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 I want to talk about pricing, rumors, misfires, and scare tactics.
We are in a very—I’m going to call it special. I’m actually not going to call it special, I’m going to call it interesting. I’m going to call it concerning season in our industry that I just would really like to squash if there’s any way possible.
I started reporting on the recession in 2022, so it’s been almost 18 months for me. And when I first started talking about it, I got some pretty significant backlash and a lot of people said I was fear mongering and that I was creating concern where it didn’t exist. And 18 months later, as it turns out, clearly I wasn’t fear mongering, I was stating the facts, but I was stating them early. And because I was saying them early, it makes people nervous because it causes concern when there maybe wasn’t any.
For me as a coach, I feel like it’s my personal and professional responsibility to get out ahead of things and give you as much insight as I can before the storm comes, right? So you can prepare, you can buy a raincoat, you can do all of the things, versus if I’m a weather forecaster and I’m like, “Hey, psst, it’s been raining for two hours, make sure you know about it.” That doesn’t make me a very responsible coach.
When you see a lot of industry publications, some other industry educators reporting on the recession now, I believe they’re being the newscaster who’s like, “Did you notice it’s been raining for 18 months? Be careful.”
What is happening in almost like speaking to the panic that already exists about the financial position of the industry, the financial position of the economy, the financial position of our clients is there is a lot of misinformation going around our industry right now, and it worries me and it worries me because I feel like in the last three years in particular, we have come such a long way. In the last six years, we’ve made huge leaps and strides forward, but in the last three years, oh my gosh, it’s like we really grew as a collective and made me so proud and so excited.
I was like, wow, here it is. Here we go. This is where our industry really stops being seen as this unprofessional, “I guess you couldn’t make a career of yourself.” When people really start to respect our industry.
For so long, people have told me, “Britt, I don’t understand why we can’t make the money that doctors and lawyers make. I don’t understand why people don’t respect us the way they respect veterinarians, why our service profession is so looked down upon.” And I’ve always said I don’t either. We are incredible and we change lives and we do important work and our overhead is high and we should make the money we need to make.
Then in these last three months, I see our industry do what it does from time to time and self-sabotage and I want to put an end to it. I want to speak to the massive self-sabotage I see going on in the industry right now. The misinformation I see coming out of some very mainstream channels. I want to talk money. I want to talk about economy. I want to talk about rising cost of goods. I want to talk about price increases. I want to talk about fear-based mentality.
But before I get into any of that, I want to start by saying there has never been a better time to build business in our industry. Literally, we are in the very best time. In my career—so I joined the industry in 2007. Since 2007, I am telling you all right now we are entering the heyday of our industry. If you choose to be open-minded and think about what I’m about to say and not listen to all of the gossip and fear tactics that are going around in the industry.
I want you to walk away from this episode hopeful because all of this negative chatter is completely unnecessary and I’ll tell you why it’s happening.
Unfortunately, our industry is one that historically has liked to hold each other down and not like I’m holding you down, not in a good way. In a don’t-raise-your-bar-too-high, I-don’t-want-to-work-that-hard kind of way. “I walk 10 miles in the snow so you better walk 12 if you want to stand where I’m standing” kind of way.
Our industry in my experience has been one where we want our neighbor to do well, but not as well as we do. There’s this era of keeping each other playing small, and it has been the toxic trait that has poisoned our industry the entire time I’ve been a part of it.
Until we as a collective can decide, no, no, we’re not going to make decisions based on fear, we are going to cheer and champion for those to our left and to our right, and we are all going to grow together, we will continue not making the money we want to make. We will continue not having the benefits we want to have. We will continue feeling less than until we all as a whole say, “What are we doing here? We all need to stop playing so scared and fricking own it because we’re amazing.”
That’s what I want you to walk away with this feeling, like stop buying into the fear-based chatter. It’s completely unnecessary and until we as a whole decide we’re going to stop chopping each other and ourselves down and really start running our businesses like businesses, we will never get forward.
What scares me and the reason why I wanted to do this podcast is I feel like over the last few years, we’ve taken 10 steps forward and I am watching these other mainstream media resources in the industry try and push us seven steps back and I am not going to do it. I want to continue pushing forward and I want to talk about how.
