Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit, just working in your business and start working on it, join us here, where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and before we jump into this episode, we are celebrating a major milestone here on the show.
Episode 150!
Are you kidding me right now? I launched this podcast in 2018 simply because I was a podcast junkie, and there were a couple of podcasts in the industry already for stylists, but none that were formatted in the way that I would want if I was a stylist. I was like, “Man, if I want this podcast, I should just create it myself,” and I did.
The Thriving Stylist Podcast is now the largest, most downloaded podcast for stylists and salon owners, and I’m just so proud of all that. We’ve accomplished 2 million downloads in 150 episodes, and that’s all thanks to you guys.
These episodes are inspired by you, they’re recorded for you, and I am just so humbled, thankful, and grateful for all of your massive support that makes this show possible. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here for the show, for being here for me, and you keep me so fired up to keep the good stuff coming week after week.
So let’s keep this party rolling. This week’s episode is one that’s been long overdue.
Somebody hit me up in the DMs a couple of weeks back and she was like, “Hey, Britt, I’m moving across the country with my husband and I’m rebuilding. Where do I start?”
That is something I’ve coached to about a gajillion times and so I thought, “Okay, perfect. Let me just direct you to a podcast,” and I went and looked. I’ve never done a podcast on relocating in this way and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’ve certainly coached to it in-depth in Thrivers Society, but I’ve never even given a taste of that on the show.”
So this week, we were talking about moving to a new area, meaning complete relocation and rebuilding a clientele as quickly and easily as possible.
Now I will say I have coached several stylists who have rebuilt their clienteles three, four, five times. Multiple, multiple times. Military spouses often have to rebuild over and over and over, right? Often they’re with a partner who will be moving every three to five years or so because that’s the life that they have. That’s just the way it goes. And so they need to be mentally prepared to be doing that as often as possible.
There’s an amazing woman, shout out to Megan, who moved to my local community. We bumped into each other on our kids’ school campus last year. She moved here to California from Hawaii, and she built a clientele.
We have a tiny community. It’s not like she’s building in a huge metropolitan area where clients are in abundance. Not at all. She’s in a very small, very already well-established and well-networked town and built a beautiful clientele for herself.
So this is something that I’m very well aware of the people go through. You can certainly do it really, really quickly so long as you have a plan in place, and I want to help you today to create that plan.
So step one may or may not be a curveball for you. But to me, if you’re moving into a new area and you’re rebuilding, step one is actually to be mentally prepared because the mental game on this is something a lot of people can’t quite anticipate and I’ve seen it go very sideways.
So here’s the deal. Nobody cares what you’ve done in the past. They want to know what you can do for them now, particularly when we move to a new area. So if you are more skilled or are more talented or have more years of experience, that could certainly help you to build faster.
But if you’ve moved to my town and you’re like, “Well, I’ve got this in the bag. I’ve been doing hair for 12 years,” that’s nice.
Whatever you do to market yourself is going to allow you to sink or swim. Like your years of experience moving into a new community are a little bit beneficial, but it’s not a game-changer and it can be very disheartening.
If you are a top stylist in the area where you live now, you’re essentially starting over, and I need you to own that piece. I literally want you to say out loud right now, “I am starting over,” and own it. You can go through a process about it. You can drink a latte and think about it, something stronger and think about it. But that is what is happening. You are starting over and once you can own that piece and we can reconcile it, then I can coach you and we can move forward.
But that’s step number one. “I am starting over. Check my ego at the door. What I’ve done in the past is nice, but I need to prove myself in this new community.” You will build so much faster if you come in humble and eager then if you carry the ego with you, so check it at the door. Let’s go in humble and eager and I can walk you through the next steps.
I want you to know it will take 365 days of hard work to set yourself up for massive success. 3 6 5.
A lot of people when they’re rebuilding, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to take years.” It should never take years to build a clientele. If it takes years, you’re doing something wrong, I guarantee it.
