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 we’re talking about something a little bit left of center around here. This isn’t a topic I normally approach on the podcast. I definitely want the Thriving Stylist Podcast to be about making an incredible living, living your biggest life, what I call your wealthiest life as a stylist or salon owner. That is what I am passionate about coaching about. It’s where I think there is tremendous potential. I have watched such a beautiful shift in our industry just in the last decade I’ve been coaching and being a part of this ride in this movement is without a doubt what fires me up. And so I like 98% of the content on the show to be about how to maximize your business as a stylist or salon owner.
However, I know that a good portion of my listeners are already educators or aspire to be, and you may or may not know this: I’m a little bit spiritual. I’m just going to talk about this for a few seconds, then I’ll move on, I promise, but I’m really big into nothing happens by accident. Everything that happens for a reason. Everything is intentional and there have been all of these unavoidable signs around me to talk about the reality of being an educator today, what it looks like to build and grow as an educator today.
I think I did either a podcast on this, or maybe an Instagram live on this topic years ago, but so much has changed, and I had—I will not say who the person was. I had a very poignant conversation with a very big name educator earlier this year. I don’t want to put a time stamp on it. The conversation was about it’s a real shame that more educators don’t talk about what’s actually going on. And to that, I said, “I agree.”
I think that talking about the reality is so vulnerable for a lot of people, and it can feel too exposed or it shifts the facade, and I am not afraid of that kind of thing. I think that the keeping it 100 and the transparency is what makes us good humans and truly no judgment to anybody who’s like, “I don’t feel ready to have the conversation.” Trust me, I get it. I’m just now having it. I understand it’s a process to get here, but I do think that it’s a conversation worth having. And if I’m truly on a mission to uplift the industry, I do a disservice when holding back the reality of what’s up and what things look like.
I’m going to pull back the curtain a little bit and what I’m not going to do is drop names or talk brands or anything specific like that. It’s not my way. You would have to navigate those pieces on your own, but I want to shift and talk about my experience as an educator, what it looks like building as an educator today, how to get amazing opportunities, where those connections come from, all that stuff.
I want to start at the top about the three different kind of educators I see in our industry today. I don’t think any two are identical. I really don’t. There are a lot of people who speak on a lot of similar topics, but none of us are the same as each other. It’s like the idea—can you tell I’m hungry, I’m recording this at lunchtime—it’s kind of like saying while Jack in the Box, Burger King, and McDonald’s all sell cheeseburgers, so they’re the same. No, even as I say that, some of you are like, “Oh, I can’t stand McDonald’s,” “Oh, I love Jack in the Box’s curly fries,” “Oh, I would never go to Burger King,” or whatever your take on it is. You have an opinion about all those different restaurants, but they’re all essentially franchise fast food chains.
What if I said In-N-Out Burger? Does anybody have feelings about that? What if I throw Chick-fil-A in the mix, then what happens? Right? See, these are all fast food franchises, some different menu variables, but at the end of the day, it’s quick food for your family, right? Yet each of us has our personal preferences around it.
I see the education space in our industry and beyond literally identical, same thing. We could all be serving up similar concepts, meals, systems, strategies, but the way that we do it is different.
I believe that education today comes in three forms: teaching, coaching, and speaking. I think that educators today will do themselves a huge service in realizing what they’re really great at and what they’re not so great at.
For me at this stage in my life and in what fires me up and where I think I’m the best, for me, it is speaking. It’s not for everybody. Speaking is not for everyone. Now, when it comes to coaching, I don’t think I’m the best coach by any means. If somebody else wants that space, I will let you have it. There’s actually been people who’ve reached out to me and they’re like, “Listen, I really want to start some coaching, but I had a coaching call with you a while back. I don’t want you to be upset.” I’m like, “I don’t want that. You got it. You go for it ‘cause I know you can do better than I can.” It’s just not my bag. It’s not as fulfilling for me.
