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 we are going to talk about how to grow and feeling capped out, and the five restraints that exist within your business.
There’s five restraints that exist within all of our businesses. Yours, mine, everybody’s in between. A lot of times we aren’t even aware of these restraints. We’re focused on the wrong restraint, or we’re frustrated by our results and we can’t pinpoint why. I want to talk about what holds any business back, even the most successful ones.
This episode was inspired by a listener named Bailey. Whether you know this or not, if you leave me a rating or review on iTunes, I read every single one of them. This is the best way to get show topics in to me, so if there’s a question you have for me or something you want me to talk about, make sure you leave me a rating or review on iTunes and I’ll do my best to get to it.
This comes in from Bailey. Bailey says, “This podcast is absolutely amazing and I recommend it to everyone. I have a question. I’ve been a salon studio suite owner and a Thriver since January of 2020.” She’s in my Thriver Society program, she’s a studio suite owner. “I previously worked in a very mom-and-pop commissioned salon for 10 years that was very old school with no room for growth so I went out on my own, and I’ve loved every minute. Since joining Britt’s Thrivers Society and being out on my own, I’ve more than doubled my net income from 32 grand a year to 70 plus, all while taking four weeks’ vacation, scaling my schedule back to 25 hours a week, and only doing one evening a week, and two Saturdays a month.”
Bailey’s really working the dream schedule: part-time, one evening a week, two Saturdays a month, four weeks’ vacation a year, and has more than doubled her income.
“I also no longer double book and I only take color and extension clients, no haircut only. I’m absolutely loving my schedule and I’m so proud to be able to make more money while being able to scale my schedule back and have a better work-life balance.”
Bailey is working the dream business for a lot of our standards, but she says, “However, I feel like I’m capped out and I’m at a loss for what my next steps are. The ultimate goal is to own a full salon with employees. But for now, I’m in a single studio suite and I’m consistently booked out two plus months in advance. The majority of my clients are gray root retouches and need to come in every four to six weeks.”
So Bailey’s built a clientele that has high frequency, right? They’re coming in every month or every six weeks. That’s really good and the demand is there for her.
“My specialty is multi-dimensional colors and extensions, and I’d like to continue down that path. I’ve scaled back on my marketing funnel though, because I just don’t have room to put anyone new.” Bailey’s reached the Thrivers Society problem of, “Oh my gosh, I’ve created so much demand for myself, I can’t even serve them all.” She’s had to take her foot off the gas pedal when it comes to building clientele in her marketing funnel ‘cause it’s almost working too well.
She says, “How do I grow from here without having to add more hours back to my schedule?” If you know something about me and my coaching, I never advise somebody to add more hours to their schedule ever. Never is that a part of my coaching, of, “You’ll need to work more, you’ll need to do more.”
But as we talk about the five restraints, please know that Bailey has said, “I’m not interested in working more,” which is okay, I wouldn’t coach her to do that anyway. But she says, “What are the next steps that will take me from where I am now to working towards the path of full salon ownership with employees?”
That is the question. She wants to go from where she is now to having a full salon with employees.
“My thoughts have been to do a pretty significant price increase, like 20 to 30% in the hopes of losing some current clients to make room for new target market clients. I’d love to upgrade to a double suite, and hire an apprentice or a junior stylist that I could feed all of my maintenance color to, giving me more room in my schedule. But there aren’t any current doubles open in my area. Any advice?”
Bailey, really great question and this opens up the door to some really great conversation. Even if you hear me describe Bailey’s business and you’re like, “Well, those are first world problems,” because Bailey has built this beautiful business for herself and she’s doubled her income while working part-time. She doesn’t work evenings, she doesn’t work weekends, she has more clients than she can handle. Poor Bailey. But this is a successful stylist problem.
When I talk about the four stylist archetypes, we have Struggling, we have Sinking, we have Sacrificing, and we have Scaling. Bailey falls into that fourth category of Scaling. She’s built a scalable business, but when even when you get to scalable, you’re still playing the game of business and there’s still challenges.
