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, ready to record arguably my favorite episode of the year.
I do a predictions podcast every single year. I have since I think 2019, maybe even 2018. A really long time. What I like about these is I’m always looking forward in business. I think so many educators, business coaches, speak to the now. I think speaking to the now is fine, except for that it always keeps you 10 steps behind. Because when you look at successful business, they are thinking decades ahead.
When all we’re doing is constantly adapting to the now, chasing the trends, A, it’s exhausting, and B, you actually never get ahead. All that allows you to do is to tread water, hopefully keep your head up, but it doesn’t allow you to actually reach the finish line.
For me, I’m obsessed with building forward and this episode allows me to share those thoughts. And number two, historically I’m right. I don’t mean that in an egotistical way. I mean it in a way of look at what studying the future of business does for you. I’m not able to pull this off because I’m a great guesser or I don’t have a crystal ball. I simply do the good smart business research and I listen to the facts instead of making emotional decisions.
Even as I share this episode, some people are going to be really pissed off by it and they’re going to be like, “I hate that she said that. I don’t like that she’s talking about this.” I was actually teaching a class this week for a brand and I shared a concept and I said, “Listen, I think that this is the way that the industry is headed,” and several people in the chat were like, “I don’t agree with you,” and “I don’t like that you said that.” That’s okay. You don’t have to agree with me and you don’t have to like that I said it. But if in six months it becomes the reality, my hope is that you think back to this day and you say, “Well, damn it, she was right.”
As you listen to this episode, I invite you to not like everything I say, but to also keep it in the back of your mind so that, when and if it becomes the reality, knowing that my predictions episodes are pretty dead on, you have the skills you need to adapt because next year, 2023, and the following year, 2024, are going to be years of adaptation. That is going to be the theme.
There is no doubt that the world is moving fast, the business is evolving quickly. I want to just start at the top. This is one of the things we have to talk about. But when we look at the fact that big tech is doing mass layoffs for the first time in over a decade. I mean since the tech booms since Silicon Valley happened, we have never seen layoffs like this. When you look at the fact that companies like—I won’t even talk about Twitter, ’cause Twitter’s on a different playing field and they’re going through their own evolution. So let’s leave them out of the conversation.
Let’s just talk about Uber. Let’s just talk about Carvana. Let’s just talk about Facebook. When we look at companies like that, laying off thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands of people, that tells you that the world is changing and if you’re not evolving with it, you will 100% be left behind.
Changes like that do affect our industry. Even if you live way outside of Silicon Valley, you will be affected in 2023, and I want to talk about how.
First thing we need to know, the big question for everybody: is the recession coming? Is this just a rumor mill? Is this is going to be our reality? When I first started talking about the recession, it was actually February of 2022. Flash forward, I’m recording this podcast episode several weeks ahead of it airing, but at this time, over 90% of economists are calling for a recession. Many are saying we’re already in it. We’re seeing a lot of key indicators. There’s a little bit of a lag in reporting when it comes to things like unemployment and national debt and stuff like that, but a lot of economists are saying once the reporting catches up, we will be in it. Some others are saying it’s going to land end of 2022 into 2023. Some are saying we’re not going to really feel it until more like later 2023.
In some markets they are feeling it already. I was talking to—I won’t say her by name, but a great stylist I’ve been working with for many years was saying in the Chicago market, they are already feeling it at scale. I know I’m in Northern California, businesses here are feeling it at scale. So it probably depends on where you are, but it’s happening.
I want to read you a quote from economist Nouriel Roubini. I hope I’m saying that name correctly. Roubini says, “I see a severe recession starting in the US at the end of this year and lasting probably through all of 2023. It’s not going to be short and shallow.” The New York University economics professor told Bloomberg last month, meaning October of 2023. There’s all kind of varying opinions on this as far as is it going to be severe, is it going to be light?
The one thing that we know for certain is that this recession is caused by inflation. If you want to know what that means, I have several podcasts on that that I released this year and what it means for the industry and the US people as a whole. But inflation is the cause of this.
Because of that, it’s not going to be identical to the recession that hit in 2007, 2008, 2009. I was part of the industry when that happened. A lot of you fellow fighters were too and the war cry is “We made it through” at that time. We’ll make it through it again.
I agree, but what I want you to know is it will not be your 2008 recession. It’s not going to be coupon cutting, Groupon, coupon clippers, discount codes. It’s going to be a different game. A big part of what’s different is that our economy is filled with cash right now. Now there is an abundance of money.
