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’s episode is again inspired by y’all. Another beautiful listener who wrote me a rating and review asking “How do I know if it’s time to let a team member go? How do I know if I’ve given them a fair shot? How do I know if I’m keeping them around for the wrong reasons and how do I do it successfully?”
What I think is irresponsible and unfair is if you allow somebody to stay in a job too long that they’re not suited for. It’s not serving you, it’s not serving them. Who’s winning? I guess they’re still getting a paycheck, but often they feel weird.
Usually if somebody’s being let go, it’s not because they’re incredible. Something’s not going right, like their performance isn’t good, likely their confidence isn’t great. Sometimes they’re a drama person and if they’re creating drama, then they have drama in their life. Like the drama they create is not just for you, it’s for them. And we say things like, “Well, some people like to thrive on drama.” If you’ve ever actually met somebody who has been almost like a reformed former drama-ist, like somebody who used to love drama. We all know those people, the people we perceive and we’re like, “Oh, you just love it. You like to stir the pot, You like to mix it up.”
Well, what’s funny is with age becomes the wisdom and I have found a lot of people who in their early twenties love the drama—I’ve stayed connected with for the past decade and they’re now drama-free and they’re like, “I so regret those years.” That’s why I say when we look at some people and you’re like, “Oh, they’re just drama,” actually no, their life is much happier when it’s not drama-filled. The reason why people get gossipy and cause problems and stir the pot and get cliquey is because they’re insecure. Healthy people don’t do things like that and that’s why whenever we let somebody go from our business, or our life for that matter, it’s actually a really great gift.
I have let go, countless—I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve fired over the course of my leadership. Dozens. I can’t give you a firm number. I don’t know, over 50, maybe even close to a hundred. I fired a lot of people. Of all those that I’ve fired—some I probably can’t even remember, if I’m being honest. I have hired several hundred people and fired a lot and when I think back on some of those closures I’ve made, the relationships I’ve closed, a good chunk have come back around to me and been like, “Losing you as an employer was such a blessing. It hurt at the time and it felt uncomfortable and it was awkward. But on the flip side, my life became better.” And we actually can reconnect and be friends now because generally it’s not personal. A couple times I caught people stealing from me, that was personal, but usually that’s not it.
When a termination comes from a good place, it is a gift for everybody. Terminations go bad when they’re not handled professionally, they’re immature, or they’re irresponsible, or a trigger is pulled too fast.
With this episode, I want to set you up for success with all of your hires, all of your terminations, and completely take the fear out of it.
Raise your hand if you’re a salon owner and you’re listening to this and the idea of firing people scares you. I get it because we actually care and we have a heart. It’s heartless people who don’t care at all about that. But our industry doesn’t attract a lot of those people. The mindset shift I want you to take away at the top of this episode is it’s actually unkind to keep the wrong person in the building and it’s unkind to them and to every single other person who shows up to work for you every day. Let’s take a look at how to set our teams up for success and then when to let them go and how to do it effectively.
First things first, in order to set yourself up to have happy employees, you have to have job descriptions. I find that in salons, having job descriptions is very rare. Having fully fleshed out job descriptions is even rarer and having leaders who hold their stylists accountable to the job descriptions is practically nonexistent. That probably represents less than 5% in the industry. There’s a lot that have written a job description, a person sees it at the time of their hiring and then it just goes into a binder somewhere and it’s never shown again.
There’s a good chunk of people who do that. In real companies, which is what you run if you’re a salon owner. That’s my whole mission is to help everybody understand in a salon we’re not running a unicorn ferry business. We are actual business owners and we need to run it as such. In the real business world, you are connecting with your team on their job description every 90 days. And if we’re not doing that, you as a leader are actually failing because here’s what happens: If we don’t have good, clear job descriptions that are robust and full and truly explain all of our expectations, and then you get mad at a team member, they have every right to be defensive because they don’t even know what you were expecting. In your mind, you have expectations. And then we do silly things like we say, “Well, they’re reasonable adults, they should know that they have to do this. It’s obvious that stylists should have to do that.”
Nothing is obvious, okay? Nothing is obvious. You have to explain everything, right? What is expected needs to be inspected. If you don’t have a system and a plan to be inspecting it and to allow people to know what standard they’re being held to, don’t even bother having standards, right? And we are visiting that conversation all the time.
Now, another thing that’s important is core values. In my company, we have right now today, we’re on probably our fourth iteration of core values over the last probably four years. They’ve been changing pretty regularly. There’s some that have been in place for a long time and if you happen to be watching this podcast by video, I actually have some people ask me, “What is the sticker in the bottom corner of your laptop?” It’s our core value sticker. All members of my team have these core values that stare them in the face every single day and we talk about core values every single week. My team is evaluated on core values every single quarter and when I am letting somebody go, they’re almost always terminated because they are not in alignment with core values.