What I want to talk about is the five restraints that live in all of our businesses and then Bailey, I am going to give you some one-to-one advice of what I would do next based on what you shared with me.
I want you to reflect on your business now, everybody who’s listening to this, and think about what you want more of. Most of the time when I ask that question, “What do you want more of?”, 99.9999% of time, people say “Money.” People come to me for business coaching and I am very well aware of that. I can teach you to make more money. That’s very easy for me. The pieces that can be harder are teaching you to make money with balance.
When I talk about wealth, I believe that the two greatest resources we have in this lifetime are going to be money and time, and time is the resource we can’t get back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
So we always have to look at money, we have to look at time, and then we have love, and we have health. Those are the four areas of wealth in anybody’s world
I want you to think to yourself, “What is it that you want more of?” I know you want more money. There’s very few people who are like, “…and I don’t want more money.” Everybody would take more money, of course. Beyond money, what do you want more of? When you hear about somebody like Bailey’s schedule, she’s got great free time and nowhere in her request to me did she say, “I want more time.” She’s happy with her schedule and now she’s in the place where she wants to take on more responsibility.
Bailey’s at this place where more to her means an opportunity to be a salon leader. She does want to make more money. She’s not willing to sacrifice her time in the process.
I want you to ask yourself what is it you want more of? What is it you want less of? And what are you willing to do to make the more money? Fair questions.
As you’ve asked that question, I want to lay out for you the five restraints that exist for any of us in building and growing business. The first of which, and I think it’s the most obvious, is time. Time is a major restraint when looking to build business. All of us have different time restraints and time restraints change based on the season of life that any of us are in.
If you’re raising a young family, balancing home and your children and work is a restraint. It feels like there’s not enough time. Some of you work two jobs. Again, time is a restraint. You only have so many hours in the day, so time can feel like a major restraint for us.
When we look at the restraint of time, you have to ask yourself, knowing that it’s a restraint, knowing that it is a limitation, knowing that time is a factor that can hold me back in how much I want to grow or the ways in which I want to grow, are you happy with how you’re spending and allocating your time? Question mark.
Time is a resource, like I mentioned just a moment ago. How are you investing that resource?
All of us are hectic. Everybody’s the “B” word—busy—to a different degree. But when you do look at how your time is being allocated, do you feel like it’s being spent appropriately because time wasted will be one of your greatest life regrets and there’s lots of different ways that we can waste time. But I want you to really ask yourself, “Am I allowing time to be a restraint in my business?” How often do you say, “I know I should do that, but I don’t have the time?”
Yes you do. You have the time. You’re not choosing to allocate time towards that thing. Whatever that thing is that you’re saying, “I don’t have time for that,” actually, you do have time for it. You’re choosing not to spend time on it. It’s not the same thing.
Sometimes we choose not to allocate time on things that are not going to push us towards where we want to be, but sometimes we don’t allocate time because of some of the other restraints I’m going to get into in a moment.
But I really want you to think about your relationship with time. For me, business unlocked for me when I got over the restraint of time. When I developed a better relationship with time, my business opened up in a huge way.
When I say “better relationship with time,” I was willing to make some short-term sacrifices for long-term gain time-wise, and now I’m incredibly wealthy in time. I can spend my time however I want to and I can say no to everything I want.
So can Bailey. Bailey’s in that position too. Is time a restraint for you and how is your relationship with time? Another restraint that holds us back in business is physical space. So we might want to pull something off, but our physical space holds us back. If you’re a booth renter and you are like, “I want to build a beautiful business,” but like Bailey was saying, she was working in a mom-and-pop shop and she was only able to make 32 grand a year. She had to shift her physical space in order to double her income. For some of you, that’s the reality. I personally was. I worked out of my home for six years. It was causing major problems in my marriage, in my home life. I wasn’t able to do all of the content and pull off all the things I wanted to do, so I needed a different physical space in order for my business to get where I wanted it to go.
