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 are talking about holiday season success strategies. Woohoo.
If you’re listening to this in real time, and you saw this episode auto-populate in your podcast downloads, and you thought, “What the heck is Britt talking about? It is still summertime.” For some of you, it’s still hot and humid out there. For some of you, kids aren’t even back to school yet, and here we are talking about the holiday season and you’re like, “Uh, I might listen to this episode in a couple months.” Well, darn it. If you were to do that, you would’ve missed out on the massive potential that could happen for you in the last two months of the year.
And what I have found in coaching our industry over a decade is that those who actually get the most out of the holiday season—and when I say get the most, I mean, get the most personally and professionally, ‘cause that’s—people, 100, the holiday season can be a massive money maker, and a massive physical and emotional drain. What I found is those who get the most out of the holiday season start planning that success the first week in September. It changes everything. And if you think to yourself like, “Well, I don’t need months to plan for the successful holiday season,” then you’ve likely not maximized your holiday success in the past. So this episode is just for you.
Now I’ve spoken to holiday success in the past. There’s actually an episode about it on this podcast from 2019. You can go back and look for it if you want to. It happens to be episode 102, so kind of a relic. You can go back and listen if you want to. I’ll be candid: some of the advice that I shared back then on that podcast episode to me is dated. That’s how quickly the industry changes and shifts. What I was coaching to even three years ago is it’s like, whoop, nope, we’re in a different market now. So go back and listen to it if you want to. I think there’s some good principles and there’s some good things to think about.
But candidly, a lot of what I shared there has actually changed as far as what I would coach to doing now in a current holiday season, so I want to dive into it.
And my goal with this episode is to help those of you who really want to take the bull by the horns this season and close out the year strong is to think about the potential of the season a bit differently. Think about what it could mean for your life, for your business, for your clients, and for your growth.
Let’s talk about the holiday season from a very basic standpoint for just a second. For a lot of us, the holiday season is prime time, right? We know there’s the old adage that like the J months are slow. Have you heard this before? January, June, and July historically had been slow for the salon for a couple reasons. One, June and July because clients travel. Summer season historically had been a little tricky for us because clients would go out of town and so their regular booking patterns would change and we’d see the summer slump a little bit. And then August, school would start again and we’d pick back up. But those J months in the summer would be slow.
And then what else would be slow was January because everybody had come in in November and December, right? Sounds about right? So what we think is no one’s going to miss their November/December hair appointment because they want to show up to see friends, family, all the social gatherings looking incredible, and so getting your hair done or getting your beauty services done is going to be a part of that.
So volume is high and we know that, but I think that like a very basic business mindset says, “I will see more clients. I will make more money. Holidays are great.” That is the most basic way you can look at the holiday season and when we look at it with that mindset, what you do is you work yourself to the ground to make all of your clients feel good and nobody be mad at you and everybody gets their hair done during this peak season, even if it means you break your back, you break your spirit and you don’t see your family for eight weeks. At least everybody got their highlights in and you made a lot of money.
I think that that’s very old school and while I still do still think there is massive financial potential when we look at the back 2 1/2 months, eight weeks of the year, I want you to shift your mindset around why there’s so much potential there.
What we do think as being the gift is the volume and I will say the volume is the gift. Your demand in your business will generally be much higher during that time than in any other peak of the year. You are very likely to have incredibly high retention Q4 of any given year. Most clients don’t stray and try a new stylist in Q4.
That being said, your new guest request might be low, but you’re generally cool with it because you wouldn’t have time to see them anyway, which is why clients don’t leave and go see somebody else because demand is so high.
While that demand being high works to our benefit, it can also be a disservice. So when I’m coaching to holiday season success this year, I’m looking at building you up in four different categories.
So as you step into September to plan your holiday season success, I want you to think of it as marketing and messaging, nurture strategies, awareness strategies, meaning business awareness, and revenue. I want you to make sure that you have strategies in each of those four categories of your business.
Let’s talk about each for just a moment. When we say “marketing and messaging”, what are the outward bound messages that you’re going to share to your existing followers, your existing clientele, to let them know what’s up the last quarter of the year? That’s going to be scheduling-wise, that’s going to be promotion-wise, that’s going to be building your brand and your reputation, all those kind of things. What’s the game plan for that?
