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 Stylists podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and today, we’re going to talk about how to legally train assistants on trademarked methods was the question, but actually, the question leads to other questions. So let’s dig into how to pass on knowledge that you’ve learned from somebody else.
How do you reshare proprietary information? What does it look like to train assistants ethically? I just think the most basic question opens up Pandora’s box.
I want to read to you the question. This question was submitted as a rating or review on iTunes. If you don’t know, now you know that I get most of my podcast request topics from ratings and reviews, so leave me a rating or review on iTunes. I take a look there every single week and choose what to talk about on the show.
This is the question that came in. “Britt, I need your take on this. As a stylist that has invested in two extension methods, one being $5,000 to certify and the other being $500. One of these courses, meaning the $5,000, in their training mentioned we cannot teach this method to anyone else, only to whom took the class and paid for it, or they would take legal action if the information was shared or taught by someone who didn’t invest in the course. Over the years, I’ve been curious as to how stylists that have an assistant under them do these methods without teaching it to them or salon owners that do the class and teach their salon these methods. Or as a salon owner, when you bring a booth renter in and this person decides to invest in another method, not being the one that the salon owner invested in and want to learn or shadow that person doing their method. I’ve heard some stylists that work with assistants charge the assistant to assist her for all the methods she has learned that she would be sharing with her assistant through the year. So she would pay the assistant hourly, but then charge the assistant to assist her.”
Breaking that down for a little bit, it’s like if a stylist was to hire an assistant named Jane and she paid Jane hourly except for when Jane was shadowing her on extensions, and then Jane is paying the stylist back for training or something like that. That’s how I’m perceiving it. But to be totally honest, the legality on that is real dicey, but that’s what it sounds like is happening here.
Essentially the question goes on to say,” How would you navigate this dilemma? How are stylists with assistants doing this? Or salon owners with booth renters or commission-based stylists navigating this? Please share some light on this very controversial topic.”
This is spicy, this is controversial and I love this because I’m sure that if you are certified in extensions or anything like—you know, if you’re a curl cutting specialist certified in one of the methods that are out there or a certified colorist or whatever, an educator, like I’m an educator, several of my programs are trademarked. I understand and I feel like we need to dig into this.
Let me talk about my very limited experience with trademark infringement. I definitely have been involved in a couple of legal cases regarding infringement of my Thrivers Society content. I don’t speak about the details publicly. I don’t believe I ever will, I don’t think it’s a relevant storyline. I’m not trying to tear anybody apart. Generally speaking, I don’t prefer to go a legal route. Here’s what I will tell you as a word of warning from the perspective of a stylist, not from the perspective of an educator, right? I’ve created a fairly large education brand at this point. I know front-facing it looks like it’s just me and I do podcasts and I do videos.
That is far from the reality of what we have going on. I have a very complex legal structure. I have 16 full-time employees, I’ve got several contractors. We have a legal team on staff, like we have a lot going on over here. That has developed over the years. Protecting my intellectual property and my trademarks is critical. We have an annual budget in order to do that.
That being said, I have never once had to go out of my way to file infringement against somebody because when it happens that somebody has blatantly taken one of my concepts or taken a piece of my courses or stolen a graphic or an image or whatever, they are always ratted out. Never once have I had to go seeking it. Every single time a student of mine has come to me and said, “Hey, FYI, XYZ is using this.” “So and so has taken that.” “I think yada yada is teaching something illegally.” Sometimes we’ve taken legal action, sometimes we haven’t. Sometimes I wait to see how things play out.
My point in saying this is that if you are choosing to teach an extension method that you were taught in a certification program with the understanding that it is illegal for you to teach it and you’re choosing to teach it anyway, you are playing a very risky little game. Because the idea is like, “Well, I’m never going to get caught. No one’s ever going to find out.” It takes one assistant to tell on you and you can be in heaps of trouble.
I looked it up. How much does it cost to litigate a trademark? So trademark infringement, lawsuits that advance to trial are estimated to cost between $375,000 to $2 million per case. Trademark infringement is risky because there can be legal repercussions where the originator of the content can say, “Well, how much revenue was produced based on what you shared?” and they can take a portion of total revenue. They get really messy and so you have to be very careful.
A great rule of thumb is if you are reteaching something that was not yours to begin with, be prepared because if it is not your original concept or you learn something from somebody else who’s trademarked it and you’re choosing to just go off and teach it, hoping you never get caught, my thoughts and prayers are with you, but every single year this comes up for people and it can be expensive.
