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 hair stylists, 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 week we’re talking about what it actually tangibly looks like to be making 100K working three days a week as a stylist. I wanna clarify right at the top, I mean taking home six figures. So we have a few different episodes where I’ve talked about making six figures and lots of different ways to do it. I’m gonna debunk some of the myths around what it takes to earn six figures. I’m gonna give real examples of stylists who are working three days a week and making six figures, the math around it, the strategies around it, and I’m gonna source like real examples of case studies where I’ve looked at the businesses of stylists and salon owners who are making real revenue, like deep revenue. So to be taking home 100K, right, you’re doing 200,000, 250,000, 300,000 or more behind your chair individually to be able to take home six figures.
So I dug deep into all of these businesses where they’re pulling that off and really analyze, okay, what are the things that these people are doing differently and how do we emulate it at scale? So this episode’s very timely. It’s coming on the heels of the episode I did just a couple of weeks back where it was a big Gen Z study and it was kind of looking at, you know, what this next generation wants. And I know a lot of you who listen to this are millennials, I’m a millennial, or maybe you’re Gen X. That’s totally fine. What we have to understand is the new generation is always the generation that inspires shift, right? Gen X changed the way that the industry ran from the generation before them. Um, millennials changed a lot of industry norms for Gen X. We’re seeing the same thing happen with Gen Z.
We don’t have to like the change, but we have to understand like the new generation always pivots any given industry. And what we found in that survey was that Gen Z prioritizes life balance in this huge, huge way. And it puts them into the subcategory of being lazy. And the data doesn’t support that. There’s so much production coming out of Gen Z. They’re very driven, they love education, they’re hungry, but they’re not willing to do it the same way that Millennials or Gen X did back in the day. So combine that with a broader survey. So I found bank rate data, so this is a recent survey of working adults and it was asking what your ideal work week is. And what they found was on average, based on survey, 3.8 days a week was the ideal work week. So it means somewhere between three and four days a week feels the best to those in the workforce.
It doesn’t mean that they have it, but if like they were able to choose, “Okay, I still wanna feel productive. I wanna make a great living for myself and I wanna have life balance, what would be the sweet spot?” And it was this kind of like three to four day week survey data based on thousands of people’s feedback. And that does echo a lot of what I’m seeing coming out of salon owners who are coming to me for coaching saying, “This is what my stylists want.” That’s all very aligned. Three to four days work week sounds like what people want. This is where that data got interesting. So in that same survey, the surveyor said, “What would you be willing to give up to work three to four days a week instead of five?” 23% would work off peak hours. So what they’re saying is, “If you want me to work a Saturday, I’m happy to do it, but I’m only gonna work three days a week.” I though that was interesting.
There’s a lot of salon owners who were like, “None of my staff wants to work Saturday.” I wonder if you said, “Well, we need people to work Saturday, but if you do so, you can have a three day week.” I though that was an interesting trade off. 23% said I’d be totally down. 17% would take a less interesting job. So 17% would choose boring work if it meant they could work a better schedule, so less mental stimulation. 16% would give up vacation days and other benefits. 12% would accept a longer commute. Only 10% would take a pay cut. And I think this is kind of the rub, and it’s where often I come in as a consultant is people will say like, “I do wanna work more favorable schedule, but I’m not willing to lose money.” Of course you’re not. Of course you’re not. And anybody who’s coached with me knows there is no circumstance where I say, “Well, we can reduce your schedule, but you’re gonna make less.” That would be terrible advice.
It’s always looking at, okay, how do we get you working the best possible schedule, the one that fits your lifestyle while scaling your revenue? And that’s the game that we play. So I’m gonna share with you some Thriver stories. Susie says, “I sign up for Thrivers Society and I’m thrilled to share that I’ve reduced my schedule behind the chair to three days a week and I am making more money than I’ve ever made.” So she works less and is producing more revenue-wise and doesn’t double book. So anybody who’s like, “Oh, it’s because she’s double booking.” It’s not that we reduced her schedule and massively increased her volume. That’s not the game we play. Prior to Thrivers, I was making around 20 to 25K annually, working six to seven days a week. Now I’m taking home well over 80K and on track to take home over 100K this year while enjoying my five children and being present at all of their activities.
