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 be talking about the beauty and the quest to be working more remotely and working from home.
This is a question that I get a lot, and I think that this is something that’s weighing heavy on a lot of people’s minds, especially when we look at the state of the world right now, and just not even the state of the industry, but like the state of human beings. We just came out of an era where we got to spend more time at home and the world got a little bit slower and we really reevaluated our priorities and I think in that there is this general quest to just have more life balance is probably the easiest way to sum it all up.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about work from home or making money while you sleep or passive income or all of these quests that people are now chasing, and I wanted to dedicate this episode to what it could look like to have a work-from-home business as a stylist or a salon owner. And I wanted to talk about what it really means and what you’re really asking for and why you might want to be asking for it.
This episode, just like many of my most popular episodes, came in because of a listener just like you, so thank you to Lindsay today for bringing this episode to us. Lindsay left me rating and review on iTunes and then in the comments there, she asked me a question and that’s where I get about 50% of my podcast topics, so make sure you’re leaving those ratings and reviews and letting me know what you want to hear.
So Lindsay says, “I’m grateful that you actually read your reviews on the podcast and then respond to them. It’s pretty awesome. I have another question that I’m sure I won’t be the only one thinking about, but is there any type of way for hair stylists to work remotely? I know education geared towards hair stylists already exists, but what about education for clients and/or another avenue for hair stylists to work remotely? Thank you so much for this in everything that you do in our industry. Best to you.”
Lindsay, such a great question and I agree, I’m certain that you’re not the only one asking this or thinking about this.
We’re living in this very interesting season in time. So obviously I’m somebody who’s chosen to educate hair stylists, right? I was a hair stylist myself from 2007 to 2009, and then I was a salon director up until 2016, so I shifted away from behind the chair to essentially working fully remote.
However, I think there’s a misunderstanding about what that looks like or when it works or how it happens. I really want to unpack all of it.
So when Lindsay says, “You know, we know that educating stylists is a thing, what about educating clients?” and I think this is a really great question. And probably a lot of wheels started turning because I and other industry influencers started saying as the world shut down in 2020, “Think of how you can keep your clients engaged. How can you educate them?” And education then looked like for spouses, teach each other how to cut your spouse’s hair. How do you apply your partner’s root touch-up? Those were the things that we needed to educate on because those were these desperate needs.
I want you all to slow down and think about that for a second. Why was I or anybody else coaching you to teaching your clients how to do their own clipper cuts? Why was I suggesting that you do root touch-up kits and teach your clients how to do root touch-ups at home?
In fact, I filmed a whole video tutorial training of me coloring my own hair. You can see me with hair color on if you’re in Thrivers Society, showing you how to make a training video to show clients how to apply their own hair color if they don’t have a partner who can do it for them, right?
So we were educating our clients to do hair themselves. Now I’m certain nobody is thinking about doing that right now, but why was that a working format? And why did it work back then?
Because you were teaching to a pain point. There was this desperate need, and you were the expert who was able to come in and meet that need.
I coach on business for stylists and salon owners because I am much better at the business side of our industry than I am in cutting and coloring hair. In fact, I’m terrible at cutting hair. I’m only good at coloring because I understand the science and the chemistry of it. It just kinda makes logical sense almost in the way that math does, but that doesn’t mean that my highlight application would be any good, right? The physical parts of the industry, I was not good at. The business part, I deeply understood so now I educate there at scale.
Here’s the thing: When we start to say, what is it that we could teach our clients from home that would allow us to work from home? And the answer is not much, and here’s the reason why: there’s no pain point there.
This is where most people who consider getting into the digital education space get it wrong. And we’re not just going to talk about digital education so don’t worry, I’m going to shift forward from this. But because in Lindsay’s question, she was asking what about educating our clients? What could that look like? I do believe you should be educating your clients, but it doesn’t mean you create a paid training course for them. How come? Because there is no desire for it. So what you’d be doing is you’d be trying to force a need onto a consumer and that is the recipe for burnout, financial loss, and disaster.
Oftentimes when we’re the expert, we know what somebody needs, but people don’t necessarily buy what they need. They buy what they want. So when somebody is on a fitness journey, what are they looking to have happen? They want results as fast as possible and that’s why you see people doing things like crash diets, ‘cause you know what, I just want to get it done as fast as possible. Versus if they just chose a healthy lifestyle, ultimately they’d get where they want to be, but it might take a year and a half instead of taking 90 days. We’re always looking for these shortcuts that get us to our results faster.
So when I come in and I’m teaching stylists how to build and grow their business, how to make more money, how to scale their schedule back, I’m essentially giving a shortcut. I’m able to get you the result that you’re looking for faster. I’m coaching to a natural pain point. Stylists and salon owners want to make more money. They want to end the overwhelm. They want more freedom in their schedule. They want to understand marketing, but they don’t want it to feel heavy. That is a natural want and need. Heck I want all those things, right? It’s natural.
