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 the four types or you might say stages or phases of salon ownership.
So I think for a lot of us, certainly for me, when I joined the industry, I thought, okay, salon owner owns the salon. Main key holder, pays the bills, person in charge, the end, and it was as simple as that. And generally speaking, we felt like we trusted salon owners who were stylists or had experienced and were licensed. It’s pretty rare that somebody can come into the industry and run a really successful salon if they’re not experienced themselves. It’s not totally abnormal, but it’s definitely not the mainstream way to do it.
Generally speaking, there was this formula that we all assumed salon ownership looked like. I actually think for a time that was completely true. However, in recent years that’s really changed and now we see four different types of salon owners across the industry.
So whether you are a salon owner, you aspire to be one, you work for a salon owner, maybe as a commission stylist or a booth renter, I want you to really listen to this episode and think about who you work for, how you work now, where you want to be, and what you envisioned when you became a salon owner.
Because I think that’s the thing that’s tricky is that for most of us, we thought, “Okay, you’ll be the salon owner.” We definitely thought there would be a financial windfall, like who in their right mind is opening a salon thinking they’ll make less money? Nobody. However, that’s the reality a lot of people are dealt, but nobody goes into it thinking that or hoping that, so we think financial windfall.
We also think that we’re going to do things the way we want to do it. There’s this level of control that we’re seeking when we do it as well and I truly believe everybody opens a salon with the best of intentions. I really think they want to inspire the industry, create an amazing experience for the community; however, some fall short, and so we’re going to uncover why that sometimes happens. We’re going to talk about how you might be showing up as a leader today and I’m hoping to get you inspired on what kind of leader you want to be for the future.
Let’s start with category number one, which is simply salon owner. So salon owners would be those who opened a space. Their name is on the lease that either cut commission checks or collect booth rent or pay hourly. There is some sort of financial exchange between they and stylists who work for them, right?
I like to say that those who are owners are 100% executors. Execution is the name of the game. You want it, you got it. I’m doing the best I can. I’m collecting the rent. Your paycheck comes on time. I’m stocking the supplies.
Often owners are basically just trying to get by, so they’ll do the day-to-day operations. They do the bare minimum to consider themselves to be a business owner and their main focus is execution. Almost always those who follow into this category of salon owner, or 100% executor are still taking clients themselves.
The reason they end up in the position of being an executor all the time is because they’re taking clients too many hours a week or a month and there isn’t much time for anything else. Like they really did open the salon with the best of intentions, but listen, you know they provided a great place to work. It’s beautiful enough. It’s clean enough. And then they’ve got their own clientele to run and we understand you have your own bag of problems, stylists, but I’ve got my own thing going on too. And I’m only a human and I’ve got a family and I’m doing my best, right?
I hear from a lot of salon owners, like “I know my team wants a lot from me, but I’ve got young kids at home, so they’re going to have to wait until I have more capacity.” It’s kind of a huge ask to say like, “Well, wait for me, I’m doing other stuff with my family. You’ll have to wait for me to be ready.” It’s understandable. I understand the desire to prioritize family or maybe the desire to prioritize something else or you don’t have the capacity or what right now, but the expectation of, “well, they’ll just have to wait for me,” to me is a bit naive. Their career is going on. They have aspirations too.
That’s a typical owner, so that’s what I would just call straight-up salon owner. Then I have the weight-bearing salon owner.
The weight-bearing salon owner is 30% vision, 70% execution. Remember I said that the straight-up owner was just 100% execution. They’re just a doer, doer, doer. I’m doing the best I can. They keep the lights on, but there’s not much more you can count on them for. Okay.
Then we have the weight-bearing owner. 30% vision, 70% execution. They’re still hustling. They’re still taking clients. They manage the day-to-day operations and they are actually tuned in.
The difference between the weight-bearing owner and just the owner is the weight-bearing owner is trying to actively create culture. They’re trying to create a place that’s a nice place to work. It’s important to them to be attracting high quality stylists to the team, like they have 30% vision, so they have this sense of what they want the salon to be. It’s not cool for them to just make the money or to just be the owner. They really have aspirations. However, they’re still weight-bearing because 70% of their role is based on execution. They’re definitely still taking clients. They do salon supply runs, the bookkeeping, they are the troubleshooters. If something comes up, you go to the owner.
