closing the doors. I’ve already given everything to this salon. To my team, to the clients, my family’s tired. I’m tired. I have nothing left. I can’t give anymore.” Every single one of those sentences is a symptom, not a diagnosis. A lot of salon owners out there right now are self-diagnosing themselves as broken, not enough, tapped out, done, over it, not capable. That is not the truth. A lot of salon owners are diagnosing themselves as failures when all of those feelings and all of those messages and all of those statements and all of those posts are actually symptoms of an owner who has been playing the wrong game for way too long.
As I say that, I wanna be clear. I am not invalidating your feeling of exhaustion. That is real. I know that a lot of salon owners out there are exhausted. They’re at the end of their rope. I’m not trying to invalidate that part at all. I have owned this coaching company, Thriving Stylist, since 2012. I’ve been consulting stylists and salon owners for almost 15 years. I have had countless highs and lows. I have hired 22 team members in Thriving Stylist as a brand over the years. We’re currently a team of 11. So of the incredible hearts I’ve hired over the years, half are gone. When I was leading the salon team from 2009 to 2016, we had a team of 26 employees. I hired over 100 stylists, assistants, and front desk personnel in that time. I know how brutal and exhausting all of that is.
I’ve had employees steal from us. I’ve had to fire employees that I cared about deeply and then locked myself in the bathroom and cried about it. I have had team members that I though would build business with me forever, leave and completely blindside me. I’ve gone months without a paycheck. I had somebody I trusted wire a $50,000 payment to the wrong account and the money was just lost. I’ve been audited twice, once by the state of California, once been the IRS. I have worked all night long, like pulled more all-nighters than I can even count. I have no idea how many. I’ve had my daughter and my husband both tell me that my workload frustrates them. I missed my son’s preschool graduation for work. I’ve had my daughter call me in tears needing me when I was across the country coaching a salon and couldn’t get to her.
I have missed countless sports games for both of my kids. I have though about closing this company countless times. Ask my husband, he’ll tell you. So when I hear salon owners say, “I’ve already given so much to this business. I don’t have any more to give. You’re not being dramatic. I have been there. I have totally felt it. You literally and mathematically have already given so much. You’ve given your sleep, you’ve given your paycheck, your health, your evenings, special events with friends and family, your patients with your own kids, grace with your team. I see you. I see you. And I know that the day you turn that key in the front door of your salon, you did it because you loved this industry, you loved the craft, you loved the people. Maybe you dreamed of building the kind of salon space you never had when you were coming up.
Nobody handed you some kind of guide that was gonna tell you how to be a super successful, super profitable salon owner. Nobody told you that you were gonna have to become an expert marketer and learn finance and have employees come for you and be accused of things that were not even true. And then try and be, you know, the break room therapist on top of serving your own guests, even when it means you don’t take a paycheck home that month because you have an entire team that you have to take care of first, right? Leaders eat last. Here’s what I know about salon owners. They’re not weak. They’re not lazy. They’re not bad at business. They’re humans who have been carrying a huge workload, largely alone because it’s an industry that isolates. We talk such a good game about community over competition, but then everyone wants to gatekeep the secrets and not talk about what’s working and be in suffering together and we’re all miserable together and nobody’s making any money.
It’s isolating. It’s overwhelming. And we as an industry have just experienced the most turbulent five-year stretch that I think this industry has ever seen. And we all collectively felt it. A lot of you will remember in 2022, I released a predictions episode where I was talking about was the great divide. It was this split I saw happening in the industry in real time where it was the haves and the have-nots. And this industry has always been one where there’s someone who were super successful in a lot that weren’t. This rift was different. That big divide in the industry is here in such a huge way right now. And it’s why the industry is starting to get frustrated and noisy at scale about it because you can’t ignore the rift anymore. What once felt like normal of some people have more than others is now this obvious disparity where some salon owners are not getting by.
They’re not surviving anymore. What used to work for them is completely failing and they’re lost. Meanwhile, they’re watching other businesses celebrate the best year they ever had. And it is a total mind F. And it is completely defeating, and I get it. What’s tricky about all of this is it happens slowly and then all at once. On this podcast in 2021, we started talking about how there was an artificial inflation hitting the industry. It was in the recovery from the pandemic, and salons were full to the gills. You didn’t even have to market that hard. Clients were just pouring in. Money was pouring in. A lot of salons made great money between 2021 and 2023. And then it’s like somebody turned the tap off. And the revenue started to dry up a little bit. And it started to feel like pressure. But we blamed a lot of external factors.