Melanie says, “I’ve doubled my income. I started seeing only target market clients and cut my hours to three days a week, no weekends, no evenings. I am now taking home six figures working part-time.” Rachel Snyder is somebody that I interviewed on After the Last Client. You can head to afterthelastclient.com. It’s a series of really incredible interviews where we dig deep into the backend of super successful stylists and salon owners businesses and they tell us what they did and what their mistakes were and their secrets and all that kind of stuff. Rachel Snyder is one of the stylists that I interview on that series and she’s based out of Florida, which is a highly competitive market. She works three days a week and she’s clearing deep into the six figures. And she talks about how she created efficiency in her business to do that. She doesn’t have an ultra high ticket.
She’s like, “I think that’s the thing that’s a misunderstanding is people think, Oh, making a lot of money on a shortened schedule, every client must have a $600 ticket. She’s like, “That’s not true of my business at all.” And so she really debunks a lot of myths around it. She’s a great example. So she started off as a studio suite owner and then hired one assistant in her studio suite. It’s interesting, she’s been able to build the clientele of her assistant and the way in which she explains it in the episode’s amazing. Seriously go back and listen. And now she’s expanding, which is so exciting for her too. There’s another stylist whose name I will not share. They’re based out of Sacramento. They are a deeply successful extension artist. They’re X Club, so if you’re in Thriver Society X Club, you might know this person who is clearing $300,000 working Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 11 to 70.
So she’s not working three days a week doing three 12s. Her schedule is 11 to seven, but she does the thing that came up in the survey data. She’s doing the trade off. She’s like, “I only wanna work three days a week. I wanna make a lot of money, but if it means I work a Saturday, it means I work a Saturday.” And that’s what she’s done. And it’s worked out really, really well for her. So let’s look at the math first to figure out what it would take to take home 100K. So I always assume 50% take home. That’s oversimplified. Some of you are in commission salons where the most you can make is 45%, so you’d have to adjust the math on that. Some of you are booth renters where your expenses are way above 60%, so in which case you would not be taking home 50%.
Some of you are booth renters and you are taking home 70%. Badass. So everybody’s gonna land a little bit differently in the mathematics, but depending on where you land, you would kinda shift these ratios. So if the goal is take home 100K pre-tax, you’re gonna have to pay tax on whatever your income is no matter how we slice it whether you’re a booth renter or an employee, whatever, but you wanna take home 100K on paper. You would need to do, in simplest terms, about 200K in services annually. I also like to assume that everybody’s taking two weeks of vacation every single year. In my company, we do three weeks paid vacation a year, but you do it how you wanna do it. At least two weeks vacation a year I think is healthy for anybody. Everybody needs a break. So based on that math, assuming that a stylist works three days a week, their daily production needs to be $1,333 a day.
If they’re working eight hours a day, three days a week, they would need to be averaging $175 an hour in services. So for some of you, that’s a huge jump. Some of you, if we were to look, you’d be doing more like 50 or $60 an hour in services. And if you’re like, “How do I get that math?” What you do is you take your total average revenue for any given day in the salon and you divide it by how many hours you’ve worked. So if you did $800 in service revenue last Wednesday and you worked eight hours, then you were producing $100 an hour. So we would need to get you to an average production of 175 an hour. There’s lots of different ways to do it. You could be doing haircuts that are, you know, $230, but they’re in your chair for 90 minutes, something like that.
People who were doing color services are averaging way above that often. Extensions is another way to do it. The thing we have to keep in mind with extensions is the overhead is much higher on an extension service and the labor intensity of an extension service is incredibly high. It’s very physically demanding work and it’s time consuming. So is there a lot of money to be made? Absolutely. I love the specialty, but I think a lot of times people are like, “Well, that’s the way to make big cash.” I don’t know. I mean, when I talk to people like Caitlin Carnahan, who was a guest on after the last client, Rachel Snyder, Rachel does extensions, but she’s like, “I make so much money for my color clients.” And, and even Caitlin Carnahan, she’s, all she does is like root touch-ups and some foiling, but it’s all color related.
And it’s not color corrections. It’s like really simple color services done really efficiently, and they’re generating way above these rates, but there’s a lot of different ways to cut it. So don’t oversimplify it and say, “Well, that’s only for such and such.” I see people in all specialties doing it. There is a barber that I have networked with for years. He was a speaker at Thrivers Live years ago, and to sit in his chair for a barbering service, you start at 350. You cannot sit in his chair for a barbering experience for less than 350 bucks. So this idea that like everybody’s charging $60 is just not true, but then we start to look at, okay, when we do have people who are producing $165 an hour in services, what are the commonalities there and what are the things that we can say if we do these things, we can get on the right track to have this be our reality.