First, I want to talk about the truths and realities of where we are. We are in a recession. I started talking about it in 2022. The writing was on the wall. 2023 has been challenging for the consumer as a whole. We will talk about our industry in a second, but when you look at what’s happened specifically in the United States, I’m recording this podcast here in the US. Most of my listenership is US-based. When you look at what’s happened here, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs this year, layoffs at scale across many different sectors. Cost of goods is incredibly high. Inflation is an all time high. Mortgage rates are up. When you look at the indicators—the national debt average is up. When you look at all of those things, we are definitely in a recession.
However, this is not the recession of 2008. A huge part of what I think is happening is that our industry is very scarred from what happened in 2008, which was an incredibly dark time. Salons lost their businesses and listen, in 2020 we saw salons closing coast to coast. We had trauma in 2008, trauma in 2020, and so here we are, batting down the hatches saying, “Oh no, not again.”
Y’all, this is not 2020 and it’s not 2008. The chatter around the fact that a recession is here, think about your clients, what about discounts? It is very uneducated conversation and I want y’all to choose to instead of buying into the gossip and buying into these fear-based conversations, let’s look at the facts and the data.
How has it become more expensive for you to do hair now than it was before? If you’re a salon owner, why has the lease on your building likely gone up? Why is the cost to ensure your business likely gone up? Why is the cost to buy a tube of color gone up? Why is the cost of a chemical relaxer gone up? Why is the cost of a hairbrush gone up? Why is it costing twice as much to buy foils? Why are these things happening? Because of inflation. Everything is more expensive.
It’s interesting because I think I’m somebody—I was born in the eighties, so in my adult life, this is the first time I’ve gone through a very significant period of inflation. I think this is for most of us in recent memory, the biggest inflation we’ve ever seen.
However, as I say that, if you’re like me, I’ve been an adult for 20 years now, almost 20 years now I can remember—this makes me sound old and I totally understand. I don’t care. I remember when I first got my driver’s license, a gallon of gas here in the San Francisco Bay area was a $1.40, okay? By the time I had been driving for five years, it was already over $3.
When you look at that, like wow, the cost of gas doubled in five years, that is also inflation. You look at the cost of gas in California, now we go back and forth between mid fives, over six bucks a gallon. It has increased five times over since I started driving.
Inflation is always there. Inflation is always a thing. So why does it feel so painful now?
I have talked about this on the podcast. I’ve talked about this in the keynotes. The reason why it is so significant now is because of all of the stimulus that was pumped into our economy in 2020. The government didn’t pull into their own pockets and give you money or give—I shouldn’t say you. Give consumers money. When they did PPP loans, it’s not like they opened some bank vault somewhere and started doling out change. They literally turned the money printing machine on. They made fake cash. There was no additional cash to hand out.
Now it felt like relief at the time and it was relief. I don’t know what the better solution would’ve been. Americans weren’t working. We needed a way to pay our bills and get by and continue to buy groceries and all the stuff. I understand why the decision was made, but I don’t think that, I certainly didn’t at the time realize, “Oh shoot, all that they’ve done is printed five times more money than was ever in circulation before.”
So when we say, “Whoa, the cost of foils has doubled,” yeah, but do you remember in 2020 and 2021 when people were fast and loose with their cash? Come on, we all remember what that looked like. There was a glory time when we were like, “Whoa, people are spending money.” Our salons were super filled and the money was flowing in.
What people were not being made aware of and what there wasn’t transparency on is the fact that that was all based on all of this artificial inflation. When that happens, the cost of everything must increase because demand has increased, because people have more money and so they’re spending it more freely.
Remember when you couldn’t buy a car to save your life? I don’t know if anyone was trying to buy a used or new car in the last three years. It’s been hard because the demand was there. Remember how the housing market popped off and houses were selling crazy because there wasn’t enough inventory and all of these things? Because of that, inflation had to happen. It’s the way our economy gets put in check. It’s just part of the natural cycle. We are cycling through that right now.
The cost of everything will not go back down. It is important to understand that. The name of your game is not “At some point this will calm down.” Historically that has never happened, so that’s not going to happen. What you need to do is you need to start increasing your revenue to overcome that inflation. That is what smart business has done for the history of working mankind.
Like I said, let’s come at this from an educated standpoint, I understand that inflation has been painful. What I don’t understand is how some of the mainstream sources in our industry are responding to it.
