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 Brit 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 Seva. And today we’re talking about maternity leave. We’re talking about unexpected leave of absence. We’re talking about planned leave of absence. For ever, this was a topic that was like members only. And I’m excited to bring it to the podcast. It’s something that’s one of the most requested topics for me, something I geek out over, and so I’m excited to dig in. So I’ve had to take leave of absences myself a lot of times. I’ve taken two maternity leaves. I’m a proud mom of two. My daughter is 22, so she’s an adult now. With her, I had a two-week maternity leave. I had to race right back. It’s probably relatable for some of you. And then with my son, I had a 17-week maternity leave, so you can imagine which one I preferred.
When my son was born, I was much more prepared and knowledgeable and stable and all the things, and I was able to take a much more effective leave. And I wanna talk about what I did to make that possible. But I’ve also had to take plenty of leaves unexpected throughout my professional career as well. In 2017, I got shingles. And if you don’t know what shingles is, it’s kind of like an adaptation of chicken pops. I’m gonna explain this in a non-scientific way, but probably easiest way to understand. It’s something that lives in most of us or all of us, and it’s generally induced by stress. So I actually happened to be hosting a live event, and I started feeling sick, and 48 hours after my live event, I had developed shingles. And it’s extremely debilitating and it affects your nervous system. And I had to take about two weeks off completely unexpected.
I had to shut my business down, turn clients away, like all the things. In 2018, I herniated two discs in my neck at once. I, I had like basically lost function in my right arm. I mean, it was unbelievable. And I was away, I think, for six weeks with that. And then in 2021, if you were been following me for that long, I very publicly lost two of the most important people in my life back to back. And so in dealing with time away for grief, time away for illness, time away for injury, time away for maternity leave, I have become like an unexpected expert on this topic. I’ve also coached thousands of stylists through leave of absence at this point, and I know what works and what doesn’t. And my goal on this episode is to help you set yourself up for prepared leave, prepare for the unexpected, and preserve as many clients as possible.
I got a DM recently from a stylist who was just returning from a leave. She had just had, I think it was her first baby. And she said, “Hey, Brit, I’m coming back from my first leave and I feel like I set myself up as well as I could. I found somebody to take care of my clients while I was gone. I came back and now a lot of my clients are staying with that stylist they saw while I was on leave. How do I politely approach them or the stylist and ask them to come back?” And my coaching was, “Well, you don’t though. Those clients made a choice and we respect that choice and we respect the season and we’re thankful for the time we took and we’re thankful to the stylist who took our clients. But that’s not how clientele works. It’s not like borrowing a sweater and you just ask for it back when they’re done.
Like it, this is a person’s choice.” That being said, there are things that we can do in preparation of a leave when we know one is coming or even when an unexpected one comes up to ensure that as many clients stay with us as possible. I always say whenever you’re taking any kind of leave, expected or unexpected, a 15% loss of clientele is something you can anticipate. If we can prevent that and you keep 100% of your guests, even better, but planning for a 15% loss and rebuild is to be expected. Anything more than that is likely due to lack of systems, lack of structure, so we hope to keep it at 15% or less. I looked at some stats about maternity leave. They were of course upsetting. We know that maternity leave is a challenge here in the United States and, and in, in many countries in the world.
Roughly one in four American women returned to work within two weeks of giving birth. So I talk about my two week maternity leave as like this painful period of my life. Man, that was normal. I’m 25% who took a leave that was that short. It’s so unfortunate, you’re so not ready to come back mentally, physically, emotionally in all the ways. On average in the US today, women take 7.2 weeks of leave. Anybody who’s been a new mom knows that at 7.2 weeks you are still a fraction of yourself. You still have this beautiful new baby who really needs you, and it’s hard. And I shared the difference between me being able to take a two week leave and a 17-week leave. And the difference was preparation and financial planning. And I wanna teach you kind of all those tips and tricks, of course. So let’s talk about the financial part first, because if the finances are taken care of for a lot of you, that’s like half the battle.
