What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
I’m your host, Britt Seva, and it’s official.
The brand new Thriving Leadership Method is available, and you can check it out at thrivingstylist.com/thrivingstylistmethod.
But maybe even more exciting than that is I’m hosting a brand new 90-minute digital training called The Ultimate Salon Structure Masterclass, your roadmap to getting off the floor, organized, and achieving 500k or more with a 10% margin as a salon leader.
You’ve never seen any kind of digital training like this before.
It’s revolutionary and I’m really excited for you to experience it.
This is the 11 steps to 10% profit margins, operational systems organization, and irresistible salon culture that gets you out from behind the chair and leading full time all while increasing your salon’s revenue.
I know it sounds too good to be true.
I swear it’s not.
Get in the room.
You’re going to love it.
It’s totally free.
We have a couple of dates scheduled.
You can register now at thrivingstylist.com/ultimatesalonstructure.
That’s thrivingstylist.com/ultimatesalonstructure.
I’ll see you there.
Do you feel like you were meant to have a kickass 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 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 Seva, 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 Seva and I’m recording this podcast right in the middle of our summer 2025 leadership bootcamp training.
I don’t normally report podcasts during training weeks like this, but I’m feeling mega inspired this time around.
This bootcamp has been really eye-opening for me.
We’ve got about 800 salon owners in there, all working on their business, working to really elevate their salons, looking to attract the best and the brightest salon professionals, knowing that the industry has changed radically.
They know that their booth rental rates have to change, and their compensation rates and plans and strategies and systems and structures have to change.
Knowing that what stylists are looking for is super different, and these salon owners don’t want to be left behind, and they’re asking really innovative questions that are making me even look and think really differently.
And so because of that, one of the things that came up was I realized I had never done a podcast around what is critical when you are looking to hire employees as a salon leader.
And when I’m looking at this room of leaders, it’s a really interesting cross-section.
So we have some very established employee-based salon owners, and we have some owners who have 60 employees in this room.
Then I have some salon leaders who are hybrid.
So they have a mix of renters, a mix of employees.
Then I have some where they have a full-time team of renters, but they’re realizing they might want to start shifting to more of an employee-based model or a hybrid model.
And then I’ve got people who are just now opening salons, or I have people who are in studio suites saying, I think I want to hire an assistant, or I think I want to bring in my first employee, my first commission stylist to work alongside me in my studio suite.
We’ve really got a little bit of everything.
And I think what really cracked this conversation open, this is one of the really buzzy topics in the bootcamp right now, is that on day one, we did this structure quiz.
And through the quiz, I walked through a series of questions that lead salon owners or aspiring salon owners to better understand what structure really is going to align with their goals, their lifestyle goals, their financial goals, all the things.
And based on the results of this quiz, everybody who takes it ends up being perfect for an employee based salon leader, perfect for a hybrid based salon leader, and perfect for a booth rental salon leader.
So you end up seeing one, two, or three as your end result.
And what we’re finding is there’s a lot of booth rental salon leaders who are like, huh, maybe I really should be hybrid.
And we have a couple employee based salon leaders who are like, I really shouldn’t have done this whole thing.
I just should have had booth renters.
And it’s been a really interesting conversation just to have people realize maybe part of their frustration and leading is that they’re working completely within the wrong structure.
So that’s been interesting in and of itself.
But there’s a big conversation around, okay, if I am going to hire employees, where do I start?
And I’ve always known that in our industry, we are scared of having employees.
And I think it’s one of the reasons why our industry is so unique in the booth rental culture that is so prominent here.
I will say this industry is cyclical.
I joined the industry at a time where it was pretty trendy to be an employee, like a lot of people at least want to start as employees and then maybe you’d graduate to booth rental.
But being an employee was pretty good.
And then over the last 15 years, it’s been really trendy to be independent.
And now we’re seeing a shift back to employment.
It’s actually very interesting.
So as there’s more of this natural curiosity around what it looks like to have employees, these conversations are coming up a bit more.