There was a time where all I did was coach full-time, but I think that there are people who are better at it, so why not allow those who enjoy coaching that one-to-one mentorship shine in it? I think that my style, when I’m in my natural style, it can be a bit abrasive. I think it can be a bit aggressive, and a lot of times when you want to coach, you want somebody who’s empathetic and is like, “That’s okay.” It’s just not my way and my style, right? I like to be a little bit more direct. So the coaching is kind of my Achilles heel, to be totally candid.
And then teaching. Teaching I think is like when there’s a difference between Zone of Genius and Zone of Excellence. I think my Zone of Excellence is teaching. I think my Zone of Genius is speaking. Like even as I’m doing this podcast, I’m speaking, and I think that’s what comes the most naturally to me.
So if you are going to go into—you can be wildly successful in all of these. So if you’re like, “I don’t want to learn how to be a speaker,” it’s taken me truly a decade to be even a decent speaker. I still have so much work to do and to go, and that’s why you see a lot of people who are killing it in the speaking space are older. You don’t see a lot of people in their twenties who are totally destroying the speaking space because it takes time to develop that skill set, right? It’s very rare. If you think about influential speakers today, how many of them are in their twenties? How many of them are even in their thirties, right? It just takes time.
For me, that’s my focus and where I’m refining my craft, but you can be wildly successful as a teacher, a coach, a speaker, whatever it is you want to be. But I think really getting real with yourself and giving yourself the grace of I don’t have to do everything, but I have to realize what I’m good at.
The next step if you’re going to become an educator, do it because you do something so uniquely special, that you—I think it’s always best if you developed it yourself, like not something you learned from a third party or you thought was really cool. You can have some success doing that. It’s, generally speaking, pretty short lived, but truly something you mastered on your own.
You see a lot of empowerment coaches who lost many family members in a tragic accident and had to learn to carry forward. That’s not something you can copy from somebody else. Either you have that life experience or you don’t. People who come out of really painful divorces, emotionally abusive relationships, like I’m getting into some heavy stuff, so I apologize for going there. But when you look at people who have these deep life experiences and turn it into teaching, coaching, speaking, that’s where they become wildly successful.
Now it doesn’t mean you have to have gone through life trauma to be exceptional in teaching, coaching, speaking, but what have you done that nobody else is doing? Like, literally it’s so innovative that people jaw drop when you’re going to talk about it. That’s when you’re onto something really, really powerful. And when you have proven transformations—for me, I didn’t know exactly what it was that I was good at., and I had been coaching literally one-to-one until I’ve been doing one-to-one for about five years and then I dialed it in. This is something that I think a lot of people in the education space today are skipping and it’s a disservice to them—to nobody else, but truly to them is they’re not taking the time to realize what their Zone of Genius really is.
I think that there’s a lot of working in the Zone of Competence right now. I can do it, I’m capable of it, but is it my Zone of Genius? Probably not. And that’s exhausting. That’s a really tiring place to work from.
So really thinking about what am I actually so stellar at that people line up around the block to learn this from me. And if you wnt to educate but you haven’t found that thing yet, y’all, patience is such a virtue and that is coming from the most impatient person you’ve ever met.
As I said that, I could literally in my mind hear my husband go, “HA,” because it’s so ironic to hear me talk about patience. Patience is something I’ve struggled with for my entire lifetime. But, you know, with the age comes the wisdom and I’ve realized often we waste a lot of time, emotional energy, and we cause a lot of pain and strife just because we’re in a hurry. And if you just allow yourself to be a bit more open and stop chasing, and instead starting to attract, you’ll find that the abundance comes, the clarity comes, people start clamoring to you asking about something specific. That’s what you should be teaching on. Stop chasing, start attracting, right?
The other thing that I think is important to recognize is I can’t tell you how many people a month now DM me and they’re like, “So I want to be a digital educator. How do I do it?” As soon as somebody tells me I want to be a digital educator, my heart breaks a little bit because to me in my mind, when somebody says that they’re thinking like “I want to work-from-home job,” and it will be incredibly difficult for you to build and grow as an educator if that is what you’re seeking.
Here is where I start getting into the good stuff that people aren’t talking about. The digital education space peaked in 2019. Peaked. There’s no doubt about it and it has been on a shift ever since.