Clients don’t naturally want to learn how to flat iron curl their hair. They just don’t. Clients don’t naturally want to learn what healthy scalp care looks like. They just don’t. Do they need it? Yes. Unless they want to wear a messy bun every day, which is their prerogative. But that’s not the person we’re speaking to with this question anyway. They don’t actually want to have any of that kind of stuff. They just wish the problem solved.
So when you’re like, “Oh my goodness, well, what I could do is create a training program about effortless everyday hair.” You could, but there’s already, I don’t know, 200,000 YouTube videos out there about how to create beach waves, how to flat iron in your hair.
The question then becomes why would somebody choose your paid program, your work-from-home paid program over watching a free video? And then you might be saying, “Well, it’s ‘cause they’re not watching free videos.” That’s right. Because it’s not a big enough pain point.
I don’t want to discourage you from working from home. Actually, I’m actually going to be giving you some suggestions as to what that could look like.
But when we start to say things like, “Oh, I feel like a lot of people are educating right now. Maybe I’ll just become an educator,” there’s a massive difference between being smart, being successful, and knowing how to teach. And then beyond that, creating something that there is a natural desire for. That’s going to be the success recipe.
And when we talk about, can we create training programs for our clients, I just generally believe that your clients like you because they like coming in to sit in your chair. They like the experience you provide. They like the way you style their hair. You’re like their treat. You’re like a guilty pleasure. They don’t want to learn how to install their own extensions or do their own perm or you know what I mean? They come to you because you’re the expert.
And here’s the rub: we are in the service industry. You’ve chosen a physical skill. Now I think that trades are the most smart business decision anybody can get into. In fact, I’m encouraging both of my children to go into trades because I think that these are professions where there’s always going to be a need, no matter how the technology changes, unless we all become hermits and live in our house forever. People are going to want to get their hair done and so there will always be this natural desire for it versus some other jobs like manufacturing or whatever skill-based jobs where if the technology’s not needed anymore, it’s gone, right?
So trades are incredible. However, trades always require you to be physically on premises, at least for some portion of your job.
So when we start to say things like, “Listen, I think I’d like to work from home. What about educating? What about doing blah, blah, blah,” I always say, “Oh, so you’re looking to start a second business.”
Most people don’t think of it that way. They think of, “You know what I’ll do. I’ll layer on this work-from-home component to my business and my life will get easier.” Your life will become exponentially harder at least for several years because you’re not just creating this second stream of revenue.
When people talk about side hustles or second streams of revenue, it’s a little cringy for me because I think it’s very misleading to make something like that take off and explode, it will be hours and hours and days and days of work. I feel so blessed that I have the career that I have and that I am able to work from home. However, I work in an office four days a week because working from home I think is different than what people imagine. I also work more hours now than I ever did before.
I think often we think like, “Oh, it’s going to give us the flexibility that we’re looking for,” and here’s the crux of this podcast. You already have all the flexibility you’ve been looking for. You joined this career in this profession, why did you get into it? Because you saw being a barber, being a stylist, being an esthetician, being a nail tech, being a salon owner, you saw that as an opportunity to have what? Freedom. Financial freedom, time freedom, you saw it. The vision was there. In your mind you were like, “This is going to be amazing because what I can do is work just a few days a week, work the schedule that I want, and I can make some real money.”
All of those things are true. So why are you looking for a work-from-home job? And this is where I think we’ve got it backwards. Why would you take on a second career instead of just maximizing the one you have?
Here’s why I think people start looking to do things like this because they’re bored, because they’re burnt out, or because they are lost as far as what to do to push this career forward.
I always say, if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing right now, I would go back to working in the salon. I’d be there three days a week and I would enjoy four beautiful days off every single week and I’d make great money. A hundred percent that’s what I would do.
I think that a lot of people have decided like, “Well, being a salon owner is super hard. I need to work-from-home gig.” “Being a stylist is super exhausting. I just need to do something where I can work from home.”
Work-from-home is not the same as enjoying time with your children. In fact, for years, if you asked my kids what it was like being with me, they would say, “Mom is always working,” because when I was in home, I was always working. It really changed the perception of the way that my kids saw me versus when you’re in the salon now, when you come home, you’re mostly at home. You’re pretty present. You relax, you do stuff with the family. Maybe you make dinner, you enjoy dinner, travel, all this kind of stuff. Your work life is your work life and your home life is your home life.
When you work from home, there is no boundary, it’s all work. And so I think that people think that like, “Oh, if I work from home, I’ll find more flexibility and freedom.”
There should be no reason why you can’t pick up your kids from school as a stylist or salon owner if that’s important to you. If you want to work in the morning while the kids are at school and take 90 minutes off in the afternoon to pick up the kids, get them settled, get them a snack, start their homework and go back three hours in the evening, do it.
Why are we not just doing that? I’m a little bit lost on that. What is it that you’re looking to achieve in the work from home that you don’t already have, right? Start to ask yourself that.