So we say to ourselves, if there is so much cash floating around—and I’m talking like hundreds of millions, billions of dollars inflated into the economy. False money, it’s not even backed by anything and that’s what got us to this place. But with plenty of cash flowing around, it can’t possibly be exactly what we experienced in 2008, which was a lack of cash that was caused by a housing crisis where people didn’t have enough money to pay their bills. This is different. Big business is suffering. Inflation is causing people to change their consumer behavior, and we all need to adapt to that as a people, as small business providers, as hair stylists, as salon owners, as all the things.
We’re going to get into what that money means because that doesn’t mean you get to take a load off and say, “Plenty of money, I’m going to be fine.” It means we need to change the way we look at business.
Prediction number one, I think that we will see mass layoffs in most large business sectors for a good chunk of the year. I think it could affect a lot of different industries. Like I said, I don’t have a crystal ball. I know tech is crumbling far and fast right now. I don’t know if it’s going to be manufacturing. I don’t know what the next industry that’s going to feel it is. But what I know is it will happen. It will likely happen at large and hundreds of thousands of families will likely be affected. It will be painful to watch, for all of us to watch our family and our friends go through that.
I think props to us and those of you listening to this podcast who did choose the self-made path that I did where you chose to become a stylist, an esthetician, a salon owner, a barber, a makeup artist, a tanning artist, or you’re one of the beautiful listeners who has nothing to do with the beauty industry but listens to the show because it inspires them. Congratulations to you for choosing a self-made path and not being a part of the big business machine because you’re in the driver’s seat.
Here’s the rub: it doesn’t mean you won’t take a financial loss in 2023 and I want to talk about that. When I say mass layoffs, what I fear is that our industry will actually see a good amount of layoffs as well. We saw it happen in 2020. I’ve seen estimates of anywhere from 60,000 to a hundred thousand beauty professionals left the industry in 2020 because of the pandemic. You can call those layoffs if you want to. You can call those voluntary quits, you can call some of them terminations. But when we lost 10% of our industry over a period of months, that was painful. There is a real chance that a good sector of our industry is going to get hit hard again.
The thing that makes me nervous is everybody thinks, “Oh, the poor newbies.” Oh, I’m not worried about the newbies. I’m not worried about the newbies at all. I’m worried about the OGs who are comfy and are following outdated practices and are thinking that the trends of five years ago are going to get them through 2023 and they’re not. That’s what scares me.
Let’s move forward. I’m going to come back around to that, but I want to get into my second prediction, and my second prediction is that our industry as a whole, revenue-wise, should perform well. When I looked at the economic predictions for 2023, the consumer discretionary sector is actually projected to be the strongest sector in 2023, which is great news for us.
When you look at consumer discretionary, we have automobiles and auto components, consumer durables and apparel. That could be household, that could be stuff you order on Amazon, it could be clothes you wear, all of those kind of things are luxury goods. It could be the new house you buy, could be a new diamond ring you purchase, all of those things fall into that category consumer services.
Hotels, restaurants, cruise lines, all of those things are set to do really well, and then retailing. Distribution, internet and direct marketing, retail, specialty retail, services retail. And what’s great is we fall into that category.
I talked about this on a previous episode, the Lipstick Effect, which is that when the economy tanks, people seek out ways to find joy because we lose the predictability in our business. We lean into the YOLO factor of you only live once, I’m going to enjoy it, I’m going to travel, I’m going to find myself, I’m going to treat myself, I’m going to rebuild my confidence, and we as an industry can really support all of those feelings.
The great news is that luxury hair services will be sustained. However, consumer choices will be adjusted, which leads into prediction number three. I think we’re going to start to see what I call the great divide in the industry. I started talking about this in early 2022 is again, another one of the things I talked about that pissed people off because people don’t like it when I speak negatively and I don’t like to talk negatively either, but I also like to be a realist.
I think that for years we’ve seen a revolution in the industry. Can I get an amen on that? We have literally in the last three to four years seen people really take this industry seriously and change the way that they look at business. And we’ve seen a small sector of the industry, I want to say less than 10%, make some really powerful business decisions and revolutionize, evolutionize the way that we look at what it means to run a salon or to be a stylist. Some of those changes piss people off and that means that we are evolving. My concern is that the 90% who have stayed comfortable and who have become risk averse and who have said, “Well, that’s always worked for me before so I’m not going to change it,” or who fight things like social media and feel like it’s a waste of time, or fight the changes that need to be done in marketing, in hiring, in the way that you compensate your team, in the way that you take care of booth renters, in the way that you market your salon space and what it looks like to be an owner and what it looks like to be a service provider and what it looks like to create an amazing client onboarding experience. The people who have fought away from those evolutions, I am genuinely nervous for you because what happens when our economy goes into what it’s going into, especially when inflation is high like it is, is people will not stop spending money. People start spending scared.