Now, when I say “shift”, I’m not saying it’s tanking because it’s not. That’s not what I mean, but it’s not what it was pre-2019 and I think a lot of us are still seeking the pre-pandemic normalcy and we’re living in denial of the fact that the world has changed. What people want has changed. You’ve changed.
How do you like to learn now compared to 2019? How do you show up on social? What podcasts are you listening to? What books are you reading? What lives are you showing up to? Are they the same ones? No. Then why do you expect people to behave the same way that they did two and a half, three years ago, right?
So the digital education space has rapidly changed and the new trend on the horizon is immersive experiences. And everyone’s going to say, “What does that mean?” It’s trending now. This is the shift that’s happening, like this is what’s being built and so it’s happening in real time. One of the things I think that makes people exceptional as educators is the quest to be pioneers and the lack of fear to screw it all up a hundred percent, like do it all so badly that it blows up in your face. You have to have that level of confidence and resilience, to be quite candid, to stay cutting edge and to stay at the forefront, right? And that comes with the patience and the time as well.
If you’re like, “I just don’t have the resources,” which our two greatest resources are time and money, “to be reckless like that,” then you’re going to have to tap into the patience and you’re going to have to wait and see what emerges.
But if your quest is to be a digital educator, I ask you to really reflect and say, “Do I want to be a teacher, coach, speaker?” Because that’s actually the question. I don’t know that education will stay digital forever. I really don’t and I think right now we’re looking at it and we’re like, “Oh, digital education will be here for 20 years.” As the parent of somebody who is entering adulthood, that girl has no interest in learning online. I’m here to tell you. Part of it is that she had to do online schooling for almost a year and a half. We are a California-based family, so she had to learn digitally for 18 months. Her perception of digital education is it ruined her high school experience, so imagine the taste that’s in her mouth. There were several speeches given by students at her commencement and the first one—to the young woman who shared this speech, I’ll never forget it. It was moving. And she talked about the trauma that high schoolers have gone through in the last few years. It was eye-opening to me ’cause you’d watch the kids sit there and nod their heads and you see ’em going off to school and they smile and they laugh and you think, “Oh, if they’re back to normal, everything’s great. They got to go to prom. They had a graduation. Congratulations.” And we don’t think about what they’ve endured and I’m going to use the word “endured” and I mean it.
How many of you are zoomed the F out, like burnt out of being in online classes, right? So again, it’s not to say it’s folding. It’s not, it’s still here, it’s still a thing, but it is evolving. And so if you want to be a teacher, a coach, a speaker, brilliant, beautiful. We are living in a time where education is not optional. It is critical. The speed at which the world around us is changing is exciting and concerning all at once. If you are not actively learning, engaging, being mentored, you will be left behind. We need people who want to teach, coach, speak. It’s so important right now. So, so important.
But really ask yourself like, okay, if it’s not online—like let’s say online education falls flat on its face—do immersive experiences fire you up? ‘Cause for me I’m like “H yes,” like I’m here for it. I’m down for that. But I made a very poignant decision a decade ago with my husband and my children, saying this is what is important to me and so really thinking about is that the lifestyle you want and does that work for you, right? So think about it.
Another thing I want to talk about is the legalities of digital business, if that’s what you choose to do. There’s laws in everything that happens. The digital education space was highly unregulated for a very long time. 2020 really changed that because so many colleges, high schools, elementary schools, everything had to go online, so it had to get regulated and regulated really fast.
So in the last few years, a lot of things have changed. One of the things is sales tax laws. When you sell digitally, you have options you can sell just to your state if you so choose to, you can sell throughout the United States. I’m U.S.-based. If you’re listening to this internationally, welcome, I’m honored to have you. You can also sell internationally. There are laws and guidelines to doing all of those things. There’s different terms and conditions. There’s different things that you have to have people agree to. There’s different taxation policies.
First of all, for a long time, those things didn’t even exist. Second, for a long time, nobody was really watching. Now they are and so making sure that you have all those things set up is really important.
