Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? 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 aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here, where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up you guys, and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva, and today we’re going to talk about keeping stylists motivated as a salon owner. Ugh, biggest question in the room, right? It’s always a tough one. I want to explain a little bit of my history as a leader before we dive into this one, just so you can understand the context of where I’m coming from.
I was a salon director for a multi seven figure salon from 2009 to 2016. One of the owners actually stepped down in the time that I was there as the salon director, the other was an absentee running a secondary business. So it was my job on the day-to-day to motivate the stylist. That was my responsibility, to figure out how to do that.
Sometimes I did a great job. Sometimes I fell flat on my face. I’ve learned a lot in the process and the business I have now, I have going on 20 employees, not contractors, full-time employees in the business, and it is a daily struggle to show up as a good leader and keep everybody motivated. Again, sometimes I do great and sometimes I fall flat on my face and fail. But I’m going to share from my experience, both in the salon and out of the salon, as to what it takes to motivate employees.
One of the first things I want to talk about is you can’t win ‘em on. You’re not going to motivate everybody. It’s actually impossible. I found that you cannot create drive in a person that doesn’t want to have it. Success can’t be curated on your timeline; it’s going to be created on the timeline of each individual. I believe that drive… drive is what pushes action forward and drive, to me, is like this little grumble in your belly.
I always think of it like–I’m a kid of the 80s and 90s. We had troll dolls and these troll dolls had these wild colored hair and then where their belly button would be, they had this colorful jewel. To me, the jewel actually represents drive. I always get this visual in my mind of a troll doll when I think of it.
The drive can either be ignited or dimmed, and drive only shows up under certain circumstances. Drive is going to show up if there is need, desire, and passion for something. Need is like, if I don’t do this, I won’t have a roof over my head. Need is sometimes like a psychological need. I promised my father before he passed away, I was going to do this. I’m going to do it. That’s a deep need.
That’s also desire. When look at desire, it’s like, I want to do it because I made a promise to my dad. Or desire my be, I want to do it because my parents didn’t own a home, so I want to own a home for me and my family. That would lead to desire as well.
Then we look at passion. You have to love what you are doing, or it’s very difficult to be driven by it. I gotta be honest. I don’t have drive to take out the trash. I’m not passionate about it. Don’t have drive to do the dishes. I haven’t washed a dish in quite some time because it’s one of the chores that I make my kids do and my husband do. I’m like, I’ll do anything except the dishes, please. I’m not passionate about that. I would leave the dishes for three days. I’m not driven or motivated to do the dishes because I can’t stand it.
When we’re looking to create drive in something, all the factors have to be there: the need, the desire, the passion, or it’s not going to happen. If there are stylists in your building who aren’t driven–like they don’t seem motivated to push forward–it doesn’t mean that they’re not meant to do hair; it’s that they don’t have the need, the desire, or the passion right now.
What I found especially is stylists who were still living at home didn’t have as much of the need. The desire was there, like it would be cool to move out and live by themselves. But also, my parents have a pool and it’s awesome, so it doesn’t suck that much. The passion is there, but they don’t have all of the pieces to create the drive.
Versus when I joined the industry, I was a young mom. My boyfriend was in school at the time and I was making $8 an hour. So I had a lot of drive because we had this young family that we needed to be able to feed, and so my drive was really strong because I had to do it.
The problem was I wasn’t passionate about doing hair. I wasn’t passionate about cutting hair. I was passionate about marketing. I found that to be like a game. That was super fun for me. Stepping up as a salon director and away from the chair was when it was like that troll doll jewel in my belly lit up, because now I have the drive and now I wanted to do everything, all the time, as much as I could.
You can’t create that drive. It’s like a recipe and a formulation. You can help to inspire it. You can help to enlight that passion. You can help to create some of the desire. The need is pretty tricky. There’s only so much you can control.
I want to share that because it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. You should always try to motivate your team. That’s your job as the leader. That’s what good leaders do at least is to inspire and motivate their teams. But there’s only so much you can do.
I find that a lot of salon leaders get frustrated and they’re like, oh my gosh, Nicole would be so talented if she would just put in the work. Then you give Nicole the sun, moon, and stars and you end up angry at her when she doesn’t do it.
Friends, she’s just not ready. She doesn’t have the drive yet. That’s okay. But then you have to decide, am I okay having somebody in my building who’s not driven? That’s part of a bigger question on another episode, but we’re just going to talk about motivating stylists today.
First of all, what motivates people to do good work? What motivates people to show up to work? Studies have shown over and over and over that it’s going to be purpose, that purpose driven professions are trending right now. I think probably for the rest of my lifetime that’s what I’ll be seeing.
In my parents’ lifetime, it was like, well, you find a good job with a good salary and good benefits, you do it, and you don’t complain too much. You work there for your entire life. They were part of that generation.
We’re living in the ‘purpose’ generation where people want to do what makes them feel like they are making an impact. Making an impact is trending and so it’s important that those in your salon space feel like they’re making an impact. They need to make an impact on their community, they need to make an impact on their family, and they need to make an impact on the salon team.
