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, Brit Siva, and today we’re talking about Gen Z. I just got the chance to talk to a lot of Gen Z stylists, and I wanted to kind of get to the root of the conversation. There’s a lot of chatter in the industry around this idea that Gen Z is less motivated, that they’re lazy, that they just don’t understand what it takes to make it work in this industry, that they’re difficult to manage. I mean, I’ve heard all the things, and I have Gen Z employees, and I understand there is a cultural difference. I am like an elder millennial, and so I grew up in one working environment, but the working environment that exists today is not the same as the one I grew up in when I was, you know, a teenager or in my 20s or even in my 30s.
And adapting to this new workforce is not something we can avoid. It’s something we have to embrace. So this was the first year that Gen Z actually is a larger population of the workforce than baby boomers. As we see baby boomers starting to shift into retirement, there is more Gen Z entering the workforce. So it’s important to understand how to make your business environment work for the new generation, not against it. Now, millennials still make up the largest portion at 36% of the workforce, and then Gen X at 31%. Gen Z and Baby Boomers are essentially at a split with Gen Z at 18% and Baby Boomers at 15. So in a few years, we’ll be more like 30, 30, 30 with the next generation coming up. So these challenges that we’re having are not gonna go away. We have to learn to shift forward.
I have a couple of other really great episodes on the topic if you haven’t listened already. We have 235, which is Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z in the salon. That’s a great one. I talk about how to shift salon culture to match every generation where they’re at. Every generation has a different expectation for what they want their workplace to be like, how they’re motivated, what’s going to make them stay with you long-term, how you can keep the peace between all generations. So listen to 235 for that. I also have episode 316, which is motivating Gen Z. Gen Z’s motivators are not the same as those of a millennial person or a Gen X person or baby boomer. All of us are raised with our own unique money story, right? My upbringing is going to change my relationship with money or what I find to be important or what I’m working towards versus my daughter who’s a Gen Z is motivated by a completely different ideology.
Yet she was raised by a couple of millennial parents and this is just simply the world that she grew up in, right? I grew up in a world where there wasn’t internet and, and things were just more simple and we were told that you’re supposed to find a career and stay there forever and pensions were amazing and build towards retirement. And this generation was not told those same things. And we can want them to want the same things as generations before, but it’s going to be yelling into a void the better strategies to understand what they want and that’s what this podcast is dedicated to. So just about a week ago, I shared an Instagram story and I said, “Hey, if you’re a Gen Z stylist and you’re willing to help me out with something, raise your hand. I’m gonna have you complete a survey.” 300-something stylists responded.
And the way I did the survey is if somebody said, “Yes, I’ll do it,” I made them submit their details and profile. What I’ve done in the past is I’ve done surveys and because the data’s anonymous, I was like, “Is this really coming from Gen Z?” The people who said they wanted to participate who were quite clearly not Gen Z were screened out. So I know everybody in this particular survey is exactly who we wanted to hear from. So I’m gonna share with you what they want, how to motivate them, the biggest misunderstandings about this generation. I have some quotes about what they love and what annoys them, what they look for in dream salons, what schedules they want to work, what motivates them, all of the things. So first, let me tell you a little bit about who responded. So 28% of respondents have been in the industry for seven or more years.
You could figure those people were in their late 20s. 21% have been in the industry for five to six years, 23% three to four, and 28% two or less. So it’s really a good cross section of Gen Z. We have a lot of great responses. What was interesting is I also asked about their earning level. So I asked, “How much service revenue are you producing?” So I didn’t say, “What was your net take home pay or what did your paycheck look like?” I said, “What are you producing at the service revenue level?” And the options were less than 20,000 to, I think I topped out at 150,000 or more. And we had responses at all of those levels, but there was this cluster at either end. So we had a lot of responses of stylists who were making less than 50K and then a lot of responses of stylists who were making over 100K.
And I couldn’t have predicted that, but what I found to be interesting is I have been coaching for several years about the squeezing out of the middle class in our industry. There is a squeezing out of the middle class when you just look at the US as a whole, but when you look at how it is in our industry, this is what I’ve been calling the great divide. There’s this generation or this group in the industry who is barely getting by, struggling financially. Can this industry work? I am so frustrated. I’m not building fast enough. The money’s not there. And then this other side who’s like, the money’s actually great. And there’s not a lot of people in the middle. The other thing about the middle, if you just participated in leadership bootcamp at the end of this summer, I talked about how dangerous the middle can be for a salon because when you’re a mid-range stylist, even if you’re independent, you’re making more money than you were making before, but it’s not enough to turn a meaningful profit and it’s this really tough spot.