If you’ve been struggling for years, something is not correct. If your income does not increase at least 20% year over year, even as a brand new stylist, something is off and I can coach you through getting to the other side of that, but it should not take that long. There’s a break in your marketing system. There’s a break in the way you’re running your business. This holding you back, slowing you down, and becoming an Achilles heel so we have to resolve that first.
It should only take one year to build a clientele anytime, anywhere, no matter the situation, okay?
I want you to set a goal and I actually want you to set several goals. If you’re an overachiever—where my overachievers at?—I want you to say, “Okay, within 90 days, I will have seen [how many] guests within 180 days.” How many guests will you have seen within one year? How much money will you be making? I want you to have targets.
I don’t want you to go to this new town with the hope-and-pray plan. “Well, I hope this works,” praying for a miracle. I don’t want to do that. I want you to know with, without a shadow of a doubt, that you’re going to make this happen. And in order to do that, we need to create benchmarks and push points so you need to know what you’re shooting for.
How many of you kind of go through the industry hoping something cool happens? Hoping for massive success that generally doesn’t pan out? I need you to have benchmarks and a plan to push you forward, okay? So that’s number one.
Number two, set up a marketing funnel before you move. I think there’s a lot of people who think they have an effective marketing funnel.
How many of you have heard me talk about the marketing funnel before, right? The hair stylist marketing funnel is the system I coach too. So when you look at the marketing funnel, it’s about creating your target market, designing a website that speaks to that target market, social media efforts in alignment with that target market, captions and messaging that sell to that target market. Selling without selling, right? Your captions should be entertaining. They should be inspiring. They should be educational. And because of that, somebody is inspired to come in to see you, right? It’s not “Book with me on Tuesday!” Nobody wants to see that, right?
But if your social media is formatted in a way that speaks to your target market in a conversational way that creates that desire, then we’re doing it.
And then awareness is the top level of the funnel, which is the one that’s most often ignored. It’s driving that traffic to the social media, which then feeds into the website, which then speaks to the target market, right? And having all of those cylinders firing.
Somebody very recently commented on my social media feed. She’s a Thriver and she was like, “You know, I’m already at module six or something, and I haven’t seen any of the strategy on something very specific yet.”
I took a look at her marketing funnel and let me tell you, she’s heard the strategy. The challenge is she hasn’t applied it yet. So when she’s like, “I haven’t seen any results” and I take a look at her marketing funnel, she hasn’t applied any of the training yet, so it doesn’t surprise me that she hasn’t seen the results. Like I know that she thinks she has a marketing funnel. I can totally tell. I can see it. She’s put a lot of the puzzle pieces into place. However, she hasn’t optimized a single level and so when she’s not seeing results, I’m not surprised.
She has the frame of a marketing funnel, but the internal structure, the guts of it, the meat of it are not correct. And that’s why it is broken. That’s why it is not working. If you are going to be making a massive move, you want to have that marketing funnel firing on all cylinders before you move. There is no worse feeling than being the new person in a new town with no way to prove what you’ve accomplished. Nothing.
A resume? Who even uses a resume anymore? I mean, in our industry, your resume is your portfolio. Your resume is the work you’ve done. “I can show you pictures on my phone.” I don’t want to see pictures on your phone. I want you to have created a marketing funnel for yourself and today’s top salon owners judge you based on your social media presence before you even get an interview, before you even walk in the door right? So getting that social media right and tight and a great example of what your talent looks like and what you bring to the table is crucial.
So you’re going to build that marketing funnel before you move if possible. If not possible, if you haven’t done it in, you’re already moving, that’s okay. We’re going to talk about that too.
But it’s a fact, it’s a thousand times easier to move if you have a marketing funnel. Why? Because if I have a beautiful social media presence with a fabulous website to support it, this speaks to a target market. And I know I’m a master of awareness level marketing. I could build a clientele in 90 days. Like I could slay it in a new community and I’ll tell you how in a second, but that’s not hard. What is hard is I have no social media presence, I go to a town where nobody knows me, and now I’ve done my first three Instagram posts. That’s hard. I look like a rookie in a new town and so you have an additional challenge to overcome, right?
