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 and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva and this week on the show, we’re gonna talk about growth, but we’re gonna talk about it in a really different way of thinking about it.
Generally speaking, we are coached, encouraged, set to believe that the only way for business to be successful is for it to grow, which in a lot of ways is true. The challenge is just not that simple, and most people, particularly in our industry, aren’t talking about what actually smart business growth looks like.
Because of that, we hear the word grow and we think more, more, more, more, more, and then burnout comes. We talk about hustle life and the challenge is smart business doesn’t actually grow that way. It doesn’t actually expand that way, and so I want to talk about the four different ways to grow a business.
We have expanding, scaling, shifting, and stabilizing. In your business, and when I say your business, it could be you behind the chair, renting a booth, awesome. You run a business, you behind the chair, working commission, amazing. You run that chair. You run that business. You could be a salon owner. You could be an industry educator. You could work from home, anything like that.
If you are a business owner, which anybody with a cosmetology license, an aesthetics license is, needs to understand these four different ways to grow, and you should be cycling through all four at any given time.
Let’s first talk about traditional growth. So generally speaking, when I say it’s time to grow your business, what do you think? You think more clients, more money, right? Generally. Now, that would be more like vertical growth. It could be horizontal depending on what we’re looking like.
I did a previous episode all about the differences between vertical and horizontal growth. Whenever a business is growing vertically, it’s growing up or down, so you can think of going deeper into any given service package. Like if you’re a specialist and you want more of that specific client who likes that specialty, that’s going to be vertical growth. Becoming even more of a master in something you’re already good at. That is often the fastest, most profitable way to grow.
Then we have horizontal growth and horizontal growth is like “I’m taking over the world.” It’s reaching new markets, it’s opening a second location with an existing salon model. It is going wider in the way you grow your business, so the potential is much bigger. The challenge is it slower and more costly.
Also, if you open a second type of business venture. So if you are currently a stylist and you decide you’re also going to open a bed and breakfast, you’re growing horizontally, you’re reaching new markets, right?
There’s new opportunities available. Can be incredible, like you could absolutely scale the bed and breakfast and scale your business as a stylist. It’s going to be costly and take time.
That’s very traditional growth. But when we look at how smart businesses really create consistent growth of 15% or more like we talked about in a really recent episode, really smart businesses are the ones who make lots of profit and consistently grow well above the 15%. And they’re also the ones that are not always just looking at horizontal or vertical growth. They wouldn’t be. They would like skid to a halt and they’d never get to where they want to be. Instead, they’re thinking very long term.
When we look at long-term growth of anything, and when I say growth, I mean like improvement. So like the long-term growth of your family, long-term growth of friendships that are important to you, certainly long-term growth of your professional business, it will require periods of expansion, scaling, shifting, and stabilizing.
Let’s take a look at all for today.
First, we have expansion and I want to start there because it’s probably the most traditional form of business growth. When I say, “Let’s grow your business,” you likely immediately go to expansion. If you’re ever to goal set with me or do my program Wealthiest Year Yet, when we get to the Dream exercise, you likely think of expansion dreams. It’s the easiest, it’s the most instinctual. It’s generally the most fun, and we’ll talk about the pros and cons of each as well. So generally our brains go to expansion.
Expansion could be adding to your service menu, so if currently you do cuts, color, and styling, and you decide to add in chemical relaxers, that’s going to be an expansion. You’re adding in the menu of what you offer.
Adding more chairs to your salon. This is something that I really geek out over. A lot of salons are missing on a profit potential simply because they have installed things in their business that look pretty but aren’t profitable. When you look at somebody who’s analyzing a business, like we talk about business evaluators, the value of your business, it is the potential revenue that can be reached. And it’s fun.
I do an exercise in my Thriving Leadership program—I should actually bring it on here, and I’ll talk about this in the future episode as well. But we look at the different profit potential of salons based on how they’re built, how they’re structured, how many chairs they have and what the shifts look like, how many days a week they’re open. And it is so fascinating because most salons today operate between 30 to 50% of profit potential.
Even if you have all your stations filled, you’re like, “Oh no, no, we’re full,” that’s nice. You’re still operating at like 30 to 50% profit potential, and that’s a totally different rabbit hole that we could go down.
So when I say expansion, adding more chairs to your salon could be expanding. Then we have opening another location. So there are a lot of salons—well, not a lot of salons. That’s probably an overstatement. There’s a fair amount of salons who have done really well in one location and are able to open a second. You look at Drybar, that’s a franchise now, they’ve really expanded. Same model, same services, same branding, same format, hundreds of locations, so that would be an expansion as well.