Stylists started getting a little bit antsy. What they were asking for was different. Clients’ expectations were different. What worked in marketing was different, and it felt like everything got harder all at once. You did not imagine that. That was totally and completely real, and it happened at scale. So if you’re tired as a salon owner, take a breath. You’re allowed to be. It’s always been a journey owning a business, and the last five years have been brutal. But now that we’re on the same page about that, and you know that I see you, and you know that I’ve been you, and I know that building a business is hard, and paying a team is hard, and being committed to payroll is hard because I’m all of those things too. I need to tell you where that tired is coming from and what it’s actually made of, because the source, the actual symptom is different.
Here’s my thesis for this podcast. You don’t have a capacity problem. It’s not that you can’t do enough. It’s not that your team can’t do enough. It’s not that the marketing is not working. It’s not that the clients are the worst. It’s not that the economy has turned on you. What you have is a clarity problem. When you say, “I can’t do anything right,” what you actually mean is, “I can’t tell which of the 40 things I’m trying to do right now is actually working.” That is not the same sentiment, not even close. One of those phrases, “I can’t do anything right,” means you’re broken. The other phrase, which is, “I can’t tell which of the 40 things I’m doing is working and which isn’t,” means you’re blindfolded running this business you have today. You are not broken, you’re blindfolded. Think about it. When any of us don’t know what’s working, what happens?
Everything feels critical. Instagram posts feel critical. Promotions feel critical. Events feel critical. Selling more retail feels critical. Promoting the team feels critical. Updating the website feels critical. More team meetings, more promotions. We need to change the schedule. We need to expand the hours. We have to hire now. All of it feels like it might be the right thing. So we hold onto all of it, and we try to do everything all at once. You’re carrying 40 bricks because you don’t know which of the three are actually holding your building up. That’s why you’re exhausted. It’s not because you’re doing too little, because you’re doing a lot. You’re doing too much of what doesn’t matter. And because you’re running the business with a blindfold, you have no way of seeing it.
I want you to imagine for a second that we’re not running salons. I want you to imagine that we’re in a race, and we’re at the starting line, and at the finish line is a successful salon business. And they say, “Ready, set, go,” and we all start running. Some of you have been running at marathon speed for 90 miles when the marathon was only ever meant to be 26.3. And when you open that salon, you trained for the marathon, but you only trained for the 26.3. So when the journey became three times longer and harder than you expected, now you’re feeling tricked, you’re feeling resentful. You’re wondering why you’re the one that hasn’t found the finish line yet. So that leads us to the hard conversation. The reason why a lot of you are running a 90-mile marathon when it was only ever meant to be 26.3 is because you’ve been running in the wrong direction, maybe for years.
And at the risk of people being pissed off at me, it’s too important to not just call it like it is and say it. I’m watching a lot of salon owners today try to run a salon that is a modified. I can’t even say improved, to be quite candid, like this modified, adapted version of the salon that they themselves were trained in, and it’s all you know. I get it. It’s what was modeled to you. And you’re a salon owner now, so you’re successful. So some variation of that model that you participated in, you’re thinking, “Well, I’m gonna do this model because A, it’s what I did, and B, it’s what everybody does.” We use that word a lot. It’s what everybody’s doing. It’s industry standard. That’s one of my favorites. It’s industry standard. And I’ll just remove the parts and pieces that I didn’t like that my owner did.
And then it will be a good working model. That’s how most salons set up and are run. Or maybe you’re running a model that worked super well in salons 10, 20, 30 years ago, and you’re wondering why now you can’t turn a profit. Why your best stylists leave four, five, six, seven years into their career? And what I’m watching this industry do, and this is the crux of why I felt it was important to talk about this now, is I’m watching salon owners turn on themselves. I’m watching salon owners blame stylists and then wonder why nobody wants to work for them. They call stylists today lazy and complain that they don’t work half as hard as they did in my day, and then wonder why the most driven stylists are not interested in working in that building. I hear salon owners say, “I made half as much as I have to pay these people now.” Yeah.
