Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hairstylist? 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 weren’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 Siva, social media and marketing strategist just for hairstylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Siva, and this is kind of a fun, different topic today. We’re gonna talk about what we look for when we are hiring Thriver Society coaches. It has changed massively over the years. We have finally, probably in the last like six months, really dialed it in and figured out how to bring in coaches that are going to blow our students’ minds and how we can ensure that if we’re bringing somebody onto the team, they’re gonna be creating breakthroughs in anybody who works with us, which is essentially the criteria at this point. So I’m gonna tell you kinda what my criteria used to be, mistakes I’ve made, what onboarding looks like, what interviewing looks like, so that if you ever wanted to be a coach with us or with any other company, honestly, you’d get a sense of kind of what that looks like.
So let me, uh, first explain, like, how coaching works in the industry at scale. We’re not the only business coaching company in the industry, of course. There’s, I don’t know, a hundred or probably more at this point. So many. There’s probably, there’s probably half a dozen to a dozen that have really established names for themselves. And probably, uh, no, probably most of those have at least some coaches that those who work with those companies can choose to work with. As far as I know, and someone can correct me if I’ wrong, because I might be wrong on this. I have not deeply researched every other coaching company out there. But the ones I am aware of, we do happen to have a lot of people come to us after having worked with other coaching companies and not been happy with the results. So we get a lot of insights from those people about what it was like working with those coaches.
And one of the things I hear consistently is my coach was a contractor. When I say, “Tell me about the coach you work with,” it was like, “Oh, well, there are stylists somewhere, or they own a salon somewhere, and they were a client of this coaching company.” And then when you have been a client with some of these coaching companies for a certain amount of time, what you can do is go to a training. My understanding, it’s a paid training. So you can pay to go to a training, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. This is just what I’m hearing. There’s a chance that it’s a totally free training. I don’t know. But go to some kind of training, either paid or free, hosted by a coaching company, and then you can be a contractor with them, meaning that company will have somebody sign on board for a one-year agreement to be a part of their consulting company.
And as part of that, they get to have interactions with a coach. That coach is a salon owner or a stylist from somewhere else in the country, and they would be assigned to that salon’s account, and they would essentially be an independent advisor talking about how they use that coaching company to help their business. That, for a lot of reasons, is not what I’ve ever wanted to do. I have worked with coaches who work like that. And what I found was it was like putting my trust into a coaching company, but then at the end of the day, getting a watered down variation of that program through somebody who puts, at minimum, a 10% spin on it, and then comes over and tells me what works for them. As much as it’s nice hearing from somebody like that, like, that’s what I call networking. That’s not the same as coaching.
Like it, yeah, of course it’s nice to hear what worked for another salon owner or another stylist, but that’s different than being, like, deeply mentored by somebody who is trained to be a deep mentor. And what I learned the hard way and decided myself was if I’m going to have coaches who are able to coach stylists and salon owners at the level that I expect, they have to be employees because the level of control I would want, the level of training I would want, the level of expectation I would want, the way I would want them to make sure that they were coaching to our methodology all the way through was too critical to me to just pass on to a contractor. Legally, I could not require a contractor to uphold the standard that was important to me. So going back in time, when I first brought on coaches back in 2022, I started off with contractors.
But I told myself that’s actually gonna be okay because what I’m gonna do is I’m only gonna hire Thriver Society members. And if I only hire Thrivers, I know they’re coming in with a base knowledge of the programs, and I trust all of these people. And when I first hired coaches, the criteria I was looking for was I wanted only Thrivers. I wanted to hire people that I genuinely enjoyed talking to, being in the room with, that I trusted, that I had full faith and that there were people who operated out of integrity and I knew they were running successful businesses and I trusted them. Like that was so big. And the first four coaches I hired checked all of those boxes and we hired all four all at once. And they were hired on a part-time contractor basis. And I couldn’t provide that much training because that’s not what you can do with contractors.