Hiring an assistant, that’s an expansion. Why is hiring an assistant an expansion? Because it allows you to increase your volume. Anybody who said income on the back end of that, I don’t believe that so much. Can an assistant expand your income? Yes, but the reason why I put it at expansion, not scaling is because there’s a fairly significant cost of bringing on an assistant. I like assistants. I was an assistant. The salon I worked at had assistants. I developed an assistant training program, all the stuff. Love assistants. I think they’re great.
When we look at what it means to bring them on, I put them under expansion instead of scaling because as they are an expensive investment and when we invest in assistants, we’re not just investing money, we’re investing a lot of time. Anybody who’s had an assistant and has done an assisting program, right, like done a true mentorship, knows it takes a lot of time so it is definitely an expansion move.
Can you get more income on the flip side of that by using the assistant? Yeah, of course you can. That’s why a lot of people do it, but it is really an expansion technique because it allows you to increase the volume of guests you see if you use that person correctly.
So when we look at expansion and why it would be something that we do when we grow, expansion brings profit potential, but always requires a financial investment. You can’t expand without taking on additional costs. It’s actually impossible.
Whenever we’re expanding, we have to look at how does that affect our profit margin, and expansion generally does require hit on the profit margin for at least a period of time. And then that can be recovered, but there is going to be a financial investment.
Whenever we expand in any capacity, it’s time-consuming. Like I talked about in that last example, when we are expanding, it is going to require a lot of time. It’s never like a snap of the fingers and then you’ve expanded. It’s going to be an investment of time and money.
And it’s risky. Expanding is always risky because you’re shifting your business model in a way. We’re gonna talk about shifting in a minute, but you’re changing your business model in a way where you can’t be a hundred percent guaranteed of how the outcome is going to look, but you’re making a financial investment to do it and you’re investing a lot of time.
When we expand, we’re making a conscious choice to abandon our existing business model, whatever it is, and shift to a new one. So if you are doing like—I’ll go back to the example I used. If you’re doing cuts, color, and styling, and you’re deciding to take on relaxers, that’s great. You’re expanding your menu, but you’re also so taking time away then from those who were just getting cuts and colors, because now you’re taking on people who need longer time and they’re getting relaxers and it can be a really good thing for you, right? You’re like, “Well, yeah, but you’re going to come out ahead. It’s going be great.” Awesome. For some people, they will come out ahead and it’s going to be great, and for some people, the expansion’s gonna be a dud.
One way that people really like to expand in our industry is by taking on extensions, very common. And we look at extensions, from a glance, it’s such a sexy opportunity. Like it’s a high, high, high-cost service. So the money coming in is great, there is certainly an overhead associated with it. There is a massive learning curve in figuring out how to do extensions right.
I saw the funniest recently. First of all, I’m a reality TV junkie. When I can watch TV, I almost always go to something like really, really Real Housewives-related or Shahs of Sunset or Selling Sunset or something like that. I was on Instagram scrolling and there was a New York housewife, and on the back it was showing her extension track and it was terrible. I’m like, you are a wealthy woman from all accounts, and I don’t know where you’re getting your hair done, but whoa, that you were not being seen by somebody who knows extensions in a deep way. The root wasn’t blended. The application looked terrible. Her hair was parting in the back in a way that you can see that they were not installed in a way that was smart for her hair type. It was so bad. And so when we talk about expanding into something like extensions, you can’t just buy the hair and sew ’em in. It is a craft.
And so when I say it is going to take time, it is going to take money and it’s risky. It really is. I think a lot of people think, “Oh, I’ll start doing extensions and make a lot of money.” You can or you can lose a ton of money and time and end up frustrated. So that’s what expansion looks like.
I like expansion. Expansion’s something you’re going to need in your business. It’s just important to understand the choice you’re making when that’s your growth path.
So now let’s look at scaling. Scaling brings profit and produces time wealth, which you know I’m a huge fan of the time wealth. When we talk about wealth on this show, and in all of my training, we talk about the four areas of wealth, which are going to be health, love, time, and money.
I know we all want money. That’s why you’re here listening to my show. I get it. I respect it. I love it. We want to grow our business. You also are going to need that time wealth, ‘cause if you don’t have the time wealth, this is when you see people burning out. People with all kind of money who are exhausted and kind of hate the business they’ve created because they don’t have enough time wealth.
When we scale, we get the profit we’re looking for, and we also get the time wealth, which is really the big payoff of running a smart business. The challenge with scaling and the thing that people get hesitant about is that scaling can feel boring, and this is why most come out of a season of scaling and choose to either shift or expand, which we’re going to get into shifting in a minute.
But scaling is critical. You have to scale your business. It’s the only way you’re not going to burn out. You’re not going to lose your family in the process, all the things. However, it doesn’t feel fun or exciting or splashy. A lot of creatives, aka pretty much everybody who joined our industry, likes feeling fun and exciting and splashy. When you lose that feeling, it feels boring.
