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 this week we’re going to talk about how to become the local it salon. Isn’t that so fun?
This episode is very inspired, like many others, as it is based on a rating and review left on iTunes. If you’ve already done so, you can leave the Thriving Stylist a rating or review on iTunes or Spotify. My team and I go through there once a month, and we pick and choose reviews and questions that we think would be fantastic for the podcast. This is one of those.
This is written from Owner on the Struggle Bus. So Owner on the Struggle Bus, thank you for reaching out. Owner says, “Hi, Britt. I binged your podcast on one long flight and became obsessed. I couldn’t stop listening on vacation. I literally made every mistake you warned me about in owning a salon. I took over a salon last year and it was too neglected in care and maintenance. There had been zero management, a completely absentee owner. I was a stylist in the salon for nine years, and most of the others had been there for at least that long too. Prior owner collected the rent, changed the light bulbs, that was it.
“We’re chair rental salon, everyone gets along pretty well, but it was a pecking order mentally. I’m now very close to an empty salon, did all the renovating, and the clients are loving it, but it doesn’t do any good without stylists. How do I go about fixing this? I need to build a new group of stylists, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how to create a culture when they’re all insistent that they’re independent and can run their own business how they want.
“We’re also a smaller community with tons of salons that all have chairs open, making it even harder to fill. Can’t wait to join Thrivers and get a better handle on this.”
Okay, a few things I want to point out in what she said. It’s very interesting to me that your community has lots of salons with chairs available. Do you know why? Because no one wants to work in any of those salons.
A lot of times we look around and we’re like, “My community’s too inundated. There’s so many salons for people to work at. So many other salons are hiring. How do I compete?” Y’all, if you’re in a community where there’s lots of salons with lots of open chairs, hello blindspot! That is the easiest opportunity to build in because it means every other salon is struggling to attract stylists.
Why are they struggling to attract stylists? Because none of these salons are offering what stylists today are looking for. Ding, ding, ding.
These salons with other open chairs are not your competition. You are the only competition. If we polled stylists, particularly stylists who are in studio suites and we say, “Why are you in a studio suite instead of working in a salon team space?” Or if we ask stylists, “Why did you leave your most recent salon?”, they will say, “Lack of leadership. There was no culture, too much drama. The salon owner had lost their passion. It wasn’t inspired. I wanted to be in the driver’s seat.” Very rarely will somebody say, “Because I wanted to make more money.” Money will come up for sure and if you look at—in any industry, wanting to make more money, as generally the fourth or fifth reason people leave their job. There’s three or four other emotional factors that hit before money even enters the conversation. It’s same for our industry.
Let’s look at what it takes to become the local it salon.
The game we’re trying to win is how do I be the salon where everyone’s dying to work?
One of the things I like to humble brag about is my drawer full of resumes. Anyone who worked with me or for me, shout out to the former JC crew. One of the things that I brag about is my drawer full of resumes. When we needed to hire, I would open my drawer, and I had at any given time 10 to 50 current resumes of people who were dying to work for us. It was rare that I had to post any kind of listing, “Hey, we’re hiring.” So rare because we had that it salon thing.
The challenge is when I talk about it salons, it’s this intangible thing. You’re like, “Yeah, but how did they do it?” To be candid, the how did we do it is the back of what I’ve built this business on, is we were able to do things very, very differently. To be honest, when I started working at the salon, we didn’t have the drawer full of resumes. The drawer full of resumes came after I started implementing some very specific things.
What I want to talk about is how you can become that its salon if you’re a salon owner, what you should be looking for in incredible salons if you’re a stylist. I’m going to give you some actual examples of salons you can look up.
I’ve identified some incredible Thrivers Society members who I think are amazing, thriving leaders and incredible owners that I’m going to showcase and shout out today. You can check them out and hopefully get a little inspiration.
When you say “it salon,” it’s generally a place where everybody’s—generally speaking, the best of the best stylists today don’t want to work in a place where people are lazy. They don’t want to work in a place where people are bitter. They don’t want to work in a place where people are resentful. We’re going to talk about how to undo all those things.
Number two, a place where everybody’s driven. There’s a difference between being business-minded and driven. People can be serious about their career and completely unmotivated and not driven. They’ve already built a clientele. There was a stylist that we worked with who had the reputation for almost being a diva, but I don’t think that she was. But every time we have education, it was like, “I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I’ve taken lots of classes. I’m not doing any more.” Now she was very business-minded. She was hardworking, she was reliable. Her clients loved her. Good team member for sure, not driven to grow.
When you look at incredible stylists today and what they’re looking for, they want to work side by side with people who are still driven and in it and inspired. Let me tell you what, driven does not mean wants to hustle. Driven does not mean wants to work five days a week, 40 hours a week, double, triple booking. That doesn’t have to equal driven.