But I told myself it was gonna be fine because they were Thrivers, so they knew enough about the program that they would be successful. And from that standpoint, I was actually correct. They were deeply educated. They knew the program. They could certainly advise people, and the advice they were giving was fantastic. So all of that was fine. There were deep challenges with that that I didn’t expect. What I came to realize, and I, and I’ve realized this over a series of years, not just with those first four coaches, but leading and coaching is different. Being somebody who’s exceptional at coaching their own team versus advising somebody else whose business works completely differently than yours does can be a little funky. And what I realized was it can be tempting as a coach to be like, “Well, I want you to kind of do it the way that I’m doing it because it works so great for me.” One of the things that’s different about Thrivers is that we teach a framework, but the framework is so adaptable that there’s a lot of parts and pieces that you can really make work for your own salon.
But it would almost be difficult as a salon owner who’s doing things one specific way to be advising people in six other ways. Like it just, it created this interesting friction point that I didn’t even realize until members started pointing it out to me. And I was like, “That’s so interesting.” It was just one of those things that caught me off guard. But at the end of the day, the reason why just bringing on Thrivers, assuming the knowledge was good enough, knowing that they were amazing natural teachers, the reason why that actually ended up not working wasn’t because of who those people or who they were or anything like that. This is where I went wrong. One, because we hired them as part-time contractors, we were working around their own schedules. And I thought that was gonna be great. I knew that these people still had clientele, still were running salon teams.
And I was like, “So let us know what works.” That created so many logistical nightmares. Like, we could not. Our, our Thrivers were asking for things that we couldn’t comply with, and I was asking for these contractors to do things that they, they couldn’t do and they didn’t wanna do. And it just created this friction point where we were like, the lack of schedule control is just not sustainable at the scale of business we have. We just had too many members and needed too much support and it just wasn’t viable to be flexing schedule to meet other people’s needs. And I understood why it happened. It just didn’t work for us. Next, I tried to be their leader. So I was like, “Don’t worry, I’ll take them on. We’re gonna create this coaching department and I’m gonna lead the coaching department.” I didn’t realize how much of a fail that would be because this was in 2002.
I looked back. In 2022, I took 31 business trips. So 2022 and 2023 were probably the years I was on the road the most out of all my years working in this coaching company. It was a lot of travel. So I was speaking on a lot of stages. I was, at the time, our only full-time coach. Like when it came to advising the members and the students in the one-to-one accounts, it really was me and we were trying to incorporate these coaches, but I had my own bank of accounts I was working with. I had these 31 speaking gigs or business trips or private consultancies or whatever I had already booked for the year. So I was planes, trains, and automobiles constantly. I was still the primary marketing person of the business. Like my face was everywhere. I was dropping podcasts every single week. At that point, I was the number one salesperson.
I’m not anymore. But I was the person who had to bring in new members to the company. On top of all that, I’m still the CEO, right? So I’ve got 16 other employees who need me. And then I was like, and now I’m gonna build a department and pour into these four people as contractors on the schedule that works for them. It just, it was this, I could not do it well. And I convinced myself it’s gonna be fine. I’m gonna make it work. And I couldn’t. I could not show up in full. The other thing, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a long time, you can run the timeline on that. And in 2022, I was, like, deeply in grief. I had just lost two of the most important people in my life, like, eight months before that. And I just was such a broken person, like, trying to teach and train and inspire people.
Hindsight’s 20 and 20 on that. Like, I totally got the timing wrong. And I learned a lot through the process, and I was very fortunate to have four brilliant, gracious people who were, like, extremely patient with me. But we’ve shifted completely away from that. So that’s where we started. We’ve come a long way in the last four years. So then we shifted to all employees. And now, and since, I think, 2023, all of our coaches have been employees and will continue to all be employees moving forward. That was the first year we took a chance on somebody who had not been a Thriver before. I was like, “Okay, what if I abandoned that entire idea and hire somebody who’s just an incredible educator? Natural coaching skills, tons of industry experience.” And that ended up being a phenomenal decision. That brought us Coach Nine, who’s amazing and is so experienced.