You can look this up. When people get scared, which they will—people are already scared, they’re hearing the word “recession” and people are scared. What happens is they start saying, “Well, I’ve got money, but I’m going to be a lot more careful where I spend it.”
When you say, “Wow, but my clients love me. They trust me. Susie’s been seeing me for 15 years,” but what was going on in Susie’s life in the 15 years is going to be different than what’s going on in her life in 2023 and we are watching it everywhere right now. Clients are getting what I call the wandering eye and they’re starting to say things like, “Well, Michael was an incredible stylist for a really good time, but there’s this new up and coming stylist, Janet, and she looks great. I mean she looks great and people are trusting her and she’s got all these great online reviews and I’m kind of looking for a fresh start.” She’s leaning into that lipstick effect and she’s feeling like she needs a revival. Because her stylist or because her salon got stagnant and didn’t evolve, she’s going to choose a different service provider.
I don’t want it to be that way, but we can’t fight what consumers are choosing to do. If you think this is one of those things that I’m just making up, the reason I’m speaking to it is I get DMs weekly. There are posts in the Thrivers Facebook groups talking about this already happening. I’m saying it’s going to happen tenfold in 2023. This is why I call it the great divide. Some of you who have built phenomenal brands and whose perceived value is to the moon and back and who have really embraced what modern business looks like are going to have a landslide victory financially next year. 2023 and 2024 will be the most rapid years of your growth that you’ve ever experienced.
For those of you who have not evolved, I’m scared for you. I think that there will be mass losses. I think people will lose massive amounts of money. It’ll happen really fast and they’ll feel blindsided by it. This is my word to warning on that as you can’t be comfortable heading into next year.
Let’s talk about my next prediction, which is also a fact. Prediction number four, the flooding of the industry. How many of you felt like, “You know what, for the last couple of years that coming out of Covid, business has actually been pretty good?” Coming out of 2020, 2021, 2022, business was pretty good. We made good money. We were seeing good new guest requests, we were retaining really well. Amazing. I’m glad you had a good two years and I hope that you were smart with your money ’cause that’s all about to change.
The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports that our industry is growing by 11% over the next few years. That’s a public statistic. You can look it up. That is categorized as one of the fastest industries growth-wise in the US today and that doesn’t mean consumer spending. That means new employees entering the marketplace, newly licensed cosmetologists. What that means to us is over 110,000 new beauty professionals are landing. Remember when I said a hundred thousand beauty pros left in 2020? They’re back and they’re back with vengeance because it’s a new breed and they’re coming for you. The challenge is we say, “Oh, well, these youngsters, they don’t know.” Oh, they know and they’re going to lap us if we’re not careful.
I want to talk about that for a minute. How is it that our industry is growing so fast? Why are we being so deeply affected by this new group of cosmetologists who want to come in? And when I say new cosmetologists, a lot of us think Gen Z, okay, like more 18, 19, 20-year olds joining the industry, Uh uh. What we’re seeing is a lot of people left their corporate jobs and chose to go into personal services.
Not everybody coming out of cosmo school is a Gen Z. A chunk are, but a lot are millennials, a lot are Gen X, some are boomers. For those of you who are like, “Gen Z can’t get me,” well, the millennials and the Gen Xers who are fierce and hungry or coming for you, so be careful on that.
Forbes reported that undergraduate admissions for colleges coast to coast in the US decreased by more than 662,000 in 2022 alone. Over 600,000 students are choosing trades or to go into the workforce instead of going to college. This is the greatest decline that the advanced education sector has seen ever. Things, they are a’changing.
We need to know that competition is going to get stiff and I’m going to talk about what that looks like and how it’s going to affect the industry at large.