So there is a federal program called FMLA that does give job protected leave to employees. However, it’s generally speaking going to be for employers with 50 plus employees. The average salon in the US does not have anywhere close to that. There’s some salons that do. The average is well below that, so that means FMLA does not come into play for a lot of hairstylists. Now, FMLA is not paid. It’s just job protected. When we look at paid leave, like paid medical leave, paid maternity leave, now as of 2026, 14 states plus Washington DC have enacted paid family and medical leave programs for employees. And this is a huge breakthrough because forever, we had just a handful of states who offered any kind of support. So now jumping on board in 2026, we have Delaware and Minnesota who launched January of 26. Maine began paying in May of 26, and Maryland and Virginia are still phasing in.
So hopefully by end of 26, early 27, we’ll see those states come on board. And there’s a handful of others as well. I happen to live in California, so when I took my leave, I was able to take part in the paid maternity leave programs, but only because I was an employee. When we look at the statistics, 48% of US hairdressers, uh, and 76% of barbers are self-employed. So with that, you don’t get to take part in the traditional paid family medical leave programs, but there’s a caveat, and this is something I don’t think everybody’s aware of. So most, but not all of the programs who do offer some kind of paid medical leave program for those working within their states do have the option for those self-employed to voluntarily opt in. And that’s a piece that I think a lot of people don’t even realize.
A lot of people who are at the crossroads of going from employee to self-employed are like, “Ugh, but I’d hate to lose some of the employee benefits like a paid maternity leave.” Well, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Washington, and DC, and others who are potentially coming on board do have the option for those who are self-employed to voluntarily opt in so that when and if they do take a medical leave, they could potentially get that paid support while they’re on disability. So this is called disability insurance elective coverage. And I wanna give you some stats on what that currently looks like. So I’m a California resident, born and raised, and I wanted to look up what enrollment in the elective coverage looked like just in my state to give me a framework. It was so dismal. It made my jaw drop. So in 2024, more than two million Californians reported being self-employed.
So we’re talking about millions of people are saying, “I’m definitely a self-employed person.” A good chunk of those people would be stylists and barbers, of course. As of March 2026, only 1,326 self-employed Californians had opted into the state’s disability insurance elective coverage program. That is way less than 1%. So this is a benefit that’s an option that over 99% of self-employed people, at least in the state of California, are not even taking a part of. Now, there’s probably a reason for that. It’s expensive. So when you are an employee of a business, there’s a portion of your benefits that would be provided by your state that are taken care of by your employer, right? And that’s one of the perks of being an employee is that your employer takes on some of those coverages and payments for you. Well, when you are an employee and you’re paying into one of these state benefit programs, it’s somewhere around 1.3% of wages that gets withheld to fund a potential disability claim that you may or may not even make, right?
1.3% of wages. In California, if you wanted to opt into this optional program, it’s 8.84% of net profit. Whoa. Uh, it is significantly more. What does that end up being? Like six times the rate to get this insurance. So when you think about why people aren’t opting into this optional disability coverage, if it is available for the self-employed, it’s because it comes at this premium rate. And, and made me wonder, like, why is it so premium for somebody who’s self-employed? And there’s actually a lot of data on that. It’s because the program is optional, and so states who are offering this optional additional coverage for those who are self-employed, no, if you’re opting into it, it’s because you intend to make a claim. Versus when you are an employee in the US, you just have to pay into these state-funded programs if your state offers it.
You don’t get to opt out. It’s just part of how it works working in that state. Since it’s an optional program, if you’re opting in, they expect that you’re gonna ask to be paid out, and so you pay a premium for that. The other caveats are you have to be enrolled at least six months before you can file a claim. So if you were planning a family or knew you had some major time away that was coming up because of a medical injury or something that would be covered by one of these plans, you would need to get covered long before anything changed in your health. And so it’s one of those things where it is a big commitment. In some states, you have to commit for a certain amount of time, sometimes it’s several years. So it’s not something you just do supplementary because all of a sudden you know something’s coming.
It is something you kind of have to opt into if you know that you’re gonna be making a claim and you want some kind of financial support to help you beyond what you can financially set aside and save yourself. Let me take a quick break to thank Square for supporting today’s episode. This week I wanna tell you about a salon leader I coach Rachel. Rachel started as a solo stylist and she’s now managing a team. And what she told me was, “Square has been a great fit as I’ve grown from solo stylist to team leader. Having so many parts of my business connected in one system has made scaling so much easier and eliminated a lot of what would be manual work.” So for Rachel, she’s got all of her business functions all in one place. So booking, sales, marketing, contracts, payroll, her team clocks in, the hours import.