Do you have the physical space to build the business that you want? Again, question mark. Or do you need to move? Bailey wants to move into a bigger studio suite, but the physical space is not available, therefore that is a restraint for her. See where I’m going with this?
Number three, budget. Sometimes we just don’t have the money to pull off what it is we want to accomplish.
Often we say, if I had more money, this would all be so much easier. The irony is, and you talk to people, even talk to somebody like a Bailey who’s gone from making 35 grand a year to 70 grand a year. She could have all the money, but the physical space restraint and the time restraint and perhaps even a couple of these other restraints are still going to work against her.
The reason I think it’s important to talk about the budget restraint is so often we put so much pressure on the money. Like “If I just had the money, it would all come together.” Money is a vehicle. Money can certainly make things easier, but very rarely in business is money the secret to success. Very rarely. It’s almost always one of these other four restraints. However, if you don’t have the budget to move into a physical space that helps you to build and grow, yeah, that can hold you back, right?
If you don’t have the budget to spend on our next restraint, which is knowledge, yes, it can hold you back. So let’s lean into knowledge as a restraint.
This is the most overlooked restraint, arguably, because all of us think that we know enough. Even people like me, like I consider myself to be a lifelong learner. Learning is is my arguably my favorite thing to do other than spending time with my family. I love learning. There’s nothing I like more and I am constantly realizing how much I don’t know.
Again, going back to self-awareness, something we talked about in the podcast recently, when you become aware that a huge part of why you are at wherever it is you’re at in your life right now is based on the knowledge you currently have, a whole plethora of opportunity opens up for you. That’s why knowledge can be such a restraint. I know you think you’ve got it pretty well figured out. Once you humbly realize you don’t even know 10% of what you could possibly know that would take you to the next level, man, does opportunity open up.
Knowledge is one of the biggest restraints in business and it’s why you see people who are deeply successful still looking for mentors because very successful people know that a huge portion of their success is contingent on having the right knowledge and the right education. Not having that will be likely the number one restraint in your business. Thinking you’ve got it all figured out, you know enough, you don’t need someone to show you, you don’t need someone to help you, that will hold you back more than anything else.
Lack of knowledge is for me the number one restraint. However, the restraint that holds a lot of us back and probably the majority of the people listening to this show right now is going to be demand.
Now, Bailey doesn’t have that restraint. Bailey has more demand than she knows what to do with, right? She’s turning clients away. She’s turned her marketing funnel essentially off because she has so many new guest requests and she’s booked out so far that she can’t even serve more people. For Bailey, demand is not a restraint. But if you are not making the money you want to be making and you don’t have full books, demand is a restraint for you.
Don’t worry about figuring out anything else until you have figured out demand. For a lot of you, you’re not where you’re at in your business because the demand for what you want to make sexy, like what you want to make marketable, what you want to make profitable just isn’t there.
If you would stop focusing on tweaking things and adjusting things and making things look fancy on Instagram and instead focus on what it is you need to do to truly create more demand for what it is you offer, my gosh, would your world open up.
Almost always, demand actually comes from the operation, the guest experience side of things. Almost always. Not always, but almost always.
Circling back on the things that hold our businesses back, the five restraints that exist: the restraint of time, not enough time. Physical space, “I’m not in the right space to build the business I want.” Budget, “I don’t have the money to invest in education, knowledge, physical space,” whatever. “I don’t have the budget to do what I want to do.” Demand, you don’t have enough demand for what it is you want to be pulling off in business. There’s not enough interest in working with you. There’s not enough interest in seeing you. And then knowledge. Do you have the knowledge to create that demand? Do you have the knowledge to create more free time? Bailey got it. She joined Thrivers, she figured it out.
