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 this week I though we would give your business a little bit of a tune-up, a check-in, a checkup, if you will, and see if we can find some ways to make you more money fast. When I think about what a lot of stylists specifically come to me for, they say like, “Britt, I need to make more money. I need to do it quickly.” I totally get it. When I’m coaching somebody, usually they start to see more money in 90 days or less. Usually it’s around $1,000 more within the, the first 90 days and then we scale from there. The other thing that I get a lot is I’m doing everything right and I’m not seeing results. Never have I ever had somebody tell me that I’m doing everything right and I’m not seeing results.
And then I audit their business and they’re doing everything right. That’s never happened before. And the reason it’s never happened before is because none of us are doing everything right. I have faults in my own business. Like this, this is just, this is life. And so what we need to do is occasionally take a self audit or have somebody audit our business and be like, okay, here are the areas that could probably use improvement. When I’m getting this kind of feedback, there are absolutely patterns in the feedback I give and there’s things that I see coming up more and more regularly. And what I though we could do is talk about five fast ways that you can make more money as a stylist that don’t involve like discounts or cheesy marketing. What I find is that when stylists are looking to make more money, they don’t need more gimmicks, they need a stronger business plan.
And that’s what I wanna deliver to you today. So what we’re gonna do is go through a little list of things that you can do or try or check if you’re looking to increase your revenue quickly in the next 90 days. I wanna start this episode by sharing just a couple of recent Thriver Society success stories, some that have come through in the last 30 days, so very recent. And the reason I wanna start here is because there’s a lot of chatter in the industry right now that everybody’s struggling, nobody’s making money. And it’s not true, it’s just that making money as a stylist has become more strategic. So what Sarah Sanchez shared in our community was, “I hit a 10K month this month without working nights or weekends, only working four days a week behind the chair.” She posted that on October 3rd, 2026.
Jessica Soli said, “I managed to double my monthly revenue from 5K to eight to 10K as a solo provider.” That was on October 21st, 2026. Julie Kingman says, “My demand has been sky high. I just had a price increase September 1st. None of my clients have even batted an eye about it. I had 23 new guest requests last month. That was left September 10th, 2026.” So these are all very recent success shares. So if we’re living in the narrative that everybody’s struggling, it’s not true. I mean, I could go on and on. We get these every single week. But the reason I share that is because you can be making more money. I promise that you can. It’s about troubleshooting the areas that need a little bit of love and nurture. My technique is always to do it the simplest, easiest way possible. What you’re gonna see right now is a lot of people leaning more into discount programs and things like that.
What that will do is fill your chair faster, which psychologically is gonna make you feel busier, but it’s the fast road to burnout because yes, you’ll be working more, so you won’t have to feel the pain of empty books, but you’ll be working more at a less productive hourly rate. And ultimately, it will hardly move the needle when it comes to revenue. It will move the needle significantly when it comes to the fact that you’d now be building a discount clientele, a clientele that won’t likely stay with you when you move your prices up to a more profitable place. And that’s where resentment builds from. So I’m gonna share some strategies that you can implement where none of those things have to happen and you can build a scalable business that just grows forward with you. So the very first thing I always advise a stylist to do when they’re looking to make more money fast is take a look at their website.
And I know when I say that, it’s like the unsexiest advice that anybody could ever give as a business coach because I say website, you say eye roll. And trust me, I understand. It’s a heavy lift. It’s kind of boring. It’s like, is this important? It is arguably the most critical. Reason being, most stylists and salons back burner their website completely. And what it does is it leaves a gap for those who do wanna prioritize the website to slide in and literally dominate their sector of their market. I see it happen all the time. I want you to think about your own browsing history. When you’re looking for a service provider, if you find somebody who’s got a gorgeous polished website, it does elevate your confidence in the business or the person. And I don’t just mean created a website, check. That’s not going to do it.
Just having www.britsiva.com is not what I’m talking about. The website has to be formatted properly. So when we’re talking about a killer website that’s gonna convert and drive more clients to your chair, five core pages. The first one’s just a killer homepage. The formatting on the homepage counts twice. It has to be done properly. Great, amazing homepage using the right photos. Then a new client page. We want an about me page or about us page if you’re a salon team. Services menu, service breakdown, and then contact me, contact us is gonna be your fifth page. And then if you are a salon who hires stylists, you’re not a solo stylist, you’re also gonna want a careers page. Another page that a lot of our thrivers do is a guest experience page that’s more optional, but I mean, a really robust website makes a huge difference.