Driven just has to mean still in it, still wants to play the game, so business-minded and driven. Also stylists want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and that’s a huge piece of the it salon factor.
Let me start by listing off three salons that I think are total it salons.
The first is going to be Sandbar Beauty Co based out of Florida. The owner is Liya Bergstrom and Liya and her team are amazing. When you look up Sandbar Beauty Co—Liya’s been a Thriver. Liya, correct me if I’m wrong, I think she joined in 2021 and she was just diving into salon ownership and leadership. When I see what she’s built, I mean she has the Thrivers foundation for sure, but once she had that foundation in place, she really made it her own. And a lot of these salon owners, I’m going to list the same thing. She learned the basics, she understood the fundamentals, and then she was able to build onto it from there.
When you look at Sandbar Beauty, there’s culture, there’s energy, there’s a methodology, which we’re going to talk about in a second. Everything is deeply branded. They have their entire marketing funnel on point, guest nurture on point. They’ve literally built the Thriving Stylist system in full, marketing funnel, retention funnel, Hair Stylist Success Hourglass. They got it. Then they were able to implement the Scaling Stylist things.
Liya is, without a doubt, an incredible leader and when you look at what she’s done, it’s an it salon. You want to be a part of it. You’re not just joining a salon, you’re not just doing hair. You’re a part of a movement. That’s what people are into.
Another example, Erin and Tim Frazee. I love this incredible power couple.
I met Erin when she was just Heyday Collective. When I say just Heyday Collective, tongue in cheek because I think that Erin and Heyday has been a brand that a lot of us within the Thriving Stylist community have admired for a really long time. But Erin was inspired and found a vision and chose to create what’s called The Nest.
The Nest is a very unique concept-style salon building for independents that work collectively as a team. There are essentially studio suite opportunities. There’s more shared space opportunities. There’s a community networking space for clients. It’s almost like a coworking space. It is phenomenal.
You can look up Erin, Tim, Heyday, and the Nest at heydaycollective.com/the-nest, or you can just look up heydaycollective.com and navigate from there. But people are clamoring to become a part of The Nest because truly it’s a place where you have to be driven and you are a part of something bigger than yourself. It’s not just come on in and do hair. It’s a lifestyle. It’s incredible.
Then I want to talk about Tami and Tami’s team at Twist Salon.
Tami is just up the way from me. I’m in a small community called Half Moon Bay. Tami is in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area—Oakland, San Francisco, broader Bay Area, probably more names of cities that you’re familiar with—specializing in textured hair. I’ve actually sent a couple of my friends to Tami’s salon. When you look at what Twist has done, they are very cultured. And by cultured, I mean you can tell that everybody who works there has the same values, has the same mindset, has the same—likely, is into different things, but believe in the vision of the business.
By the way, Twist has a vision for the business, which is a lot of things a lot of salons are missing. You think you have a vision, you don’t. They only do a handful of services and they do them really, really well, which is a tie that binds a lot of these different salons. When you look, they really do look like a team.
And before anybody says, “Well, all of these things are only possible in employee-based environments,” no, they’re not. Some of the most bonded teams I know are groups of contractors. When you’re building a team, it doesn’t have to be based on a legal obligation to do things the same. It’s based on values and character. Does everybody understand that?
I work with contractors in my business. My videographer is the contractor, my podcast editing team—which shoutout to my incredible podcast editing team—are contractors. I think that they would all agree if you ask them, why do you continue working with Britt? Because we like working together. We’re values aligned. Our styles are the same. We compromise together, we see business the same way.
I’ve worked with lots of videographers. I’ve worked with my one videographer, Brendan, for years because we actually align. He’s completely independent and so am I. We’re not legally obligated to each other, but I think we both consider ourselves to be on the same team.
You can have that with independence within a salon space if you’re hiring the right people, and you can only hire the right people if you set yourself up for success.
Let’s talk about how to set yourself up for success.
Phase one is going to be finding the right space. Do not compromise on this. I know a lot of stylists open their first salon from a place of desperation. I have a lot of podcast episodes on that, of “I got to get out of here,” and they settle. It’s okay to find your first place to land, but finding the right place in space takes time.
The other thing I want you to know, if you’re like, “I found a space, we’re projected to open in February,” if the space comes through, you’re opening in July. It always takes longer than you think it will. Be patient with the process. Know that it’s going to take a while, but like I talked about on last week’s podcast episode, if you’re opening a salon, you shouldn’t be doing it for quick success. You should be doing it for the long haul. So spending a little more time to get it up and running should feel okay for you. So find the space.