So the weight-bearing owner really does have the best of intentions, much better intentions than just the straight up owner, however they’re so in the weeds that they’re not able to give the vision the full focus it needs.
Often, weight-bearing owners want to be mentors. They want to be guides. They have like really clear cut expectations of how they want to help the industry. The problem is they’re so at max capacity that they rarely have time to get there because they’re carrying this heavy burden of weight and they’re doing it for a few different reasons.
I find often weight-bearing owners, I’ll go to them and I’ll say like, “Tell me what’s going on.” If a weight-bearing owner is coming to me for coaching it’s because they’re starting to feel a little bit icky about how things are going. And I’ll always say like, “Tell me what’s going on. What’s not feeling right?”
Generally speaking, the weight-bearing owners will say like, “Well, I’m still taking clients,” and then they list off problems, and almost always my solution is “Okay, well, in order to tackle these problems, we need to get you out from behind the chair,” right? At most I would want a salon owner working one maybe two days a week behind the chair, but a lot of times that’s hard to give up and I’ll say like, “Okay, how come you don’t want to do that?” And they’ll say things like, “Well, I still really like taking clients.” I understand that’s your passion and that’s your craft, but then I have to question a little bit, like why did you become a salon owner? Was it mostly just to have a beautiful place to be? You weren’t happy where you were? Is there a reason you chose not to just do a suite? Like why did you choose salon owner?
Because to me, when you choose to be a salon owner, you’re not just choosing a cute space that’s branded the way you like it or you have no boss. That’s the owner of the 1980s. The owner of 2022 and beyond realizes that you’re taking other people’s career into your hands. As soon as you’re starting to allow people to work in your space, you’ve taken on this tremendous responsibility.
And so when you say, like, “Well, I still like to take clients,” in a way as an owner, it’s selfish. Like, okay, well I understand that, but also you’ve made this massive commitment to those who are choosing to work for you and my guess is you have a pretty high expectation for what you want from them.
I’m finding that even those who have booth renters want a lot, like they want their salon to look full. They want their stylists to be successful. They want them to live these huge lives. So even if they’re independents, a good salon owner has aspirations for their team. Otherwise, they’re just the owner. They just don’t care at all.
But a weight-bearing owner aspires for those who work in the building to do well. However, because you are still stretched so thin taking clients, you’re caught in 70% execution and you don’t have the time to be the inspirational, aspirational mentor or leader that the salon team needs you to be in order for them to achieve at their highest.
And the challenge with that is that if your team is not achieving at their highest, you’re not attracting the best and brightest talent to your space. It’s impossible because the best and brightest talent want to be in the best place. Because they are so successful, they get to be in the driver’s seat on that. You’re holding yourself back in that process.
So I encourage you to ask yourself, are you really still taking clients because you just love it so much that you can’t let it go? Or are you avoiding maybe the responsibilities of true leadership, or, keeping it 100, are you scared to lose the money? Are you thinking like if this salon folds, I need to have something to go back on.
That last piece is the scariest for me. So if you work with any business coach, not me, anybody else bigger than our industry, whatever, they will tell you that it is the foolish business owner who holds onto multiple businesses out of fear. If you give yourself a backup plan, you’re not giving 100% to plan A.
Plan B, when, when you go to a business coach, if you ever say like, “Well, plan A is, but plan B,” as soon as you say plan B—if you’re trying to get funding for something, if you’re trying to get acquired, if your business was trying to get evaluated, as soon as you have a plan B it’s like flat line. Because the person who was actually going to take a business to success into fruition, there is no freaking plan B. It’s plan A or die, like it’s plan A or bust. I’m going to do it. There is no other option. And that’s what you’re looking for, that kind of drive and dedication.
So if you’re holding onto your clientele as a safety net, that is a huge indicator that you are scared as a leader. And I totally understand, but what is it that overcomes fear? Education, experience, and confidence, every single time.