My next prediction, which I believe is prediction number five, is that booth rental and commission salons are going to see an influx of applicants. Everybody’s like, “Oh, the suites are taking all of our stylists.” Yeah. So the hundred thousand people who are not going to be able to pull off affording a suite right away, they’re going to need a few years to work somewhere else are coming for you, booth rental salon owners and your commission salon owners. I know the last two years have been tough and you’ve been sweating bullets saying, “Why isn’t there anybody for me to hire and feel like I’m losing everybody to studio suites?” This is not a knock to studio suites. I’m not saying that studio suites are going to take a dip. What I’m saying is there’s a new influx of new grads who can’t afford that bottom line and so they’re going to be coming to look for work in booth rental and commission.
So often we look at the now and we’re like, “Ugh, this is the end of commission salons. This is the end of booth rental salons. Everybody wants to go to a studio suite.” Y’all, think forward. Look at what’s happening now, not what happened in the last two years. You have to realize all these new grads need a place to land, so understand that they’re going to be coming for you.
Which leads into prediction number six, assisting programs will see a dramatic shift. I’ve talked about this openly on the podcast a few times. I’ve done a couple of private Thrivers trainings about it, about what will need to happen in the evolution of assisting programs. If you have an assisting program that takes six months, nine months, a year, 18 months to get through, you’re going to have a hard time hiring moving forward. The beauty industry graduates who are in school right now don’t want anything to do with that. They don’t want a six-month, nine-month, 12-month, 18-month, two-year training program. You will not hire them. The best of the best will not be interested in that. They want to get it moving in a different kind of way.
Then the logical side of us says, “Well, I can’t put somebody, it’s irresponsible for me as a salon leader to put somebody untrained out onto the floor.” Okay, so then don’t do that. Then figure out a way to train them more in-depth faster, figure out a different vetting process, a different hiring process.
Then the question becomes how are you increasing the perceived value of your salon so that you are attracting the best and the brightest who are hungry and dedicated to come in and work for you.
Anybody had a hard time recently hiring great stylists? They don’t show up for their interviews, they’re late, they’re lackadaisical, they’re not the quality of person you’re looking for. Whose fault is that? Yours. Stylists aren’t getting lazy, they’re getting particular. And for whatever reason, the messaging you’re putting out there is not the one that they are looking to receive. We can go deeper in depth on this but this is a huge challenge. It’s going to affect those of you who double book, double column, and work with assistants.
One of my next predictions, which I think is prediction number seven, is I actually think we’re going to see a surge and apprenticeships come back around.
And in a lot of countries outside the US—I happen to be US based. I know I have an international listenership, but I’m going to talk to the US-based stylist. About 40,000 of my weekly listeners come from that base. When we look at apprenticeship, for a lot of years it was like the stepsister of the beauty industry. Over 90% chose a traditional path where they went to school and they got their license and then they joined an assisting program or went straight out and started working independently. Because newly licensed cosmetologists don’t want the traditional assisting experience that we formerly had, which is they assist a stylist for six months, nine months, 12 months, longer. They’re helping with shampoos, they’re helping with blowouts, they’re helping with foiling in a more advanced assisting program. They’re hands in, they’re really involved. Unfortunately, they don’t want that in the same way they used to. I know you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what I got. It’s super sexy.” Yeah, it’s just not working anymore. What happens now is stylists want to get onto the floor faster. However, for some of you, you’re like, “I need a right hand. I want somebody who’s going to be doing shampoos for me for at least the next year. I want somebody that I can truly train from the ground up.” Cool. What you want is an apprentice.
You want to hire an apprentice and you want to take somebody green and you want to truly mentor and mold them. The cool thing about hiring an apprentice is depending on what state you’re in, they’re locked in to working with you for a year or two, sometimes three, depending on what kind of licensure they’re looking for and what the hourly requirement is.
I know in California right now to be a barbering apprentice, you need more than twice as many hours working as an apprentice. Then you do graduating from a school program. Do you know what I mean? So I’d have to look it up. I was looking it up the other night, but let’s say you needed 800 hours to get your barbering license. You need over 2000 to get your barbering apprentice. You would be locking somebody in. They literally can’t go work anywhere else unless they find another apprentice who’s willing to transfer their hours and it’s a huge paperwork nightmare. I mean, you’re getting a long-term assistant.
If that’s what you’re looking for, hire an apprentice, start an apprentice program, and build that out in 2023.
Here’s the thing, cosmetology schools are already getting overwhelmed by applications. My daughter is currently in cosmetology school. Her class is the largest class that has ever gone through the campus. It happens to be the school that I went to as well. Never been larger and they’re going to be turning students away for the first time in a really long time because they can’t take them on. Imagine if your salon had an apprentice program to catch all of those who couldn’t go to traditional cosmetology school and you showed them how your path was even better.