If we don’t plan for it now, we will end up with upset clients and we also will not make as much money as we possibly could.
Okay, so marketing and messaging. Nurture strategies. When we look at nurture strategies, it’s what are we going to do to make our clients feel loved on during the holiday season.
Then we have revenue. You should be making more money during the holidays and likely more than you’ve even made in the past and even more than you think.
And then we have awareness. Awareness is the piece where we are greasing our wheels a little bit, and we are positioning ourselves to grow exponentially in Q1, Q2 of the following year and beyond because we are maximizing what we do during this holiday season to catapult our upcoming year to success, right?
So marketing and messaging awareness, which both are marketing perspectives, but very different tactically when we pull them off, and then we have nurture, which is loving on our clients and then revenue, which is making more money.
So while I would love to coach to all four of those categories here on this podcast episode, I’ve only got about 20 minutes with you, so I’m going to choose to focus on the Awareness level marketing as far as how you can maximize this season to catapult your business forward for the long haul because I think that’s the most overlooked opportunity.
If you want to learn more about the nurture and the revenue increasing without having to break your back and work more shifts, here’s a fun fact: you should actually be working less in November and December and still making more money.
If you want to learn more about the revenue strategies and the nurture marketing strategies and the brand positioning as far as social and all that kind of stuff, I have a different opportunity for you. I’m doing a holiday success workshop this year. I’ve done this in the past too. If you go to thrivingstylist.com/holidaysuccessworkshop—if you’re listening to this in real time, you can head there, you can save your seat and I’ll show you how to complete all four categories, like a full plan for everything. I’m talking calendars and planning guides, and links to resources and all that kind of stuff. So you can head there and save your seat.
But on this episode, we’re going to just do a little taste and we’re going to talk about what you can do using the holiday season to make sure that you are banking success for the future.
So knowing that we are working with volume and scale, what we want to do is take advantage of the fact that we’re seeing so many clients in a small period of time. So at a very basic level, when we’re thinking revenue, we’re thinking of what we can do to increase our sales.
Now, what I know to be true is that for many of you adding on services during the holiday season is tough because you’re booked back to back, right? So popping in an extra highlight or a smoothing service or something, it’s like you don’t have the extra half hour or whatever you need for that. So we look at like microservices, mini and microservices.
One of the things I talk about a lot when I talk about holiday season success is salon conditioning treatments. Do you know this? I’ve shared this in the past. In-salon conditioning treatments are, generally speaking, the single most profitable service you’ll do in the salon. And as I say that, a lot of people are like, “Well, no, ‘cause I make a thousand dollars on a color correction.” Yes, I know, but how much product you have to use? How many hours does that take you? How physically demanding is it on your body? When you look at purely profit margin, you’ll be hard pressed to find a service that is more profitable than an in-salon deep conditioning treatment. Try me on that.
When you look at the upsell on the difference between the cost to apply the treatment and what you can charge for it and the time it takes you, it’s going to win every single time.
The other thing that we have going on is winter hair dryness, so we start thinking about, “Okay, how am I going to educate my clients on this is the opportunity to treat yourself for the holiday season?”
And I want you to make note of that because what I am not going to be coaching to now or in the holiday success workshop are things like retail sales at all. I’ve phased out encouraging clients to buy hair care for their friends and family as gifts. If they happen to want to do that, I think that’s great. I think it’s forcing an unnatural behavior and instead of doing it that way, we look at it from the angle of the holidays are a time where we give, give, give, and serve, serve, serve others.
But if you look this up, statistically one seventh, so somewhere around 15% or something of the revenue that gets generated during the holiday season is on self spend. So there’s a certain amount of funding that all of us psychologically allocate to treating ourselves during the holiday season and we do it as a survival mechanism. I think we’re giving, giving, giving, buying stuff for others, and we’re like, “Well, I’m going to treat myself.” You want the “treat yourself”. That’s the bank you’re going for.