And we find a lot of stylists kind of coast and get comfortable somewhere around like 65 to 90 grand a year where it’s like better than you were before, but you’re not really to financial freedom. What was interesting is very few respondents on that survey were in that middle chunk. It was a lot of trying to build a clientele and already producing six figures in revenue, which is usually who comes to me for coaching. I, I usually coach very high producers looking to scale or people at the start of their career who are trying to figure out how to at least get to that first 90K. The people in the middle are comfortable and often that’s not who I’m coaching to. So I will be honest, not a lot of representation there. Now, the first question I asked in the survey was, “What is more important to you right now?
Making as much money as you can, as fast as possible, or having plenty of time to enjoy life?” What do you think was the most common answer? Remember, these are people basically under the age of 29. Overwhelmingly, 62%, making as much money as I can, top priority. Only 37% said, “Having plenty of time to enjoy life.” So immediately that debunks this idea that Gen Z does not want to work. They want to make as much money as possible. But we know there’s this like scheduling friction there that we can’t ignore. It’s there. I will explain it to you as this episode goes on, so hang tight. Next I asked Gen Z stylists, “What is the number one benefit that you look for in a salon that you’re looking to work at?” So I want you to imagine this, you’re a salon owner and you’re looking to hire and you want to attract amazing driven Gen Z stylists, what should you be advertising to get them to want to come work for you?
So I’ll start with the least popular responses. Not a single person picked no nights or weekends or retirement contribution matching as the benefits they’re looking for. Not a single person in the survey picked that. Something to keep in mind. The next least popular response was paid time off. Only 3% of Gen Z stylists that, “I’m looking for a salon that offers that.” Next least popular response, health insurance support. Only 6% of Gen Z stylists said that’s something that they’re looking for. The next least popular response, unlimited unpaid time off, only 9% picked that. Okay, so then it starts to turn the corner and get interesting. 16% of Gen Z stylists said they’re looking for ongoing education as a primary benefit when working at a salon. 22% said the possibility of 55% plus commission, so top earnings essentially. 22.5%, so barely more, said salon provides 70% of the clientele.
If you can build a clientele for them, you will hire the most amazing stylist to your business. And then 31%, this was the most requested benefit, you wanna guess what it is? I get to make my own schedule. So that goes back to the point that I just brought up. There’s this idea that Gen Z is lazy or don’t want to work. It’s not that they don’t want to work. They don’t necessarily want to work when you want them to work. You know how sometimes as millennials, we were raised by parents who were like, “You’re gonna do it because I say it.” And there’s not a lot of room for negotiation. That’s the reality I was raised in. When you look at Gen Z coming up, they were the like, “But tell me why generation. I need to know why. I need to know how.
Prove it to me that I have to do this.” You don’t have to like it, but that was the world they were raised in. They were raised in a more aware world. They were raised in a world where mental health mattered, that they lived through COVID. Like they’ve just had a different experience than those of us who are millennials or Gen X have. So their belief system is completely different. And freedom of schedule is number one. Now I’ll tell you what it looks like to work full-time for them. I think the answer might actually surprise you. I’m gonna move on to compensation, but before I do, I just wanna make a little side note on the benefits that we just talked about. When you look at the three most cost-effective or cheapest things on that list, it’s things like unpaid time off, schedule autonomy, and potentially education if you can provide that in-house.
I’m not saying those things are free, right? If you give somebody unpaid time off, their chair’s not productive. I understand that cost. If you are doing in-house education, sometimes you’re paying an educator. I understand both of those things are arguably less expensive than things like paid health insurance or retirement matching, because you’re paying those things out kind of like regardless of what’s going on in the building. When you look at the things that stylists are really craving, they want you to fill their chair with clients. They wanna be able to create their own schedule. Those are things that can be like very low cost in comparison to a lot of the more traditional benefits that we’re used to thinking we have to offer. So just something to consider. So let’s move on to compensation. I wanna say at the start here that 58% of respondents were in booths or suites, so 58% were independent and then 42% were employees, which is pretty indicative of, I think, the people who follow me.