There’s a few social media posts in general that made me a little bit concerned. One came out earlier this fall and it was something like, “Wow, look at what this stylist is doing to support their clientele.” The post was something like, “Hey clients, I know we’ve all fallen on hard times. I care about you. I care about your family. I care about your well-being. I want to make sure I take care of you. If you can no longer afford my services as the prices are listed today, let’s have an open conversation about it because I want to make sure that I am doing what I can to meet you where you are comfortable, so let’s make this work.”
Do you know what a post like that is? That is a fear-based post wrapped like a present with a big fat bow on it that comes across to a client like, “Wow, Susie is such an empathetic stylist. She wants to make my life easier. That’s so amazing.”
The way that this mainstream media source had presented this post was like, “We are all so grateful to be part of such a heart-centered industry. I wish there was more stylists like this. Let’s give it up for whomever this is for making sure that they listen to their clients’ needs.”
Y’all. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t say, “When can we be an industry where people don’t no-show on us? When can we be an industry where we charge cancellation fees and nobody bats an eyelash? Why can’t we be an industry where we get health benefits? How come we’re an industry where the average income in the United States is still less than $30,000 a year?”
We know that we’re an industry with all these problems and yet when the times get tough, we make posts that say, “I know you’re struggling. Instead of you being in pain, let me burden myself,” which that’s the truth of what that post says and it’s wrapped up with a bow. It looks like a present, and I’m sure that stylist got so much love for it because it was like, “Wow, you care so much about our community that you’re willing to run a nonprofit doing hair,” which is the message that’s received.
Now listen, oh, that’s a brilliant idea. If somebody wants to start a nonprofit that’s a hair salon, I don’t know what the legalities of this are, so please look it up for your state and local government and see what’s possible. But if you wanted to run a salon that was a nonprofit and you were not doing business to make money and you were doing hair services strictly as a community give back, I would support that all freaking day long. And I would say what a beautiful business model. I love that we’re focused on community give back.
Most of you are not running nonprofits. Most of you are in this industry because you need to make a profit. This is how you support your life and your family. For years, we’ve been in an industry who feels like it is our responsibility to bear the weight of our clients’ burdens on our back, to make their lives easier, to discount their services, to reduce our profit margins so that they don’t leave us.
That’s the truth of where that kind of post is coming from. That post is coming from a place of, “Please don’t leave me. I am scared. The cost of running my business has increased. It is different to build a clientele now than it was a few years back. And if I’m being honest as a stylist, I don’t really know what I’m doing. And so in order for me to feel like I still have some level of control, what I’m going to do is tell all of my clients all my prices are negotiable. Let’s just talk about it. Please don’t leave me,” but it’s wrapped up with a bow so it looks really great.
Please don’t do that.
A) You’re going to lose your livelihood in that process. That is not a sustainable business model. I know that it feels psychologically better to have full books even if it means you’re not making as much profit as you want to. That is a recipe for burnout. Please do not do that. Let me show you how to build a sustainable clientele.
Here’s what I can promise you right now. There is more money in the economy today than there has ever been in any of our lifetimes. There is no shortage of money. The reason why some stylists and salon owners are literally making money hand over fist right now is they have learned what it looks like to build a business. And anybody listening, I am happy to show you how to do that if you’ve not yet figured it out. But the way to do that is not to undercut yourself. That is never going to work.
Let’s move on to the next post that was very concerning to me. It was a post that said “Why you should be doing free haircuts,” and it was a multi-post graphic that explained if you don’t have anybody in your chair, some money is better than no money, so why wouldn’t you take something? I am extremely summarizing this. If you look around, I’m certain you can find the post, and this post even says something like, “I know some of you are nervous about this,” and you might say, “Yeah, but my time is worth my money.” The counter response was, “Yes, but if you do one free haircut today, he’s going to rebook and then he’s going to come back for another haircut and then the haircut was never free, and then he’s going to send you three friends.”
That again is a very fear-based way to build a clientele. It’s also dated, like I’ve been saying over and over and over. This is not the recession of 2008. When we go back to 2008 and what was happening in that recession, people were losing their homes. That was a mortgage crisis-based recession. Foreclosures were an all-time high. People were losing their jobs, didn’t have money, didn’t have a place to live, and that’s when coupon clipping, Groupon, all of that became trendy because people literally were flat broke. People lost their retirement savings, the stock market bottomed out.
None of those things are happening right now, and even when we see unemployment on the rise, other businesses are still hiring. Entrepreneurship is up, and like I’ve said a hundred times over, there’s still five times more money in the economy than there’s ever been today. What I am telling you is giving services away for free and at discount literally do not match what’s going on in the economy.
