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 today we’re going to talk about the idea of developing your personal brand.
Now, this is something that certainly evolved in our industry over time. There were times, years ago where I said you don’t really want to have a personal brand as a stylist. The star of the show on social or on your branding is the client. Now as consumer behavior has evolved and changed. It’s not that the client is no longer the star of the show. They are.
However, the pandemic specifically really dramatically changed consumer behavior and consumers today value trust as the number one factor when they’re making any kind of investment decision, whether it be business based or familial based or anything.
So we want to be creating a trust-based brand if we want to build and grow our business and developing a personal brand is going to be the way to do so.
Now I know, even at the top of this episode, when I say developing a personal brand, some of you are swaying way too far to one side or the other when you think about what personal brand means.
A lot of us think personal brand equals personal blog, right? So it’s like, “Okay, perfect. So now I can start sharing like my kids more on social and my marriage more on social and my vacation that I just took and the new outfit I just bought.” That is a whole lot of transparency. And it might be good, especially when connecting with your existing clientele, but that can be actually a little bit too much information for somebody who’s not yet working with you.
There’s a really fine line between relatability and overexposure and so we had to be really careful on that. Now to those who are extreme, who are like, “Oh my goodness, I don’t want to put my whole personal life on social.” That’s a question I’ve actually gotten a lot about over the years is I’ve gotten DMs from people who are saying, “You know, I’ve left an abusive relationship. I don’t really want to be showing everything about me on social media for truly my personal safety,” right? That’s a really big example, but I’ve heard that not once, but a couple of times now at this point, and I can deeply relate. You’ll probably notice on my social media, I very rarely will showcase my kids or family. For me, I choose to show who I am as a person without showing every little bit of my life.
And so when we talk about creating a personal brand, I want you to find a happy medium between the two. A happy medium between I don’t want to show up anything at all, I want to be like a ghost and I want to show every little bit about what I had for breakfast, the new clothes I bought today, and my shopping trip to Target. There’s somewhere in between that is going to be a sweet spot for what it looks like to build a personal brand as a beauty professional today and that’s where I want to live with you.
Now, spoiler alert. This is a bit of a prequel because next week we’re actually going to be talking about how to recession proof your business. Yes, a recession is coming and we’re going to talk about that. But having a personal brand is going to help to counterbalance that in so many ways.
Let’s first talk about what it means to have a personal brand and what other brands are out there. So you’ll probably see this. I’m going to rattle off some examples of what different kind of brands exist today. But as you’re browsing the ‘gram later—which we all know you will. So when you pull up Instagram later and you’re scrolling, I want you to scroll with purpose and I want you to ask yourself, “Okay, what kind of brand am I looking at right now?”
Some of the brands you’re going to find would be entertaining brands. Then we have education brands, product brands, experience brands, and personal brands.
When we look at something like an entertaining brand, we could go a couple different ways with this. I think that—I follow a lot of motivational quote accounts on Instagram. You could say those are educational, but I would probably push back and say I don’t know if they’re educating me as much as they’re enlightening me. And for me, that’s my source of entertainment.
Now for you, it might not be right. There’s other entertainment brands. Like when you look at something like Saturday Night Live, that’s clearly an entertainment brand. That’s their whole multimillion dollar business is making people have a laugh, okay? That is going to be an entertainment type of a brand. When you look at education brands—have you noticed that in my business, I have two brands. I have multiple websites. I have multiple Instagram accounts. So Britt Seva is my personal brand and Thriving Stylist is my education brand. Two different brands, right? Two different purposes.
So that’s why when you follow Thriving Stylist on Instagram, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of me. That’s not my personal brand space at all. That’s a place and space where people get to know what it looks like to educate with me, right? To hear from my students. It’s about community. It’s about the methodologies I’ve built and trademarked, right? It’s a different kind of purpose.
Then we have product brands, right? So Fenty, Rihanna’s brand Fenty. That’s obviously going to be a product based brand. The product leads full focus.
Now you should have already had a light bulb moment go off. So when I talk about Fenty and how that’s a product-based brand, what do they show on their social? Check them out. If you don’t already follow—I’m obsessed—they show the products and people using the products. That makes sense. It is a product based brand.
This is why when you post about retail, you don’t get as much engagement. You don’t have a product brand. You sell products. Yes. So do I. I have my Wealthiest Year Yet planner. It is a physical item. It is never leading the way in anything that I do. In fact, if you look on my social and you try to find any posts about Wealthiest Year Yet, what will you find? A picture of me with the planner. Why? Because I have a personal brand, the brand is about me. It’s not about the things I sell. And that’s the difference between personal brand and product brand, right?