There’s also things like you can’t just change your course on a whim whenever you want to. I had decided to make some really major changes to my programs in 2020, 2021. I know there was a frustration from me, from everybody where it was like, “Oh my gosh, are you going to change it or what?” And it’s like, “Yeah, I’d love to change it, but I have to do things legally. I’ve got to wait until I can.” I think so often we think internet, easy! That’s really changing.
I want to share with you the name of my lawyer. I don’t get any affiliate cut from her. She doesn’t even know I’m going to drop her name, but in case you’re looking for somebody, Autumn Witt Boyd is who I work with. She is phenomenal. Phenomenal. She’s not cheap, but she’s really good and she specializes in digital education space, public speaker representation, things like that. Definitely worth looking into. She has some, if you don’t want to pay for private consulting, she has some templates and things you can buy. She’s got a package, I think for just over $600, something like that. So she’s got some tools and resources that are available, but making sure that you really cover your buns is so important.
I’ve heard plenty of stories about things going sideways for people and I have always been really mindful of the legalities of the business side of things for that reason, because I’ve seen firsthand how quickly things can turn.
When you’re in this speaking space, not so many legalities. It’s much more transactional. When you’re doing one-to-one coaching again, much more transactional. It’s when you get into the digital core space that things get a little bit more complicated. So just making sure that you’ve really covered your booty cheeks and everything is all good.
Now, let’s talk about if you want more stage opportunities, like speaking on the big stages. Do you ever watch people? I don’t even, this might be old-timey. My daughter tells me all the time. She’s like, “Mom, you sound old, like you really, you’ve slipped,” and so that’s quite possible. But one of the things that I know a lot of people aspired to be when I was in the salon was a platform artist. So it meant that you got to stand on the big stages, right? Like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re here.” That was such a big deal. You’d go to these big beauty shows and these hair shows and there’d be these stage presenters, and sometimes it’s just one person commanding the stage with lots of models. Sometimes it’s five people up there and it’s like, well, that’s the north star. That is still such an incredible opportunity. Like talk about making an impact. Whoa.
So then I think a lot of people are like, “Okay, I want to do that. How do I do it?” So I want to talk very briefly about opportunities, compensation, working with brands, things like that.
Often when you see a speaker take the stage, speak in a more intimate sense, whatever at an event hosted by a major industry brand, not so much the smaller brands, but a major industry brand organization, sometimes at publications, often those people are sponsored by hair care or color brands to speak on that stage.
Let’s say Britt Seva brand color is hosting a huge annual event that does not exist. You can Google it if you want to, nothing will come up. I’m sure I’m not going to create a hair care line or a color line, so you can have it if you want it. Let’s say that Britt Seva brand hair color is hosting their big annual event and we’re expecting 3,000 stylists and I have three different stages for people to speak on. Often what happens is some brand, some comb company, some brush company, hot tools line will pay $10,000 to speak on my stage, and then they will bring in the speaker of their choice to represent that hot tool line.
The reason I’m sharing this is I think there’s this idea where you see this platform artist up on a stage and you think, “Wow, they were probably paid $25,000 to do this.” Possibly. Often what happens though, is some other company or sometimes even the speaker—I have absolutely been offered speaking engagements where the host said “Amazing, we’re glad you accept. For you to speak on our stage, it’s $15,000.” Meaning I pay, they pay me nothing. I fly myself there. I pay all my own expenses and I pay to stand on that stage. Very common.
And before anybody says like, “Well, that’s what’s broken in our industry,” it’s just a really common arrangement in the speaking space. I’m talking about the speaking space specifically. That’s not always the way though, because what will happen is sometimes the hot tool brand sponsors the stage and they’ll pay an educator to speak on that stage. But you have to remember—let’s say the hot tools brand paid $10,000 to sponsor a speaker on that stage. Well, they don’t have another $30,000 to pay the speaker. They maybe have got 2,000 bucks to pay the speaker and their travel and their hotel and all the other stuff, right? I’m making these numbers up. I’m not saying that these are always the hard numbers ’cause they’re not, and we’ll get into numbers in a second.