I think in our industry, a lot of times we’re like, “Ooh, buy gifts.” “Ooh, gift cards.” “Ooh, send me new business.” “Ooh, referrals.” I think you’re tackling the wrong angle and I think that’s why you might get okay results at the holidays. In the past, you might have done okay, but give this mindset shift a thought.
One of the stories I shared on the podcast a couple years ago, and I think it’s worth sharing again, is that my husband and daughter and I—my son wasn’t born yet, so this was probably like eight or nine years ago—we were not only broke, we were flat broke. We were in about $35,000 in debt. We owned one car. It was a 1993 Mazda MX-6. It was not cute. It was a stick shift and—which I love driving stick, it had nothing to do with that, but it was a junker clunker. The passenger door didn’t open and we shared this car. So my husband worked a mid graveyard, so he had to be at work at 3:00 AM. So I would wake up at 3:00 AM, load my daughter into the backseat. I would drive him into work, drop him off. My daughter and I would go back home. We’d try to settle ourselves back into sleep. Then she and I would wake up. I would take our one clunker car, drive her to school, drive myself to work. On my lunch break. I’d have to go pick him back up. He would then drop me off at work because we were sharing this vehicle and literally getting by on a prayer.
No joke, I still got my nails done every two weeks. And I think it’s important to recognize that we think a lot of times like, well, it’s the season of giving. Like we literally call it that. But if you are the one who capitalizes on the one thing that nobody else is celebrating, I think you’ll win.
I am personally of the mindset that smart business wins in the gaps. When we look at all other markets and every other business during the holiday season coaching to “buy, gift, gift, gift, give to others, give to others, give to others”, we are service providers. And if we say, “But what about you? What are you doing for you? Are you taking care of yourself?”, we are in the self-care industry. Yet we head into the holiday season and we’re like “Buy gift cards for other people”, “buy retail for other people”.
No, our magic is that we remind people that they’re important and that self-care is critical and that they’re beautiful and they’re confident and they’re amazing. Double down on that. That’s where you’re going to make tremendous money in the holiday season and you’ll capitalize on people like me, who admittedly was spending, I don’t know at the time, probably 25 bucks, 30 bucks, every two weeks to get her nails filled when she was $35,000, $40,000 in debt because it mattered to me to look and feel good about myself in the holiday season.
It matters to people to feel and look good about themselves. I believe you’ll actually end up making more revenue and finding more residual business if you don’t focus on selling gift cards and selling retail gifts and retail promotions and discount junk. Forget all that and you say, “Treat yourself this holiday season,” I think you’re going to find massive, massive success.
Now in turn, the other thing that I think should be a massive focus as you head into the holiday season is online reviews. I think everybody listening to the show, whether you have a clientele of 30 or 300 should walk this holiday season with like 70% of your clients leaving an online review.
If they don’t, we’ve done something wrong. I really, really think that’s where we are. That’s where we’re at and when we think about what can we do this holiday season to catapult our success forward, I think that using this time and using this idea of service, building confidence, self love, all these kind of things, if we position all of that right, your digital reviews should surge and soar. That’s what I would take advantage of.
For those of you who struggle to get online reviews, this is the time where you’re going to see your best of the best clients. This is the time to figure out that strategy and truly make it happen.
Let’s talk about marketing for a second and what I think works well for holiday season marketing and what I think works poorly. For me—I would ask that you retire the 12 days of Christmas social media post strategy that pops up every single year. I’d go ahead and let that retire.
I would retire the marketing strategy of “here are our holiday retail promotions”. Again, I talked about that before. I think that if we shift out of the idea of this is the season of selling and the season of giving, and really think of it as the season of serving and the season of building confidence, this is where we’re going to win.
So instead of using your social platform to cram more product and cram more contests and tag and share and nominate, and I think if we get out of that salesy mindset on social this holiday season, that’s where we’re going to win. This is a lot of where the content that I had taught in 2019, in 2020 even, and in years past, that all had to retire because social media used to be used very differently.
It’s still very much a critical marketing tool. However, how many of you still like being sold to on social? How many of you love seeing salesy posts on social? How many of you are burnt the F out of seeing social media ads. Right. So then please don’t go making social media ads all over your Instagram account and Facebook pages and all that stuff.