Then we have experience brands.
So when you think about something that might be an experience brand, Disneyland, okay. Disney in general is a very experience brand, right? That’s not a personal brand. There are entertainment aspects, but really it is about the experience, right? People say, “Oh, I want to take my kids to Disneyland one day.” That is an experience-based brand.
Another way to actually think about experience brands would be like lifestyle brands, which I’m going to spoiler alert. Although you probably already know this, there is a huge downturn in the influencer economy. You all know that, right? Everybody’s well aware of it. That the influencer economy really fell flat starting at the tip of the pandemic because a lot of brands didn’t have the money that they used to have to pump into influencers.
Now some of the big brands are still pumping into the really big influencers. I’m talking like Kardashian status, but anything below that, there’s just not enough revenue going around to take a risk. It doesn’t mean there’s not revenue in the market because there is. We’ll talk about that more about that next week when we talk about the recession. But what it means is people are choosing to build brands differently.
How come? Because of what we’re talking about today, the trust piece. How many of you are a little bit sick and tired of seeing somebody on social be like, “Oh my gosh, woke up this morning and started my day with blah, blah, blah, power shake.” And it’s like, oh my gosh, no, you didn’t. You got paid $5,000 to do this. We just got a little bit jaded from it. And so the influencer economy is taking a major tank.
So when we look at experience brands or lifestyle brands, we can say things like influencer branding as well. Those kind of all tie in together. For me now, experience brands are still doing really well, but that whole influencer lifestyle is having a really rough go and you’ll actually see it around. I encourage you to just—I don’t want to say too much, but start just like looking around on Instagram at those you follow and those you’ve admired in the past and look at what’s happened, right? These people may have been admired as influencers, but when it comes down to it at the end of the day, when that was their leverage, they weren’t able to sustain. And that’s why I’m pushing you to think beyond that. Beyond “I want to be Instagram famous,” and really say like, “I want to build a business,” right? Because clients pay the bills, followers don’t, and building the personal brand is going to be the way.
People follow people today. We all want to know the face behind the brand, right? But partially because we want to hold the brand accountable, partially because we want to know who we’re doing business with, but people today do business with people they trust. Period. Trust is the big piece, right?
I saw a quote recently from AJ Vaden. She’s a speaker coming into Thrivers Live actually to speak specifically to personal branding. When we were filling the lineup for Thrivers Live, I was like, I gotta have someone come in and talk personal branding ‘cause I know how critical it’s going to be on the forefront. And one of the things she says is trust is the new currency of business.
I freaking love that statement because if you are not building the trust with your brand, you are losing out before you even stand a chance. Trust is the new catapult to growing business today. It used to be flexing. It used to be who was shiny. It used to be who has how many followers. And now we are so turned off by that, like, “Okay, cool. You have a hundred thousand followers. Are you so out of touch that I can’t even relate to you?”
There’s this relatability piece that consumers are looking for and this is what tipped the influencer market on its head is that there’s a lot of clients now who are like, “You know what? Maybe I’d be better off seeing a stylist with 500 followers than one with 50,000,” because how much attention do you think they’re going to feel like they’re going to get? Much, much more. And that’s what I’m saying.
Consumers today aren’t so enamored with the idea of, “oh my goodness, my stylist is famous,” and they’re more enamored with like, “What can you do for me? I’m a human and I’m important too. So what can you do for me?” And in our personal brands, we can make that possible.
I saw a question come through. I won’t say where it came from. I saw a question come through recently from a salon owner who said, “I just recently hired an influencer to work at my salon. What are the things I can do to prepare?” And to me, that’s a little bit of a 2017 mindset because that person, no matter how many followers they have, needs to build a business the same way as somebody who just started yesterday. The roadmap to build is going to be equivalent. So you don’t want to put that person on a pedestal. It’s, first of all, going to destroy your team culture. That would be a really scary thing to do overall. And second, they’re held to the same standard as everybody else. They might be 16 steps ahead. That’s amazing. Maybe they can mentor the other stylists in your space who aren’t quite there yet, but they don’t get special privilege. You don’t change the way your salon operates because you have somebody in your space with more influence. It can be a really big, beautiful thing for you, but we don’t know, so you kind of have to play it out and see what happens.