Now, I’m gonna break down for you the things you need to do. I wanna first take like a teeny tiny break and talk about scaling because I think it’s critical and I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t include this as a sidebar. Let me take a quick break to thank Square for supporting today’s episode. This week’s Square story comes from a Thriver Society member, Jenny. Jenny’s a stylist and she says her favorite thing about Square is that deposits are simply consistent. She said she shifted to Square after being on another system for years, and with her old system, she said her deposits would be coming in normally as expected for a few weeks, and then out of nowhere, three days would go by with nothing. She’d have to call the software company and try and chase down her deposits, and it was just one more thing to worry about.
She says after three years with Square, she never once had to worry about late or missing deposits. It was just consistent with no surprises and no hiccups. For me, I’d much rather you have a simple system that is predictable than one with a hundred features that you never touch. Sometimes predictable is the best feature you can find and you’ll find that with Square. So if you’re just getting started or if you’re running a business that deserves better tools than what you’ve got, right now you can get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com/go/thriver.
That’s S-Q-U-A-R-E.com/G-O/T-H-R-I-V-E-R. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Whenever somebody is like, “I wanna make as much money as I possibly can, and I wanna work a three-day week schedule,” great. The Thriver Society golden rule is always gonna be the first thing I share to anybody. Demand comes first. I can get you to anywhere you wanna go in business. I can help you make as much money as you want, ex – open a salon, expand a salon, hire a team, become an educator, whatever it is you wanna do, but demand comes first. We don’t build anything unless the demand is there. So my big rule is I never like to make shifts to a stylist business that will make them earn less, unless they want to. But unless it’s strategic, anything we do has to produce more revenue as part of the outcome. So if you’re a stylist who is struggling with demand right now, and you have lots of gaps on your books, and you’re not seeing eight to 10 new guest requests a month, and your revenue is not increasing by 15 to 20% a year, that’s step one.
We have to get like a basic solid marketing funnel in place for you. And if you’re not sure what I mean by that, just do a Google search of thriving stylist marketing funnel. I have so many podcasts on it, you’ll see a ton of free resources. That has to be in place first. The biggest mistake I make is people see an episode like this and they go, “Oh my gosh, perfect.” And they start band-aiding their business, and you’ve got so many potholes that you could layer on all the things I’m about to talk about, and then you come back to me and be like, “Yeah, that didn’t work.” And I’d pull up your marketing funnel and be like, “Oh my gosh, it’s because you put lipstick on a pig.” If you’re not familiar with that phrase, basically it means, let’s say that we were in the business of flipping houses.
We weren’t building businesses stylists. We’re in the industry of flipping houses, and right now you’ve got a fixer-upper. You just bought it, and it has a lot of potential, but it’s not, it’s not running at the rate that it could be. You bought it for really cheap. For some of you, that’s what your business looks like behind the chair right now. It’s not what it could be. It’s got a lot of potential. It’s got good foundation, but it’s not positioned right. Maybe it’s not in a great neighborhood, or it’s not painted well, or it hasn’t been updated in 30 years, going back to the home renovation example, right? For some of you, that’s what your business looks like, and I can tell in about five seconds looking at what you’ve got going on, if that’s where you’re at. You could do a quick flip, and you could go to Home Depot and buy a bunch of cheap finishings and furnishings and paint it and drop in new carpet and not really fix any of the electrical, not really fix any of the plumbing, but just make it look prettier, like new, new backsplash, whatever, and you might be able to break even or make a little bit of a profit on it versus if you took a year and you were like, “You know what?
We’re gonna do this right. We’re gonna upgrade this to the core. Yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do the things that need to be done to make it look more modern, but it’s all gonna be very intentional. We’re gonna create mood boards, we’re gonna design it properly. It’s gonna feel like a home, like somebody can see themselves living here, not just better than it was before, but like very intentional. That’s a home you’d flip and make like real profit on. And when you see people who are in that business, that’s what they’re doing. It’s not a lot of. They don’t try and do 10 quick flips a year. They try and do one really, really well. That’s how I want you to look at your business. If your business is not producing in a healthy way right now, you can put band-aids on it. It’s never gonna produce the result that it could if you were to like get down to business and do the work you need to do to get it solid.