People like to win. That’s what I’ve noticed really big. That’s going to lead me to one of my tips. One of the things that we do in my business now–and I’ll talk about the salon as well. One of the things that we do in my business now is we have a channel called Cheers for Peers, and we have a team-based communication channel. We don’t use text communication. We hardly use email. We use this team-based chat software to communicate with each other.
If you’ve heard of Slack, it’s similar to Slack, but it’s through a different system, and we have this channel called Cheers for Peers. That is one of the most widely used channels in our system. It gets used every day. What will happen is Jenn will shout out RC and say they say, RC, I am so amazed by you. Everybody look at what she created today. I can’t believe she pulled this off. She did it three days earlier than we expected, and we already got a nod from Modern Salon because of what she did.
Then the feed blows up and everybody gives her so much accolade and praise, and she feels like she’s serving the purpose of the business. RC does, because of the one social media post she made. It’s not just like, cool RC, you did your job. You made your social media posts. It’s like, whoa, look at the impact!
I run a different business that you could do the same. You could find a way to celebrate: Hey, did everybody see the extension application that Jennifer did yesterday? It blew my mind. Take a look at what she created. I’m going to ask her, actually, if she can show us how she did this technique. Everybody claps her up.
Now it feels like you’re serving a purpose. Now it feels like you’re a part of something. It’s not just, you show up, you do the hair. There has to be more. Now the salon can serve a purpose. The salon can serve a community purpose. There can be a give back component. All of that is great, but everybody in the salon building needs to feel like they are important. They can’t just be a cog in the machine and they can’t just work at station number three. It needs to be bigger than that.
Something that we did in the salon that was not electronic through this chat thing we do right now was called affirmations. Shout out to my team, if you guys remember this. We had this box. Anytime that somebody else in the team did something cool, a stylist or an assistant or a receptionist would write an affirmation. It was like a little love note, a little piece of paper.
It would say, I just want to celebrate Carolyn because yesterday I was having a really bad day and she chose to go out of her way and buy me lunch, and it turned everything around for me. Carolyn is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met and she goes out of her way to make everybody’s life a little bit easier.
What we would do is we had staff meetings every other week and we would read these affirmations out loud. Sometimes they were anonymous and sometimes people would write whoever they were from, like whoever Carolyn bought lunch for obviously, we all knew who that was. But it was really cool.
Sometimes the affirmations would be like, Hey, I just want to give a shout out to Emily. She did the most incredible color correction yesterday. It left me feeling so inspired. Emily, thank you for sharing your talents with us. It was just a chance to praise each other.
That made everyone feel like they had a purpose, because maybe Emily is burnt out. Maybe she was like, if I have to do another color correction, I’m going to lose it. But even hearing that back to her, like your color correction inspired me, it lights Emily’s fire again, that jewel in the troll belly. It keeps the desire moving forward. Creating purpose is super important.
You, as a leader, should start this yourself. I wouldn’t do an affirmation box or Cheers for Peers feed unless you’re giving feedback. I try my darndest to do individual gifts and affirmations for my own team.
If somebody does something great, I personally don’t use the Cheers for Peers channel a ton. I send a private message. I’ll be like, Adrena. My Gosh, I cannot believe the way you handled X, Y, or Z. I tell my team all the time: you inspire me to be better. That gives them drive and motivation. I see you. You are not just a cog in this machine. You are making an impact.
Starting with the leader, leave notes in the stations of your team members, little love notes, give them a $5 Starbucks gift card, send them a text message. Let them feel appreciated and like they are serving a purpose in your building.
Another reason why stylists feel unmotivated is because they feel like their opinions don’t matter. Really big one. It’s super de-motivating when it feels like I’m at this salon, whatever the owner wants is how things go, and my needs are unimportant. It’s very difficult to be inspired by that. What I found as a leader is that everybody is in the building for a different reason.
One of the things that when I was an inexperienced leader, I thought everybody wanted to promote fast and make tons of money. That’s not true. I had to learn that the hard way, pretty quickly. Some people are like, no, I know I want to work no more than 30 hours a week and I’m happy as long as I’m making 60 grand a year.
You won’t motivate them past that. That’s what they’re driven to achieve, and they’ll tell you that. I will work 30 hours a week. If I make 60-65 grand, I’m a happy camper so don’t ask me to do anything more. Cool. So they’ve given you their drive limitation. That may work for your salon business. It might not.
If it doesn’t, you don’t get to be resentful of that person. You can ask them to leave if that doesn’t fit your model. You can have conversations with them about why that’s their personal glass ceiling. But if that’s their purpose, like I said, you can’t motivate somebody more than they want to be. You can’t change their timeline, that’s on them. Then it’s for you to help support them in getting there. Motivating your team is going to be a by-product of some really heartfelt conversations.
I want to talk about compassionate leadership, which is something I’ve had to really learn in recent years. There have been times I’ve been kind of a hard-ass as a leader, kind of straight and to the point. My salon team will tell you: they were scared to call out sick to me, which I’m not proud of at all. It’s embarrassing. That was when I was a young, naive leader.