For those of you who like the idea of a more traditional assisting program, rethink it. Rethink how you can make this work for you and both the people that you hire as well.
Prediction number, I believe this is eight, consumers are expected to be much more particular about where they invest, opting for more evolved and sophisticated brands. I read that in my research here, there, and everywhere. Like we talked about, I said, inflation is an all-time high. There’s plenty of money in the economy. Consumers will just be very picky about how and where they spend it. And when I say evolved and sophisticated brands, I don’t mean “Well, my clients have been seeing me forever.” “Well, I’m like a figure in the community.” “Well, my reputation precedes me.” No, evolved and sophisticated, which is a totally different formula. That may have worked for you. Your salon reputation, your reputation as a stylist may have gotten you to this point, but what I’m telling you is what got you here won’t get you there. It won’t get you through 2023.
An evolution is going to be required to stay at the very top, which leads into prediction number nine, values-based brands will win. People want to know what your values are. People want to know what you care about, what you stand for, who you align with, what brands you align with, why you choose to align with those brands, why you choose the services that you do, how you serve your clientele. All of those things count.
Just doing good hair is worth very little value at this point. This is why things like for a long time, if you had a color certification or an extension certification, it was like, “Ooh, they’re fancy.” Yeah, consumers today don’t care so much about that anymore. It’s not what have you done in the past, it’s what have you done for me lately? And that’s going to be the brand messaging, the values that you share, the online reviews that you have, your communication, your brand messaging if I didn’t already say that. Values-based brands are going to win in 2023.
If your brand is just pretty, pretty, good hair, good hair, good hair, look how fancy I am, it’s going to be a rough ride because values, brands, and authenticity are winning. We are seeing brand deals fall apart left and right in both big and small business because of values.
Prediction number 10: in-person education and skills-based education will surge. Okay, so kills me a little bit inside to say this, I’m a digital educator primarily, right? The challenge is the digital education sector is seeing a massive shift. I’ve talked about that a lot this year. Big, big shift. We’re seeing much more deeper value in-person education and also skills-based education, cutting, coloring.
If you are an educator who focuses on cutting, coloring, and extensions, chemical relaxing services, curl/texture-enhancing services, how to use hair care products, you are in for a treat because people are wanting to really sharpen those skills in those arenas, especially new graduates.
Knowing that tens of thousands of people are joining the industry at large at a time, if you are teaching cutting color, any kind of physical hair skill, the world is going to be your oyster. I’m envious of you because it is going to be very easy to get new students into your classes in a way that we have not seen in recent years.
How many of you feel like cutting and cutting/color educators are a dime a dozen right now? We saw over the last few years, I mean you could take a balayage class here, there, and everywhere. It was like everybody was teaching it. What happened was the pressure flushed a lot of educators out. Educators got burnt out, a lot of stuff took place. The educators who are still fighting strong and those who choose to create solid education brands teaching to skills, it is going to be a landslide victory for you heading into 2023, 2024, 2025, because there’s going to be a huge demand for those services.
I’m a business coach. For those of us who are business coaches, buckle up, it’s going to be a little bit different. New grads don’t realize they need you. For those of us who are like, “Amazing, a hundred thousand beauty professionals coming in,” when you talk to my daughter who’s in cosmetology school or her boyfriend who’s at a barber in school, they have no interest in learning business skills. We can say, “Oh, they’re naive.” Or “Britt Seva’s daughter doesn’t want to learn what she teaches.” No, ’cause she’s just a normal person. They haven’t been burned by the industry yet. They don’t realize that they need that business-based education.
What they want is to learn their skills. What they are well aware of is they’re not learning enough in cosmetology school and they want to learn physical skills. Those of you who are teaching physical skills are going to do really, really well.
Now, that also creates a gap. For those of you who are like, “I’m scared and I want to make sure that my business stays sharp and I want to stay out ahead of all these changes and shifts and trends,” leaning into a program like Thrivers Society, like super solid business-building education is a great way to safe-proof yourself and make sure that you’re staying cutting edge and out ahead and your perceived value stays high and your pricing is solid and you know what to do and you have a community to support.
I hope this prediction show has been helpful. If you have any questions, please leave me a rating or review on iTunes. In the comments with that rating and review, leave me any questions that you have and I will do my best to clarify anything moving forward.
I’m here for you, I’m going to continue to support you in 2023 and we’ll see which of these predictions shake out.
As I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