It’s like the anecdote to fear. Once you have the education and the experience, you gain the confidence to know you got this, nobody can touch you. There is no longer a fear of losing anything, but because you’ve accomplished so much and proven to yourself that you could do it right, which leads us into category number three, which is either—so if you’ll remember, our owners were 100% execution. Our weightbearing owners are 30% vision, 70% execution. Our leaders are 70% vision, 30% execution. So they sway much more division than they do see the execution piece.
Our leaders—we don’t get to call ourselves a true salon leader until we stopped taking clients. We still manage the day-to-day operations, so you still have hands in. You’re still in the mix. You’re focused on training and delegation. So you are actively looking for ways to essentially replace yourself.
Now I will be the first to say I had a really difficult time with this. So at the salon, and now in my coaching business, there was a time in both businesses where I did everything. I ran social media, I did all the graphic design, I did the daily operations, I chose the perks and benefits, I did customer service. I literally did everything. And then over time, I’ve hired so that I could focus on teaching and training and the things that I like to do with you the most.
It’s very hard to release that control. How come? Because the business itself was built on my initial vision and my initial execution, right? I too was the 100% executioner and then the 70% executioner. And I’m really proud to say, now I’m 30% execution, 70% vision. That is my role in my business as it exists today.
And what I had to do was A., trust, have faith that maybe, just maybe there is somebody out there in the world who is better than me at something. Maybe somebody can market better than I can. Maybe somebody can offer more exceptional customer service than I can. Maybe somebody is better at sales than I can. Maybe somebody is better at finance management than I am. Just maybe, right?
It’s so egocentric for us to think we are the best person, the only person capable of doing what we do. It is one of the most foolish things any leader can do and one of the smartest things you can do is be open to trust because it frees you up to catch bigger fish. It empowers those around you to feel like you actually care about their future. It’s not just about you. It’s about bringing everybody up alongside you, right?
A rising tide lifts all boats. That’s where that comes from. You need to rise the tide within your space, right? So if you’re not delegating and you’re holding onto things because you are convinced, you are so convinced nobody else can do it the way you can, you’re naive and your ego is calling the shots.
What you need to do to get out of that is to create a training and figure out like, okay, this very specific thing, maybe it’s something that’s super specific. It’s hard. It’s easy to mess up. It is always possible to delegate.
We are in the way on that. We’ve either not systematized enough, we’ve hired the wrong people, or our ego is calling the shots instead of allowing ourselves to really grow. Because when you start delegating the things that are important, you get to start working on the things that are critical. You can’t get to critical until you’ve delegated good and important, right?
When you look at one of those charts where it’s like urgent, but not important, not urgent, but is important, like really start thinking about what are some of the things you can pass along and what truly does need to be you. That’s what leaders start thinking about right? Systems and structures focused.
So leaders, because they’re that 70% vision, they’re really thinking about like, “Okay, what do I need to put in place in this business so that if I was plucked out tomorrow, the business would carry on? The business would go forward.” That’s a real leadership kind of decision.
Because what that empowers you to do is do things like take a vacation and have your salon keep running. Does anybody get text messages from their salon team? Like, “Hey, the microwave doesn’t work.” “Hey, we’re out of 6N.” “Hey, this came up.” “Hey, it looks like the coffee machine’s broken,” whatever. That’s because you’re missing the systems and delegation.
Never do I ever get a message like that. Never did I ever get a message like that when I was at the salon. There were systems and processes to ensure that wouldn’t happen. I didn’t need to be there to ensure granola bars were stocked and we didn’t run that of 6N. We had systems and processes in place to ensure that that was done, and that’s the kind of stuff that leaders do, right?
And then spends their time learning and mentoring rather than taking clients. A lot of leaders are scared too, like, “Well, what will I do with my time?” My friend, when you’re being a true leader, there is not enough hours in the day to mentor, to lead, to teach, to train, to take classes yourself. There’s never enough hours in the day for that.
A true leader has to be elevating themselves so that they continue to lead, right? I’ve shared this before. When you look at what a leader is, if nobody is choosing to follow, you are not truly leading, right? Until people openly choose to follow you, you’re not a leader. You’re just a boss. You’re likely the weight-bearing owner, but when you are so good and so sharp and so inspiring and so inspired that people choose to follow you, then you are a leader. You don’t get to be a leader unless you’re actively creating, unless you’re actively leveling yourself up, right?