The more you can carry with you using that marketing funnel, the easier the build will be. So the sooner you can start a correct and effective marketing funnel, the better it’s just going to make the move that much easier, so we want to do that ahead of the move if possible.
And when I say marketing funnel, I mean all the levels. Understand what you’re going to do for awareness marketing. When you go really curate that interest level properly, that desire level should be on fire.
You should know the target market you’re speaking to which leads into step number three, research salons in your new area before you go.
Who serves your target market? What salons would even be an option? I will tell you one thing you need to look at: what is the target market in the area where you move to?
In my community, we’re population somewhere around 14,000, not teeny weeny tiny, but not huge, and there is certainly an energetic vibe. I’m in a little California beach community and if you came here and you were a vivids specialist or an extension specialist, you would have an incredibly difficult time building a clientele. You would have to work at a salon in San Francisco or in San Jose maybe in order to build that clientele, or maybe in some of the other areas like Palo Alto (there are some other little communities that you could look at). You could not build that kind of clientele here in my little community. There’s just not enough market to support it and not enough people would be willing to commute to get it.
Barbers in my community crush it. Stylists doing everyday cuts and color slay. But those are the kinds of things you need to know before moving into a market of what geographic areas are going to be a good fit for you and the work that you want to do. So you want to do that ahead of time if possible.
If you’re moving to a new community, I do want you working in a salon, not in a studio suite. Why? I love studio suites, don’t get that twisted. I love them. I think it’s much difficult to be the new person in a new community where you know nobody, working by yourself. It’s like the trifecta of challenges.
Being in a salon where there’s maybe a reputation, you have others that you can lean into, I think energetically just for your mind space, I think it’s going to be a much better fit for you to not be so ultra-isolated.
I would find a salon, potentially one with a really good reputation or some good window traffic. I’m not a huge fan of walk-in business. I don’t think walk-in business is sustainable or good business to build off of. But if people can visibly see your salon, there’s that chance of you saying that you work there and they already know it. So for visibility and marketability purposes, if you’re new to an area, I would prefer you be in a salon than a studio suite if possible.
I want you to also run the Perfect Price Point module calculations that we talk about in Thrivers Society so that you’re certain that you price yourself properly for your new market.
Here’s the toughie: Let’s say I’m in California in a fairly major market. Let’s say that you’re doing haircuts here and they’re 80 bucks for cut and blowout. If you move a thousand miles east, like you move to more central United States, you might not be able to charge $80 for a haircut, even though it flew here, like it was great here. Your price point in a totally different state is going to be more like $35, $50. It’s going to be something totally different because you’d be mid range market charging 80 here in the area that I’m currently recording this podcast from. But if you were to go to a completely different area, that would either be too high or too low. So you need to take a look at what the market can bear in your area.
Now, when I say use the calculation in Thrivers Society, some of you might be like, “Or I’ll just look at the websites of salons in that area.” Well, you could, except that you’re researching blindly.
What do you know about that salon? They have a pretty website. They have an ugly website. You don’t know who they’re serving. You don’t know how they’ve determined their prices or what they’re trying to do. So it’s like the blind leading the blind. I wouldn’t do it that way. I would do it based on facts, but you want to make sure that you know what to charge in your new market so you don’t come in over or under bidding. ‘Cause then you’re going to miss your target, right?
And then that leads into does your service menu need to change? To what I said, if you were to move to my community and you were an extension specialist, yikes, it would be challenging. You might be able to do it. It would be incredibly challenging and you’d have to be very aggressive because you’d have to be pulling in clientele from well, outside our natural demographic here. It would be challenging so you need to know those kinds of things.
What services should you be offering? What should you be prioritizing? And how can you make that possible?
Then we get to step four, which is—it’s so funny. Like this is the fourth and final step, yet for most people who are moving, this is where they think they start. No, no, this is where you finish. So step four is begin making your presence known in your new community, right?