So that totally makes sense. When you look at that 42% who were employees, 47% said that they were employed on an hourly wage or an hourly/commission hybrid, meaning either hourly or they’d make commission if it outweighed the hourly. That was 47%. Only 12% of respondents said it was even possible to earn 48% commission or more. I want you to think about that. If you are a salon who is able to offer more than 48%, you are now competing in the top 12% of salons when it comes to compensation. And I know there’s this thought process that you couldn’t afford to pay more than 48%. Paying more than 48% commission doesn’t have to cost you more than 45% of expenses. We have members in thriving leadership doing it all the time. I think that budgeting and salon finance is something that is just incredibly misunderstood. I’m not suggesting that you spend over 50% of your expenses on payroll.
For most salons, I know that would not be sustainable, but I think that salons oversimplify what finance looks like and don’t really even know the numbers to realize you can pay more in commissions so long as you are running good financials and are paying everybody properly, your highest performers can absolutely do it. So when you look at the opportunity to be a salon that pays more and offers more, it’s certainly available to the Gen Z stylists who do want it. And going back to the data, when you see that 50% of respondents raked the possibility of 55% commission in their top three desirable benefits, there’s certainly a correlation there. So then I went back and I said, “Take me back to the beginning. How did you find your current salon?” 34% said personal referral. 25% said Instagram. 22% said local reputation. So like word of mouth or driving by, they were just familiar with it.
9% said Google, and then 9% said they came to my school. So when you see that 34% is personal referral, your reputation about your team and what it’s like to work for you is everything. Like if your existing team and those who have worked for you and have moved on are not saying, “If you’re looking for a great place to work, you wanna be at such and such salon,” that’s probably an indicator that something is off. Your reputation’s gonna matter a lot. And then number two is gonna be Instagram. So if what you’re showing on Instagram isn’t making stylists want to work for you, we wanna look at the content we’re posting and be like, “Huh, am I attracting the stylists who I’m hoping to bring in?” When you look at Gen Z and I talk to Gen Z and I say, “Hey, what are you looking for?” When you’re looking on Instagram to find a stylist, I get a lot of, “I wanna know their personalities.
Like I wanna know the personalities of the team. Are they gonna be approachable? Are they gonna be a little bit elevated? Are they gonna be intimidating but in a good way? Are they gonna be intimidating but in a bad way? What’s the owner like? Are they nice? Are they easy to talk to? Are they funny? Are they serious? Are. How, what’s their style like? Well, how am I supposed to dress? Like these are the things people wanna see on Instagram. They wanna find a salon that’s a match for them. How frustrating is it when you have somebody come in for an interview and it doesn’t go well and you’re like,” Ah, they’re a good person. They just want a good fit. “You attracted the wrong person. And they can tell when they take a look at your website and your socials if they’re likely a good fit or not when all of that is put together correctly.
Then I asked,” What would make you stay at a salon for 10 plus years? “And on this one, people could pick unlimited options. So if they wanted to, they could pick all the options I gave. People just picked the ones that meant the most to them. So you’re gonna hear overwhelming numbers and underwhelming numbers. So the least common answer was traditional benefits. So things like health insurance, retirement savings, only 16% said that would make me stay at a salon. The other over 80% said,” I’ll take it or leave it. It’s not gonna make me stay with you.” 19% said clients or marketing support. And we see that from senior staff. New staff wanna come in and be built up. Now, I’ll tell you how you can keep them in just a second, but when you get to somebody who’s senior, who’s thinking about should I stay or should I go, they likely already have clients and marketing support, so they’re looking for something different.
25% said flexibility, scheduling and time off, which is interesting because when people were looking at where to start working, that was their number one priority. But when it was where are people thinking about when they’re staying working with you, that becomes one of the least popular. How come? Because if somebody is thinking about leaving you, they’re more than likely going to become independent, so they know they’re gonna get that as a byproduct. So the flexibility is actually what brings the new talent in. Senior staff know they can get it with if they stay or if they go. So be mindful of that. There was actually somebody in the survey who said, “Our salon is set up that the more senior you become, the more schedule flexibility that you get, but what ends up happening is it seems like you have to have a baby to have a flexible schedule, and I’m not a mom yet.” Be careful of that.
You don’t wanna have a policy where it’s like, “Well, just the moms get it.” Or, “Well, she should get it now. She’s a mom.” That starts to look like you’re giving bias in the wrong direction, so be really, really careful of things like that, especially if that’s the perception from your team. 28% said excellent leadership communication and honesty is what would make them stay. Another 28% said, “Unbeatable money and compensation.” So t – only 28%. So over 60% said, “That’s not what would make me stay.” 53% said, “Unlimited growth opportunities.” This is something we talk about in a lot in thriving leadership. I do coach to opportunity for stylists to make lots of money so that the owner can make lots of money and everybody can make lots of money, but growth often looks very different than that. And so when in leadership, we talk about the difference between horizontal growth and vertical growth.