I will say there are some—this is not the hard, fast rule. And there are some companies, brands, organizations that when they call, I jump at the chance and it’s never about the money. It’s about the way they’ve taken care of me, shown up for their audience. That for me, as somebody who chooses to work as ethically as I possibly can, that’s what I’m looking for.
And so sometimes it’s not about the money, especially as a speaker. Sometimes it’s about the connections. It’s about building reputation. I have spoken for free on stages with the understanding that I can bring a videographer and tape the whole thing. I haven’t done that super recently, but a couple years back, I definitely did because I wanted the video footage, and likely I would’ve paid to be on a stage to have that. Sometimes you have to think of it that way and I think educators are just now starting to come out and talk about “I taught for free. I’ve done the reps.”
I’m not saying you have to do that. If you’re like, “It’s not worth it for me to work for free,” I totally understand. But that’s why I’m hosting this podcast is so that you understand the way that things are set up right now and not just in our industry, but as a whole, right? And thinking about what is it that works for me?
Often speaking engagements, big ones, big ones, big ones, big ones, whomever’s hosting it knows you’re going to get 200, 500, 1000, 3000 eyeballs on your business. That’s exceptional exposure, really exceptional exposure when it’s the right branded opportunity, right?
Some of you are like, “I don’t work for exposure.” I respect that so super deeply. All I’m trying to do is expose the reality of what’s happening. So what if you’re saying, “I want to do this. I’d like to take advantage of these opportunities, but I need to be paid.” Great.
Now let’s talk about your speaking rates and this is something I think that can be really confusing too, because we see these really big, exciting numbers, like, “Oh my gosh, Gary Vaynerchuk charges $80,000 a keynote.” Well, yeah, but he’s been doing this for 20 years. I mean, it’s just a totally different arena he’s playing in. And also P.S., he doesn’t have the keynote. He makes so much money through his own business, it’s optional for him. It’s fun. It’s how he has his fun.
So we have to get realistic. I think when we’re looking at if you want to be marketable, like if you actually want to speak, if you actually want to partner with brands—and when I say speak, like sometimes I get invited to do backend stuff with a brand, right? So stuff that doesn’t make social media, I’m just coaching on the back end or something like that, virtually or in person. When you want opportunities like that, you want to make your rate approachable and appropriate. I’m not saying the whole “don’t charge your worth,” yes, but I think sometimes we get confused about what our worth actually is, and you don’t want to overprice yourself or underprice yourself. And so understanding how to make yourself marketable, it’s just like marketing yourself in the salon. It’s the same thing. That perceived value piece, right? It has to be there.
What I think we do is we determine our hourly rate. Now, if you are a stylist in the salon taking clients and you are teaching a physical service—so whether it be a color service, a texture service, a cutting service, an extension service, whatever, if you’re teaching how to do a service that you are killing it at, then you base this rate on your gross service dollars in the salon.
If you teach to anything business, then your rate is based on how much your business coaching business is already generating. Even though you’re like, “Oh, but I do the techniques that I’m coaching to for business in my salon,” I know, but there’s a different perception to the two different kinds of education.
Generally—now this is a general rule, not always the case. Generally, you can actually command a higher rate when you’re teaching a physical skill. It just is the way things are set up right now. So it’s something to think about. Let’s say you’re doing 300 grand a year in color services, you’re super killing it. What we do is we divide that by 2080. So 2 0 8 0, which is the number of working hours for somebody working full-time. Now, if you’re working part-time, you can adjust this. I’m cool with that. You do this how you want to, but let’s say you’re working five days a week and you’re making 300 grand a year gross, not net. Okay, so that comes down to $144 an hour is your hourly rate.
What I believe is a good formula is you multiply that—I’m going to break this down. There’s actually a different number you multiply by, but I want to break it down in a way that it makes sense. You multiply it by eight ’cause that’s your daily working rate. So $1,153 a day.
So what we do is we take that number and we multiply it by five and that becomes your keynote rate. So for this stylist, the keynote rate is $5,765, so that’s the rate to do one 60-minute-ish keynote would be $5,765. That’s what they would charge.