How do we develop this personal brand, right? How do we get away from the idea of, “I want to be an influencer. I want to look like I drive a nice car. I want to look like I’m a really big deal.” And how do we realize that if trust is the new currency, how am I building trust? Well, we certainly do that with the personal brand and I want to share with you the steps that I believe you need to take to get started on that journey.
Number one, before you develop yourself as a person, you need to develop the brand for your business. One of the things I’m passionate about, the thing that I coach to in Thriving Stylist Method is the idea that your brand is not for you, period. I still feel that way, even though when you’re building your personal brand, your brand is not for you. Your brand is for your target market client.
Did anybody notice I just went through a fairly massive rebrand? If you haven’t already, check out brittseva.com. Totally rebranded. If you go to my Instagram, @brittseva, completely rebranded, new color scheme, new feeling, new verbiage, new everything, because my target market has changed so I have to change my branding in relation to it. I don’t change as a human. The way I show up stays the same, right? My personal brand can stay the same, but the branding around my business is completely morphed and that’s what you have to keep in mind.
So first we develop a brand for your business and the brand needs to speak to the target market client. It doesn’t need to be a representation of you.
Let me explain what that means a little bit deeper. A lot of people say like, “Well, I’m a little bit edgy. I’m a little bit rugged. I don’t know. I’m a little bit alternative.” Okay, great. So they want their brand to be rugged and alternative ‘cause that’s the person that they are. But even though they’re rugged and alternative, they do great root touch-ups. They do cut and color. They do highlights. They do all the services that the mass majority of clients get, right? There’s some services that the minority of clients get, like when we look at a booming market like extensions, it’s still the minority of people who are wearing hair extensions. The majority of people do not wear them.
So when we say like, I want to show up my business and dress a little different or look a little different than whatever, I don’t know what you’re comparing to be different. I think we’re all really different individuals. But if you’re saying, “You know, I’m edgy, I’m alternative. My brand needs to be.” Actually, not necessarily. The brand needs to speak to the target market client, period. And you don’t want to mislead them.
But I always use the example of one of the things that I love in my life is sunflowers. I have an affinity to them. I’m a kid of the nineties. I’ve loved them since forever. If I was going to build a brand that was this great representation of Britt Seva the human, it might be coated in sunflowers, but it has nothing to do with what I offer to you all. It’s not how I show up in the business. So it is a massive disconnect. Maybe work perfectly for somebody else. If it works for their clients, it does not work for me. So while it would be a great representation of me as a human, it is not a representation of my brand, right? So the brand lives on its own. Great.
Number two, determine what you are the expert of. So we talk about this in Thriving and Scaling Stylist Methods, but the idea of who you are, what you do, what you want to be known for your brand messaging, then we get into things like Zone of Competence, Zone of Genius, Zone of Excellence, and start saying like, “What is it that I do best?”
And often it’s so funny. I do this even too. We think like, “I’m determining what I do best. It better be really fancy.” Going back to what I just said, the low hanging fruit is being incredible at haircuts, because like I said, 98% of people are going to want haircuts sometime this year. I mean, that is the low hanging fruit. Just being badass at haircuts is a really great way to build and grow a business. So often when we think like, “What am I the expert of? I better develop something nobody’s ever seen before,” there is some logic to that when you get more advanced as a stylist, but to start like just figure out what you’re really good at, and let’s double down on that.
Number three, determine your perception and positioning. This is where it starts to get interesting.
So I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I am far from the only business-building coach in the industry, far from it. There have been plenty who have come before me, plenty who came up alongside me, and plenty who are coming after me. Absolutely. Why is my podcast still the fastest-growing, most downloaded? Because of the way I show up differently. There’s something about my perception that happens to resonate in this moment at this time and so that’s why it’s working. I don’t show up the same way as somebody else.
Now, somebody else might have way more traction on Instagram or way more traction on YouTube or way more traction at a hair show, right? That is their perception and their positioning. Choose how you want to show up. You choose where you want to connect, how you want to be perceived. I personally like to be super relatable. Not everybody wants to be relatable. Some people want to be out of reach. Some people want to be fancy, right? So it depends on how you want to be perceived and how you want to be positioned.
So think about your clientele, going back to point one, the brand for your business, who you’re trying to attract, what do they want? Do they want somebody fancy or do they want somebody who feels like a best friend they can just get down with? For me, I would probably, even though I could financially if I wanted to, I would never go into a luxury salon just because it’s not me. Like I’m somebody who’s driven lifted four wheel drive vehicles for as long as I can remember for years, right? I’m just not fancy in that way. So it’s not that I couldn’t do it if I didn’t want to. It’s just on my vibe.
