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 today we’re going to talk about scaling beyond $100K in take-home pay.
So this is going to be a bit of an advanced episode, but even if you’re a stylist who’s only making $18K behind the chair right now, this is for you because I think it’s really interesting to what the game looks like three, four, 10 steps down the road.
The further we’re able to project our career out, the more clear the success path becomes. So if you are still at the beginning stages of your career, I still want you to tune in, and if you are that stylist who’s at six figures and beyond, this one is just for you.
Let me first talk about what I mean when I say scaling beyond a hundred grand. In this episode specifically, I’m talking about take-home pay.
So for those of you who have net earnings of a hundred grand or more—now that’s not to say gross earnings of a hundred grand aren’t incredible. Like please celebrate that milestone. It’s massive when you’re producing a hundred grand in the salon behind the chairs, selling retail. I mean, that is a beautiful accomplishment and we celebrate that so big.
But when I talk about being ready to scale, you’re really ready to scale your business when you’re earning more like 200 grand behind the chair in services and/or retail earnings, and are taking home your net income is that six-figure benchmark.
Why? For me, it means there’s a different level of what I call business sophistication.
In the first years of our career, we’re really just learning who we are, what we even think about this industry, what it really means to be a stylist, what kind of clients we work the best with energetically, as far as what kind of services they want emotionally.
Like there’s so much to figure out in the first few years, and any seasoned stylist will tell you, at some point, you get into this groove where you’ve found your sweet spot. I like to call it target market, but we can go deeper than that. But when you find your target market of, “okay, these are my people, this is the hair I really like doing, this is when I’m able to produce an incredible result,” and that’s when the sparks really fly, right? That’s when your career starts to take off and you start to make some real money.
You can stay in that zone for quite some time and you can grow to the point of a pretty high demand and you can grow to the point of certainly six figures, top-line earnings, and ultimately get to multiple six figures, top-line earnings, which allows you to be a hundred K earner.
When we look at somebody in real-world terms of who’s a hundred K earner, it means that’s what they’re taking home, right? The business is producing X amount top line, but bottom line, the person who’s doing the work gets to enjoy a hundred K income. That’s really and truly what we mean.
Now, when I say let’s talk about the stylists who were doing 200 grand a year behind the chair, some of you were thinking, ‘Well, that’s impossible.” Well, no, it’s not impossible because I did a poll on my Instagram story, this was a few months ago now, and about 12%—and there were several thousand people who took part in this—about 12% were taking home a hundred grand, meaning they were doing over 200 grand in services. I have countless examples of people in Thrivers who are doing numbers like that.
Now I’m going to share with you some numbers, but I have to be honest. I don’t love it. When we look at numbers this way, I think it’s too generalized. Your business is as unique as you are, which is why I prefer you use the calculator tools and the Freedom Number Calculator and all the things we have in Thrivers to make this more unique to you. But I’m going to share some generalized numbers as to what it looks like to earn 200 K behind the chair.
When you look at it, there’s 52 workweeks in a year. I like to assume that we as beauty professionals are taking two weeks’ vacation a year at minimum.
I was just talking to a salon owner who took six last year and still had her highest producing year yet, right?
But let’s assume you’re taking at least two weeks fully off of work every single year. So you have 50 working weeks to pull from. To earn 200 grand gross top-line. You would need to be producing four grand a week in services. If you’re working five days a week, that’s not even a thousand dollars a day. Now, if you’re working four days a week, that is a thousand dollars a day. If you’re working three days a week, it probably goes up to $1200, $1300, something like that. But this is very doable.
When we look at the number of 200,000, it seems ridiculous. It’s not ridiculous. There are stylists who are doing three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand dollars in services. It’s not ridiculous. You just have to get systemized to get there and that’s part of what we’re going to talk about today.
So you can see as I’m rattling off these numbers how the game of getting to, say, 50 grand in take-home pay or 70 grand or 100 grand is different than when we want to scale beyond it. The way your growth plan has to look—if you’re going to break through those barriers, it has to be a dramatic shift.
One of the sayings that I love, I’ve heard this from a previous business coach and I’ve shared it here before, is that what got you here won’t get you there. The other quote I’m a huge fan of is “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result.”
The efforts and the strategy and the marketing that took you to that first a hundred K will not get you beyond it. This is why so many people stall out in business is they feel like they’ve hit the jackpot with one strategy, but that strategy was only good up until a point, and then you hit an invisible glass ceiling, and now in order to break through it, you’ve got to do stuff differently.
Let’s talk about some of the things we have to do differently if we want to be that 200K earner and beyond, and how does that look in our business.