Number two, and this is hard. Most people are like, find the space, hire the team. No, find the space and one of my requirements is you have to be able to cover the cost of running that salon by yourself in order for you to be ready to do so because it prevents you from making impulsive decisions and rushing into things you’re not really ready for, hiring the team that’s not going to serve you.
Optionally, you can do phase two before phase one. I actually think it’s very smart and it will help anybody who’s considering salon ownership to define and solidify do you truly want to be a salon owner and are you ready for it?
Phase two is create your brand and brand standards. This is where people cut corners. They’re like, “Oh, I can do that in a weekend.” No, creating a brand and brand standards and everything it involves probably takes six months or longer. Most people are like, “Wait, what?”
By six months, I mean six months at 10 hours a week or something like that. Most people are like, “Well, what would you even spend your time on?” Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll give you a really easy summarized version, and in our program, Thriving Leadership, we dig in deeper, but your brand and brand standards are the set of rules and guidelines that predict the look and feel of your organization.
When you look at Twist Salon, when you look at Heyday Collective, or the Nest, when you look at Sandbar, they have this.
When you’re like, “How did they do it?” They put in the work. There is no like, ooh, secret. They put in the work, period.
When I say brand standards, I’m talking about things like handbook. Are you going to offer benefits? What are the working hours, time off, PTO, leave of absence, dress code, no dress code, code of conduct, service experience standards.
Some of you were saying, “Well, if you have independents, you can’t do that.” Oh, definitely, you can have service experience standards even with independents. If somebody doesn’t say—if you’re like, “When you work here, these are our service standards,” and they’re like, “Yeah, I’m independent. I’m going to do whatever I want,” no worries, but then you can’t work here. This is not a place where everyone comes in and does whatever they want. We are independent, but we choose to have the same values and stick with these guidelines. This is what it looks like to be in this building.
It’s like—a lot of people think that if you’re owning a salon, your renters get to do whatever the heck they want. No, it’s like if you’re renting—have you ever rented a house and the owner of the home is like, “Yeah, you can’t have pets here.” You can’t be like, “Well, I am a pet person, so I’m getting a turtle.” No, the rule is you can’t do it here, and that renter is a lessee or a lesser, it doesn’t matter. The landlord still gets to have some guidelines.
Now, can the landlord say, “Well, you have to turn the lights off in this joint by 10:00 PM.” No, there’s some things that they can’t control, but there are things that they can.
And so understanding you can have a culture, you can have a way of living and breathing and doing work in your place and space. It’s not Jesus, take the wheel, people do whatever they want. That’s not what it looks like to be an independent salon leader. That looks like that’s what it looks like to be a landlord. But most stylists today don’t want to work for landlords. So when stylists come to me or salon owners come to me and they’re like, “All of my stylists want to go independent, everybody wants to rent a suite these days. I don’t know what’s wrong,” what’s wrong is a lot of salon owners got used to being landlords and haven’t adapted to being a leader.
Today’s society of stylists want leadership. If people aren’t following you, you’re not a leader. In order to lead, you have to have followers. You can’t have one without the other. If you’re not inspired, if you’re not educated, if you don’t know where you’re going, if you don’t have brand standards, if there’s not a growth plan in place in your business, no one’s going to follow you because we don’t even know where you’re going.
Establishing that leadership is first. That’s why you can see it would take at least six months to get these things in place.
Next, and I suggest you do this as phase three, but a lot of people do this as more like phase five or six or something like that. Phase three, I would say consider a signature methodology. A huge part of my program, Scaling Stylist Method, which is something you can graduate to, is creating a signature methodology. I believe it is how most successful salon companies do scale. When you look at these, well at least Twist and Sandbar, it’s certainly what they’ve done and a lot of other really successful salons have done as well. It’s not what you do, it’s the way in which you do it.
When I started doing hair in this industry in 2008, 2009, 2010, doing good hair was enough, having a good personality was enough. In today’s world, it’s just not enough. You don’t have to like that. You just have to understand that that’s the truth, and instead, having a unique way in which you do what you do and not just a unique way in which you do what you do, but the way you position it. I call it brand positioning, the perceived value around it, how you market it, how you showcase it, how you talk about it, how people become aware of it, all of that stuff counts twice.
Understanding how to position what you do, how you do in a unique way, not only attracts more clients, it attracts people to want to work for you because it’s very tangible what the end result of working for you will be. There’s no question mark of how will my clientele look, what kind of services will I be doing when I do this. It’s very simple what we do, how we do it.
When I talk about methodology, especially if you’re hiring employees, that methodology pours into how you train, how you educate, what that education program looks like. I have an episode several weeks back, if you look up Thriving Stylist assistants or Thriving Stylist associates or Thriving Stylist Podcast mentors, it’ll come up where I talk about what new stylists are looking for today and training programs. It’s not the haphazard kind that used to work 10 years ago. It’s very stringent and structured, and I think that when you have a signature methodology, it makes that that much easier.