That’s when you could be a true leader, which leads us into number four, which is the freedom leader. So dreamy. So we had the owner, the weight-bearing owner, the leader, and now we have the freedom leader.
Anybody guess what the freedom leader is? 100% vision. So what we call that is nose in, hands out. That’s what a freedom leader looks like. It doesn’t mean that they have washed their hands of the business. That’s an absentee owner and when an owner goes fully absentee and they don’t have their nose in, that becomes very dangerous. Unless you’ve put somebody really strong in charge, that can be a little bit scary, but a freedom leader has 100% vision, nose in, hands out. They’re not in the mix. They’re not problem-solving or troubleshooting, but because they elevated to leader and they spent their time learning and mentoring, and they’re continuing to learn and take classes, they become the north star of the business.
That’s where you get to graduate to. You’re the person with the answers. You’re the person with the experience, but you’re not the problem solver because you have built a team around you who is able to do that themselves. And what allows them to do that? The systems and the structure through the delegation that you infused when you chose to become a leader, right?
Things are going on in the business that you don’t know about, but as long as the CEO vision is achieved, you’re happy.
I can’t even tell you what a good feeling that is. So I’m in the place right now where I’m definitely a leader, but I get to enjoy some of the benefits of freedom leadership. So I have quarterly meetings. I have four leaders on my team right now. So I have a total of 19 employees and four leaders.
Every quarter I sit down with my leaders and they get to break down for me what they’ve been working on and never ever do they have these meetings where they don’t say half a dozen things I didn’t even know were happening. Like they’re working on these incredible initiatives and incentives and they’re caring for students and they’re doing all of these things I wasn’t even aware of, but I can see when I look at our growth and what’s happening in the business that things are going really well. I just don’t need to be hands in to manipulate all the pieces like a puppet master. They’re able to do it themselves, right?
How do you think that makes them feel? Empowered. They almost get the feeling that they are self-employed without being self-employed. So if you have booth renters or commission stylists, or whomever working for you, they likely would like to have their voice heard, even if they’re a booth renter, they’re independent. If they’re choosing to work for you, they’re choosing to be a part of your culture. And they likely would like to be a part of the growth.
I tend to believe no stylist starts working in a salon hoping to leave there. I think that they start working in a salon hoping it’s the place where they can spend the rest of their career. And oftentimes those at the ground level, like that will have really great ideas, but are you open to hearing them? And then when they share them, do they get implemented?
Because the stylist of today believes their voice matters—and it does—and wants to see some of the really great things that they’re learning through hopefully classes they’re taking or things that they’re seeing come to fruition. And the freedom leader is able to enjoy that as well.
So when you’re a freedom leader, you have the right people in the building to achieve vision without you as the resource only.
Does anybody feel like you’re the official problem solver in your business? Like have a problem, go to the owner and nobody else can do it?
When I talked about the issue of “I think we’re out of coffee beans or the microwave isn’t working,” I know that feeling where you want to reach through the phone to the person who just texted you and be like, “So figure it out.” The reason they’re not figuring it out, do you know why? It’s your fault. You haven’t created a culture or systems or anything where that gets figured out.
For those of you, if a class is happening in your salon and you are the person who has to show up an hour early, set everything up, pick up lunch, make sure the catering’s there, lock up, drive the educator to the airport, are you joking? Oh my gosh. So you’re definitely the weight-bearing owner. You’re 70% execution, 30% vision.
There’s nothing wrong with that so long as that’s what you want and that’s what you’re looking for. But if you want to be a leader or you want to be the freedom leader, you need to start doing things differently.
So you can see, this is like an ascension. This is something that we work towards over time and I want you to start asking yourself, if you are an owner or you work for an owner, how are they showing up in the business? Are they showing up in a way that inspires others? Are they showing up in a way that empowers others to also have a future success growth plan? Are they showing up in a way where they’re inspired and that they’re true leaders who you want to follow?
I hope you’ve gotten some great takeaways from this one. If you need any insights on leadership, my program Thriving Leadership is standing by ready to help. You can head to thrivingstylist.com to learn more at any time.
And as I always say so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