For me, this breaks down into four steps and I’m going to share every single step with you, and I’m going to go deep on as many of them as we have time for today.
The first step is refine your brand. If you’ve coached with me in Thrivers Society, before we talk about branding, right, it’s one of the first modules always in the program. The initial brand you build is good, and for those of you who have not gone through Thrivers, I have to be honest, your brand could probably use some work.
Most of us think we’ve nailed the branding until we dive in deep and realize what it means to be a brand that actually moves customers from prospects into actual clients. The brand has to be pretty powerful in order to do that.
Once we have solidified a brand that works right, once your brand is firing on all cylinders and is getting you to the place of a hundred grand earnings, I mean, certainly the brand is working, but it actually does have to be refined in order for you to break through to the next level.
I personally just went through, I think this is my fourth rebrand in five years, because every time my business reaches a new level, I have to refine the brand. I can’t just stick with it.
And this should also give you some peace of mind because I know for a lot of people when you’re choosing the logo and the colors, and you’re doing all these things, it feels very permanent. Nothing about it should be permanent unless your business plateaus, then yes, you’re just going to roll with it until you’re able to scale. Or you’re going to go back to the drawing board with your brand altogether and see if there’s a blind spot out there. But generally speaking, your brand does have to evolve as your business does. That only makes sense.
So step one is going to be to refine your brand.
Now within that step, there’s three components. We have determining your Zone of Genius and X-factor, securing your brand positioning, and defining a method.
I want to talk really briefly in high level about Zone of Genius and X-factor. A good brand shows who a business is and what they offer. A great brand shows how they do what nobody else can.
Many of you listening to this have very similar brands and a good brand I always say it’s like the virtual handshake. It introduces you to the world when you can’t represent yourself. When somebody looks at your Instagram, they’re going to make passing judgments on you and that those passing judgments should be authentic to who you are. That’s why all of this matters.
So if you’re not showing up on Instagram, my passing judgment of you is maybe you’re flighty or you’re inconsistent or you’re not that dedicated. Those might be lies, like that might not even be true, but that’s the passing judgment that people make when they look at our brand anywhere, right?
If I look at your website and it looks like a scrapbook, like not well-pulled together, that is my perception of your business and your brand. It’s just, “Okay, it’s not that well put together.” But if we do have a good, solid brand, it will show who a business is, who they best serve, what services they offer, and does set them apart in their community. That’s good enough to get you to that first a hundred K.
A great brand, the one that will allow you to scale, shows how you do what nobody else can. So when we talk about the idea of competition and when I say you have no competitors, you truly don’t. The only person you’re competing with is yourself, but perceived.
So when we talk about the idea of competitors and I say things like, “Well, you have no competition,” the perceived competitors are the other people in your area, other stylists in your salon, other salon owners, whatever are perceived competitors. You’re not competing against them. You’re only competing against yourself. They’re fighting their own battle. It doesn’t really matter what they’re up to. If you are playing the biggest, best game, you’ll always capture the largest share of the market. That is simple. It’s A plus B equals C.
The way to capture the greatest part of the market is to be the great brand that shows how they do what nobody else can. Don’t compete with anybody. Be so far above and beyond that you’re untouchable. That’s the secret to massive success and scalability.
Now you may inside know that what you do is far superior. You may know that you use a better hair color line, a better extension line, better products, whatever. But if that isn’t perceived by your marketplace, it’s all irrelevant. Like if they don’t perceive it, it doesn’t matter. There’s no value there. It’s your job to make that abundantly clear if you want to be a 200K, 300K earner. It has to be blatantly obvious.
To me, we do that through a brand promise. There’s seven steps to that brand promise: getting clear on your Zone of Genius, uncovering your X-factor, identifying the problem you solve. (We all know that, right? People are willing to pay to have their problem solved. It’s as simple as that.) Solidify the payoffs of working with you, define your fascinator, create your message and establish your brand headline.
Now, I go into all of those in greater detail in my Scaling Stylist Method, but that gives you a good sense of what it would mean to create a solid brand promise.
So let’s talk a little bit about Zone of Genius and X-factor. Zone of Genius is like branding on fire. It’s like on another level. When I say be special, have a specialty, and then I push you to refine that specialty even further, I’m forcing you into a Zone of Genius.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the days of the jack-of-all-trades hairdresser have died. Everybody will pay a premium to see a specialist. Everybody.