If you want to see examples of what amazing salon websites look like, if you go to thrivingstylist.com/websiteacademytemplates, you’re gonna get to see the templates that we offer where the website is 80% built for you. You just drop in your photos and everything is formatted like impeccably. It’s a very high converting website format. You can do that. Also, when you go there, our website showcase is on that same page. So you’ll be able to take a look at those who have used our Website Academy templates to build amazing websites that we know convert clients every single day, and then you’d be able to take a look at that as well. So if you’re looking for visual examples of what that killer website would look like, thrivingstylist.com/websiteacademytemplates. When you think of the website, it’s essentially the little slice of the internet that you own. It sets the tone for what it’s gonna be like sitting in your chair.
When I say website, I don’t mean online booking page. I love online booking. I’ve only ever coached online booking. It’s incredibly effective. It’s such a game changer. The website, I’m doing air quotes right now, that your online booking system includes for free with your booking page is not a website. It’s a landing page. It doesn’t index the same way. It’s not searchable the same way in Google. It’s not effective in converting clients in the same way. If you have a well-built, well-formatted website, interest and demand in working with you will increase. It’s a natural effect every single time. So I would start with the website. Take a look. Is yours formatted properly? Are you using the right photos? Does it create an energy? Is there a brand in place? Does it make people want to see you and work with you? Okay. Strategy number two, reconsider your pricing.
So when I look at stylists who are building slowly, often I find that they’re either underpriced or overpriced. Sometimes they’re priced just right, and it really is more of a marketing or a position thing. But if you’re overpriced or underpriced, you will build so much slower. Let’s talk about being overpriced for a second. I do think that’s something that we’re really facing right now. We watched a lot of stylists deeply overprice themselves, specifically in the last two years. From 2024 to 2026, or 2023 actually into 2026, there were some really wacky pricing strategies that were floating around, but they sounded so good on paper. It was things like, “Take a look at your overhead costs, divide that by the amount of hours you’re gonna work, and that becomes your hourly rate, and that’s just what people are gonna have to pay.” That’s not how pricing of anything in any industry works.
You chose that overhead, and that’s fine. I want you to be able to afford your lifestyle and pay your bills and pay your rent and do all the stuff, but that’s a brand positioning marketing issue. That’s not a, “Well, the clients will just have to figure it out.” If coming in to see you doesn’t feel worth it or you’re overpriced based on what a client believes you’re the perceived value of the services you offer are, you will build slowly. You might see new guest request demand, but your retention will be low because clients will be like, “Well, that… I mean, I paid $300 for that and it didn’t feel like $300 experience,” or whatever, whatever their reasoning is. It could have been the results, could have been the way you talked, it could have been a lot of different things. But if you’ve overpriced yourself, it will slow your growth radically.
If you’re underpriced, when I see stylists who are underpriced, it’s often a lack of confidence or a fear of pricing themselves out of this current market. There is a lot of fear-based chatter in the industry right now around consumer confidence in our industry. Are people still getting their hair done? Yes. Let me tell you, stylists and salons are growing faster than ever right now. Clients are still wanting to get their hair done. They’re just more particular about where they go. They don’t wanna roll the dice or take a risk. They wanna see a sure thing. Being underpriced, I think sometimes feels like a safer decision for stylists than potentially living in the proper price point for themselves because they’re afraid if they raise their prices, they’ll lose clients and then they’ll lose income. When you do a proper price increase, because your market is demanding it and all the indicators are there, not only will you not lose more clients than you’re comfortable losing, you will make more money more efficiently and you’ll open yourself up to a tier of clients who isn’t interested in a bargain haircut.
So if you’ve earned a price increase, you should take it. There’s no reason to resist price increases right now if you have earned it. What we avoid in price increases is cost of goods increases, “My rent is up, so I have to charge more increases. I can’t afford my house payment increases.” Those are all things we have to fix in other ways versus just impulsively or emotionally raising our prices. So be careful of that. If you’re not sure if you’re priced properly or not, we do have our dynamic eight factor pricing calculator and thriving stylist method. You can use that at any time. Next, tip number three, update your services webpage and listings and make your pricing super easy. One thing I’ve been doing a lot of right now is booking experience audits. I go through a stylus booking system as if I was a client.
I’m trying to get in with you. I’m, I’m pretending that I want to come in and book a service with you. I cannot tell you how many of you have extremely confusing booking systems. And I understand that to you it makes sense. To me as the client, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Sometimes it’s the, the terms that you use for your services. Sometimes it’s your service menu is so big and so complex and so long that I, I’m sure you have options for every client you could ever see under any scenario, but for me who just wants to get my, my roots done, it is like an overwhelming amount of information. The other thing is I’ve noticed this must be some sort of like new feature. It’s happening more recently, like in the last 18 months. A lot of booking systems, and it’s several, it’s not one booking system, it’s several, I’ll go into book an appointment and let’s say I choose, you know, root touch up and blow dry.