But do you know the path to get you to all these places? If your business is not where you want it to be, one of these five things or all five of them are most certainly holding you back, okay?
When we look at what needs to happen in order to make more money for any of us, any of us, no matter what your restraint is, there’s only three ways to make more money ever.
Number one is increasing volume, seeing more clients, doing more services. Now Bailey already said she doesn’t double book, nor does she want to. She doesn’t want that, she doesn’t want to work more hours. She doesn’t want that.
For me, from what I know about Bailey, increasing volume is not what she’s after. She’s got the volume that makes her happy, so she’s not interested in that. However, for a lot of you, increasing volume is just what you need. You haven’t yet tapped out the resources that you have. You haven’t yet maxed out your time. You haven’t yet maxed out your space. You can do more with what you have. Increasing volume is, generally speaking, the fastest, easiest way to increase revenue is going to be increasing volume.
Now, Bailey has maxed that out as far as her restraints are concerned, right, because she doesn’t want to give up more time. That’s a restraint. Okay, no worries. And you don’t have to, Bailey. But if I know Bailey’s not interested in giving up more time and she has enough demand, then increasing volume is not going to help Bailey. But for some of you, it will.
The second way to make more money is by increasing value. We had increasing volume, then we have increasing value.
My daughter and her boyfriend have both decided to go into the industry, which makes me one proud mama. She is in cosmetology school, he’s in a barbering program, and both the kids have come to me and asked me about what their financial future could be, what is possible for them, and I said, “The sky is the limit. Y’all can make as much as you want to. You can create whatever quality of life you want to in this industry. However, you can also make next to nothing. And the difference for you both is going to be increasing the value.”
When I’m coaching these two up-and-comers, and if I was to have the opportunity to come in and coach any of you listening to the other side of this podcast, I would say before we worry about the volume, let’s worry about the value.
I truly think increasing value is going to be the key to success in 2023 and beyond. Consumer behavior has changed radically. How many of you had a weird December? I did a survey on Instagram stories recently where I said, “How’s business feeling this December?” ‘cause I’ve heard the rumblings. Over 40% said they felt like they were seeing less guests in December than they ever had before in their business. People were saying that clients are starting to push their appointments out. Visit frequency is waning.
I’ve been talking about the recession since February of 2022. Y’all, we’re just now seeing this, starting to see this shift in consumer behavior. I don’t know how long it will last. I’m projecting years. I don’t think it’s going to be a short-term impact. I think it’s going to be a long-term impact. So all of the education that I share on this podcast is going to be shifting towards how do we adapt to this new generation of clients? Because clients are changing, their behavior is changing, their patterns are changing, their needs are changing, and what they are seeking in a stylist or salon is changing radically, and I truly believe increasing value is going to be the key to success.
Bailey, for you, I think increasing value would be the lever that I would pull in this time. You said that you’re considering raising your prices by 20% or something like that. Give that a shot. That might be a little bit aggressive, even given the demand that you shared with me just because consumer behavior is shifting so radically, but based on what you said, the demand that you have, the marketing funnel that you’ve built, you know what you’re doing.
Oh, you said increasing your price is 20 to 30%. Let’s start at 15 for you and see how that goes heading into early 2023, and then we can shift and grow from there.
But beyond just raising your prices—and this is why I say blanket price increases are not going to increase your money. Do you know, I’m not going to say who this was, but earlier this year I shared on the podcast, or earlier last year, I guess it will be by the time this podcast airs, I shared the story of a stylist who followed a different coaching model, increased her prices by over 20% in one shot, and her business basically fell out. It was scary for her. She reached out to me asking for advice, and then we didn’t really talk about it until about eight months later and just last week—I get emotional talking about it. Just last week she let me know, she was like, “You saved my business. The advice you gave me to not do that big, huge reckless price increase”—which she did, she pulled the trigger on and she was like, “But everything you said after my road to recovery, the way you coached me through it saved my business.”