So I’m gonna share these tips, assuming you’ve already got a pretty solid marketing funnel in place. You’re seeing at least six to eight to 10 new guest requests every single month. You’re doing okay. You’re definitely not doing 200K a year in services. Maybe you’re doing 80K a year in services. And you’ve got a good reputation for yourselves, but you’re like, “I’m ready to scale. Like I’ve put in the work in this industry. I don’t wanna work five days a week forever. I wanna make real money. How do I do it?” Okay. So when I look at the commonalities of all of the stylists that I know that are clearing 100K take home and working part-time, they have all done professional photo shoots, and they’re all doing professional photo shoots annually. So I’ll tell you a little bit more about what that looks like. It’s a combination of things.
They’re doing professional photo shoots where they have a photographer come into their salon anywhere from two to four times a year and take candid shots. So they can bring a client in and have a photographer come in and have that photographer just take photos every step along the way of one client visit. Some are setting up model shoots where they’ll have like two clients come in or three clients come in and they’ll have them photographed in different phases of the guest experience. So somebody will be getting a shampoo and then somebody will be getting a haircut and somebody will be getting a color service, and they get this broad range of what it would look like to be sitting in this stylist chair, lots of guest experience photos. Those would go on the website, they would be all over social. Also in these photo shoots, it’d be lots of photos of what the salon space looks like.
That’s a huge misfire. I have seen studio suites photographed so gorgeously. That’s one of the things I hear a lot from studio suite owners is like, “Well, I’m in a tiny space.” I just, I can’t take that as like a serious reason why you can’t do it because I see so many, so many studio suites photographed so well. A Thriver Society tip that I’ve shared for years is if you find a real estate photographer, if you’ve ever searched for homes, you’ve seen this happen in real time. Real estate photographers have fish eye lenses and they’ve become really good. They don’t look as cheesy as they used to, where they’re able to take a small room or a small space and photograph it in a way that it looks 40% larger. You want someone who knows how to do that, if possible. So you might have a friend with a fancy camera or a bridal photographer.
They might be able to come in and do like the candid shots for you. When you want your space photographed really well, pro tip, find a real estate photographer. They just, they move different, they do it different, their eye is different, the approach is different. I’ve never seen a better result than I have with that. So getting those professional photo shoots done regularly and having those professional photos on your website, on your social. The other thing that there’s a lot of, I’d probably say 60%, it wasn’t even, it wasn’t even overwhelming, but about 60% of these stylists and salon owners have invested in relatively high production video marketing for their business. So big video header on their website, use of a professional videographer to even capture social media content, and not cheesy social media content and video, like very intentional, aligned with their target market clientele and the specialty that they’re building, et cetera.
So really great visuals is consistent across all of these brands. Number two, they all had very exceptional websites, very exceptional websites. New guest booking page, great professional photos, almost always video. Not almost always. I can’t even say it like that. About 60% video. The other place I saw the video was on social. Somebody asked me recently, “Are we still doing reels on Instagram?” Yes, but that shouldn’t be the bulk of your content. When you look at Instagram usership data, it’s not most people are consuming reels. That stopped in 2023, like it’s been a minute. It has to be a good balance of photo and video. Going back to the website, your website should have great professional photos, not social media shots. Social media shots don’t belong on your website at all, so it’s all professional photos. Very solid formatting layout. If you don’t know what a great website formatting and layout looks like, if you search Thriver Society Website Academy templates, we have a huge website showcase.
You can just look at the websites that we put our stamp of approval behind and check them out from there. Very clear pricing. It’s not a lot of like starting at or request for a quote. You don’t see that in these businesses. Like it is very transparent. And so clients are self-selecting their way in or their way out immediately. The next thing that I see as a commonality in all of these businesses is they’re all specialists. Every single one. None of them’s a generalist. No- nobody’s like your neighborhood cutting color stylists, that’s not what it looks like. Now that being said, one of the most overlooked specialties I find is amazing gray coverage. So if you’re like, “Well, my specialty is, you know, my knowledge of formulation,” then go all in. But I don’t wanna look at your socials and look at your website and you’re like, “I’m a cut and color artist.” Well, then you’re one of a million.