Look at what’s happened to the economy. Everything has changed. The systems we’re running have to keep up. I watch salon owners say, you know, I’m so much nicer. I’m so much more patient than the owner that trained me. Gosh, I hope so. I hope we all learned from what we experienced back then and are trying to raise the bar. I though that was the whole point of this. I know your training program is twice as good. I get that part. And when we say things like stylists today are just not grateful and they’re not willing to work, that is not true. That’s one of my biggest advantages as a business coach is I’m one of the only, if not the only, like I, I don’t even know anymore, business coach who coaches commission stylists, booth rental stylists, studio suite owners, booth rental salon owners, and commission/employee salons.
I’m talking to everybody. I’m getting an earful from everybody. I’m getting a cross-section of data from the entire industry, no matter how everybody works. Let me tell you, this is not an industry full of lazy stylists. There is way too much money being produced by young stylists, by stylists working part-time. For me to believe that this industry has gone soft or lazy. The data that I see, and I get to see P&Ls, I get to see financial parts. Heck, I get to see year-end tax statements. So this is not hearsay. I’m looking at the proof. Stylists today are not lazy. The reason why it’s feeling weird is because the stylists you are looking to hire today and the clients you’re looking to attract today are not living in the industry you remember from 10, 15, 20 years ago. They’re living right now in 2026 in the reality that exists today.
Being right about the past doesn’t change the present. Being successful in the program that you went through doesn’t mean it’s what’s gonna work right now. So when I hear and see owners saying, you know, online and in the forums, stylists these days just don’t wanna work like we did, or clients used to manage themselves without so much handholding, or we never had to do online booking before, this internet stuff is the worst. We’re sounding like our grandparents. Like I remember when I was a new stylist looking at the stylists who were, you know, 20 or 30 years older than me and being like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so out of touch.” And then I hear some of the salon owners talk now and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, y’all have become those people.” We have to evolve forward. It’s not 2002 anymore. At some point, we gotta get with it.
And listen, I know change fatigue is real. My business, the coaching business I run right now is in constant pivot. And when people do choose to leave or when people are let go, it’s often because the rate of the pivot is too much to keep up with and it’s overwhelming. I know change is hard and exhausting. It is also what allows my coaching company to still stand. When I look at the salons that I’m working with, they’re growing by anywhere from 58 to 400% revenue in a year. And this is not a salon going from like 50,000 to 200,000. These are salons going from like 500,000 to 750,000 in a year or 400,000 to 900,000 in a year. Like really, really rapid growth. They are constantly evolving forward. They’re not doing anything like it did 10 years ago. There’s a DM I got years ago.
It’s kind of burned in my brain. It’s from a salona that’s still a thriver. She’ll know exactly who she is. She sent me a DM that said, “I just wish the industry would go back to how it was in 2019. And I get it. It’s just never gonna happen.” And that owner wasn’t angry. I know her. She’s an absolutely amazing leader today. Like fast-forward and she’s got it all dialed in. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t bitter. She didn’t hate her team. She was grieving. Your teams are not against you. Your stylists don’t want you to lose. It’s not that they don’t appreciate you. They’re watching you pour your last reserves of energy into a strategy from a decade ago, and they don’t know how to tell you. They don’t know how to help you. They themselves don’t know what the solve is. But they’re not the leader, so it’s not their job to figure it out.
So what we wanna do is before they get to the point of watching you crash and burn and get nervous about their future, we have to have an intervention with ourselves. And what I need all of us as leaders to understand is your exhaustion with the idea of change and the necessity of change are two completely different things. Both are true, but being tired of the weather doesn’t stop the rain. And every bit of energy you’re pouring into resisting and resenting change is reducing the speed in which you can get back on the racetrack. You’re burning time, you’re burning energy, you’re wasting resources, and you’re learning good team members because you dug your heels into the ground instead of accepting the fact that maybe just maybe there’s a better way to do it. You can’t keep doing the same thing and staying frustrated that the result isn’t improving.
