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 today we’re talking about what to do when a stylist goes bad.
I want to get to the core of why I chose this topic and really to the root of why you would ever have a stylist in your space that isn’t a good fit or that takes a turn or has a negative experience.
I’ll just say right at the top of this episode, I am just waiting for somebody to come back and say, “Well, what about all the owners who were toxic?” And I understand that. There’s good and bad in every side of working with anybody and there are bad owners and they’re are bad employees and there are bad renters and there’s bad everywhere. I totally get it. I’m not sharing this episode to bash stylists by any means.
But the reality is, if you’re in business long enough, you’ll come across somebody who’s just not a great fit as an employer, as an employee, as a renter, or whatever. This episode is dedicated to what happens when you’re an owner or hopefully a leader and somebody in the space goes bad.
This message came in as a rating or a review on the show, which is the best way to get your requests in. If you leave a rating or review on iTunes and ask me a question in the rating, I will do my very best to get you covered. I’m going to read this to you. It says, “Been loving this podcast for years and I don’t see myself ever stopping. Britt has such a positive and realistic approach to everything. She’s inspired me many times over in less than 30 minutes.” Thank you for your kind words. Then goes on to say, “I’d love to hear Britt’s opinion on what should be done when a stylist that no longer works at a salon is doing everything in their power to slander it, both in-house with the remaining staff and to the public eyes. Thank you, Britt, for sharing your knowledge and power.”
We are going to dig into this and we’re going to talk about good hiring practice, good stylist management practice, good terminations. I want to talk about all of it. But the first thing I want to remind everybody is that hurt people hurt people, right? Have you heard that saying before the only reason anybody ever spends their time, energy, or effort trying to bring others down is because they are deeply hurt, period. There is no other reason for it.
And this stylist feels done wrong. I’m sure you have your own side of that, but if this stylist left and felt really good about the situation, you would be the least of their concerns. When a stylist leaves and they’re happy, they don’t say two peeps about you any longer. There might be at that initial of, “Oh, why’d you leave?” “Well, this, that, or the other thing,” but then it really dies down and there’s no point in going back and trying to convince your staff that they should leave too.
The reason why people do that is because they are hurt. I want to, before we talk about how to resolve the issue with the stylist that you’re currently having, we have to go back to the core of why this happened.
I have had to fire probably 70 or 80 people in my course of being a leader, not in the company I necessarily have today, although I have fired people in the company I have today. But in my time as a salon leader, dozens of people. At the end of the year, we would get our W2s. We were a blended salon team, but the bulk was employees and we would get our W2s that had to be mailed out to employees who were no longer with us. There was always a hefty stack. Most of the team members who weren’t with us were those I let go.
I was taught many, many years ago and have always followed the rule hire slow, fire fast. In the times where I have been slow to fire, I’ve paid the price and my team member who should have been fired earlier also paid the price. They ended up hurt. Because the longer you allow somebody to stay in your place in space, marinating in their own funk, the worst experience it is for them, for you, and for everybody else in the building.
I want to dig into my own experience in what happens when we aren’t careful in the way that we hire. We aren’t careful in the way that we manage our team and how those who do leave us, either by termination or by choice, end up being the hurt people who choose to hurt people. Let’s get to the root of the issue.
One of the things I always ask myself when somebody quits or when I fire somebody is where did I go wrong? Even in the darkest of days when I’ve let people go, where my overall feeling was “Good riddance, I am so glad that none of us have to work with this person anymore,” I hired that person. I made that choice. They didn’t just come wandering in and I started giving them money. I made the strategic choice to hire that person.
So to this owner who’s coming to me and saying, “One of our stylists is running all over town badmouthing us,” you have to take partial accountability for that. This is where I think a lot of owners need to step up as leaders. You invited that person into your space initially and I’m sure they were lovely, I hope actually they were lovely in the interview and that’s why you brought them along, but something changed. Either you didn’t do a good screening at the time of interview, which again is your fault. Maybe you were tempted because they had a large social following or because they had a clientele already so you thought bringing them in would be easy or they seemed to fit in with everybody or whatever.