Square calculates the commission and the tips, handles all the payroll taxes. It can even send out the W-2s. She’s not exporting anything into a secondary platform to make it happen. This is a huge mental load off her plate. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know all that Square could do until I talked to Rachel and seeing how she scaled with the system and how comprehensive it all really is was inspiring to me too. So if you’re a solo stylist or you’re scaling at a minimum, it’s worth checking out to see if Square can upgrade your software and your systems today. So if you’re just getting started or if you’re running a business that deserves better tools than what you’ve got, right now you can get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com/go/thriver. That’s S-Q-U-A-R-E.com/G-O-T-H-R-I-V-E-R. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Now, for a lot of us, we might be saying like, “Well, I’m not gonna be starting a family, so I don’t need to take a maternity leave.” You know, that’s the phase of life I was in when I herniated two discs and I got shingles and I lost two people and had to take this extended, you know, grief leave that I hadn’t planned for.
Those were not things that I saw coming. Now, my time away for grief, I could not have made a disability claim for, but my other two, I very much could have. Those were both things that I was going to the doctor for and all of those things. So when you think about, “Well, I’m not planning to take a leave.” Most people don’t plan to be injured or to have an accident. Modern Salon ran a survey and found that 15% of salon professionals were actively dealing with carpal tunnel. 35% were worried that they’d develop it. The Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology ran a survey and found that 76% of stylists complain of lower back or neck pain or shoulder pain at some point in their career. So we are in a very physically demanding industry, and the idea that you’ll never get injured or never have to take time away for a medical injury is probably a bit naive.
So whether you opt into disability leave or you are an employee and have it because it’s part of your state program, there’s a lot of things that we can do to get ourselves in the best possible scenario, and that’s what I wanna cover through the last part of this podcast episode. So the first thing I want everybody to do is to prepare for a leave before you know you need it. This is the thing that has saved my butt every single time I’ve had to step away. I wasn’t able to do it with my daughter, but with my son, I was able to do it and in all of my other injury-based leaves and my grief-based leave, I had all this in place, and so it made my peace of mind easier, my finances better, all of the things. So first things first, and this is a tough one, social media consistency counts a lot when you’re stepping away.
Here’s the thing, like what I see a lot of stylists do is they’ll make a post and they’re like, “Hey, announcing my maternity leave,” and they’ll throw that up on social media, and then you’re a ghost on social more or less for the next 12 weeks. Your existing clients get it. People who might have been considering coming to see you or just now meeting you for the first time. I’ve talked to a lot of clients and when they see behavior like that, they just think, “Oh my gosh, this person’s in a season of life where they’re starting a family. They’re not serious about business.” And it’s not a place of judgment. It’s just like, “Well, you’re not posting. I see you have this new baby. Uh, it doesn’t look like you’re working right now. I’m gonna go on and find somebody else.” We know that coming back from any kind of leave, more than likely you will lose about 15% of your clients.
You need new people wanting to come in to see you to fill those gaps, and it’s much stronger if your socials remain active. You can still tell your existing clients you’re on leave, but if we have new clients still booking in and still coming in and still feeding our funnel, that alone is gonna provide financial security. We want that to happen. I mean, you can do that by scheduling social posts. We’ll talk about that as well. But before we even get to the place of scheduling social posts and thinking about how to do it, you have to have pre-been consistent. One of the things I coach to is the marketing funnel. If you search Thriving Stylist Marketing Funnel or check out Thriver Society, I coach to this in detail. But one of the pieces is the interest level, which is social media. I understand it’s a lot of work.
It’s also not optional. It’s one of the things that clients look at when they’re considering sitting in our chairs. If you’re posting at least four, five times a week quality content for a period of several months heading into a leave, that’s the kind of preparation we’re looking for. You build up that strong reputation first so that when you step away, it floats you for a bit. Once you have that going on, then we create the content bank. So one of the things we coach to in Thriving Stylist Method is this idea that you wanna take 10 to 20 photos of every client you see. And it can be a handful of videos and 10 photos, that works too, but you want to be getting a ton of content because if you take 20 photos, you might get three great pieces of content, and that’s what we’re going for.