Now, if they’re doing an all day workshop or something like that, I don’t charge by the hour in that way because you can’t look at the work that way. The reason why it’s five times the day rate is because if anybody’s ever done a keynote, it will take you hours and hours and hours of prep and the travel and all the other things. So five times the day rate is usually good for a keynote.
Now, when you do a full-day workshop, usually you multiply that by like 2.5, so that would be 14 grand for an all day, like an eight-hour workshop experience for this educator. When you look at what educators are charging and making, when they sell one-off workshop tickets, like if somebody’s selling workshop tickets for $399 a piece and you figure they get 40 people in the salon, they’re walking with $15,960, which is about right, so you can see how the formula works out.
Now that’s for a stylist, who’s killing it, making 300 grand a year.
Let’s say you’re an educator and you’re educating on something that is not a physical service-based strategy. Let’s say you educate on like, I don’t know, wellness for stylists or style for stylists, like teaching stylists how to dress. I dunno, I’m making something up or photography for stylists. I have no idea, but you teach on something that is not physically hands-in-hair, service-based. You have to charge differently. I know you’re like, “But wait, wait, wait. I take photos of my clients in the salon. It is what I do daily.” I know, but that’s not what pays your bills. Even though you get the experience from it and it’s what does your marketing, it’s not what pays your bills. What pays your bills is doing the physical hands-on services. It’s different. So we have to charge the keynote rate based on what that business is generating in revenue.
So if you are currently making $50,000 a year teaching your photography, your wellness, whatever education for stylists, then you take the 50,000. Even if you’re doing 300 grand a year as a stylist behind the chair, your educator rate for the business skill, the not hands-in-the-hair skill, is different. So $50,000 divided by 2080 gives us an hourly rate of 24 bucks and then we multiply that by eight. So the day rate is $192. Is everybody already holding their breath? Like this seems scary. So the keynote rate is $961. So the keynote is a thousand bucks. It really changes dramatically and you can see that.
So what I think are those are marketable rates. I really do and when you’re looking at those rates and we’re thinking like, “Wow, I’m being vastly underpaid,” when we look at pay based on demand and experience, that’s about what it looks like. And we can argue that it’s broken. We can argue that it doesn’t make sense. We can argue that it’s undervalued. You can argue it all day long, but it is the way that things are set up currently. If you don’t like it, you can totally build your business your own way. But if you want to speak for brands or be on stages, that’s generally what it looks like.
Now, as far as those like platform artist opportunities, generally it’s educators who do work with brands in some capacity, not necessarily that they’re sponsored by a brand or they educate for a brand full time, but there’s some sort of ambassador agreement. That’s usually where a lot of those stage opportunities come from. Not always, I have definitely spoken for hair care brands that I am not directly affiliated with. Doesn’t always happen like that, but it often does.
Those opportunities come up through brand reputation and networking, and that’s what I think is important to understand is if you’re somebody who doesn’t feel like that doing a keynote for a thousand dollars is worth it. That is so understandable and you can build independently, like you should do coaching. There’s so much money in coaching. It’s ridiculous. You can build independently and just freaking kill it. But if you want those opportunities, that’s what the rates look like. For those who are like, well, “I would never do a keynote for even $2,500,” that’s okay. You can say no to that opportunity, but there are plenty of people who would, because they’re maybe chasing a different dream. Maybe they’re just looking to get speaking reps in, right? It’s just different.
What I think is important to remember is there’s not just one way to slice this pie. In teaching, coaching and speaking, there are six different ways to Sunday to build a business.
The big message and takeaway from this is I don’t want anyone to say, “I want to get into education so I can build a digital business.” Be careful in that. I don’t think the digital space will be here forever and so really make sure that you are doing this because you like teaching, you like impacting, you want to learn to be an excellent coach, and then are you educating yourself in those arenas. Is that where your focus is? Are you willing to have the P word, the patience, to see it all the way through?
This is kind of a random one. I know this won’t hit for everybody. Next week, we’ll be back with more business-building education for stylists and salon owners, but I hope it’s provided some clarity.
As I always like to say so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