You chose to bring them here, they ultimately ended up being a bad fit either immediately or over time.
It is important that all of us as leaders look back and say, how could I have done that differently? Should they have never been hired in the first place? Should they have been let go a long time ago? Or should I have managed them differently? Those are three really good questions to get curious about whenever somebody is leaving the space.
Let’s go back to day-to-day team management. First rule is always going to be prioritize culture, not money or skill. This is really hard for people. People will keep bad team members around too long because they’re worried about the financial implications or the loss of skill when they let somebody go. Y’all, do you know how many skilled people or highly profitable people there are out in the world right now looking for amazing teams to work at? And what they can’t find is great camaraderie, great community, and great culture. There is plenty of skill and talent and we have never had more money in circulation than we’ve ever have in this moment, right? Five times more cash is in circulation right now than was in circulation just three years ago.
There’s no shortage of money and there’s no shortage of skill. What there is a shortage of is great culture and true leadership.
So what happens is if you keep team members around because you’re like, “They’re too valuable, they’re the team trainer, they are so experienced, they carry so many certifications, they have a huge clientele,” but they’re miserable. Do you realize that by keeping that one person who basically has you by the neck at this point convinced that they’re so invaluable because of their skills or their clientele or whatever, you might have lost six other incredible stylists that you could have attracted? But they do not want to come into this cesspool of a terrible culture you have right now because you have one rotten apple spoiling the bunch, which leads into my second point, don’t poison the well.
I can think back to pretty much every team I’ve been a part of or led in the last 25 working years I’ve had. And yes, I started working when I was literally a child. When I think back there was always a person or two—you know these people, where they walk in the room and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I hope they’re in a good mood today.” Or they’re big giant question marks. They are gossips, they cause problems. They are never happy, they are not constructive, they don’t want to be coached, they’re not interested in learning. They think they’ve got it all figured out. They’re better than everybody and they like you to feel threatened. You know the people I’m talking about.
In a way you are threatened by them. You’re afraid that if they leave, you’ll lose money, you’ll lose skill, you’ll lose authority in the marketplace. Or they’ll go on to do exactly what this salon owner’s experiencing, they’ll go on to badmouth you.
Instead of cutting the ties with the person who gossips, causes problems, is never happy, doesn’t enhance the culture, isn’t interested in learning, causes all these issues for you, instead of cutting ties with the bad apple, you keep them around hoping something gets better or to not rock the boat.
In doing so, you are going to lose good people. Good people don’t put up with that nonsense. When people say, “I have a really hard time hiring,” I always say, “Well, first things first, look around at the staff you have existing who could be deterring other people like top talent from choosing to work for you.”
If there is somebody in your place and space that’s just not a fit, it is so much better for you, for them, and for everybody else to do the kind thing and let them go. It may not feel kind in the moment, but allowing them to stay, poison your well, and keep themselves in misery ain’t it. Something has to change.
Now how do we do that in a constructive way? Two pieces have to be there. One, job descriptions. I know everybody in this industry hates job descriptions. Your stylists need job descriptions and there should not just be one job description for any hair stylist who walks in your space. There should likely be multiple job descriptions for different stylists at different levels with different roles and responsibilities. If somebody in your space happens to do the stocking and inventory for you, they need a job description. It can’t just be a handshake agreement of “Well, they just kind of do it ’cause they like it and they’re good at it.” You can’t. It makes it very difficult to run the team as a whole when there is no clearly defined description and expectation.
What happens is if there’s nothing in writing, the team member thinks that one thing is going on, you as the owner think another thing is going on, and then everybody else in the building assumes a third thing is happening. And what is the truth? Nobody knows because there’s nowhere to look for the correct answer.
You know what else? Everybody’s correct and everybody’s wrong. The person doing the job thinks they’re correct ’cause that’s how they’re doing it. But maybe you think they’re wrong. It doesn’t matter what you think, nothing is defined, so everybody’s opinion is right and wrong all at the same time and it’s a mess.
That is one of the main points of conflict and friction in any business is deep misunderstanding of the expectations. It’s bit me and my team in the butt time over time where something will happen. People get upset and you’ll sit down to talk about it and one person will think one thing was happening, somebody will think something else was happening, and we’ll go back and say, “Wow, we really didn’t have clarity on what was going on,” and that’s the issue. There’s no person to blame. The process failed.