For Thrivers, they have this endless content bank that they’re able to pull into and schedule from if they take a leave to cover their butts while they’re not actively in the salon. So building up that content bank comes first. Then what you can do is pre-schedule all of that content out, which we’ll talk about in the next phase. Then we have your email list. I’m really big on this. I want you to have an updated email list collected from everyone. You have to re-verify emails every January and every June. Do it in the J months. You can do January and July, January and June. People are changing their email addresses all the time. The verbiage you can use to your clients is, “Hey, I’m updating emails all month this month. Is the one I have here on file still the best one for you?” It takes 30 seconds, but the reason you need that is if you are like me and you find yourself admitted to the hospital unexpectedly, rather than having to live on your phone texting your clients, you send one email, or better yet, you have a text message marketing system and you send one text, and it takes care of everything.
There’s nothing worse than having to spend hours managing your books or contacting everybody when you can just have one simple, seamless way to know that you’re gonna be able to get in touch with everybody. Now, the last piece and the most overlooked piece and the most important piece is physical mailing addresses. I don’t know about you, it’s embarrassing. I was showing somebody the other day, I think I have 486 unread text messages at the time of this recording. Certainly over 400, for sure. I’d love to say I get to all of my texts. I get dozens a day. I don’t know about you. I don’t get to all of them. I miss them from my friends, my family. I definitely miss the marketing ones. Like text gets busy, my email is worse, it’s uglier. I think I had over 10,000 emails last time I checked.
Like those places are full. Physical mail, we’re seeing this huge trend in marketing back to physical mail because most of us don’t wanna miss a bill in our mailbox. Like at minimum, we’ll flip through everything. Handwritten cards are at a premium. When’s the last time you got a handwritten card? How much does it mean to you when somebody writes you a note? It’s, it’s worth its weight in gold versus a text message or an email, which are a dime a dozen, right? I want you to collect the mailing addresses now before your leave because we’re gonna use them when you go. So the next phase we go into is plan. That was all the prep stuff. So getting the content, building up your marketing funnel, getting the email addresses, make sure your phone numbers are accurate, getting those mailing addresses has to happen before the leave.
So just start that today, okay? Then we step into the next phase, which is plan. If you have an unexpected injury or time away, you can’t do this phase, but if you know you have time off coming off, like a maternity leave, you can do this and it makes all the difference, okay? So first things first, we wanna have at least 12 weeks of content prepped if you’re taking even a seven week leave, because trust me, when you come back to the salon after welcoming a new baby, you are maxed out. Like doing the clients is all that you can handle. So having at least 12 weeks of content scheduled, ready to go is such a game changer. It’s the mental load, it’s the physical load, it’s the capacity, it’s everything. If you’re posting five times a week, that’s 60 pieces of content. I know 60 pieces of content feels overwhelming.
If you have a content bank, like we talk about, uh, this can be scheduled over a couple of days, and then you’re set for 12 weeks. It’s huge structurally. It keeps your final filling. It keeps the new guest requests coming in, and it’s a load off your plate massively. Next, I want you to choose who’s gonna take your clients like you would choose the babysitter for your infant, like that level of care, concern, communication, detail. That’s what we’re looking for. So often, we find stylists who choose subs who are, like, pretty good, but not as good as me, or they think that the clients will like well enough but not stick with. Be careful with that. What we want to do instead is have the guests have an amazing experience with the sub, all handled by you. And this is the piece that gets wrong a lot, and it’s the piece that makes all the difference.
So you’re the concierge. So I’m going on leave and I say, “Hey, Candace, as you know, my leave is coming up, and I know we talked about I’m gonna have Miranda do your hair while I’m out. I have given all of your formula and all of the notes to Miranda for the next two visits. And then when you come back to me for the third visit, we’re gonna recalibrate and kind of make a new plan forward just to make sure we’re still in line with your hair goals. I am going to book the next two appointments for you on Miranda’s book. So what I’m looking at is October 5th, and then you’re usually about every eight weeks, so then we’re coming up on December 7th she has for you. How do those times look? You’re managing everything. You’re the concierge. That way, there’s no confusion.