So yeah, there’s always opportunities to make more money, but what else? What else feels like professional growth? And the answer to that is different for every stylist and every salon. But if 53% are saying, “I would stay with the salon for 10 or more years, if there was more opportunities for professional growth, we have to listen to them.” And then number one is 63% culture, team, no drama environment. When I coach salons one-to-one, I can go into the dreamiest, most amazing salon and there’s culture issues. I mean, just every single time. And if you can get to the core of that and truly make sure that you have a team where there’s no rumblings in the break room and everybody’s truly happy and there’s trust and vulnerability and all the things, that is a recipe for retention. And so understanding how to create a culture that’s unbeatable with the growth opportunities and the money and the leadership, those are gonna be the top four reasons people are looking for.
Now going back, if we’re looking to attract people, I asked the question of how long of a training program were you looking for when you were applying to salons? 78% said 12 months or less. And then there was outliers on either side. There was about 12% who said I would do 12 to 18 months. 2% said more than 18 months, so very few people. That’s when we start to see burnout and resentment and turnover and all kinds of issues. When you have a longer assisting program, what you’ll find is you can put them through a nice long assisting program. They will take 100,000 years to build a clientele because by the time they get on the floor, they’re so like mentally and emotionally and physically exhausted, they’re over it. Like they’ve lost the drive versus if you can push them farther and faster, they’ll keep the drive and motivation that they had coming out of school and they’ll build much faster too.
You wanna kind of catapult on that trajectory there. There were these outliers of less than 10% of people who were like, “Oh, six months or less.” And there will always be that. And I think depending on if maybe you’re doing something departmentalized, maybe somebody’s just specializing in one thing, it could be possible. Something we talk about in thriving leadership is earning certificates, and you could certainly do something like that in six months or less, but 78% said 12 months or less felt right, so I think that’s still a good benchmark. This is what was interesting. I said, “What days of the week would you prefer to work as a stylist?” The most popular day that stylists were looking for was Wednesday. 81% said, “I love working Wednesdays.” Tuesdays was 72%. Thursdays was 75%. Fridays was 72%. Mondays was 41%. And Saturdays, 31%. So when you look at, you know, almost 70% of stylists saying, “I don’t wanna work Saturdays.” It’s something to think about.
I’ve seen salons do really creative things where people who work on Saturdays make a higher commission or there’s a bonus for working on Saturdays. Those are interesting concepts. In the last few salons I’ve consulted, and I think that there’s outliers to this too, when they have shifted. We do things like peak and premium pricing. When they have shifted the way the revenue flows, you can fill a Thursday as fast as you can fill a Saturday, depending on salon structure. So when we find a salon where there’s a team that doesn’t wanna work weekends, we’re like, okay, let’s shift structure and we can change the clientele flow to make that work. So it’s just something to think about. Now, what was interesting is, do you remember earlier we were talking about benefits that people are looking for when they’re looking for salons to work at? No nights and weekends was not a desirable benefit.
We covered that. Nobody was saying, “That’s the number one thing I look for.” But people are saying, “I don’t want to work Saturdays and I want schedule flexibility.” Keep that in mind when you are promoting opportunities to work for you. I have a video series called After the Last Client, and in that, an amazing salon owner named Kimber Chapman talked about how she eliminated Saturdays for her team, and it was a total misfire backfire. Like it was a. She, she admitted, she’s like, “I don’t know why I did it. It was not a good decision.” And I think she’s somebody who learned this lesson, and I didn’t see it framed this way until I saw this survey either. It’s not that they’re saying, “We don’t want nights and weekends.” What they’re saying is it’s not seen as a benefit. What they’re saying is they want that flexibility.
So if I wanna work Saturdays because my partner’s home to watch the kids or whatever my reasoning is, they like the autonomy to work when it works for them. And that’s kind of the caveat to that. So let’s talk about some of the quotes that came through in the survey as well that I think is gonna tie some of this together. So this is a 25-year-old stylist who is still an employee, making 151 grand a year in service revenue. So producing 151 grand a year, I should say. She said, “There’s nothing I despise more than being stereotyped as lazy just because I’m Gen Z. I’ve worked my booty off to get to where I am.” At 25 years old, producing $151,000 a year as a service provider, we could hardly call that person lazy. And then as I say that, some of you might say, “Well, she’s the outlier.” In every generation, there’s outliers.