I’ll book those as my selected services and then a pop-up comes up and it’s like, “Do you wanna book an eyebrow wax?” No. And then trying to figure out how to close that out is hard and it almost appears as if I cannot book the appointment I want unless I pick that wax. And I know as you’re hearing this, you’re like, “No, no, no, you just scroll down, you click this button.” Listen, I’m not trained on your booking system. I’m just a regular lady who wants her roots done. Those pop-up boxes are annoying AF on all the systems, all the platforms. I would literally turn that off. Unless you’re seeing like a 30% increase in revenue because of that little pop-up, it is very annoying. As a client who’s just trying to book an appointment, it’s not nice to experience, so that’s a little extra pro tip.
The booking experience should be easy. It should be easy for me to tell what I’m gonna pay, and it should be easy for me to choose my services and book my appointment. If your service menu is super robust or confusing, if I can’t tell what services are for me, it could be an issue with your webpage, like your service listing on your webpage or your new guest page on your website, or it could be that your booking system itself is too convoluted, too confusing. So I would look at both. Less is more simple is key. The more easy it is to understand, the more likely you are to book appointments. Next, tip number four, improve the quality of photos you post on social media and post three times a week. Let me tell you what I mean by quality. I mean type of content, like what you’re choosing to post and also the actual photos themselves.
Improving the lighting, improving the photo composition, improving the space in which you take photos of the clients. All of those things are gonna help. When I look at your feeds, we like to see a mix of content. There’s four core types of content that we coach to in writing stylist method, but in simplest terms right now, I want you to make sure you have a good balance of photos of clients, some photos of yourself, some photos of your space. It should be… When I look at your Instagram, for example, I should get a good sense of what it would look like to walk into your salon. If it’s just photos of hair, we’re probably missing the mark, that’s supposed to be an at a glance of your business as a whole. So a solid mix of content and really great composed photos. Posting three times a week is really important.
If you feel like you are seeing a dip in clientele, I’m gonna push you, at least posting 12 times a month. It’s not asking too much. You can have a good mix of content, but anything less than that is not… It’s not sending the message to clients that you’re super locked in, that you’re super serious about business and that they can trust you. So increasing that frequency is gonna help too. And tip number five, improve your new client onboarding and follow up. I know that like when I talk about consultations, a lot of times people find that boring because they feel like, “Well, I do consultations.” One of the things I like to do when I go into audit a salon is I’ll just sit in the lobby and listen to a couple consultations. Most consultations I hear are very basic, very basic, some borderline like poor or ineffective.
The art of consultation is a skill in and of itself. We have a whole module dedicated to it and thriving stylist method because it’s not just, “Okay, let’s discuss what we’re doing today.” That’s one of like 10 points we wanna hit. The point of consultation is not for you to understand the service you’re supposed to achieve at all. The point of consultation is building trust, period. I want you to rethink the way in which you communicate with a client at the first visit. Any consultation that is less than 15 minutes is, is not complete. And that’s when you see clients who don’t return, uh, negative reviews on review platforms, lack of retention, lack of referrals. The power of initial consultation is huge. And even when you have return clients, we talk about reconnection consultations, sitting down and refocusing and saying, “What are we doing? What works for you?” All of those things are very powerful.
So really rethinking are your consultations robust? Are you making an impact? Does it feel like you care that the client is there or are you just kind of going through the motions? Also, we talk about follow-up. Is it they came in, they got their hair done and you’re like, “Okay, see you later. Book your next one when you’re ready.” It doesn’t feel like you care to have them there. And so just the little details like that, really rethinking your guest experience, how you’re treating your clients, does it feel like it’s important to you that they’re there? If you’re, if you’re here telling me you need to make more money, every client that sits in the seat counts. They need to feel important, not just your Thursday at 4:00 PM. They have to feel critical. I’m gonna give you a, a one last sixth bonus tip.
I want you to reflect on your habits and your presentation. Do you often run late? Do you show up late? Do you sometimes forget a guest who’s supposed to be on your books? Do you show up disheveled? Is your hair sometimes damp? Are you dressed for the work day? Do you look like you’re dressed to go to a cocktail party or are you dressed to do hair? Maybe the ambiance of your salon is everybody looks like they’re going to a cocktail party. That’s fun, but does it feel like you know who you are? Can I anticipate who I’m going to see when I walk into the salon for the day? Do you appear professional? Does it feel like serving me as a priority for you? All of those things really, really count too. And so if you feel like you are not booking as fast as you want to, your books are starting to slump, retention is an issue, you’d like to make more money, these are the first six places I would start.
Okay. I hope it’s been a great one. So much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