If you don’t have job descriptions, expectations, you will likely have challenges in your team dynamic. And I won’t be surprised when somebody leaves your salon and is unhappy and feels done wrong by you because they didn’t realize what the expectation was and so when they didn’t meet it and one person or the other ended up upset, that should only be expected. It was set up to fail.
The next thing we need is regular conversations and evaluations. I know a lot of salon owners who have booth renters are like, “Well, we don’t do performance reviews,” that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be a performance review, but a regular conversation of like, “Jackie, when you were brought onto the team and you chose to lease your chair, one of the things that I deeply expressed was that we have a cleanliness standard here. It includes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That should all be written down and say, “Jackie, I would love for you to continue building your clientele here, but I have yet to see you wash a color bowl,” or whatever it is, right? Whatever Jackie’s issue is.
If she says, “Well, don’t micromanage me, I’m independent here and I don’t care,” for me, I cut Jackie loose. You can’t lease a chair here if you aren’t willing to clean up, sweep up after yourself, right? I mean, there’s some basic things that need to be monitored in a community space.
We say things like, “Well, booth renters can’t be controlled.” Have you ever heard of somebody renting an apartment and being evicted for not following policy? It’s the same thing when you rent a chair. There can be policies and standards, right? If you rent an apartment and you’re not allowed to have pets there and you bring a cat in, you can be evicted for that, so the idea of booth renters are free to do whatever the heck they want, not in the eyes of the law. You can’t just do whatever. There can be standards.
The problem is that a lot of salon owners don’t have written standards. Don’t say something when those standards aren’t being upheld. And then we get to the situation where hurt people hurt people.
Imagine if I didn’t have written standards, nothing was clear, I pulled Jackie aside and I was like, “Jackie, we got to talk. Everyone in the salon’s been saying you’re pretty messy.” Jackie has every right to be pissed because now everyone in the salon is talking trash about her. No one’s been saying anything to her face. If I worked in your salon and that was the situation, I’d probably leave and talk smack about you. Probably. How unfair is that of the people who are working in the place and space that it’s okay that everyone can just say whatever, Jackie’s held to a standard that she may or may not even understand. And now that misunderstood standard is being used against her and all her peers are talking about her. How would that not be hurtful?
You could say like, “Well, if Jackie would learn to be clean—” This is one of the most fatal flaws in our industry is we assume that everybody knows what it looks like to work in a salon environment. Clearly they do not. Clearly they don’t. It’s like as a parent—I have two kids, a son and a daughter. One of my kids is naturally quite tidy. The other one lives in a pig pen. We say things like, “Oh my gosh, it’s common sense when you finish your bowl of cereal, bring it down to the kitchen if you insist on eating in your bedroom,” which is another issue for me. But if you insist on doing that, please don’t leave the bowl of milk to rot. In my mind that’s common sense.
Common sense isn’t that common and if there aren’t standards, it is unreasonable to expect a child, a team member, an employee to just read your mind. You need to have standards and regular conversations about the expectations and things not going well.
The other thing too, never should you ever in a conversation with a team member say, “Well, everybody’s saying,” or “We’re all talking about,” or “I keep hearing.” Never. You should never make a team member feel ganged up on. You are the leader. It comes down to you. You can say, “Word’s gotten back to me that X, Y, Z is going on, what’s going on with that?” But the conflict should always be with you and the team member.
You are not the best friend and you’re not their mommy. It’s really important that you are the authority figure and that they deeply understand that and that you don’t throw the rest of the team under the bus. You are the leader. It comes down to you.
I already mentioned this, but hire slow, fire fast. Very important. If something’s not going right and you’ve had the conversations and you’ve gone over the expectation and it’s just not clicking, it is the kind thing to do to let somebody go. To let them linger is only going to cause them more pain, confusion, and misunderstanding. No matter how long you go back with this person or how much they’ve done for you or whatever, you’re not running a friendship circle. You’re running a business and sometimes hard decisions have to be made.