For me, I’ve owned this coaching company for 13 years now.
It’s surreal for me to say that I have had employees.
I’ve had employees since 2017 in this business.
I’ve led employees since 2007, so a really long time.
I’ve had employees in this business for a long time.
I’ve worked with contractors in this business for a long time.
For me, it is exponentially easier to lead and manage employees than it is contractors, in my opinion.
But I understand the reason why we have an aversion to bring employees into our business is the overhead.
The massive financial overhead is very scary.
When you’re on the line to pay a minimum wage or pay a salary and you as the business owner are responsible for that, it feels heavy.
That I completely understand and relate to.
That being said, when you look at the data and the statistics, long-standing salons and salon owners who own their businesses for years and years and decades and decades have employees.
They just do.
So understanding that maybe a huge part of the reservation around bringing on employees is fear of the unknown, fear of not being able to pay them, and just a misunderstanding of what it looks like to have an employee-based team.
I thought it would be a good idea just to kind of crack the code a little bit and just explore the option of if you’re thinking about bringing on employees, what could that look like
So step one is to research legal compliance, which is different state to state, but there are some federal guidelines.
So every employee in the US needs to have completed an I-9 and a W-4 prior to starting their employment.
So an I-9 verifies your right to work in the United States.
It’s a document, if you just Google search current US
I-9 form, it’ll come right up.
And this is a document that your new team member would complete.
It’s basic information, they should have access to all of it, and then they’re going to provide you some verification documents that verify their identity for you.
Some of the things that have come up for me when having my team members complete I-9s is name mismatches.
And it’s prevented me from a lot of issues where somebody will say like, oh, my name is Jane Smith or whatever.
And then they complete the I-9 and I’m looking at the employment verification documents and they have several different last names going on all over the place.
And they’re not trying to be shady, but maybe Jane Smith, her married last name was actually Jones, but she recently split, so she’s gone back to Smith.
But maybe when she was a kid, she had a hyphenated last name.
So maybe when she was a kid, she was Jane Walton Smith, and then she became Jane Jones, and now she’s back to just Jane Smith.
She’s got three names going on.
I, as the employer, need to know what her current legal last name is.
I can’t just go with the flow based on what one ID says and what birth certificate says.
There has to be similarities and all of those documents have to align.
And that’s why the I-9 exists, is it prevents you as the business owner from getting into any kind of trouble, not understanding the full true identity of the person you have in your building.
So you go through the I-9 process.
It’s not heavy.
It’s really simple.
You’re going to have them fill out the form.
You’re going to save copies of their documents.
They verify their identity.
And then they’re also going to complete a W-4.
The W-4 is what determines their tax withholdings.
Technically, legally, you cannot coach them on that.
What I found was when I had team members fill out the W-4, particularly really young team members like assistants or recent beauty school graduates, people who had maybe never worked in a job before, the W-4 was confusing because it affects their tax withholdings and they feel like it’s really scary because nobody wants to pay too much or not enough.
So there’s some really great resources online that help them to determine what their W-4 withholding should be.
There is some guidance on the form itself that walks them through it.
I find that sometimes it sways in the wrong direction.
So you can point them to some good resources, but do not tell them what to claim or what not to claim.
That’s technically not legal, so stay away from that.
So you want them to fill out the I-9 and the W-4.
Then, you’re going to look up minimum wage in your city, because there’s federal, state, county and city minimum wage.
You have to pay whatever your city requires.
So, for example, my daughter, when she was in high school, when she was a kid, she was working at a business that was in compliance with county minimum wage, but not city, and they got in trouble for it.
They had to back pay their employees.
So you want to make sure that you understand what the minimum wage is in your city.
So at this point, federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25.
$7.25 at the time of this recording.
That being said, only 16 states in the US have their minimum wage set at $6/725.
Washington DC goes up as high as $17.50, and then half the country plus falls somewhere in between that range.
So you have to understand what your minimum wage is in your city.
The other thing I think you should figure out is your state sick pay laws.