I will say, I’ve never gone to trial. There’s only ever been settlement. To me, it’s not about the money, it’s about the like, “Please stop. You can’t do this.” I tend to think that most other major companies, like when you say an extension brand is charging—and I don’t know who this is, I truly have no idea. I’m not knowledgeable enough on extension brands to know whose certification is 500 and who’s 5,000, so this is truly like general feedback.
If somebody is selling a certification for $5,000, you are damn right, they don’t want somebody learning that for free. It really diminishes the credibility of what they’ve created.
Imagine if you and 500 other people paid $5,000 for something, but now Susie just gets to learn it for free because she happens to work at Main Street Salon. That’s unfair to everybody who invested into the creator. It undermines the entire program.
The other thing is—remember playing the telephone game when we were in the second grade and you’d sit in a circle and I’d tell you one thing and then the person I told it to passes onto the person sitting next to them. By the time the message goes all the way around the circle, the message is not even what it was originally. That’s how passed-on education often works. The person who learned it initially can teach it 80% of the way to the person that they’re trying to teach it to. Then that person with their 80% education can teach it another 80%. Now the next person learning it is getting a 60% education quality and then the next person’s getting 50 or 40 and it goes on from there. By the time the 10th person’s being mentored, it’s not even what it was originally, but it’s like “I’m teaching you the certified way,” but you’re not though. The reason why I wanted to start with that is let’s talk about what we need to be promising assistants and what our obligation to them is.
For me, when I look back on what it was when I assisted, I was learning in a few different ways. I sat in on classes. I had six hours of dedicated education every single week. It’s not incredible. 24 hours of education a month I got for free. I didn’t clock in, I didn’t get paid for that time, but I was educated for free. It was voluntary. I’d never had to show up to a class, which is how my salon got away with not paying us for it. It wasn’t required. But if I didn’t go to classes, I could never promote to be a stylist on the floor, right? It made sense.
So I went to this 24 hours of education every month. That was me being taught by stylists who were sharing their depth of knowledge. At no point were they sharing like, “Well, I went to this class and that’s what I was taught.” They’re very much sharing from their experience. There’s no legal implication to that. That was totally okay.
Now, the other way that I learned was in my salon, we had a very aggressive training path. I was shampooing clients I think two days into date of hire. I was applying hair color probably six days in, root touch ups I would do 25 a day. From the six days into hiring, we were trained in up and running very quickly, so I learned a lot by doing.
My question to you is when you say I’m trying to teach an education method, how do I do that without infringing on trademark, I want you to think about how you’re passing along the education.
Let’s pretend I’m your assistant. I am not certified in any kind of extension method. I learned to do tape-ins, I don’t know, 15 years ago, so the technology’s completely changed. I am not adequately skilled to do any kind of extension application, so I would essentially be your assistant. Let’s say I work for you and you’re like, “Britt, you’re helping me do Amanda’s extensions today.” Cool. I show up. To me, that relationship looks like I’m handing you beads. I’m prepping wefts, I’m combing out extensions. I’m like your second set of hands. I’m clipping things up. I am not in the driver’s seat of the extension application at all.
Can I be there to support you? Can I be the second pair of hands? 1000%. Is that still helpful to you? Yes. Are you teaching me the method? No. Would I be able to master that method in full by watching it? For something like extensions, I tend to think not.
Now here’s the catch on that because some of you were like, “No, no, no, that’s how I learned.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand. I also understand that only maybe 20% of people currently offering extensions are exceptionally skilled at it and those are the people who have done hundreds of heads and done them properly and made mistakes and learned from the mistakes.
To learn by visually watching somebody or assisting somebody, you will learn the basics. You will never get to a point of mastery. That’s why things like certifications do exist.
Now, are all certifications good certifications? No. Is all education good education? No, there’s no doubt about it. But I think that sometimes we get a little too in the weeds and a little too in the details when we say, “I need someone to help me with extensions, but I don’t want to go against this trademark infringement.” I want you to think about how you are training your assistant and what the relationship with them looks like.