Now, this episode is specifically for high performers, so if you are newer to the industry, you should be doing as much as possible, exposing yourself to as many services as possible as many clients as possible. That is your job right now, ‘cause you won’t know what your Zone of Genius is until you’ve tried a hundred things and failed at 96 of them. That’s how you find out what your Zone of Genius is.
Friends, you’re going to do some bad haircuts. You’re going to create some color corrections. We all do. You have to walk that line first. Once you’ve really hammered home like, “Wow, I think I do this exceptionally well,” then we start to uncover the Zone of Genius a little bit more.
Many of you will share the same Zone of Genius. None of you will have the same X-factors. None of you. It’s fully impossible. I share the X-factor formula in the Scaling Stylist Method, but when we think about X-factors at large, what we think of is the things that make you uniquely you. Nobody else can touch it.
I was teaching, I think this was in a workshop I was teaching end of last year and I was trying to dig in a little bit to the room. And I was saying, let’s try to talk about X factors. People would say things like, “Well, I’m really funny.” “I’m very trustworthy.” “I’m very caring.” “I’m a great listener.” The problem is as I say those phrases, a lot of you are nodding your head and saying, “Yeah, I’m all those things too,” so those things can’t possibly be your X factors.
Your X factors are the things that other people can’t have. They are uniquely your own and that’s what sets your brand apart. If you want to scale to two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, that’s where you need to be. You need to be so uniquely you that it is fully impossible for you to have competitors because you’re so on another playing field.
And when I say that, it doesn’t mean you have to have 600,000 Instagram followers. It’s not even about that. There are plenty of people making big money with 2,500 followers. It’s not about being famous. It’s about being different and that’s where the success is.
Okay. Woo, that’s only step one, scaling to hundred grand and we didn’t even scratch the surface. We didn’t even get to defining a method or anything else, but that gives you a little bit of an idea of what it looks like to push beyond that first hundred grand take home.
Step two is going to be elevate the experience. This is where once we define our method, we enhance it. There’s lots of people who have methods, but how do we take it to the next level where it’s, again, not duplicatable? We improve loyalty and we increase revenue.
I think the misconception in this industry is when you want more money, you give yourself a price increase. Nope. I talked about this when I talked about the different ways to grow your business and price increases are generally speaking incremental, meaning they can boost your income five grand, six grand, 10 grand, 12 grand.
But when you’re at the place that you are, if you’re scaling, 10 grand, 12 grand, isn’t even 10% growth and we’re shooting for like 15 to 20% annual growth, so that’s not going to quite be enough.
Do the price increase. I’m here for it, but we need to do more if we’re going to be really growing and scaling our income, right? So we look at all the ways we can increase our revenue and then also improve our loyalty.
Now I’m a proponent that we don’t ever close our books. I don’t know of a healthy business model that gets to a point where it’s like, “I have enough business, no more. Thank you.” I can’t give you an example of a highly profitable business with longevity where at some point they say, “No thanks. We don’t want any more.”
When you look at general rules of business, you won’t find that existing.
And when we do things like we close our books, it’s a system break. It’s not because we actually can’t handle more. It’s because the system we have in place has now broken. We need stronger infrastructure, which is actually going to be step three, in order to make that happen. So what we do is we put pieces in place that improve our guest experience so that our method is enhanced, our loyalty is improved and revenue is increased, and when we look at improving loyalty, it’s not things like offer wine and champagne at the color bar. You can do that, but that’s not going to make the dramatic difference, right?
We look at all the things we can do to elevate our guest experience beyond what the salon down the street is doing. We think about how to kick it off to the next level.
I’ll give you a real-world example. I was staying at a hotel this last week and I was at a speaking engagement and it was a hotel chain I had never stayed at before. It was called the Archer. They have some through the Midwest, I think in the South, and they had all these little touches that made the experience so incredibly elevated for me. And it was little things that actually cost the hotel nothing at all, which is what scaling is all about. It shouldn’t cost you a ton of money. That perceived value is just very high.
So I went into the bathroom to wash my face at the end of the day. And what did they have but a black face washcloth with a message on it that said “Take the day off,” so it was clearly a wash towel for my face. Anybody listening to this who’s worn makeup knows you’re not supposed to wash your face with a white washcloth after you’ve been wearing makeup because you’ll stain the washcloth, right? So what they’ve done there is it felt like a personal piece for me, they’re actually saving on their bleach and laundry service, and to me, it was the most thoughtful little touch. That’s a way to elevate the experience.
Another little touch they did, when I checked into the hotel room, I walked in, I put my luggage down and I looked and on the vanity, there were two, they looked like handcrafted caramels and there was a little sign that says, “Several times a year, we research local vendors to provide treats to our guests. This is our current featured vendor,” and it was a local caramel shop. I thought that was so incredible. To me, that felt high value, and then I of course went and Googled that little caramel shop, right?