She knew what Thrivers was. She listened to the podcast, but she’d never been a student. And she spent a year, I mean, deep diving, researching the members, mentoring with me, learning her skillsets, doing things right, doing things wrong, taking criticism. It was. If you ask her, ask her about it sometimes. If you see her, she’ll be like that. The first year it was brutal because the level of training and the expectation was so high, but the bar was so high. And she was like, “I’m gonna reach it.” And now she, I mean, crushes us. She’s absolutely amazing. But she set a new standard. What I realized is I don’t need to just bring in, like, helpers or people who know the industry or people who love the industry or people who love Thrivers. Like, I need to bring in people who create breakthroughs and have natural coaching skills.
So fast-forward to 2026, our business has shifted so radically. So we started off as a membership company, you probably know this. Now, one-to-one coaching is the number one request in our business. We do far more, you know, higher investment, more in depth, more one-to-one i – than anything else currently. I mean, the demand for that is just so significant. So it’s incredible to see how effective, like, really high quality coaching has become. And as we continue to expand our coaching team, whenever we do a, a posting saying that we’re, you know, taking on new coaches, I think that the hiring process really shocks people. And so I leaned into my leadership team and I was like, “What if we do a podcast and explain what it looks like?” And they were like, “Great idea,” because that way there’s no sticker shock if, when and if you ever decide to apply, or you wanna know what it’s like to work for literally any other company.
I would assume some of the hiring process is the same. You get a sense of, like, what they’re looking for, what to work on, what you can expect. So for us, when a coach is applying, it does have to be somebody who is licensed in the industry. So you have to be licensed in, you know, one of the states in the US currently. Um, we’ve juggled the idea. We have a lot of Canadian thrivers, and we though about, like, should we bring on somebody outside the US? There’s a lot of legal ramifications of that. I’m still not sure on that one, but ju – right now, it’s, you have to be applying from the US. Resume has to be included. Put up something just so we know who you are, where you’ve been, you know, give us something that we can look you up by. We do always take a look at your social media, and we go back deep.
So it’s not like you can clean up your posts for six weeks and then apply. I go all the way back. So we do deep social media research. And if you’re a social media ghost, like, there’s nothing that, at least for me, as the reviewer is kind of a red flag. Like, I need to see some kind of history of at least what your take of s – on social is. I get a sense of your personality, like, how you show up, how you serve, what your experience is like. I always look at that. We do a video test project. So one of the first things we asked you for, and I won’t share the details of it, is you have to submit something to us via video. There’s a huge video component of being a coach for us. You, like, you hear me here on the podcast.
My face is on camera all the time. Sometimes I’m doing live coaching. Sometimes it’s pre-recorded. And those are all very different skillsets with different expectations coming from us. So one of the first things we have an applicant do is a video test project before you even interview with anybody on our team that comes through. Then we have you do some sample coaching. I won’t get into all the details of that either, but you could be prepared to be having to do timed written responses, to having more, uh, video responses, verbal responses, just so we can see what your natural skillset is coming in. And you don’t have to be perfect, but at this point, we’ve interviewed so many people that we know what’s gonna work and what’s not gonna work. So you just give it your best shot, and then, you know, we know from there if you’re ready or maybe need a little bit more time.
There’s usually two or three interviews, and then we go into a 90-day trial period. So the trial period is usually around 10 to 20 hours a week. It’s an hourly paid gig. Like, you’re coming on as a trainee, essentially. And it’s a mentorship. Like, you’re learning the standard of coaching that we provide. So hopefully, everybody graduates from the 90-day trial period. A spoiler alert, not everybody does. I’ll give you the stats on that in a minute. But even when somebody goes through and doesn’t graduate, they always say, like, “What I learned was so powerful.” And, and sometimes that’s a benefit too, right? The schedule that, generally speaking, candidates have to commit to and start with is at least a Monday through Wednesday nine to five. And then there’s some flexibility if we need additional hours. Like we can be a little bit more flexible, but we can’t have people who can’t work Monday through Wednesday nine to five.
That’s critical. You can’t take two hours off here and there throughout the day. Like, that’s when we expect you to be there. That’s core hours of our business. There’s a program knowledge test that happens within those first 90 days. You have time to brush up on things, but it’s like studying for the SAT. I mean, you have sample written feedback assessments, video training assessments, podcast assessments, live coaching on workshop trial classes. Meaning imagine teaching a live workshop that you’ve been trained on and you, you feel confident about, but I’m there in the chat or somebody else from my leadership team is in the chat, they’re in the chat, and we’re being students, and we’re pretending to act like students and ask questions and have tech issues. And it’s like, how would you navigate all of those things? That’s some of what somebody would go through in the first 90 days.