More and more states every single year are adopting sick pay policies.
These are mandatory, not optional, meaning if you have employees, you would be legally required to pay them a certain amount of sick days or sick hours every single year, as is the law determined by your state.
So coming up on close to half of US states have some kind of sick pay laws in place.
If they do, you must comply.
So you have to pay sick pay in accordance with your local guidelines.
Okay.
So once we kind of understand the legal compliance in our city and our state, we can move forward to number two, which is understanding what you can afford.
So a lot of people get to step one and they’re like, forget it, that was already too much.
Step one is not that crazy.
Step one is very light.
It’s just making sure you have your paperwork house in order.
It’s not a big deal.
Okay.
Step two, understanding what you can afford.
I think this is the next crossroads we want to come to.
What I find, so again, my biggest benefit as a coach and as this podcast host and all the things, is I get to talk to a lot of different people.
I talk to stylists, I talk to beauty school students, I talk to salon owners, I talk to retired salon owners, I talk to other prominent coaches in the industry, I get to talk to distributors, I get to talk to a lot of people.
One of the things I’m noticing is that a lot of new stylists or assistants are finding that it’s hard for them to find a salon that’s willing to give them 32 hours a week of guaranteed employment.
That’s tough.
Do you remember being a new beauty school graduate trying to build your clientele and then imagine if your salon is like you’ll work up to 32 hours a week but maybe some weeks it’s only 12 hours or some weeks it’s only 20?
Well, then you got to get another job and so now you’re waiting tables or you’re bartending or you’re working at Target or whatever.
I understand, I was a kid of the 90s too and our millennial generation, we say, well, that’s how it works.
You have to just hustle and work hard.
But in modern society, we’ve come to understand, why should you have to work three jobs to create your career?
What if I just want to work one job and work my ass off at it?
Isn’t there an opportunity for me there too?
And I think that for us, as salon leaders, if we’re going to stick our neck out and hire somebody as an employee, we have to match them in the opportunity.
We expect them to be all in.
You have to be all in too.
If you don’t want an employee who’s going to call out sick or be flaky or flighty or particularly about their schedule, you have to offer them some stability also.
There’s a meet in the middle on that.
So I think when you are offering any kind of employment to an employee for me, I think you need to be offering at least 32 hours a week for a service based role.
I really, really do, especially if you’re hiring somebody who’s a little bit greener.
If you’re looking for a more experienced stylist, they might be very happy with 16 hours a week or 24 hours a week, and that’s fine.
But when I’m saying hiring your first employee, most of you are looking for an assistant or a greener stylist.
I’m sure you’d love to have an experienced stylist, but usually our first employee is not like, oh, wow, a stylist doing $200,000 a year in services.
That’s pretty exceptional.
You’d be having somebody who’s a little bit on the fresher side, who needs a little bit more support.
I would put 32 hours a week minimum guaranteed as a guideline.
To get somebody who’s really great, really driven, really motivated, willing to work for you, that’s what I would suggest.
I think if you’re like, Britt, I want to do this, but I can only offer 21 hours a week, then that’s fine.
I just don’t know that you’re going to get the most qualified candidate who’s really looking for a 20 hour a week gig.
You might.
I think it’s harder and more rare, but just something to think about.
Knowing that I suggest at least 32 hours a week of employment, what I would do is take your minimum wage or the wage you intend to offer this person times 32, and whenever that number is, add 20 percent.
That is your base estimate on how much that team member is going to cost you at a minimum to have in your building.
Let me explain.
Minimum wage in your city is $14 an hour.
You would pay $14 an hour times 32 hours a week, so $488 a week, so almost $23,000 wages to have that person in the building.
32 hours a week, $14 an hour would cost you around $23 grand a year.
The reason we add the 20 percent is I think a lot of business owners in general don’t realize that there is a cost just to have that team member in your building breathing the air.
There is additional expenses you’re going to take on.