I was doing Thrivers Live in 2021 and I had a private moment with a salon owner in a small breakout room. There was maybe 10 of us there. So I know some of you saw this and I was doing really quick round robin coaching calls. And she said, “You know, Britt, I could never say this publicly, but I am making way too much money right now.” And there was a collective like, “Yeah, that’s amazing.” And she was saying, “My salon is really profitable. I’m barely working behind the chair. I’ve built a dream business and I don’t know what to do next.”
And I was like, “Well, congratulations. Like you’ve built a dream business. Next could be traveling with your family. Next could be picking up a new hobby. It doesn’t have to be business-related.” And she was like, “I don’t even know how to do that.” Like it’s so far from what is normal for big achievers that the idea of, oh my gosh, I’ve created this beautiful business that creates a full life for me, and now I can just enjoy it. It feels really foreign and it can feel a little scary. That’s very common when we choose to scale.
So what does it mean to scale? How is scaling a form of growth? When we scale, we choose to do less better.
I talked about the idea of being a specialist and going vertical. When we’re scaling, doing less better is almost like taking the idea of being a specialist and refining that, like niching down the specialty, really saying, “How can I do the least possible and be the most profitable?” That’s what scaling looks like.
Raising prices is a form of scaling. So when we look at growth, whenever we raise prices, that’s going to be scaling. I like raising prices. I’m a huge proponent of it. I have a lot of Thrivers who are raising their prices three times a year. Raising prices is great for business. The challenge with raising prices is it’s generally an incremental shift. It’s a good shift. When I say incremental, you can make an extra 10 grand this year, which is awesome. But if you’re a hundred thousand dollar earner, an extra 10 grand is 10% growth. We’re shooting for 15% or more if we want our business to be growing at a pace that sets us apart from our competition.
So it’s often just not enough. It’s good. We do it. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying do it, but it’s often just not enough. So that would be a form of scaling.
Then we have working less and earning more. I did a recent episode where we about what it takes to earn a hundred grand, and a lot of those stylists on there were saying “I started earning the hundred grand when I did all these things,” right? When I chose a specialty, when I started working less days a week behind the chair and spent some days a week working on my business, those are all scaling type of moves.
Then we have shifting and shifting is a really fun form of business. It’s something I’m always encouraging my more senior stylists and salon owners to do. So when we shift, it’s a major change in your business model. So phasing out nights or weekends would be a shift, choosing to restructure your business would be a shift. I spent a lot of 2021 in shift. We did a lot of restructure from a business organization standpoint and an opportunity standpoint, new systems and processes and what I call pioneering.
Pioneering is expanding and offering something when it’s never been tested in your market before and doing it in a way that’s revolutionary.
Let’s talk about the difference between expanding and shifting ‘cause they can be a little confusing. So going back to the example I used before, expanding would be offering extensions when you’ve never offered them before, adding those to your service menu. Great. Shifting would be double down on that specialty, but showing up as the first person in your market to specialize in hair loss.
There’s a few stylists I coach—I’m just going to say shout out to Tabitha, but there’s a few stylists I coach who have chosen to go into the hair loss specialty. That is some massive opportunity right there. It’s also a huge shift in your business format.
Instead of just saying, “…and then I’m going to do extensions,” it’s really going micro and saying, “I’m actually going to shift my entire business focus. I’m not going to do anything on a client that would promote hair loss.”
There’s some chemical services that we do as service providers where we’re like, “Man, you might lose some hair by doing this.” Like I had a—I’m not going to say what it was, and this was years ago, the technology has changed so much. I have very, very baby fine hair, like the hair of an 18-month-old. And I had done an extension method that was horrible, absolutely terrible for my hair type and it caused me to have really bad patches on my scalp, right? Really bad.
So a hair loss specialist would never do a technique like that because it goes against their really specific specialty, whereas an extension specialist might have four different techniques and they’re great based on different hair types and textures and all that, wonderful. Somebody who is shifting to truly be a hair loss expert is gonna make very different choices. Both are very lucrative paths, they are also very different paths.
The top 10% of businesses choose to shift. I’m a little shifty. I did a lot of shifting in 2021 ‘cause I want to be the top 10%, so shifting has to be a huge part of the model.
When we shift, I like to call it the risky refinement. You’re doing some scary stuff. Shifting is the scary stuff because you are cutting stuff off the table, cutting stuff off the menu, changing your schedule, restructuring your business in a way that, let’s be honest, not everyone’s going to like, not everybody likes change.
I was saying recently to somebody, somebody hit me up in the DMs and was like, “You know, I just have to tell you you’ve changed,” and they meant it in a negative way, but I didn’t care. I took it in a positive, and I said, “thank you so much.” Because at the moment I stop evolving as a human being, I’m losing it. I’m doing something wrong.