For example, if I wanted an assistant to help me with blow dries, I can show them one time or five times how I like to blow dry hair. They’re still going to have to put in a ton of reps to figure out how to do that themselves. So would I be like if I had taken a blow dry class and then showed somebody two times how I’m applying those techniques. If I’m not showing in full the methodology, they will not have all the pieces of the puzzle to replicate it. When you have an assistant helping you with an extension application, I don’t see why you’re teaching them every single piece of the puzzle unless you’re trying to cheat the system and you’re making this loophole of like, “Well, I didn’t actually train them on the method. They were just my assistant and they learned through the process.” If you can sleep at night saying that and you really trust this assistant to not report you to the creator of the methodology, good luck to ya, but it’s going to be your word against theirs and the burden of proof would be on you to show that you did not mentor them in this trademarked process.
Really think to yourself—this goes back to me like what is the point and purpose of assistants? I think we’ve gotten a little lost on that. I actually think that there’s two roles in the industry that we are now using the word assistant for. I think some of you want assistants and some of you want mentees.
Mentees shadow under a mentor with the hope of becoming independent sooner than later. Assistants—let me tell you about the best salon assistants we ever had. The best salon assistants we ever had in our salon were licensed cosmetologists who did not want to become full-time stylists anytime soon. There were three of them, myself being one.There was also an amazing man named John and another woman named Lindsay. So John, Lindsay and myself were at the salon for a long time without any interest in building a clientele.
Now, John, Lindsay and myself had also gone all the way through our salon’s assisting program, certified and trained under it, started to build clientele, and then decided we didn’t want to do it. I was given the opportunity to shift into management. That worked out great for me. That was my new path. For John and Linds, they stayed on for years being assistants and as assistants, they were the most beloved assistants in the salon. Every client wanted to have them. They were able to earn very aggressive hourly rate increases.
What was amazing is if you’ve ever worked with assistants and said, “Oh, I love my assistant, but I hate it when they graduate ’cause then I’ve got to start all over again,” with John and Lindsay, we didn’t have to do so much start all over again because they were constant. They were there. They could train our new incoming hires. They were super stoked and happy because they never had to have the responsibility of building a clientele. But man, if they didn’t make out huge at the holidays when clients were giving them gifts, like our assistants got gift big time. Not like—like I know a lot of salon assistants could give in gifts. Imagine if a client came in and gave an equal gift to the stylist and the assistant. That was the kind of relationship that they had. They got out huge on that one.
John and Lindsay, were in a very different position than every other mentee we had in the building and everybody knew it. I knew it. The stylists knew it. The clients knew it. I don’t know why more salons don’t do it that way. It was such a working model and in that case I didn’t need to worry about training John and Lindsay to be experts at things like extension methods ’cause that was never what they were going for.
Now, if you and your salon building want to have mentees, people who are shadowing underneath you, they’re new out of school and ultimately will be building their own clientele as stylists, I believe they need to go get certified themselves in the method. It is not to you to teach a method that you do not own. That doesn’t make any sense.
If you’re going to pour back into your team, then they need to go on and get educated and that’s one of the perks and benefits of working with you, right? If they have to do that independently, then why shouldn’t they just rent a studio suite if they’ve got to get all their own independent education. Anyway, that doesn’t make any sense.
You can see how this topic opens up more questions and answers. The bottom line to me is you cannot legally teach something that trademark doesn’t belong to you. I have watched the legal process shake out on what happens when you get caught doing it. It is not pretty for the person who broke the law. It doesn’t turn out nice and it’s pretty easy to prove.
I wouldn’t run the risk. It takes one bitter assistant to turn you in to the person who created the original method. Do the honest thing and say like, “Hey, listen, I was working with Sophia and she taught me how to do blah blah blah extensions and I wasn’t certified, but now I’ve learned everything,” that could be a real problem for you.
To me, the risk/reward on that is not high enough. I wouldn’t risk it.
Instead I would ask myself what is it that I really need my assistants to support me with when it comes to things like extensions or things with really heavy certifications and can I just teach them to do those certain things without pushing them all the way to the finish line on what it would look like to get the certification themselves.
Now we have to talk about the other piece where this weird funny piece, hold on, let me pull it up so I can make sure I say it correctly. “Salon owners that host classes to teach their stylists the methods they’ve been certified in.” Whoa, if that isn’t a super risky game. I would certainly not do that especially if you’re teaching a method that is trademarked and certified to a group of people. All it takes is one video of you doing that and you are in massive trouble.
Here’s the other one. “I’ve heard some stylists that work with assistants and charge the assistant to assist her for all the methods she has learned that she would be sharing with her assistant through the year. So she would pay the assistant hourly but then charge her to assist her because of all the knowledge she shared, including the methods she learned.”