You can’t stay annoyed that the industry has changed so much from when you started while still trying to make the model that is failing you work. What you can do is you can keep listening to business coaches that are telling you not to worry about it, telling you you’re doing your best and A for effort and pat yourself on the back and keep your head up. But that’s not gonna pay your bills. That won’t change your mindset. That won’t make you more financially stable. It won’t ensure that your next applicant is a dream hire or prevent your next walkout. Some of what’s draining you isn’t the industry. It’s the choice you’re making to fight it. So for all the leaders who might be listening to this who have spent time blaming stylists, blaming clients, blaming the economy, blaming coaching advice, blaming haircare companies, if everybody around you and every voice you’re listening to is messing up your business, you’ve either surrounded yourself with the wrong people or maybe the problem is the one feeling all that pain.
You can keep blaming everybody and everything else, but to what end? How is that gonna help? What is the resolution there? And I’ll be honest, I have days like that too. I’ll have a really rotten down day, and it’s much easier for me to, even for 24 hours, picture a reality where I’ve got it all figured out and somebody’s doing me wrong and place the blame on somebody else. And for me, I know why I do that. I’ve had a lot of therapy, so I’ve learned why I’ve gone this direction. It’s much more comfortable for me to feel like a victim of somebody else’s actions than admit that I did wrong. And that’s very human. Most of us feel that way. But when we do that and we blame all the external factors and blame our team and say, “Well, I’m doing my best,” we’re avoiding the issue.
And when we look at the thousands of salons right now, it’s not dozens, it’s not hundreds, it’s thousands of salons right now that are growing their revenue by 25 to 400% annually without working any harder. We’re looking the wrong direction. In case you missed it, me and the Thriving Stylist and Thriving Leadership Method have been buzzing for the last few weeks. There’s a lot of other industry coaches talking about us right now. And I honestly have to thank the conversation because what I don’t think it realizes it pushed a lot of people in our direction. They wanted to get the tea and figure out what was going on. But we have now taken on more leaders in the last 90 days than ever before in the history of my company. So getting the conversation going and questioning the norm has been h – a huge step in the right direction of getting leaders to think differently.
Many of the coaches that are saying, you know, what I’m saying is wrong. I understand the place they’re coming from. I’m pushing against what they’re coaching to. I’m pushing against systems and structures that have been in place for decades. But we have to zoom out for a second and realize that those same systems and structures that we’re trying to defend are the same ones that are keeping salons operating at profit margins of 7% or less. It’s the same systems and structures that have had stylists walking out when they finally build some kind of clientele and become stable. And then the salon owners resentful that they build up stylists and then the stylists leave. We defend that system. It’s the same system and structure that over complicate price increases, over complicate payroll, over complicate training, and keep salon owners and stylists exhausted. Somehow we’re like defending that system.
And I, it’s beyond me. I don’t quite understand why we have such a fear of change. The systems and structures that we’re having a hard time letting go are the same ones that no other industry in the world runs a business like. This has been an industry of deep struggle for decades. So maybe it is me. And pushing change and asking salon owners to think differently is the cause of overwhelm. Maybe it is. Or maybe there’s a chance that this is an industry that’s been running broken for way too long. And when I identify the issues, it’s like looking in a mirror from salon owners and some salon leaders are having to accept the reality that maybe they’ve been running the wrong direction for a really long time. And that would feel defeating. I have felt that before too. I have followed the wrong advice.
I have listened to the wrong mentor and wasted years. So I get that part. And once you see the breaks, you can’t look away, but sometimes you’re also so tired from filling all the cracks in your business. The idea of building a new structure altogether feels overwhelming. Like I said before, my major advantage is I don’t just coach salon owners. I also coach independent stylists, employee-based stylists, and studio suite owners. And the number one reason stylists leave salons is not money. It’s that the owner is burnt out, checked out, frazzled. The salon doesn’t feel stable. The salon owner doesn’t feel like a leader. Great stylists today don’t wanna work for the overwhelmed leader. They wanna work for a salon owner, a confident owner, an educated owner, an owner with a plan, an owner that shows up super pumped about the future of the business. The owner that doesn’t appear f – resentful of anybody on the team.
The owner that’s evolving. The owner that knows the business is growing. The owner that’s inspired. And I know for a lot of you, you’re not feeling inspired right now. We have to get back to inspiration. And the tough thing about inspiration is it’s not a choice. It’s not like a light switch you can turn on. It’s not a mood you can decide to be in. Inspiration comes from a specific source and a specific set of habits. I think there’s five things that create inspiration in any business owner. First is gonna be clarity, knowing what actually works in your business and what doesn’t. Number two, education. You are current on what is actually working. You know what’s trending. You’re not guessing about what to post on social media. The results you’re putting in are producing effort. You understand how to be competitive. You are knowledgeable. You’re not lost.