I mean, it’s, it’s like going through a 90-day bootcamp, but we want our coaches to be the best of the best. So the training is gonna have to be rigorous. So what are we looking for when we’re evaluating candidates? And what are the skills we know have to be there for somebody to be successful? I will just tell you right out the gate, when somebody starts off as a coach and is not successful, it’s heartbreaking for everybody involved, for me, for the coach, for the team, for everybody. We want everybody who comes in to be successful. So number one thing is confidence being on camera. And we ask that early on, like, are you confident being on camera? And if you’re not, it’s gonna be a really difficult job. I spend so much of my time, like, staring at myself recording a video. And I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s how the job works.
So confidence on camera is key. You don’t have to be confident being live on camera yet, which is a totally different skillset. But talking to camera, performing on camera, like, it is a part of it. Number two, belief in our system and methodologies. We had a coach come in who kinda wanted to, like, challenge everything we were doing. That’s just, like, it’s not gonna work. Like, if you don’t want to teach our methodology, I totally understand and respect that, but then you probably wouldn’t be an employee here, so that doesn’t work. Number three, a genuine desire to evolve, change, and grow. Anybody who comes here and is not interested in developing a new skillset, thinking outside the box, considering the reality that maybe they don’t have it just figured out just yet, this would be a tough role. Number four, speed and accuracy and written responses.
Because of the volume of coaching that we do and requests that we get, like, speed and efficiency is critical. And there’s a bit of a learning curve with that, and we can understand to a degree, but if, if their efficiency is not there because our company moves at such a fast pace, and we do have incredible opportunities that come our way, like, we have to have somebody on the team who can, like, move, pivot, adapt, be efficient. It’s just so important. Next, they have to be highly coachable, highly coachable. Think about if. I always use this analogy that I do consider myself to be, like, a coach or a mentor. I don’t consider myself to be a teacher or an educator. And I coach D1 athletes who wanna play in the Super Bowl one day. Like, that’s the kind of business owner I wanna coach.
Somebody who has a lot of potential, a lot of talent, ton to drive, and wants to be the best of the best. That’s who I like to work with. And so, being highly coachable is the only way I can get you to play on our Super Bowl MVP team. Anybody who comes in and, like, has it all dialed in and doesn’t want feedback and doesn’t want to have to watch back me giving a deep critique of areas that need to be improved, this will not be for you. The coachability is what makes coaches exceptional, but it’s, it’s not comfortable, and it’s not for everybody. Somebody who wants to come in and really learn and be mentored, this is amazing. And then lastly, the ability to travel 12 times a year. One of the things we’ve noticed is, trust me, I started this company. My son, I could just get emotional thinking about it.
He’s gonna be 12 shortly here. And I built this company when he was an infant. I had started coaching salons one-to-one before he was born. I coached salons while he was pregnant. I know some of those salons. Remember those days? Or when I was pregnant with him, he wasn’t pregnant, weird saying. And now, he’s almost a teenager. And so, when I first started really scaling the coaching company, it was long days, long nights with this beautiful new baby, and I was trying to do it all. And I’ve done the juggle, and I, I get it. We had one team member who refused to get on a plane. That, for us, at this point, doesn’t work. Because there is such an interest and demand in one-to-one coaching, having that level of support. This is very much a 90% work-from-home company, but it’s not a free-for-all either.
And so, having the ability to be flexible and travel, it’s an amazing opportunity. Like, it opens doors to so many wonderful things. But to anybody who’s not in a season of life where they can’t do that, this would be impossible. We would need that flexibility there. Thankfully, I’m not flying 30 times a year anymore, and I don’t expect that of a coach with us starting out either. But the ability to travel, you know, we do our X-Club retreat once a year. There are, are just things you’d have to be on site for, and that is a part of it. Something that I think surprises a lot of people is the coaching role is about 50% student support and 50% administrative. There is a lot of moving parts and pieces in organizations in a company like ours. We have a relatively complex customer relationship management system.