If your assistant is a contractor, then the relationship is one way, right? If your assistant is not an employee of yours, let me tell you what legally that has to look like. I understand most stylists don’t worry about the legalities, but I only coach to legal and above board, so I’m going to share with you what that would look like. If you had an assistant who was truly a contractor, every week or every month, they would let you know what days they’re available to help you. You wouldn’t reach out to them and say, “Hey Maggie, I need you to come in on Saturday.” No, no, no, no, no. You don’t get to ask Maggie when she wants to help you. She lets you know when she’s available. That’s what contractors do. They are not under the controller advisement of the person they’re working for. That’s a true contractor/contractee relationship.
If Maggie was your assistant, Maggie would let you know like, “Hey, I’m available to assist Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday this week. Let me know if you need anything covered.” Then you can respond and be like, “Yeah, such and such hours. These seems to be great. See you then.” That could work. But Maggie wouldn’t adapt to your schedule. You would adapt to hers.
The other thing is when you are working with contractors, you should never be training them. A contractor is somebody who is already skilled and you’re hiring them for their skilled labor.
I get this is why our industry gets into such trouble and if you go back to the podcast I did talking about unions and how our employment in this industry is too gray to really pull that off, here’s another example of it.
Again, it takes one angry assistant to turn you in and you have a tax issue, but that’s what a contracted assistant would look like.
There likely wouldn’t be any training because you can’t really train somebody that’s a contractor. It violates the relationship and the legality, so that’s tricky.
Let’s say that you hire an assistant as a true employee, which would be my preference. You can’t charge your employees for education. If I wanted somebody on my team to read a book, I had to buy the book for them. I can’t say, “Hey Emily, it’s important to me that you read this book, buy it on your next paycheck.” If I want Emily to read the book, I buy it for her. If I want Lauren to be trained on something, I pay for the training.
My team knows that we have an education budget every single year. It’s many thousand dollars, and they let me know, “Hey, I’d like to take this course or program.” Great. I have to invest in it. I want them to do better for me. I have to invest back in them. That’s what it looks like to be an employer.
I understand that that gets expensive. This is why—I have several podcasts on this, but this is why I say do you really want a mentee or do you just want to help her? ‘Cause if you just want to help her and you just want an assistant, it looks very different.
I invite you when you’re at these crossroads of how do I train somebody to be a fully functional stylist without violating all these trademarks and doing all of this stuff? Our industry is at this real crossroads. For so long, we ran as this mom-and-pop shop, kitchen cosmetology, cash under the table, shady employment industry, and it’s all blowing up in our face and has been for these last few years.
In traditional employment environments, that would never happen. It would never happen that an employer is just teaching a certified method under the table.
In my company, my team will tell you if I want them to learn—I read this book and I love the concept, I had to hire the author to come in and teach my team on it ‘cause I never want to violate anything. It’s too risky.
So I encourage you when you’re making these decisions to hire an assistant or hire a mentee—and listen, I know some of you’re rolling your eyes and you’re like, “Here she goes, going too corporate.” I think this is the direction our industry is heading. I really do. I think that it’s time to start asking ourselves how can I do this properly and have everything I want while training and mentoring people the right way?
What I have found is stylists and salons who shift their way of thinking away from what was cool in 1996 and really start to think about, okay, so what does the next iteration look like? They are making so much more money than the people who are trying to buck the system and say, “I wish it was how it was old school.” “I wish that a new grad would come in and they would assist somebody for two years and the person would mentor them.”
Y’all. Do you remember what education looked like in 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 1992? Education was so hard to come by. It was expensive. It often involved travel. A new graduate out of school, if they wanted to educate themselves, had no choice but to work under a stylist or salon for years. No choice. There was no other way.
Now there’s 17 other ways to educate yourself. This is why I say I know sometimes I share things and it feels frustrating or it feels like I’m overcomplicating it. I don’t want to do that. But I do have to advise you to adapt to the ways that the world has changed. We’re not doing hair in a 2012 environment anymore. 2023 and it’s changing really, really fast is our reality.
I know this has been a whole lot of talk. I hope that this has been constructive and if anything, just encourage you to think more about what it is you’re trying to provide to assistants that you hire. What mentorship looks like coming out of your brand, what ethically you feel good about sharing, what risks you’re willing to take in your business and what you are willing to put your reputation on the line for.
I hope I’ve encouraged you to think creatively, think about how to pour into your people without taking advantage of anybody else, and think about what education could look like for the future.
Y’all, so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