It’s stories like that, that I do this work for. Because so often we hear the really catastrophic, very dangerous advice of “Just raise your prices and it’ll all be okay.” No, sometimes, it’s not okay. Sometimes you do that and you lose everything and it’s a free fall.
This person had built a really beautiful business and it was one recklessly-coached-to business decision that could have cost her everything.
When I say “increase value”, and I’m talking to Bailey about a price increase, I don’t mean, “Oh, you’re busy, raise your prices, everything will be great.” No, everything will not be great. You need to do everything very strategically. But Bailey, if you increase value, you pull on that lever, you can raise your prices and do just fine. But Bailey, for you, I would focus on the value.
The other thing that we can do to increase value is increasing the lifetime value of every client we see.
Imagine this. Imagine if every client who saw you stayed with you forever. You retained 100% of all of your clients all the time. Everybody listening to this podcast, if that was their reality, they’d be making half a million dollars a year or more. Truly, run the numbers. Depending on how long you’ve been in the industry, you’ve met a thousand clients by now. Some of you have met more like 3000 clients by now. Some of you have only been in the industry a couple years. You’ve met 300 clients by now. If you had retained 300 clients, you would have more business than you knew what to do with. You’d be charging a thousand bucks an hour. Legit, I’m not making stuff up and being wild and wonky. You would be so successful you wouldn’t even know how to handle it.
So when I say increasing the value, finding ways to increase retention is the fastest, easiest way to make more money, truly, there is no easier way than increasing retention. When we say value, think about lifetime value of each guest. I’m talking more than just like, “Oh, and if you sell them retail, their service ticket will go up.” Yeah, that is true, but when you think value at scale and longevity, I mean the world really opens up for you.
Then it begs the question, when people choose to leave you, why do they? Hmm, interesting. Increasing volume, increasing value. That leads us into the third way we can make more money, and that’s by expanding beyond our restraints. That’s why I had to start by telling you about the restraints because the third way to increase your money is always to expand beyond restraints.
Bailey’s like, “My physical space, I can’t bring in somebody else to help me and I don’t want to work more.” Well, what Bailey can do is choose to educate herself on what it would look like to be a good leader. Bailey, you’re like, “I want to move into a double suite, but it’s not available right now.” That’s okay ‘cause you don’t know how to be a leader yet, right? Have you taken Thriving Leadership? Have you studied what it looks like to be an exceptional leader in the industry today? If not, you need to focus on your knowledge restraint first.
It’s funny, you know I’m into the power of the universe, y’all or whoever it is you pray to, but when you create capacity for something, the world opens up. Bailey, I’d love for you to follow up with us on this, but I have a gut feeling that if you spend the time learning to be a great leader and you continue working on increasing the value, like I talked about, that double suite will open up just at the right time for you.
So when I say expanding beyond your restraints, if Bailey’s current restraint issue works in a space that’s too small to hire her team, focus on the knowledge for now, focus on a different restraint, expand the restraint of knowledge. Once you’re able to move into the space, the restraint of demand will take care of itself. This is why, Bailey, I also don’t want you to increase your price point too much.
If your goal is to have somebody come in and mentor under you, and you mentioned in your message that you want that person to do all of your root touchups, like your maintenance work for you, if you decrease the demand, then that whole model starts to fall apart. That’s again why I don’t want her to aggressively raise her prices because I want you to keep that demand flow where it’s at so that your future aspiration can come through. You know what I mean? I think a lot of people think shortsighted about, “Oh my gosh, she’s got so much demand.” Raise her prices, she’s booked out too far. It’s like, ah, ah, but did you hear what she said that her goals are? We don’t want to cut that demand so low that she’s now no longer able to feed this long-term career vision that she’s building, right?
So Bailey, I hope that helped. Everybody who’s listening, I hope that you got some clarity on restraints, the three ways to increase your income, and some sense of what’s going to work best for you next. Y’all so much love, happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