Depending on what they’re up to, the expenses are going to vary, but if this person is doing services, then your increased cost of color or your increased cost of product is going to likely be there.
If there’s somebody coming in and there may be a barber and there’s not quite so much overhead, you might be able to get away with doing the calculation just straight wage.
I always add the 20 percent.
If you cannot afford to pay that person minimum wage or your intended wage plus 20 percent, you’re probably not ready to hire.
You probably need to have a little bit of a stronger revenue stream to make that possible.
One of my guidelines whenever expanding the team is my goal was always, I want to have a team member who pays for themselves.
Signs that you’re ready to hire would be, you have a demand that you’re not able to serve yourself, so a surplus of clients you could give to this person, or they’re coming on as an assistant and you know that you’ll be able to increase your service production every single week by at least this amount, if that person is in the building.
If you’re not able to create more revenue by having this person, then they become a liability, not an asset, and that becomes really scary for me.
So you want to make sure you’re able to cover the wage plus 20 percent, and that there is a plan for you to increase your revenue by that much by having them in the building so that you don’t end up taking a loss by bringing in this team member, which is what often happens, which comes to probably like a tricky sticking point before we move forward.
If you were thinking to hire somebody just to make your life easier, like, oh my gosh, I’m going to bring somebody and they’re going to take a load off.
If you’ve ever talked to anybody who has employees, the initial thing an employee does is not take a load off.
When you bring in an employee and you do this the right way, I believe there’s a 12-week training and onboarding period.
It’s a grind.
But if you really are hiring with good intention, you’re hiring somebody because you’re literally building a team or you want a mentor, and so pouring into somebody for the first three months is part of the gig.
In order to reap the benefits of having a team, you’re going to have to pour in as well.
And so going back to that question of how are you going to cover that wage?
How are they going to pay for themselves?
You might have to market more.
You might have to find more clients.
Something has to give in order to expand your business in this way, right?
Which leads us to step number three, which is create a three-year growth plan.
So one of the things we talk about in Thriving Leadership Method is like growth paths and KPIs.
This is a little bit different than that.
Just like zoom out for a second.
Let’s not get so functional for a minute.
I just kind of want to walk you through a series of questions.
When we look at the data, the number one reason for termination or resignation in any business, not just our industry, the number one reason is lack of quality applicants.
Meaning, you didn’t have good enough people applying, so you just hired whoever because it wasn’t looking that great, and then turns out they weren’t very good.
That’s the number one reason for termination or resignation, so basically bad hire, right?
Number two is lack of hiring strategy or interview skills.
If you can’t screen out the people who are no good for you, that’s on you.
And it does lead back to number one where you’re like, damn, we’re just not even getting anybody good applying.
That stinks, and I totally get it.
But again, that’s your fault.
You’ve not set yourself up to be attracting the best and brightest.
There’s amazing people out there.
Whenever salon owners are like, I don’t know where all the good talent is.
I do.
They’re just not talking to you.
They just don’t want to work for you.
It’s not that there’s no good talent.
You’re not the person they want to work for.
So number one reason that you’re getting lack of bad applicants is going to fall to you as the owner.
Number two is you don’t have the skills or interview strategies to filter out the bad hires.
You’re just settling, and then when they get in and they’re not very good, again, why didn’t you screen them out?
Which leads into number three, lack of training.
For me, I tend to prefer to hire for personality, train for skill when possible, knowing that some skills you cannot train.
And that is one of the things I’ve learned.
The older I get, the more I’ve realized, there are some skills that cannot be taught.
There’s a lot that can, probably most can.
Eighty percent skills probably can be taught, 20 percent either got it or you don’t.
But that’s what the interview is for, is to screen for the 20 percent of you got it or you don’t.
But for the other 80 percent, we as the leader have to train, and there has to be a plan for it.
One of the things we talked about a lot in boot camp is this idea of building the plane as you’re flying it, which I think maybe forever as a business owner, it’s something we all feel like, like, oh my gosh, I’m trying to make this work in real time, and I’m building systems and building strategy as I’m running the business, as I’m taking clients, as I’m hiring, as I’m figuring.