You’re not rolling the client over to Miranda. Miranda’s handling Candace in my absence, but I’m managing everything. And it changes the complete perception of what’s happening. Now we have this, like, soft verbal understanding of this is just a two visit thing. I’ll be back for visit three, and we’re gonna recalibrate there. And now it makes you excited about it because I don’t wanna miss the recalibration. I like working with Britt. I wanna have that. So give them something to wanna come back to and heavy handhold on all of the logistics. Then what I like to do is keep a shadow calendar. So if Miranda’s taking my clients and I’m booking you on Miranda’s calendar for October 6th, on October 7th, you’re gonna get a text from me. “Hey, Candace. I hope you’re doing great. I am still at home and baby blessed, but I wanted to check in with you.
How did your appointment go yesterday? “Y’all such a game changer. Like such a game changer. And even if you’re on some kind of medical leave or something like that, a shadow calendar is huge. You wanna keep those constant touch points, not ghost them for three months, if at all possible. If you have a really savvy marketing system, you can pre-schedule a lot of this too. Then we also wanna pre-write the, um, coming back cards. So this is where the physical mail comes in. So it takes time to do this, but what you do is you hand write a card that we’re gonna drop into the mail that says,” Hey, Candace, thank you so much for all of your patience with me. As we discussed, I’ll be back in the salon starting January the 19th. It looks like your appointment with me is January the 29th.
If anything has changed, please let me know. I’m so excited to see you. Thank you for your patience with me. Looking forward to catching up then. “And it’s a handwritten card because it’s powerful, it’s meaningful, it carries a lot of weight, and they’re going to want to come in after all of that effort. They’re gonna feel more loyal to you because you’ve been loyal to them, okay? Then we get to execute. So this is where, whether you were able to schedule things or not schedule things, this is where it all goes down. So I wanna tell you a story. A stylist I’ve known for a long, long time messaged me in 2017, and she says,” I’m in trouble. I have a serious back injury and it requires surgery. “And it was like she had. I don’t know if she injured herself behind the chair, but it was debilitating.
It was like she was okay one day, she was not okay the next, and she was like,” I need to go into surgery tomorrow. “There was no downtime, and she was emotional and in a panic, it was unexpected, and she was about to take 16 weeks leave. This was a spinal surgery, and she’s a stylist, like she can’t just pop back in. She has to take the time. She called asking me how to do this, and I said,” Okay. “I walked her through all of these steps, but we had to do it in a short timeframe, right? I said,” Find a killer sub. “She found two. I said,” Do what I talked about. I want you to concierge book everybody. “It took her two days to do it, but she got it done. “Concierge book everybody with your sub, do the shadow calendar, follow up, send the cards,” like she followed everything I was talking about.
So this stylist had no warning time. She implemented everything that I shared, and she followed up with me in the DMs and she said, “I just came back from my 16-week leave, and as far as I can tell, I’ve only lost three guests.” We’re talking probably 75, 80 clients, like a huge volume of clients. She lost three. So losing less than 10% on a leave like that when she dropped them on a dime, had to move all those pre-booked appointments, they could have been really mad at her. The way that she handled it saved her business and retained her clientele. That’s the kind of result I want for you too. Last but not least, and this is the piece that I think people forget, spoil your subs, Van. Spoil your subs. If somebody is taking care of my clients for me, Miranda is my queen.
She’s getting Starbucks cards, I’m sending flowers, I’m checking in with her. “How are the appointments going? How’s your load feeling? Any issues? Anything I can help you with? “Because I want that stylist to feel thankful that I gave them this book of business. I’m sure it was helpful for them financially, but also it is a burden on them. And also I want them to feel like,” I’m not giving you my clients. I’m taking care of you, and neither of us are confused about this arrangement. I’m thankful for the favor you’re doing. I hope you’re enjoying the money you’re making, but at the end of the day, I’m gonna try and recoup these clients. “And the more I take good care of this sub and show her my appreciation, the less she’s confused about like,” Well, maybe Brit’s not even coming back. “Or like,” I’m gonna take as many of these clients as I can.
“If I stay on good terms with her and take good care of her, she’s much more likely to encourage clients to come back to me too. Just keep things on the up and up. So the little things you do matter the most. So whether you know you have a leave coming up or you are just a human being who could have one at any point, I hope this has given you some good strategic tips that are gonna keep you prepared. I’d love to hear in the DMs your success stories from this episode, and as I always say, so much love. Happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