I know we have coached over 17,000 accounts. There are probably twice as many inquiries in the CRM. Like, there’s just so many moving parts and pieces. We expect detailed notes after every coaching call. There’s recordings to manage, and a community to manage, and content to create. And so, in addition to the coaching and the support, it is a hugely administrative role. And I know admin work is not for everybody, but that surprises a lot of people as how much it’s not just coaching, teaching, helping, but, like, there is a, a relatively large admin component as well. Because we are a decent-sized team, trying to keep everybody on the same page is a constant battle. We are still fighting all the time. But the systems and administrative structure we have in place makes that as doable as it possibly can be. Most coaches who come to work for us are hoping to get hired on full-time.
Not everybody. Some people are happy being part-time, and that can work too, depending on what season of the business we’re in. Coaches who are full-time can be hourly or salaried, depending. Most of you know this. I coach to hourly being pretty badass. You can earn a high hourly rate working with us. However, a lot of coaches ultimately get to a place where they’re salaried because of the schedule and the logistics and all of the things. Full benefits. I’m proud to be a full benefits company, if that’s something that’s for you. We have a bonus pool that unlocks at the end of every year. If our annual revenue and annual profit margin is sustained, that is a deep into the multiple five figures profit pool that gets shared. It’s juicy. So that’s a nice opportunity. We work as a team, and so if the team collaboratively hits a goal, the reward is rich.
Two weeks full company closure at the end of the year. Lots of good stuff that our coaches get, and they work for it. They really work for it. When you see somebody who’s named as a coach in our company, it’s not flippantly decided, is well-earned and deserved, and the mentorship is ongoing. If you ever wanna ask any of our coaches what it was like, you know, being trained or working, they will tell you, for sure, for sure. And, and I think it’s just different than you would think. Couple of quick FAQs at the end. Uh, do we hire coaches that are like me? No. That actually ends up often being a bit of a red flag. And we already had a whole lot of me around here. So the last thing we need is more me. So we actually look for coaches that are different.
So like I say, you have to believe in the methodology, but I want you to have different experience. There’s a lot of things I’ve never experienced, and I don’t pretend to be an expert of things that I don’t feel confident speaking to. And so when we bring in people who are different, different lifestyles, different everything, it really diversifies our coaching team. It brings a different breadth of knowledge, of experience, values, variety, like everything. So no, coaches that are too similar to me often get declined because of it. So you don’t know if you’re too similar to me. If you’re interested in being a coach, you could still totally apply, but our team will be like, it’s like a mini Brit and that, that doesn’t work. We don’t need any more of me around here. Next, can coaches still work at their salons? Yeah. I think most, if not all, coaches who have applied to work for.
Yeah, all who started working with us were behind the chair in the salon full-time. Some left ultimately. But yeah, I think every single person who’s applied to work for us was in a salon as a stylist or an owner. So yes. The only no is that coaches cannot work for us and work for other education companies at the same time. Probably out of respect for us and for the other company. I think it makes it crunchy between both sides. So just out of, like, cleanliness for everybody all around, it prevents, you know, any funky stuff of, like, that was our idea, or a- anything like that. It just prevents the funk in the air. Um, so that’s a no, just in best interest of everybody. I don’t, I don’t want that to be funky. So that’s a no. But otherwise, otherwise, anybody who is in the industry has that craving on their heart to give back, loves our method, thinks it’d be a cool gig, a cool skill to learn, a great opportunity, wants to pour back in.
It’s a pretty cool, it’s a pretty cool job. I think so. So if you’re ever interested in becoming a Thriver Society coach, you can always email into support@thriversociety.com and say, “Hey, I’m interested in being a coach. You hiring right now? Can we get things started?” Uh, my team can let me know if they are hiring right now or not. And we hire throughout the year. Um, we do our best to keep all interested candidates on file, just like I coach salon owners to do. Yeah. I hope this has been an insightful one. If you’ve been sliding into my DMs asking what it looks like and how it goes, I hope this has been clarifying. As always, so much love. Happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