If you’ve done core values right, terminations become very simple because your expectations were clear. You can start saying things like, “Well, one of our core values is self-awareness. Based on what I saw yesterday, you are not self-aware. I was explaining to you what was going on. You were arguing with me that it wasn’t true. Now that you’ve had a moment of self-reflection, do you still believe that what I observed was not true?”
“Yes, I still believe you’re wrong.” “Okay, well then, I believe you’re having a self-awareness issue and that’s of a concern to me because you’re not in alignment with our core values and this is the crux of what it means to work here.” It becomes this crosscheck of everybody knows what it looks like to be part of the culture. Are you in or are you out? I think this is where a lot of times the buzzword “culture” gets misconstrued.
It’s interesting, we are onboarding a new team member to my company right now and in the interview process, we do panel interviews, we do a lot of things, but one of the things we do at different levels of hire are panel interviews. After a few of these panel interviews in the last round, one of my leaders was like, “It’s funny to me that a lot of these applicants are saying they’re drawn to us because of our culture.” And I said, “It is funny. Why do you think it’s funny?” And she said, “Because they have no clue what our culture is.” Culture is very misleading. I think that like my team knows what culture is. They are very well aware because we have a defined culture and we hold ourselves to it.
A lot of times people think culture is vibe, culture is positive, culture is growing, culture is drama-free. None of those things are culture at all. I’m thankful that my business projects that kind of energy, but that’s not the same as culture. You have to ask yourself does our salon have a defined culture? We’re a family here, we all support each other, we like to educate ourselves. None of that is culture.
If you don’t have those good guidelines in place, terminations are hard because it’s not clear how somebody needs to be showing up. Then what I like to do, if somebody is not in alignment with their job descriptions—so they’re not completing their role in full and with a job description, we want things like KRAs and KPIs, right? What are they expected to achieve quarter over quarter?
If your stylists are expected to just make more money, just throw the whole thing in the trash can. That’s not effective. Very few people in this world are wired to just want to make a ton of money. Most people are chasing a different objective. It could be to prove somebody wrong, it could be to overcome poverty. It could be debt free, right? But there’s always the why anybody’s looking to make money. In our salon, if it’s ever like, “Well, you’re successful if you make more money next quarter,” you have missed the mark tenfold, you have just totally blown it.
That’s why a lot of other systems where it’s all about like, “Well you’re hitting your numbers,” or “You’re hitting your numbers,” that’s 30% of the conversation. What about the other 70% we’re completely leaving out? There’s very few businesses that run like that where if you don’t make your numbers, you’re no good here. Very few. That’s a very antiquated way of doing business, right?
When we’re looking at our team members and we’re saying to ourselves, “You know what, somebody in this room, my gut is saying something’s off.” First of all, I’ll tell you this, if your gut is saying something off, it is, and I at this moment can’t think of a single person I’ve let go and regretted it. Never. Not one time did I have a regret. Every single time we’ve let somebody go, the replacement has been far better because the culture builds upon itself and we are now doubling down on our standard, right?
If you’re letting somebody go because they can’t achieve the job description and they’re not in alignment with the core values, what message does that send to those who are left in the building? I don’t play around and a lot of times we think like, “Well then, it’s going to lead to a fear culture.” It will lead to fear if you’re not clear in your communication, absolutely. But if you’re communicating effectively, there’s no reason to be scared, right?
This year, it is currently 2022, I have let four people go this year. I was very transparent with my team the entire time every time one of those decisions was made so that nobody had to be scared. It was unnecessary, right? Making sure that you’re setting yourself up for success is also going to be a huge, huge piece of that. But what happens is with every termination the bar gets raised a little bit, the quality of who you hire next is better, team morale actually goes up and those who are in the building feel more bonded, connected, and appreciated because they are working hard to stay stellar and they’re being rewarded for it, right? Okay.
So if there’s somebody who’s on the fringe and you’re like, “I just don’t know if this is right,” we ask ourselves three questions:
Do you believe they believe in the business? That alone is actually a really good qualifier. There’s a lot of people who are like, “Well it’s a job. I’m working here ‘cause it’s a job. There’s nowhere better.” I don’t want that person in my building. No thanks. There’s plenty of other places to go work that will accept that attitude. Go be there.
So you have to ask yourself do you believe they believe in the business or are they just showing up ‘cause it’s a job?
Do you believe they trust you and your leadership? If they don’t trust you or you don’t trust them, they cannot work here. No good relationship is built without trust.