Phase number four, here we go. Phase four, hire a team that aligns with the culture and let go of those who don’t. This is the hardest. It’s the hardest for me. It’s the hardest for any leader is having to be at the crossroads of letting people go from your team, your culture, your place, your space, your business who no longer serve the vision or maybe never did. But often what will happen is people who are not culture-aligned or people who don’t fit with the signature methodology, they have challenges and they’re unhappy, and it’s because it’s like oil and water or like round peg, square hole or whatever. It’s not a fit.
What we do is we hang on to people who don’t really fit the mold or we hire people out of desperation and the end result is lack of success, frustration all the way around, gossip, drama, and misery. When you have people in the building who truly believe in what you’re building, they buy into the culture. They choose to be a team with each other. They cheer each other on, they choos_one of our core values here at Flourish Salon Business Development or Thrivers Society you might call it, is collaborative success. If there’s somebody on my team who does not work well with others, they cannot work here. You can’t be, “I’m really good at my job. I don’t want to work with anybody else.” That’s fine. Then go be good at your job somewhere else. Here, we collaborate. If you don’t like that, that’s fine. You just can’t work here. You have to be that bullheaded about your team and who you let in your building.
How many of you have that stylist in the salon that’s maybe a high producer but is miserable? That stylist in the salon everybody’s intimidated by, that stylist in the salon who’s always a grump, but they pay their rent on time so you let them stick around. If I’m a driven stylist and you have a grump stylist in your salon, that’s a shot against you. I might work down the street because I don’t want to work with the grump you’ve got.
You have to know that the longer you hold onto people who don’t fit the future of your business, the further away you get from the future of your business. You have to bless and release those people in order to make space for becoming that it salon. They don’t belong there.
If the future it salon wouldn’t hire the grump, the existing salon shouldn’t have them working there either. In order to attract incredible talent to be seen as that it salon, you have to start building the it team and you won’t know what that looks like until you have your brand, your brand standards, your values, you know what your growth plan and path is going to look like. You’ve established the methodology.
Any established salon owner will tell you it is so much harder to convince people who already work for you to change than to just hire the team that believes in your vision from the jump. Getting long-term team members to adapt and change is very challenging versus finding people who just love the business where it’s at is so much easier and more comfortable and everybody’s happier. If you establish those things first, it’s just simply easier.
Then number five, drive awareness. I say that again with a little chuckle because that’s so frustrating. I’m like, you need to spend time doing all of this legwork before I’ll allow you to market your salon.
Here’s the challenge with where we live today is we are in such a society where we want it and we want it now. When you look at social media, when you look at the culture we’re living in, we are living in an instant success world. Having to work at something for six months, one year, three years before getting the fruits of that labor is something we struggle to tolerate because the way the world has changed, myself included, and when you listen to any long-term successful business person, they will truly tell you patience and failure is where all of my success came from.
But we’re living in a time where if you fail, you can get canceled. You can get roasted on social media, people will judge you, people will make fun of you. You have to be the business owner who doesn’t care, and maybe you have to live for several years in struggle.
I will tell you, my husband’s family and our personal friends judged us for a long time. When I say that we lived extremely humbly for a lot of years, people were genuinely concerned about us when we had our son—our son’s now nine—and people were like, “I don’t know how they’re going to do this.” And to be honest, we were living in a 700-square-foot, two-bedroom duplex, and my husband and I were sleeping on the couch because we didn’t have enough bedrooms or space to go around. I can see how from the outside people were looking at us and they’re like, “These two have no business having another kid.” I totally understand. But he and I believed in the work-your-ass-off-in-silence-and-then-show-’em-what-you’ve-done.
So a few years later when we bought a home a block away from the beach on the California coastline, people were like, “What the heck?” But it’s because we were willing to not look cool and to face the judgment and to have people think that we weren’t doing well. We didn’t worry about that. We worried about actually building a future for ourselves.
I think if a lot of salon owners chose to do that too and said, “I’m going to put my head down for three years and really build something that means something,” my gosh, you will have 30 years of massive business success at your back. It will be so much easier.
When I look at Liya and when I look at Erin, when I look at Tami, these leaders did that. They were willing to put their head down, work their butts off, and grind it out to have all of the beautiful success they have today. They did all these things. They put in the time. They struggled. I’m sure they cried themselves to sleep some nights, but they never got complacent with it. They chose to educate. They chose to have a network. They chose to be curious. They chose to learn. They chose to make hard decisions. They chose to invest time. They chose to invest money. They chose to invest in themselves and their future.
I want you to do the same. Any of you can have a local it salon. It’s time to show up, do the work, and uncover your best self.
Y’all, as I always like to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