I’m not even saying like, “Oh, oh, don’t put money behind it,” like if you’re trying to sell something through the social post that you’re making, like openly selling it, you’re creating an ad, which is the kind of content nobody wants to see right now. It’s not playing, it’s not working. What used to work in 2017, 2018, they’re called loop giveaways. There was a time when they really worked where it was you get together with four different businesses and everybody to enter the content that has to like the post and tag into friends and DM me and share it to the feed and go like these other accounts. And if you do these handful of things, you’re entered to win something amazing.
Listen, there have been really cool prizes given away from those things in the past. Do you know what kind of clients you’re going to attract with that? Junk clients, clients who want a free cut and color package. They’re going to come in and be nightmarish to you if they end up being the winner. You’re not going to retain them because the only reason they even participate in your contest was get to get the free stuff. That’s not the kind of person that you’re trying to attract and retain.
Even when we do things like sell gift cards—have you ever had somebody come in and—Marilyn buys a gift card for her sister and you love Marilyn. Marilyn’s great. Marilyn buys a gift card for her sister who happens to be in town visiting for the next eight weeks and is staying for the holidays. You meet Marilyn’s sister and you’re like, “How are you two related? I mean, this is like night and day. You come from another place. You’re totally not our target market. You don’t like us. We don’t like you.”
Gift card sales in our industry, I think, are challenging and risky. I think that we are so deeply ingrained in the relationship business, and as we start to become an industry that more specializes than generalizes—like people say things like we want to be seen as more like doctors, lawyers, dentists, that kind of thing. We don’t buy gift cards to our dentist, no matter how great they are, right? Because it’s such a personal choice. I think we’re becoming more of a personal choice.
If somebody gave me a gift card to get my hair color done somewhere, would you use that? Or would you choose to go see somebody who you love and trust? Right?
If your clients are buying gift cards for each other, again, you’re not making any more money. Legally, when you sell a gift card, you have to hold onto that money until it’s redeemed so you’re not actually creating additional revenue in that. So that model to me is a little bit tricky and not overly effective.
Industries that do really well with gift cards could be spray tanning, spa services sometimes, although I will not let a stranger touch my face. I’m so particular about who does my facials and skincare. I think that as our industry’s become more specialized and become more upscale and we become more respected, it is going to have an impact on gift card sales.
It’s kind of like everything we ever wanted, but, oh, shoot, now we’re getting it. I think we’re in that era.
So I would lean away from again, sell, sell, sell promotion, promotion, promotion, social media contest, anything that’s talking about a retail sale, let’s phase all of that out of our social media promotion strategy through the holiday season.
Let’s go back for a second. As I’m sharing these handful of concepts, and I’m saying things like, “Wait, but why do we have to start this all in September?” So circling back around, when I’m saying we need to create a full-faceted plan where we think about marketing and messaging, which marketing and messaging essentially is for our existing clientele, how we’re going to let them know what our holiday season schedule looks like, how we’re going to let them know what promotions we are doing. Because it doesn’t mean don’t promote. It means don’t do the scammy, spammy stuff, right. What we are doing is showing up on social in a way that they actually appreciate.
I have this theory about social media and you’ll likely find it to be true when I share it. Your Instagram stories, your Facebook group, or page posts, those are the kind of things that are for your existing clients, right? Stories, Facebook pages, all that kind of stuff. Email marketing, text marketing, that is for your existing clients to see. Your Instagram grid, your website, your Yelp reviews, all of those kind of things are for new clients. Not the same.
And I think so often as we’re building social content strategy, we’re like, “Well, what does my existing clientele want to see on social?” My friends, less than 10% of your existing clientele, even though they follow you, is seeing any of your stuff. So your way to connect with them and your way to connect with a new client who is considering seeing you for the first time is not the same.