Number three, do you believe they’re giving it their best effort? Even if they’re not achieving the results, I can get over the achievement. That’s not a problem for me. But if somebody is not even trying, they seem complacent, they’re adverse to learning, they’re not educating themselves, they’re not even putting the effort in, that’s very difficult to coach through. You need to have somebody who has enough drive and desire to push. Anybody ever been an owner and you’re like, “I’ve got these stylists. They’ve got so much potential, but regardless of how much I offer them, they never go all in.” You can’t create drive in somebody. That is something that they have to instinctually have.
Often people don’t have drive when they are uninspired, when they’re lacking confidence, when they don’t enjoy the work that they’re doing. So you can help to build their confidence. That’s going to come through the transformational leadership circle that we talk about in Thriving Leadership. You can work on that. That’s very possible, but you can’t want it more than somebody else does.
So if you don’t believe they’re giving it their best effort, that’s going to have to be a part of a bigger conversation.
Now, the other thing we do is called the GWC and I love this exercise. G stands for gets it, W stands for wants it, C stands for capable of doing it.
Let’s say you have a new stylist. They are six months in and they are really struggling to build a clientele and maybe you have them on hourly wage and you are losing every single month. You have them in the building and you’re losing money. There’s no profit and unfortunately you’re actually out 500 bucks a month just having them in the building. I like to GWC that.
So we ask ourselves, “Okay, do they get it? Do they know what the job description is? Do they understand our core values? Do they know my expectations?” ‘Cause if not, then that’s your fault. It’s not their fault. Do they get it? If you’re like, “Well, I’ve told them,” “No, no, no, I’m not asking did you tell them. I’m saying do they get it?” It’s not the same question at all.
Okay, then do they want it? Is the drive there? When you say the expectation is that they have built an entire clientele and are producing 20 grand in service revenue in a year, do their efforts show that they want that or do their efforts show that they’re just kicking it ‘cause this is a job? Want it is a big one. It’s got to be there.
Then there’s the capable of doing it. Sometimes you have somebody like—I was not capable of doing good haircuts when I was a stylist. I was fully incapable because I wasn’t educated. And also I didn’t have the want. The want was so missing for me when it came to haircuts. I just didn’t care. I didn’t want to get better at it. Had I wanted to get better at it, what would I have done? I would’ve gone to ABCs of Cutting and taken a five-day program and figured it the heck out. But clearly I didn’t want it bad enough. So I didn’t do that.
When we GWC somebody, it becomes very clear where their blind spots are and where they’re missing the mark. Once you’ve asked the questions and once you’ve GWC’d what they should be doing, how they should be showing up, then we have a conversation.
The first conversation I always like to have is one that includes a performance improvement plan. Usually this is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t mean it’s unnecessary. What makes this easier is if you are in regular communication with your team.
For me, you might have seen this if you follow me on Instagram every single week, every Tuesday I have a one-to-one with all of my direct reports. It’s 15 minutes. It’s not a huge, heavy thing. They know it’s coming, I know it’s coming. 15 minutes, one-to-one and then we have a quick team meeting. The quick team meeting may or may not be critical for you, it’s up to you. But I have a touchpoint every single week.
Then with my department leaders, once a month we have a strategy meeting, and then with everybody in the company, there is a 90-day, we call it a quarterly conversation. So we are in touch all the time.
Because of that, we have these natural touch-points. And if somebody is just not—my gut is saying something’s not right and I’m like, “They just don’t belong here,” there’s been too many issues, whatever, at one of those touch-points—whichever comes first, honestly—I sit down and I say, “What is going on? Things are not feeling as they should.”
One of my favorite phrases is, “I’m surprised to see that,” and then x, y, z. “I’m surprised to see that you’re having challenges getting along with a lot of our team members because when you first started, you seemed to get along with everybody.” Curiosity, framing it with curiosity. “I’m surprised that your service sales kind of stalled out. You were growing so well a few months ago. What do you think happened there?”
Start the conversation with curiosity and allow them the chance to defend themselves first and foremost. I think it’s really important to start the conversation that way. They’ll explain themselves and then your response will be “Totally understand. Thank you for explaining that to me. All that being said, these are the standards of working here and these are the areas that need to improve in order for this to continue to be your salon home.” And then you go through the list and it is up to them what they do next.
When I do a performance improvement plan, it can be a 30, a 60 or a 90-day, and it’ll depend on the situation, but I’ll give them time to improve. I think that that’s what good leaders do. It’s not just like, “Hey there you’ve been the worst, you’re out.” That to me is—that’s when you get a really bad reputation.