For me, I don’t know that I ever called out sick. I would just show up rain or shine. No matter what, I was going to be there. That’s not healthy, it’s not in line with my current values, and it’s not something I would ever promote today. I apologize to anybody who had to experience that in my salon. It was an immature decision.
But that is a poor example of compassionate leadership. That was an example of results-driven leadership. Results-driven leadership and compassionate leadership should be in a marriage. It’s important that people feel like they’re working towards something; that is crucial, but you have to get them there with compassion.
Compassionate leadership means understanding the individual needs of the people in your space and offering empathy. It doesn’t mean you change your business structure because of the people who were in it, but it means that you understand that your people are human beings and giving some grace where you can is important.
One of the things I believe we’ve done as compassionate leaders here in this business now is that we offer a lot of flexibility, meaning your deadlines are your deadlines, but I often don’t know where my employees are at 2:30 on a Thursday. They might be off rollerblading or they could be taking a yoga class. It doesn’t really matter to me. As long as they meet all of their deadlines and show up to all of their meetings, they can be at the park with their kids at 2:30 on a Wednesday if that’s where they want to be. But I still need my report due back by Friday.
That is a form of compassionate leadership saying, you don’t have to conform to what my work schedule is. I just need you to meet this set of goals. We still have guidelines. It’s still a very driven business, but I’m compassionate enough to say, hey, let this work for you. We happen to call this one of our core values and we call it the permission to prioritize, permission to prioritize your schedule. But compassionate leadership can look like a lot of different things.
When we think about implementing compassionate leadership into your salon space, it has to start with you. You actually have to give yourself some more grace as the leader and give yourself a little more compassion.
There’s a salon owner that I love dearly, and I hope she listens to this. We were talking a couple of years back and she was saying how she was driving away from her salon by the beach, and she saw a beautiful sunset in the background.
Her heart wanted to stop driving, go out on the beach, and watch the sunset. But she knew she didn’t have time because she had all of the salon’s laundry in the trunk of her car and she needed to get home and do that laundry before going back to the salon the next day. She didn’t have time to watch the sunset.
That wasn’t offering herself much compassion. If she doesn’t offer herself compassion, grace, self-love, understanding, and respect her own needs, she’s not gonna be able to pour from an empty cup and give that to others. As leaders, we have to show compassion for ourselves and choose to live a wealthy, balanced life.
When I talk about a wealthy life, it’s what? Money, time, love, and health. You need to be wealthy in all of those areas before you can be a compassionate leader. If you are a leader that is stretched to your capacity, it’s going to be hard for you to show compassion because you yourself are burnt out AF. How are you going to be compassionate to somebody else when you’re hanging on by a thread? You need to get your own compassion house in order, find balance for your life, and then empower those around you to do the same.
Now we’re talking about motivation, so I do want to talk about motivation for money. What I found is that people are motivated about money in different ways. Some people like to compete publicly for money. For some people, that is a huge turnoff. I tried to create experiences in my salon where you could earn more or achieve more privately or publicly. We did do things like retail games and contests.
I did something really fun once called Salon Land. It was like Candy Land, but you would achieve points and move your piece based on what you did in the salon. It was based on selling retail, selling in salon conditioning treatments, and I believe selling extension services at the time ‘cause they were new to our salon. It was something like that.
Every morning I would go into the salon, I’d run a report from the previous day’s work, and I’d move their little Salon Land characters. We had like 20 of them on the board. It was so fun. Move their little Salon Land characters around this board that I made. The board was probably 20×40, like a big poster board. It was hanging up on the wall and I decorated it super cute and they’d move around.
Then there were little traps, like, oh, you’re stuck in the murky swamp. You have to sell three conditioning treatments today to get yourself out. Some of my team loved it. Then in the end, somebody won 500 bucks, but everybody made more money that month because everybody was motivated to just play the freaking game. It was a silly little game and it was huge. That was motivating and it gave purpose. We bonded, we had fun, we laughed, we teased each other. It was great. It was all good fun.
Some people don’t feel motivated by that. I would also meet with my team monthly individually and create private benchmarks. If I had a stylist who was getting married, I’d say, where are you going on a honeymoon? Well, we don’t know if we can afford one. I was like, well, let’s do it. Let’s earn the money. Where do you want to go? Well, I really want to go to Maui. Okay, how much will it take for you to get to Maui? It’s like three grand. Okay, let’s do it. I’d sit down and I’d make a plan with that stylist to increase their income by $500 a month over the next six months. So they could go to Maui. That was motivating for that person.
It’s individual motivations and group motivations so that everybody feels like they’re being pushed in the way that feels comfortable for them. It gives everybody a chance to show up, but show up in a way that they feel like they can be a victor. And by victor, I don’t mean the name Victor. I mean they achieve victory.
The point and purpose of this podcast is to understand that drive cannot be created; it can be ignited. All you can do as a leader is to help ignite that by providing opportunity, leading with your heart, creating guidelines, and creating opportunity for those around you to grow.
I hope this has been an inspiring one. You guys, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