Something else that can be helpful is legal protection when somebody is let go. If you are terminating somebody, one of the things that can help you is to offer a severance. But when and if they accept the severance, they would need to sign an agreement that releases you of liability and protects you against defamatory statements. If you have somebody say in writing that, “Yes, I agree to leave on good terms, I accept the severance as a closure to my employment, and I also agree and understand I’m not going to take legal action against this organization and I also will not say defamatory things so long as they do the same.”
Now in that, you have to understand if you come to that agreement and they sign that, you can’t say bad things about that stylist ever. You need to be kind, courteous, wish them well. Can you pull that off? Because for every stylist who leaves upset and goes on to say bad things, I’ve seen salon owners talk terrible trash about stylists who have left or been fired, even if it’s just in the back break room. If you don’t want them to do that, you have to hold to the same standard.
Talking to a legal representative about potentially drafting something up for you, please don’t try and write it yourself. But that is something that could be a tool to have in your hand, like a legal agreement of we won’t say bad things about each other, I’ll wish you well, if your clients ask where you’re going, I will tell them, which, P.S., if a stylist leaves your salon, you don’t own their clientele. Owning other humans is not legal in any country I’m aware of. You don’t own their clients, you don’t own human behavior. It is up to the clients to decide what happens next. You can’t sell a clientele, there’s no monetary value on people who choose to be patrons of a business. It is the decent thing to do if you care at all about your community and clients to tell your clients where their stylist went if they ask, okay?
It is also the decent thing to do for the stylist to only say good things about your business or to keep their mouth shut when they are asked. Having some kind of legal protection in place protects you both.
Lastly, I think it’s always best to kill ’em with kindness. I think that terminations can actually end on a really good note. There’s a lot of people who have left my organization by choice or by chance who are eligible for rehire. Sometimes it’s reason, season, lifetime, like you don’t fit in here right now, but you’re a good person and the door is open and I hope you go on and you find what you’re looking for. But if not, call me. That is okay. We can check our pride at the door for a minute, like check the ego and just say, reason, season, and lifetime. This wasn’t for you.
Now for me, if an employee of mine left and went on to badmouth me, I would 100% reach out to them without a shadow of a doubt and be like, “Jackie, listen. I’ve talked to a couple people, I know that you are feeling frustrated about the way that you left and I can understand that. I’d love to have a better understanding of what you’re feeling. If you want to send that to me in an email, that’s great. If you want to have a phone call, that’s great. If you want to have a cup of coffee, I’m here for it. But what I don’t want is for this to continue to be emotionally heavy for you.” I would also personally say, “I want you to know that the reason for the separation was for both of us to find happiness. I am finding happiness and I want that for you too. And I’d like to get to a place and space where you can spend more effort on your business and not be so focused on us. Let’s figure out a way that you can have peace,” and just be open to the conversation.
Going back to the idea that hurt people hurt people, there is suffering going on in a person who chooses to talk poorly about a former business or a former employer. If there is the opportunity to get to an understanding of that, that is always the ideal. Sometimes it’s not possible, which is why having legal protections in place definitely is a nice step. But if I had a situation where former employees were talking to my current employees about how terrible we are, my current team doesn’t think that we’re terrible, so you could tell them whatever you want and it wouldn’t affect them.
That goes back to like if you are running a really well-run business and things are overall going well, what somebody says about you can’t really hurt that bad. Like if 300 people, your clients and your team love you, one bad apple can’t take that down. The reason I wanted to bring it home with that is don’t put too much energy into it. If she spends the next decade trying to tear you down, feel sad for her. It’s not a reflection of you so much as this is where she’s literally choosing to spend her time and energy. She’s staying up at night fretting about this. That to me is heartbreaking.
Leaning into that empathy, kindness, and compassion and saying, “Is there anything I can do to end this amicably?” The power and conversation and understanding runs deep, but if we hire well, if we manage properly, and if we choose to lead instead of own, very rarely will you have somebody leave in a way that actually causes challenge and issue.
I hope this has been helpful. I hope it’s given some insights as far as leadership and how to run a great team.
Y’all so much love, happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