Then you’re like, “But Britt, you said you were going to give us some options from work from home.” I am, but none of those options are going to be develop a hair care line of your own, start a shear production company, join an MLM, start an educator business.
Now you can do all those things and I wish you well, but please understand that is starting a second business when you do that. It’s not going to create any additional freedom in your life. It’s going to create more responsibility and that’s fully what it comes down to. So just understand if you do any of those things, you’re choosing to complicate your life, not simplify it.
Usually when people say, “I want to work-from-home gig,” what they’re thinking is “I want more money and more flexibility.” Can I get an amen? Did I hit the nail on the head? You can have the more money and the more flexibility with the existing business you have, but what’s happened is instead of just learning to maximize what you’ve got, you’re feeling frustrated and you’re looking at the grass on the other side, assuming that it’s greener. Water what you have. Build up this garden that you started and then let’s buy some land. Do you see what I’m saying?
So when we look at what work from home should look like as the stylist or salon owner, I want to go back to the five key roles in your business. I started coaching to this five years ago. Now stylists and salon owners need to stop being the talent in their business and start being the CEO, start being the CFO, the CMO, the COO. Focus on the marketing, focus on the operations. If you’re in Thrivers Society or Thriving Stylist Method or Scaling Stylist Method or Thriving Leadership, you know that I say you should never be taking clients more than four days a week. Never because you need at minimum eight hours a week, essentially working from home. You need eight hours a week to work on your business, to do the marketing, to look at the money, to figure out the guest experience, to work on nurture, to work on retention, to be the visionary of your own business.
You shouldn’t do that on your weekend. I certainly don’t want to be. I can’t ask you to do that either. The problem is not we need more ways to work from home. The problem is we’re not working on the right stuff to begin with.
Here’s a challenge for you and whenever I say this, people like “That’s impossible because I do this or I do that, or this is how my company looks.” I got it. Except for that I’ve coached now, I have coached over 20,000 students through my digital training programs and so I know that this is true. You can actually find more success, be more successful, make more money working three days a week, super smart and spending 10 hours a week working from home on the marketing, the finance, the operations, the CEO, then you could working five days a week behind the chair.
You just can because there is no other industry that is successful where the talent is the primary focus, right? If we look at a restaurant, like let’s say, we’re all going to an incredible Italian restaurant, who is the talent in that restaurant? The hostess or the host who greets you, the bussers, the waiters and the waitresses, and the chefs. Do you think any of those positions get to decide how we market that business? Nope. Do you think they take a look at the finances every single month and decide what they should be paid or where the money should go or what we should invest in? Do you think that they decide who the produce vendor should be? Who the meat vendor should be?
And you might say, “Well, maybe the chefs do it.” No, the chefs get an input, but I worked in a restaurant for a lot of years. At the end of the day, the GM or the CEO is going to decide those kind of things.
We in this industry are so caught up in learning to be great talent that we are not being the director of marketing in our own business. I’ve had several private coaching calls recently. The need for private coaching is at an all time high right now, and I’ve had several private coaching calls and on every single one, the person has said, “I know I should be better at marketing, but I hate it.”
Marketing is only painful when you don’t know what you’re doing. When you know what you’re doing, it is the most addicting, fun game that you could ever imagine because it’s working. It’s producing a great result. So instead of hating the thing that’s the lifeblood of your business, that is your work-from-home job. That is your primary focus, right?
I have an incredible stylist who’s coming to Thrivers Live who will do $300,000 in services this year. She’s not working six days a week. She’s just put a huge focus on marketing, operations, CEO, CFO, managing her money, getting verbiage right, nurturing her clients, and P.S., she doesn’t have a hundred thousand Instagram followers. She’s just really smart at what she does.
So when you say “I’d like to work from home,” amazing, let me create a job description for you. You’re going to do caption writing, content organization. You’re going to use the nurture techniques that we talk about in Thriving Stylist Method to nurture guests between appointments. You’re going to actually engage on social media. You’re going to create awareness around your business. You’re going to develop your signature method like we talk about in Scaling Stylist Method. And in doing that, you will make more money and more freedom than you ever thought was possible in this industry.
So the summary of this episode, which was a little tricky, and I apologize, you all thought you were going to come in here, your pencils and your pads ready, ‘cause you think you’re going to write down all these work-from-home business ideas.
You already have a work from home business. Own it, understand it. When you’re in the salon, you’re simply servicing on the promise that you generated on social. I want you to think of when you’re doing a haircut, when you’re doing a texture technique, you are fulfilling on a promise. Making that promise publicly known and pricing it properly is your work-from-home gig and that is the lifeblood of your business.
I want to encourage you, instead of seeking out a secondary business, to start maximizing the one you’ve got. We have the freedom and flexibility to work from home at least 20% of our working hours, if not more. Really redefine what this career looks like, redefine your priorities, and understand that the more you work on your business instead of in it, the faster it grows.
Y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