What it does is it makes you look desperate and it doesn’t make you look professional or qualified. What’s happening is the bar in our industry is once again being lowered, not higher.
Now what’s interesting is on the flip side of that, we are going to see, I talked about this several months back, some of this term I use. It’s called the Ninja Turtle strategy, where a lot of stylists are going to try and come up on the come up right now and they’re going to try and come up as the low price leader. All that’s going to happen for the stylists who try to market themselves as the low price leader right now is they’re going to be overworked, underpaid in a few years, completely burnt out.
Meanwhile, stylists and salon owners who chose to hold their ground and position themselves as a pillar of hope, a pillar of strength, a business that’s not scared, a business with high perceived value, a business that’s got its going on is going to make so much money in the next few years, and that’s where I want you all to be.
When I looked at this post that was promoting you should do free haircuts, and there was a lot of stylists and barbers and makeup artists and everything who were saying, “I built my whole clientele like that, this definitely works.” When I looked at the people who were saying, “I built my whole clientele like that,” when I looked back on their social media, these are people who have been doing hair for years, like years and years, some of them decades. So yeah, I’m saying doing free haircuts might’ve worked in 1994. I’m not arguing against that. Doing free haircuts definitely worked in 2008. What I’m saying is it doesn’t work in 2023 and 2024.
As your business coach, as somebody who studies the industry, it does not make sense to do that. It doesn’t match the market. I wouldn’t coach to it. I don’t see how it’s going to benefit you or how it’s going to help you attract the right clients to your marketplace. I don’t see it.
The other thing is when people are saying, “That worked for me. I’m doing it. I’m getting referrals,” I have to ask you, is that really the business that you want? When you see people chiming into these posts saying, “That really worked for me,” I encourage you to look at that person’s social media, look at their website, try and understand their lifestyle and say, “Is that someone I’m aspiring to be more like?” Because when I look at the people I’m aspiring to be more like, they’re not giving stuff in their business away for free, and so I don’t want you to do that either. You do not need to.
I’m here to tell you right now, please don’t buy into all of this fear-based conversations that’s going around the industry right now. It makes no sense. When we don’t have a strategy, we start making these emotional choices based on what ifs. They’re rolling the dice or maybe they’ll send me a referral. What if they have a friend? What if they come back? What if you’re gambling your business away? Do not do that. Let’s just get strategic.
As we start to do these very hefty discounts and promotions and giveaways and bartering with our prices, all we look like is unprofessional, desperate, and we perpetuate an exhaustion loop for ourselves. We are coming out of a very heavy season of burnout in our industry. Let’s not add this on top of it. It is completely unnecessary.
The other thing I saw a post on that made me feel a little bit uncertain was it was about how to do a price increase right now. Somebody DMed it to me and was like, “Hey, do you like this verbiage?” And the verbiage was like, “Hey, I’m making a lot of improvements to my business, so I’m going to increase my prices.” No. Why are we still explaining price increases at all? I have some podcasts on that. I would go back and listen to them. We don’t need all this heavy, heavy verbiage around pricing. It makes us appear unprofessional and uncertain.
My guess is your veterinarian, your doctor, your dentist, your lash artist—well, maybe lash artist is a bad example. Name any other business though. Your tattoo artist is not doing a big PSA when their price increases. We don’t need to do all that. Let’s stop going back in time and picking up all of these 1997 habits again. Let’s remember we were building business as strong professionals. I want to stay on that track.
If you are considering doing free services to any capacity, this is when I’ll allow you to do it. If you are making an abundance of revenue and are actively saving for retirement already and want to do free services at community give back, I’m here for it. If you’re taking models for a short period of time to learn a new skill, fine by me. It better be a very short period of time, like a couple of days. If you’re an educator looking for models for a demonstration, I totally understand. Or if you have no clients at all, like zero, you’re starting from zero and you’re asking for guests to come in knowing that when they come in for that free service in exchange, you’re going to take a hundred social media photos of them—and I’m not even exaggerating. I mean like a hundred—I could make an argument for it.
Anything other than that, y’all, please do not buy into these pricing rumors, misfires, scare tactics. No discounts, no bundles. This is not that kind of recession.
Y’all, stay strong. Stay positive. If you have specific questions, please leave me a rating or review on iTunes or hit me up in the Instagram DMs.
And as I always like to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