So lots of ways we could do that and you can go with typical surface level ways that you probably have thought of: using local hashtags, commenting on local hashtags. Commenting on local hashtags to me is much more effective than actually using local hashtags. By commenting on local hashtags, I mean, if I was moving to Redwood City—it’s an area that’s not far from me here—if I was moving to Redwood City, I might look on #redwoodcity and I would see who else is using that hashtag. I would comment on the posts of those using that hashtag in my target market, right? Versus me using #redwoodcity, people would only find me, it’s like needle in a haystack, if they happen to be looking for that hashtag. And they happen to be looking for that hair stylist.
And then some of you were like, “Oh, but she should use #redwoodcityhairstylist.” Again, needle in a haystack. If somebody happens to be searching for that, but then you’re playing the happenstance game and that is not a strong way to build a clientele. That’s a hope-and-pray technique so I’m not such a huge fan of that, but those are certainly some things that you could try and network with local businesses in your area.
If you’re in Thrivers Society, module 14, type of techniques, really getting in there with local businesses, making those connections and building those bridges so you can get a really nice steady clientele flow.
One of the things I mentioned at the top of this episode, Megan, who is a stylist in my local community—it has to have been a year ago that I bumped into her on our kids’ school campus. She had just moved here. One year later, she has a full clientele for herself and she is a working mom of three, so it’s not like she had all the time in the world. It’s not like she’s in a major metropolitan city where it was easy. She worked her butt off and she did it.
I can remember when I first bumped into her, she told me, she was like, “I actually got a part time job working at the local restaurant.” We have this restaurant in our area, it’s a higher end restaurant, but she was working at the bar, so she was bartending there. But this is a very, probably top three restaurants, high end, you know, a dinner is $60 a plate. Very high end restaurant.
She was working the bar there and she was doing it to meet clients. She was like, “Honestly, I want to network with the locals and want people to get to know my name and face so when they see me around town, they bump into me, they say hi, they think of me for hair. I want to make connections with the people that work here,” and it freaking works. I wanted to share that because often when we think of strategies like that, we say things like, “I have all these other commitments. I could never work a part-time job.”
But remember what I said at the top of this episode, I’m not asking you to do this for your lifetime. She chose to work at that bar for less than one year, long enough for it to help build her clientele. And as soon as it did, she quit. So she didn’t say as a mom of three, “I’m going to juggle bartending at night and taking salon clients during the day forever.” But she was willing to make a short term sacrifice for a long term gain and that paid off really well for her.
I’m not saying you have to do that, but I’m saying think outside the box of how you’re going to put yourself into this new community and make connections so you grow your clientele quickly and you don’t have to work that level of struggle forever. Like could she have skipped working at the bar and continue just to try and hand out cards and network in our community? Yes. Would it have taken three times as long? Yes. So she was willing to do that short term sacrifice for long term gain. And for her, it really paid off.
Think about how you can interject yourself into community conversations so your name and face get recognized faster rather than slower. And then of course, within that, making your presence known, working your marketing funnel really hard. I know marketing is a lot of work.
I shared recently about the five roles that are needed in every business right? Do you remember what they are? How many of you remember those?
We have the CEO, the head honcho, the visionary, right? COO, chief operating officer, CFO, financial officer watches the money. Then we have the talent, which is the work we do behind the chair. The talent is the least paid, less least important position in any company. (I know, hard to believe.) And then the CMO, the chief marketing officer.
So while I know that creating a marketing funnel and worrying about the marketing feels heavy, it should be a massive portion of your efforts because without marketing, how would anybody know you exist, right?
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s like you being the tree falling in the forest and nobody knows you exist.
You could have the most beautiful Instagram on the planet. You could be doing the best haircuts in the world, but if nobody knows you exist, it doesn’t matter. So how do we get more eyeballs on the business that you’ve built and the brand that you’ve created?
I hope that gives you some direction, a jumping off point, a refinement of where to focus your efforts. If you’re moving to a new area to rebuild, it can be done. It really can be done and it doesn’t have to take a lifetime.
I want you to do those mental exercises first. It is such a game changer.
A lot of great resources, tips, and tools coming your way soon to help you guys build clientele, create a business you’re proud of, and enhance your life to the fullest.
You guys, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