It lands to a client as generic. I’m a brunette. I don’t have any dimension to my hair. I don’t like foil work. It’s just not for me. It’s not for my texture. It is so hard. And I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m in a huge market to find somebody who specializes in amazing dimensional, like, root touch-ups, gray coverage, just like killer brunette color, very hard to find, because everyone wants to be a rooted blonding specialist, right? So you don’t have to do something, like, so avant-garde, but you have to niche yourself down to be like, “I’m the best at this. This is what I do and I’m the best at it.” That is a commonality of all these people. You can be a cutting specialist. When I see the cutting specialists that fall into this bracket, they’re charging anywhere between 200 and $400 a cut.
A lot of them do specialize in texture and curls. Barbering, man, it is incredible to see what barbers are charging now because I think that, especially in the mail services market, there’s a real need for an elevated experience and elevated results. Since grooming is just a booming side of the industry that I think gets overlooked. So you can be a cutting specialist with a very premium ticket, even in a smaller market. So cutting specialty, I see working really well, like I said, color, blonding. And I was knocking blonding. Uh, blonding will always be a really successful specialty. I was having a consultation call with a stylist the other day. Shout out to you. You’ll know who you are when you hear this. She was like, “In a world where everybody is doing root mounts, I am a to the root blonding specialist.” She’s like, “For the client…” And she’s ultra blonde.
She was like, “For the client who wants to be ultra, ultra, ultra blonde and wants that foil to the root, they come to me.” And I just thought that was, like, genius. She’s like, “It’s not gonna be lived in. It’s not gonna be, like, super melty, super dimensional. It’s, it’s the client who just, like, wants it solid. So, so incredibly smart.” And then, of course, we have the extension specialty, which is always something, I think, in the last 10 years has been seen as relatively lucrative, but the extension market is really saturated, and it takes all kinds. I’ve watched so many people go to YouTube University and consider themselves extension specialists. I mean, you can really damage somebody’s hair and scalp that way. I think with extensions, clients and consumers have learned it can be good and cheap, but it won’t be easy. Like, you’ll be there forever.
It’s gonna be time-consuming. It’s somebody who’s learning. You can get a decent result, but you’re gonna be there for hours and hours and hours. Or it can be cheap and easy, but it will not be good. Talk to any experienced extension artist, and they’re like, “A huge portion of my clientele is clients who’ve gotten bad extensions somewhere else and are finally ready to pay for, like, a solid, healthy result that’s not gonna hurt them.” So that’s an option too. And then there’s easy and good, and it won’t be cheap. Easy and good and it won’t be cheap is basically where you want to get to as an extension artist. You want to be 100% confident, super clean partings. You’re very confident knowing this technique is for this person, this type of hair will not work for this person. Like really being an expert of trade, that leans into my next point.
When I look at all of these people who have scaled to this place in business, they all invest deeply in education. Going back to Rachel Snyder, she very openly said in that interview we had, she said, I think she spent $50,000 on extension education over the years. She was like, “I got my master’s degree in education. Like if I, if I wanted to scale this way, I had to really go for it.” And I’m not saying you have to spend 50K before you can get to this place, but these are not YouTube University people. Like when I look at these people, they are all deeply educated. They continue to educate. They do not consider themselves done learning. Like they’re constantly competing to keep up with the new technology and the competition and knowing how to be the best that they can be. That is a commonality for sure.
And lastly, they all have availability in three weeks or less, and I think that’s a little surpriser, is a lot of times people think like, “Oh, well, no, they’re probably booked out to six weeks.” No way. They wouldn’t be able to grow revenue at this rate if they were booked out for six weeks. They would have financially capped themselves. They have to have openings in three weeks or less to be feeding the machine. It would be impossible to scale to this level without it. I guess it could happen over time. It would be a real slow road and journey. So having availability and not being so booked out that you can’t get to everybody, you can’t serve anybody, there is a lack of service standard is only gonna work against you. So these people have built very balanced businesses, very intentional businesses. They’ve gone all in on marketing.
They don’t cut corners. They educate themselves. They find their specialty. They go all in. They know who they are and they’ve earned the right to charge premium dollar and scale the business that they have. I do firmly believe this is a place any stylist can get to no matter what market you work in. If you are a stylist who’s looking to scale your schedule back while increasing your income, my pro tip, scale the demand and income first, then adjust the schedule. If you need help doing that, I have tons of coaching and support for that too. I hope you love this one. So much love. Happy business building. I’ll see you on the next one.