Think about who you are trying to attract and how they’d want you to be showing up within the business, ‘cause that’s going to determine how you show up on social, on your website, on everything, right?
Number four, create a social content strategy centered around sharing the five types of content we talk about in Thrivers, which would be afters, before and afters, brand boosters, photos of yourself, and video.
Then next, add value with every post you make. So sounds simple enough, but how do you do all of this in a way that is authentically yourself? You have to be relatable, consistent, and targeted in all that you do.
Why do people like it when I show photo of my kids? Because the vast majority of my followers are parents. Not all of them, but a lot are. So when I do share that, it’s relatable.
Why do people like it when I tell cheesy jokes? Because that’s who I am and it’s super relatable. It’s not always professional. Definitely not, but it’s very relatable and it’s how I’ve chosen to brand myself. Not everybody will do that. And they shouldn’t, but you have to figure out what it is about you that makes you different.
And some people will say like, “Oh, this is the X-factor.” No, the X-factors are something totally different than what we’re saying when we’re developing a personal brand.
But people have to love you as a human. People have to say, like, “Man, that’s somebody I could go to lunch with. That’s somebody I hoped I get to shake their hand one day. That’s somebody who is making an impact for me,” and your clients should feel that way about you when they sit in your chair.
Wouldn’t you love it for them to say, like, “Wow, I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. I’ve been checking you out and I’ve been really feeling like you’re my person. And I’m really excited to have this opportunity to make it come together.”
Now I know some of you are already having those moments ‘cause I see you posting about ’em in the Thrivers Facebook group where you say like somebody came in, said they’ve been watching me for four months, and are so excited to finally be here. That is a huge indicator that you are building a super solid personal brand.
Now here’s some signs that you’re not building a personal brand. If I was to look at your Instagram feed, it is 80% photos of hair you’ve done. So again, like I said at the top of this episode, it’s not that client isn’t the star of the show. They’re just not the whole show. That’s not a personal brand. That’s a product brand, right?
So we have to say, like, “What am I going to do so that I am still front and center?” Remember trust is the new currency. So if clients want to do business with people they trust, they have to see you. If they’re not seeing you on social, they can’t trust you.
Now what if, when you show up on social, the version of you they’re seeing is unpolished, selfie style, kind of a mess. And you’re like, “Long day in the salon today. See y’all tomorrow.” Is that really the impression that you want to give? That’s how you’re going to be perceived, but is that the personal brand that you’re trying to create? And so I encourage you to really think about the perception that you are placing on your website, on social, externally all the time, right?
I think a lot of times we give ourselves the grace of like, “Well, my clients are going to love this.” Got it. But whenever we’re showing up on social, what are you showing up on social for? It is not with the intention of entertaining your existing followers. With every single thing you do on social, it should be to attract new business, period. And you’ll do that by adding value.
But often we cross too far into that vulnerability of thinking like, “Oh, my existing clients know I love to play hockey on the weekends, right?” But if your new clients don’t find that relatable, if it doesn’t fit in with your brand, it may be a misfire. So as you’re thinking about this personal brand, I really want you to think about how do I find that fine line between showing up as relatable, being a human, but keeping it in alignment with the clientele I’m trying to build, because remember, as you build a personal brand, what is the number one objective? Trust.
And if what you’re doing and the way you’re showing up is not building trust, is not allowing people to feel safe with you, is not allowing people to feel like, “Wow, this is my person. Where have you been all my life?”, we are missing the mark when it comes to building that personal brand.
I want you to take this week to really self reflect and think about how can I better show up on my website with the person that I am? How can I better show up on social so that I am creating true trust? I’m not just showing my work. I’m not just showing the environment. I am creating actual trust.
And listen, this goes for the salon owners in the house too. How many of you are salon owners trying to attract a dream team? And you feel like it’s hard. I guarantee you are not building trust and there’s not enough personal brand in the way that you’re marketing yourself digitally in order to be attracting the best and the brightest to come into work for you. All right?
So like I said, this is a little prequel teaser. Next week, we’re going to be talking about the oncoming recession, what that means for business, and how having a personal brand is going to make a huge difference in securing your business.
Now, like I said, I’m not the expert of this. We do have AJ coming into Thrivers Live. I hope she’s able to give you some help as well, but for now, if you have any other questions, you can leave me a rating or review on iTunes. Ask me your questions there in the comments and I will do my best to come back on the podcast and serve up the goodness for you.
And now I always like to say so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