Instead we always say, “This is not jiving for me. What can we do to ensure that you are successful in the way that I need you to be?” Then you give them the list and you say, “We’re going to meet again in 30 days and see how we’re doing here.”
I will say when you go through this exercise, more than half the time somebody will quit on the flip side of a pip. Almost always in my experience.
Now those who do stay will become your best and brightest team members. And that’s the truth with every level of employment. You’re not trying to hire everybody. You’re trying to hire what? The top 10%, 15, 20% of talent in your area. Going through this exercise, you save both you and that team member weeks, months, years of trouble and turmoil when they just really didn’t get it, want it, and weren’t capable of doing it. Set yourselves both free in that situation.
For those who do choose to embrace the opportunity, you should see steady improvement on the flip side of that.
Now what happens when you don’t? Let’s talk about when you absolutely have to terminate. For me, there’s been a few terminations that did not look like that. When anything illegal is taking place, you’re going to just have to do it, no excuse needed. You can document it if you want to. I believe that termination should be done with as much transparency as possible.
There was a couple times that I had people in the salon space specifically doing things that were not legal to state and federal standards. They were terminated on the spot and that was the end of that.
Another instance where somebody just needs to be terminated, no warning needed is if somebody is being overly offensive to stylists or team members. Some things are just unforgivable.
There was one team member who was actually a long-term team member and pretty well respected that I had to let go on the spot because they had done something that was completely unforgivable and I had to make the choice of can I let that person stay in the building or the person they had just deeply offended. I had to let the person who said the terrible thing go. It was inexcusable, it was unforgivable and we couldn’t move forward from it. It was unprofessional so they had to go. That’s another instance where, sorry, you just got to go. A lot of stuff is worth coaching through though and you’ll find you gain more respect as a leader if you’re seen as somebody who is fighting for your team to stay together. But also your tolerance for nonsense is low, if you’re a pushover, no one’s going to respect you. You’ll never turn a profit. You’ll be fun. People will love you, They’ll celebrate you. You won’t make money and you won’t attract the best of the best because there will be these little cracks in your foundation and people from the outside will see that shit. You have to make sure that you are holding your bar really high.
When you do decide to let somebody go, always sit down and have a conversation. I think—now I am employee based, so if you have booth renters, you might do this differently. Actually no, I think you could do it the same. I think it’s almost always appropriate to give some severance or grace to help somebody get back on their feet. Often a termination is shocking. If somebody voluntarily quits, you don’t owe them anything. That’s on them. They’re making a life choice. When you let somebody go, I personally think it’s the decent thing to do to offer them some sort of financial buffer to get on their feet again. If you let them go today, they’re not going to find a job tomorrow unless they were already looking. In which case, that’s a reflection of your leadership yet again. But let’s assume that they weren’t. I think it’s the decent thing to do and softens the blow when you say, “Today is going to be your last day, I am going to give you a stipend that is the average of your last paycheck to get you through these next couple of weeks. I wish you the best in your salon search. I will not do anything to hinder you building or growing your business forward. We’re just not the right place for you,” and keeping it short and sweet, but also professional and clear I think is the best.
It’s harder when you’re letting somebody go who you feel close to or drawn to as a friend. I’ve had to do that as well. It’s painful and that also doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it. At some point you have to ask yourself, “Am I running this business to be an actual legitimate business because that’s what’s important to me or did I just want to have a cool spot to hang out with my friends?” Either is okay, but they’re very different decisions. If you just prefer to have a cool spot to hang out with your friends, you can actually have a really happy life like that. You just won’t have the profitability potential that you could otherwise.
If you really want to have a business that you can sell one day, a business you can retire from, a business that actually makes all your wildest dreams come true. Sometimes you have to let a friend go and a good friend lets a friend go when they’re working in an environment that doesn’t suit them any longer.
I hope this has helped to give some clarity around when and how to let somebody go. For me, it is very rare that I hire somebody and let them go within the first 90 days. If I hire them and let them go within the first 90 days, whose fault is that? Mine. Bad hiring practice.
Hire slow, fire fast is generally the rule. If you have done due diligence with your hiring process and somebody is not working out, have these powerful conversations sooner than later. Don’t let the bad apples poison your well.
Now for those of you who are holding onto team members because you’re like, “Well, they’re a little bit of a big personality, but they make a lot of money and their clients love them,” you can find people who aren’t such big personalities who still do really well and their clients really love them.
Think to yourself what is it we’re trying to create in this space? Who is it I want working within these walls? What do I want my work days to look like? How do I want to feel about those in my business? If there’s anybody you feel awkward talking to, if there’s anybody that you got tension with, clear it up. Have the powerful conversation, make the hard choices. You can do this.
So much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