So to that caramel shop, it was incredible for their business. But to me, I’ve never been to a hotel that did that before. So wouldn’t you know, as I’m staying at this hotel and these are little things that cost the hotel nothing. So as I’m sitting there, I’m Googling what locations I can go to with my husband because I’m realizing that this hotel chain is exceptional. What they’ve done to elevate the experience, it would be very difficult to duplicate.
And if you’ve ever stayed in Archer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not because they spend a ton of money and it’s not ‘cause they gave me a bunch of stuff for free. It was small attention to detail that makes me want to stay with them more than pretty much any other hotel chain at this point. And that’s what it looks like to scale.
We do need to get to the final two pieces of Scaling, I’ll get there in a second, but I want to touch on those tiny caramels and dig deeper into why I felt that was so impactful. One of the things we talk about in Scaling Stylist Method is the idea of values, and for me, one of my values is I like supporting small business and shopping local. So when I saw that they were supporting small business and shopping local, it spoke to my soul, right? So it wasn’t just like, “Ooh candy,” which I have a sweet tooth. Trust me. It could have been a Hershey’s bar and I would’ve been happy too…but not really, like it wouldn’t have been the same level of impressiveness. I wouldn’t have come on this podcast and said the word Archer Hotel six times if they had left me a Hershey bar, right? It was the fact that it was speaking to my values. And you won’t know the shared values between yourself and your client until you’ve refined your brand. This is where it all starts to come together.
Okay, last two. We’re going to knock out quickly. So we have solidify your infrastructure. Like I said, the infrastructure that took you to a hundred K take-home is not the same one that will support you to 200K, beyond.
You need to improve your schedule, which means different things to different people. Really gain control of your business. Does anybody feel like their business is a runaway freight train? Like you are gripping onto the back, your legs are flying behind you, and you’re on the train. You’re going 600 miles an hour, but you don’t know how long you can hang on for.
Very common.
When we reach this level, we need to regain that control. You need to be the conductor again, not gripping onto the back like you are almost the victim of your own business rather being in the driver’s seat.
That’s a very common feeling when we’re starting to scale and then truly get organized. I know that O-word is really heavy. I’m somebody who super struggles with organization. So if you do, I really feel you deeply on that. But if we are going to scale our business, it does have to happen.
And then lastly, we have amplify your impact, so improve your content. The content that got you 200K will not get you beyond it.
When I look at some social media accounts of stylists or salons who I know are doing well, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, if you would just put a little more effort in here, you’d grow your income by 40%.” It kills me a little bit because it’s like you have such a good thing going, but if you would just take it a little bit further, your business would explode.
So what it looks to improve your content, and just improving your content doesn’t mean improve the quality of the photos. There’s so much that goes into that.
So improving your content and then we can get into paying for awareness. What it would look like to really explode your brand, like if you wanted to open multiple locations or if you wanted to—I was actually just speaking to a room yesterday and somebody stood up in the back.
She said, “I’ve been in Thrivers Society for a couple years and I’m now getting 40 new guest requests a month.” Four zero. I was floored. My jaw dropped. Right? So she has increased her awareness to this extreme level. So she’s now expanding, right? That’s why she raised her hand and was talking about it and shout out to you, ‘cause I’m so proud of you. I’m still going to keep talking about you. I thought it was amazing.
When we look at what it means to scale, she’s there, she’s in that place where the demand is there and she needs to create the infrastructure and keep that impact high while elevating the experience and refining the brand, right?
So what I want you to do walking away from this episode is really think about where your business is today and where the gaps and blindspots are that you can start implementing some of these ideas to ensure you’re safe-proofing your business for tomorrow.
Now, if you are still a 20K, 30K, 60K earner, that is a beautiful thing. Still much props to your success this far in your career. Keep this episode in your back pocket. I don’t want you to start doing these things just yet. As exciting as they may sound, you’re going to create an expensive mess and overwhelm if you try to scale too fast. The name of the game is to get to hundred K in take-home pay, and then we can start to get fancy with it.
And when we really start to scale, this is where we see stylists who are working three days a week and making a killer income and are truly enjoying the best parts of life.
If you need more information on scaling, you can head to thrivingstylists.com. I have my Scaling Stylists program there. And if you have any questions about scaling, you can leave me a rating or review on iTunes, and in that rating or review, leave me a question and I will do my best to bring it here on the show to y’all.
Y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