You have clarity. And with that clarity brings us number three, which is confidence. Not performative confidence, but like real confidence that you can hold your own, that you’re not worried about losing a team member. You’re not worried you’re not gonna attract great stylists. You’re not wondering if you can make payroll next week. You got it. Number four, you are supported. You’re not doing this on your own. When they say your network is your net worth, man, if that isn’t true, I would not be here today without having peers to support me and people I can turn to when I’m lost. And it’s not people I turn to to complain. I don’t have a lot of people to turn to, to complain. But I have other people in my life building businesses that look like mine that are much more successful than me that I can turn to on a dark day and be like, “I’m lost and they will get me back on track.” You don’t need people to bitch and complain with.
You need people to build with. That’s the support you’re looking for. And number five, the most important of all, you have to be financially stable. And I get it, if you’re not financially stable, it’s hard to feel inspired. It’s hard to feel like you have energy. It’s hard to wanna get up and lead the team. Like, if any of those are most important for a lot of you, you’re like, “Yeah, but that part. I understand.” When I talk about financial stability, this is one of the areas where I watched salon owners turn on stylists and they blame the stylists. My stylist would do more, I’d have more money. If they grow more, I’d have more money. If we had more clients, I’d have more money. If the economy was better, I’d have more money. That mindset is holding your business hostage. Financial instability is a leadership issue.
It’s not a money issue. It’s not an economy issue. You cannot pour vision into your team from an empty cup. If your team doesn’t have vision, if they don’t have leadership, you will all be broke. You can’t pour confidence out of an empty bank account. We have to have the money. And I always say teaching stylists and salon owners to make more money is the easiest thing I do. That’s like the cheap shot I do in this business. We get stylists and salonowners making more money within 90 days. Like that’s simple. It’s the other stuff that makes you a leader, but if money’s the holdup, one of my rules in coaching is demand comes first. So we start there because when there is more demand and the financial stability is there, it’s a good place to build from and everybody does feel stronger. When baseline is covered and you know the rent is gonna clear and payroll’s gonna clear and you are getting paid, your brain has capacity and your heart has capacity to think and be logical and to not stay up all night worrying about things and to not cry in a bathroom when things go sideways, right?
You have to have that belief in your business. And it’s not like woo-woo. It’s not like the inspiration light switch turns on. You do have to be financially stable because if that’s weighing in your mind, I understand you feel like it’s the barrier to everything else. So what I invite you to do at this crossroads is to not add anything to your plate at all. To let it breathe for a minute. I want you to reflect. I want you to think about what’s working in your business, what’s not working in your business, who’s working, who’s not working. And then I invite you, once you’ve done doing that, done pointing the fingers and pointing the blame, I want you to spend 48 hours looking at yourself and ask yourself, “Do I know what the hell I’m doing in this business right now? Do I know how to get us back on course?
Do I know what’s working in marketing? Do I know what’s. Are my stylists motivated? Am I motivating them? When I sit down for a monthly meet with my team, do I know what I’m talking about? Am I just reviewing numbers? And if you are reviewing numbers, are you reviewing the same numbers over and over and over and over and having the same conversation and wondering why the result is not different? Are those monthly meetings feeling like Groundhogs Day where a couple of people are growing, but a lot of people aren’t and payroll barely clears and it’s not feeling worth it, yet you keep repeating the same behavior? We can keep pointing fingers or we can start pointing thumbs and we can look at ourselves and be like, “Hold on a second. Where am I lost? What part am I playing in this? Where can I take some accountability?” Because you changing your behavior in action is a whole hell of a lot easier than trying to convince the other people around you to change who they are.
Change starts from you. Change starts from the top. You are the leader. I invite you to hit the reset button, whatever yours looks like. I invite you to change the narrative. This is still a badass industry and you can still make it, but not while you’re still believing the story that the world is against you and the industry is against you and you’re doing everything right and you’re being wronged. At some point, you do have to say, “Where is this going sideways? What can I control? What can I change to get a better outcome?” Okay, that’s it for this one. So much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