It just feels like it’s all happening in real time.
The more of this you can get organized on, the easier it will be.
So here’s some questions to think about.
If you’re going to make a hire, what will their role look like for the first year?
What are they going to do day to day?
Something that came up a lot in boot camp is it irritates me when my slower stylists aren’t with a client and they’re sitting in the back scrolling TikTok.
And I was like, OK, well, what’s your policy on that?
Well I don’t have one?
OK, well, then you can’t be mad when they do it.
There’s no rule about it.
You haven’t had a conversation.
There’s no expectations that there’s no growth path.
So there’s no direction.
If they have no direction, they’re going to create their own.
Right.
So what will their role look like for the first year?
How are they spending their days?
What are they doing?
How are you helping them?
What is their purpose?
Purpose is something people are really looking for when they
They take on a role right now.
How will you train them?
On what days will you train them?
How many hours beyond your clients are you able to work?
Beyond your clients.
So if you take clients 40 hours a week, I’m going to need you to find like at least five a week to be a leader, a trainer, a mentor, a business manager.
You have to have to have to.
It takes 12 weeks to get the average new hire on board it in any industry.
12 weeks.
Can you expand your schedule for at least 12 weeks to get this person up and running?
If not, you might not be ready.
How will they make you more money?
I talked about that in point number two, right?
And what will they get out of working with you?
Meaning, what’s in it for them?
I take this job with you and what do I get?
You get education.
Beautiful.
On what days?
When I have time.
Nope, I don’t want to work for you.
What will I get out of working with you?
Will you help me build a clientele?
Will you build my clientele for me?
How much money can I make a year from now?
How much money can I make two years from now?
If you’re in a studio suite and I’m joining you in a studio suite, is there a chair for me or am I just here to learn and then bounce?
Because if I’m just here to learn, you better teach your ass off when I’m in there.
Like I want to learn with you.
Because I know that this is kind of like a dead end.
I’m not going to be here forever.
So if I’m just here and I’m sweeping and shampooing and watching you chat with your clients and foiling every once in a while, probably you’re not going to get the best hire.
You’re going to get somebody who’s decent and wants to like kick it with you.
That’s fine.
But if you want like a real rock star assistant and the growth path is they’re going to learn a lot from you, you better teach a lot and there has to be a lot of structure and a real plan and a real commitment and a real promise.
Then you can hire a rock star who your clients would absolutely love.
But you bring that energy first, you bring that plan first, and then you attract the person who is looking for that.
Trust me.
Let the stylist in the world speak like stylist,
If you are not being mentored by somebody you love and admire yet, if I could get you into a studio suite with an incredible stylist, with an amazing skill set, they would mentor you one-on-one.
It’s just you, them and their clients, and you become their right hand.
And they are teaching you for the course of a year.
And you know after the year, you cannot work there anymore.
There’s no space for you, but it’s going to be a phenomenal year.
You’re going to learn a lot.
You’re going to learn about service.
You’re going to learn about formulation.
You’re going to learn about guest experience.
You’re going to learn about communication.
And you’re going to walk out of that a phenomenal hairdresser.
Who’s applying for that job?
Everybody.
But most of you are not advertising the job that way.
And that’s why nobody’s interested in taking it, right?
Which leads us into point number four, updating your website.
So something that’s come up a lot as we go through leadership bootcamp is lack of good communication around employment opportunities on any salon’s careers page.
It’ll say like careers or work for us, but I don’t even know what that would look like.
Like I don’t, I can’t even envision what it would be like to be in your building because you’ve not sold me on the opportunity on your website.
So if your website and your social media are not selling the opportunity to work with you and for you, nobody’s coming, nobody’s coming.
And then that leads us into number five, get your paperwork and your systems in order.
So a couple of things we already mentioned, the I-9 and the W-4 have to have it.
Your offer letter, you should have a legal and formal offer letter in place.