I’m watching a lot of people post stuff on their social where they’re like, “Well, my clients love my dog.” Okay. But Jerica, who’s never met you before, doesn’t know your dog and she doesn’t want a dog haircut. She wants a human haircut, so what can we show Jerica to build trust? And during the holidays, that’s even more so true. So thinking about what we can post on social, that’s going to position us as an expert and an authority in our community and in our space through the holiday season that is going to speak to new potential clients who have yet to meet us. That’s where I think the sweet spot’s going to be.
And then, like I said, nurture. So when you think about nurturing our existing clientele, what are we going to do during the holidays to make them feel special and important?
Now I gave you a few hints. I talked about thinking of this as the season of serving versus the season of buy, buy, buy, give, give, give. It’s like self care. I think that’s one way to nurture, but how are you going to show love to your clients during this season? How are you going to show appreciation for their loyalty to you and how they’ve shown up in your business and make them feel seen and heard? Write that down. How am I going to make my clients feel seen and heard this holiday season?
I know you feel overwhelmed right now. We all feel hectic. I totally get it. This is the time to let your clients know they’re not just your Tuesday at 4:00 PM. It’s really important because they’re feeling like they’re a part of the rat race, especially during this time of year and you being the person who’s like, “Oh no, no, you’re my person and I see you and I value you,” is very critical right now. Now more than ever.
A lot of you say, like, I want to be the oasis. I want to be the lighthouse for my clients. Great. This season, the season of hectic and panic, is your time to shine big, big time.
Then we have revenue. So like I said, we want to capitalize on making more money this season, but not just because it’s a high volume season. If you’re like, “Well, I’m going to definitely make more money this season because all my best clients will come in to see me,” you’re looking at this shortsighted. There are ways to make more money beyond just that and that’s where we need to really focus. How am I going to creatively earn more this holiday season while working less?
I am a firm believer–—how many of you have worked extra days during the holidays, extra hours during the holidays, 12, 14 hour days because if you can’t get James in for his holiday haircut, he is going to destroy you on a review platform? So you’re like, “No worries. I’ll do your haircut at nine o’clock at night,” and we do these extreme things so that James looks great when he goes to holiday dinner, even though you haven’t had dinner with your family in three weeks because you’re working so much. That needs to stop, really, really stop and we need to get the reins on that.
When I coach to creating a holiday schedule, it’s one where you have time to do your holiday shopping and you don’t have to be stressed about it, and you have time to bake cookies with the kids, if that’s what you want to do. You have time to be present with your family and taking extended breaks, like the rest of the world does while still maximizing your income and still serving your guests and not turning James away. He still gets his holiday haircut, but doing it in a way that systematically works for you, right?
So it’s revenue, it’s scheduling, it’s all those things. Then the awareness, like really thinking about what am I going to do this holiday season that positions me as the industry and the market leader and the cut above so that even if they can’t get in to see me in September, so that even if they can’t get in to see me in December, come January and February, they’ll be dying to come in to see me.
And there are promotions that we can do from the nurture standpoint, too, that also help your existing clients who, maybe they came in and got all their stuff done in December. They’ll still come in in January because of what we can do to make them feel appreciated and make them feel seen and heard, and also do what we need to do to keep our clientele flow up and our revenue up.
But I will tell you, I think heading into 2023, the very best thing we can do to secure our income is increase client demand. It’s increase interest in seeing us increase our brand reputation, increase our perceived value. I think that’s critical.
I think we are heading into a season where the potential is massive and I want you to capitalize on it.
If you need more help and insights beyond those four categories, beyond the few ideas that we’ve shared, you are more than welcome to join me for my holiday success workshop. If you head to thrivingstylist.com/holidaysuccessworkshop, you can save your seat.
Like I said, I’m going to make it as easy as pie for you, share all the good stuff. I’m going to go really deep into strategy. Today, we stayed at the thousand foot view. I’m going to go to the one foot view and I’m going to spell out exactly what you need to do when you need to do it, give you a calendar, give you links and resources, and all that good stuff.
I hope to see some of you there, but what I hope to see from all of you as I scroll all the platforms this holiday season is a new look and a fresh take on how we want to present ourselves, how we want to work our schedule, how we want to support our guests, how we want to create revenue, and how we want to be seen as professionals.
All right, y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