I think of the people I went to cosmetology school with, there was maybe four or five of us in the salon five years after we graduated. I mean, the turnover is wild, so we can’t say that, like, years ago, there wasn’t turnover like this. It’s always been there, and there always will be the strong that survive. When I talk about who took this survey, it was all Gen Z, and there was this incredible group of high-performance, six-figure stylists, and then these people still trying to build. The industry’s always look like that. It’s just that the middle has spread out, which I saw the data in the survey for, and that’s really the big difference. A 29-year-old stylist who is also making six figures says, “I don’t want to be called a baby stylist. I’m an adult. I’m making great money. Don’t refer to me as a baby.” We actually got a lot of that feedback.
A 29-year-old booth renter who is making $111,000 a year said, “I never want to be called a baby stylist again. It’s incredibly belittling.” So if you and your salon team are using the word baby stylist and it’s tongue-in-cheep, and you have stylists who think it’s adorable, that’s fine. But when you look at these high performers who are feeling turned off by it, you might be pushing high performers away, do with that what you want to. But I had the term baby stylist being mentioned in a negative way nine times in the survey. It was a repeated thought and phrase, so just something to think about. And here’s another direct quote. “This is a stylist who is doing $130,000 a year in services, still an employee, making over 55% commission, working three days a week. “So this person works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And this person says,” Great leadership benefits, good culture and steady flow of clients are my non-negotiables.
I hate the stigma that younger stylists are lazy and don’t wanna work. I do work with a lot of assistants who are 19 to 21, and I definitely understand the struggle of younger girls not necessarily having the drive or the passion, but I don’t think it can be linked directly to our generation. There’s nothing I despise more than being stereotyped as a lazy generation. “And I think that’s really fair. Then we got into schedule and I said,” Okay, what feels like a good full work week to you? How many hours a week do you like to be working to make the kind of money you want to make? “These answers super surprised me because as we’re believing this mindset that Gen Z is so lazy and that they don’t wanna work, this data completely contradicted that. So the least most popular answer was 36 to 40 hours a week, but that came in at 28%.
So 28% of Gen Z stylists said 36 to 40 hours a week is a good full week for me. It didn’t feel like working too much. It was like this feels right for me. I can make the money I wanna make. I though that was interesting. Then the second most popular answer at 34% was 26 to 30 hours. So it’s a decrease, but what’s interesting is that 81% of people who chose that answer were already earning six figures. So for the most part, the people who are saying,” I don’t wanna work more than 30 hours a week, “are the people who are already making six figures and have realized how to scale and that they don’t have to work more or double column or do all of these things to make that kind of money. So they’ve already kind of like unlocked the secret and they’re like,” Well, now I know how to make the money.
I don’t wanna work more than 30 hours. “That was 34%. 37%. So the majority said 31 to 35 hours a week. You’re looking at a four day a week team member. That’s what I coached you. Four days a week is feeling really full-time for these stylists. This is a super physically demanding job, and at 31 to 35 hours a week, that is a good load. So then we looked at how many days a week each of these people are currently working. Only 6.5% said two days. So very few of these Gen Z stylists are ultra, ultra or part-time. Three days, this actually surprised me. Only 22%, I thought it would be higher. And then there was a tie of 35% of respondents are working four days a week and 35% of respondents are working five. So at least when it comes to the people who follow me or interact with me, there’s not a lot of super part-timers.
The vast majority are working four to five days a week. They want to be working a more full week. They want to be making tons of money that’s more important to them than taking tons of time off. They just wanna have that schedule flexibility. They wanna work in a salon that has great culture. They wanna have lots of room to grow. They wanna have conversations around growth. They want to be making more money. They want to have clientele provided for them at the start of their careers. I know this is sounding like a lot. As I list all of these things that Gen Z wants, what’s interesting is there’s a lot of things that millennials and Gen X wanted that Gen Z don’t. And so I want you to look at it as a little bit of a give and take. There is an upside to this in a really, really massive way.
And here’s the rub, is adapting to Gen Z isn’t an option. It’s critical. Unless ultimately you wanna have a salon with older stylists working for you and not attract a new generation, that’s certainly an option, but if you want to keep building forward and bringing on assistance and hiring new talent, understanding what they want and what their mindset is, is absolutely critical. So this has been clarifying for you. If you have any additional questions, I’d love for you to leave me a rating or review on iTunes. We can always run it back and do another survey again. And as I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