If you are hiring booth renters, you would have a contract for rental rates in terms of that agreement.
Your offer letter is kind of the same thing, but for an employee.
It confirms their rate of pay, when they start their date of hire, a lot of the key crucial kind of employment facts.
If you change an employee’s compensation, they need to fill out a new offer letter over and over.
Some of my team members have filled out like 12 offer letters because they’ve gotten raises over the years.
Every time you change compensation, it’s a new offer letter.
Organization system, so how are you going to keep all their paperwork organized?
How are you going to keep all the documentation organized, the training system organized?
You need a training system and a plan.
Like I said, at least 12 weeks of training.
Week one, we’re going to do this, two, that, three, this, four, this, how you’re going to track it.
And then if you’re bringing on somebody as an assistant or a mentee, it’s probably going to be more like a six-month or a one-year training program and blocking out exactly what that’s going to look like week to week.
Handbook and operations manual are what I suggest for employee-based teams, mostly to cover your booty cheeks.
I think that having both in place answers a lot of questions, removes a lot of the gray area, keeps you out of trouble.
So I like both handbook and operations manuals.
We talk about having culture guides.
If you have a booth rental salon, there’s certain things that you can have guidelines on.
There’s certain things that you can’t.
Again, that goes back to point number one, understanding compliance and law in your state and what can be done and what you can control.
A good communication system.
So sometimes salon leaders will tell me, like, I’m so irritated, my team texts me around the clock.
And I’m like, oh, really?
My team, I probably get like 12 texts a year from my employees.
And it’s always like, something wild has happened or we had a live event and they’re trying to get my attention or something like that.
No joke, if you ask them, maybe a dozen texts from my team over the course of one year.
So I average one text from my team a month because we use a different communication system.
We actually use several systems that are respectful of everybody’s time.
There’s still urgent ways to communicate if something urgent comes up.
But nobody feels like they’re living to serve.
I certainly don’t.
There’s balance, there’s structure, there’s strategy.
What’s nice about our communication system is if something comes up between team members, I get to say, I’m going to audit your chats.
And that’s an option.
And again, that’s something that’s in our handbook.
And it’s something that everybody’s agreed to at time of working here.
Versus if it’s somebody who’s just communicating by text, I have no idea what that conversation was.
And by the way, am I going in the back end and screening my team members’ conversations?
Never.
I’m actually not.
I don’t have the right to do that.
But if I do tell my team members I’m doing an audit, I can do it.
And so thinking about your communication standards and what’s going to work for you and let me tell you, the communication audits have been really powerful.
We’ve been able to pull things up and team members to be like, that is not how I remember the conversation going.
And how often have you gotten fired up about something?
Like I can even think about in my personal life, gotten super pissed about something and then going back and be like, oh my gosh, it’s not even what she said.
Like, you know how you add emotion to something and you get a little bit twisty?
Having the opportunity to be able to look at communication from a different angle, especially digital communication, which can get so messy, has been really, really powerful.
And it also prevents anybody from feeling like they’re living on their phone, that we’re texting them all the time.
We don’t have any of that kind of stuff.
And then lastly, a payroll processing system.
I strongly, strongly suggest a payroll processing system.
We use Gusto.
I’m a huge fan of it.
I’ve used it for eight years or something like that.
A very earlier adopter of the platform.
I think it is way better than any other payroll processing out there.
It serves as partial HR.
It collects all of the W-2s at the end of the year.
All of the pay stubs are in there.
It’s really easy to access.
Benefits coordination, like so much good stuff.
I find it to be incredible.
So that’s what we use, but you just need to have something.
There is a cost to use a system like that.
Of course, it’s going to be tax deductible, but getting all of your systems organized before you make the hire, super important.
Okay, kind of scratched the surface tip of the iceberg.
I know that’s like, I’m hiring employees 101 step one, and there’s so much more to it.
But I hope I’ve answered some of the unanswered questions.
If you have any additional questions about leading a team of employees, booth renders or beyond, you know where to find me.
So much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