Now as we change, not everybody’s going to be down for the ride in the journey. I’m not friends with the person that I met in kindergarten on the first day of class. I was super close with that person for all of kindergarten, and then we both changed. That’s how life has always gone for us. But now, now we like to pass judgment when somebody evolves or changes. That’s a great thing. If somebody is changing their business in a way that makes them happy, that’s good.
Business is supposed to be cyclical. You’re supposed to make a change in your business that makes you unappealing to one person, but more appealing than ever before to three others. That’s what smart business does. And you can mourn the loss of the one person who now doesn’t choose to see you. That’s cool. Like that’s very empathetic and I love that, but it doesn’t mean you don’t make the change, right? So that’s what’s shifting would look like.
Now shifting has the biggest payoff potential. Of expanding, of scaling, shifting is actually the big dog. So shifting has the most payoff potential, but most people avoid shifting because of the work that’s involved. It is very, very labor-intensive, and the fear that the risk won’t produce reward because it doesn’t always.
I have made a lot of shifts in my time that have been costly time-wise and financially, and have not produced a good result. Shifting is where a lot of the business gambling comes in. There’s that risk/reward that you have to weigh it out.
And not all shifts are going to pay off, like you might phase out nights and weekends, and lose 20% of your income because you hadn’t set yourself up for that move.
It’s funny. I’ll go in Facebook groups dedicated to our industry and it’s just terrible advice being tossed around left and right. It’s painful. But I go in ‘cause I can’t help myself, and you go in there and somebody will be saying like, “Listen, I’ve been in this industry for 15 years. I don’t want to work Saturdays anymore. What do I do?” And the advice is like, just do it, just go for it. I did it. It worked out great. So that I imagine this poor person going into the salon, blocking off all their Saturdays, and losing 25% of their income.
Making a choice like that is not just a trigger pull, “just do it.” You have to be systematic when you’re making a shift.
So shifting, like I said, is the way to be the most impactful in your business growth. It’s just also costly, risky, and the most time-consuming.
And then we have stabilizing. So if scaling wasn’t boring enough, stabilizing is gonna get ya. Stabilizing is the yucky stuff, especially for those of us who are visionaries.
I’m a big, fat visionary. My favorite thing to do is to dream. I am a dreamer who does, so I’m able to take action on it, but dreaming is the most fun for me. Stabilizing is like nails on the world’s largest chalkboard. It’s very hard for me.
When we look at what stabilizing is, it’s doing the things like getting organized, cleaning up systems and processes, improving methods without adding on anything new. Nothing new, cleaning what you got. It’s like spring cleaning, but you’re not allowed to go to The Container Store. That’s what stabilizing is like.
And even as I said that, so many of you were like, “Oh man, that’s like my favorite part.” Yeah, you can’t. When you’re stabilizing, you are just organizing what you already have existing. You’re doing the things you should have done before. You’re making hard decisions. Stabilizing means you’re not actively seeking growth, but instead, you are looking to improve what you already have so that in time you can expand, scale, or shift.
I choose to never expand, scale, or shift until we’ve stabilized. And I just admitted stabilizing is painful for me, but it’s really hard to do any of the three other methods of growth until you stabilize.
So if you’re somebody who’s multi-passionate or you feel like you’re really driven, but you’re spinning your wheels in the mud, like we talked about in a really recent episode, if you’re feeling like that, you’re likely chasing too many dreams and you need to slow down and get stable if you’re ever going to grow. It’s the whole idea of slowing down to speed up. You need to have a really great foundation on your home if it’s going to be built to last, and that’s what I want for all of you.
So whenever we’re thinking about building and growing our business, the first step is to always get stable.
If you’re a salon owner, stabilizing your team—I talked to so many salon owners who were like, “I need to retain my staff. I want to be able to increase the rent. We need to be able to make more money and I want to improve our social media presence,” awesome. We can do all of those things. I’m not even going to talk to you about marketing until we’ve stabilized.
I know that’s infuriating for a lot of salon owners because the marketing feels like the lifeblood. The marketing feels like the money. The reason why your current marketing is not working for you is because you don’t have the stabilizing growth piece ready.
Like I said, it’s not fun. It’s not exciting, but it is the crux of making it all work.
Stabilizing is always going to be the first form of growth is getting what you’ve already committed to organized, clean, systematic, and functioning. And once we’ve done that, then we can do the exciting, sexy stuff. We can expand. We can scale. We can shift. We can do the really fun things that make us actually feel like we’re progressing. But progress comes on the flip side of really beautiful stabilizing.
I hope I’ve caused you to see growth in a different way. I hope I’ve helped inspire you to make some really smart growth and until the next one, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
