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, my loves, and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, really excited to geek out a little bit with you guys today over one of my favorite holidays: Small Business Saturday.
We’re a few weeks out from Small Business Saturday, but I want you to get out ahead of this incredible opportunity. “Now I feel like I’ve heard Britt talk about this before.” I talk about Small Business Saturday every single year, but I think this is the very first year I’ve gotten this far out ahead of it.
With that, there is just no excuse as to why you shouldn’t be doing this correctly. I see so many small businesses in general, but particularly stylists and salons panic in early November, mid-November, like, “Oh my gosh, Small Business Saturday is coming. What should we do?” Then I watch the Facebook groups fill with these really goofy ideas of how to bring in business during small business Saturday.
Listen, I’ve been one of those salons who tried those goofy ideas and then was like, “Man, why did I put in so much effort only to not see a great result?” I want to prevent you from that pain.
In today’s episode, I’m going to share my go-to strategy. I want to talk about what I’ve certainly shared before, and then two new strategies if you want to give them a whirl.
So let’s first go back in time and let’s talk about Small Business Saturday and how it started.
It’s actually celebrating its 10 year anniversary this year. It was started in 2010 by American Express and I love the movement. The idea was to remember our small local business owners. There is just no doubt that as a small local business, we are feeling the heat from big brands, big online corporations, multi-operation franchises, and all these things, right?
It starts to be very intimidating and even discouraging to want to be a small, independent business owner. And so AmEx started this great movement to have a day dedicated to thinking about our small business. They purposefully planned it around the holidays and I know a lot of friends, and myself included, make an effort on Small Business Saturday to buy as much as I can from local retailers as possible.
I’m very fortunate to live in a really amazing, very small community where we have some awesome shops to do some holiday shopping. We have some toy shops for the kids and definitely some adult shops, so I’m able to do quite a bit that day.
So what happens is as a local business owner, we’re like, “This is an amazing landslide victory. So how do I cash in on that day?”
I want you to think about what does cash in means as a hairstylist. ‘Cause I think for a lot of us, we think money and then we think retail. That is very typical process.
So when I look at a lot of industry, Facebook groups, like what should I do for Small Business Saturday, buy two, get one free; retail 20% off signs; cash tags. I get it okay?
But I don’t think we’re thinking about consumer behavior, first of all, and I don’t think we’re thinking about what our true long-term objectives are in the industry.
Let me ask you this question and I mean it honestly because how you answer this will determine what you do for Small Business Saturday: Do you want to sell more retail or have more clients for the long haul?
Most of you said one more clients, of course. So then our efforts on Small Business Saturday should go towards getting more clients. And that doesn’t mean load up that Saturday, right? It means something different.
That’s what I want to talk about now, for those of you who have started your own retail line and you’re like, “Oh no, no, I want to sell retail.” Well, this is a really great opportunity for you and I’m going to think about you as I start to share my strategies here and keep that in mind.
But for most of us, retail is a secondary source of revenue, not a primary. I’m very pro selling retail. Retail sales are alive and well with the stylists I coach. The challenge is that because we’re not selling scented candles or custom-made chocolates. It’s not one of those things you could just buy on a whim any time. Somebody is either out of shampoo or they’re not. And we could say, “We’ll stock up now,” right? But shampoo is not something that is consumable in the way that custom chocolate or candles are. You can only use so much shampoo.
So if somebody stocks up in November, it just means they’re not going to buy in December, January, February, March, April, May. You’re putting off the inevitable. Somebody still only gonna buy two or three bottles of shampoo a year, right?
Doing a Small Business Saturday promotion isn’t actually going to get you out ahead if it’s retail-based. Ah, did you see that light bulb go off because of that? It’s not a consumable in that way. I’m a huge fan of selling retail hair care products; I just don’t think discounted on Small Business Saturday, yeah, that’s the way to do it.
What I want you to do is think about how you can support small businesses on Saturday. Instead of saying, “It’s Small Business Saturday, people should support me,” I encourage you to be the bigger business owner who says, “Yeah, it’s Small Business Saturday. How can I support my fellow small business owners?” Right? Huge game changer.
It goes back to the old adage of we can’t control how people are going to react, we can only control our own actions. And so we can’t control, who’s going to come into our doors on Small Business Saturday, but we have full control of whose doors we walk into. I want you to be making some very powerful connections over that weekend.
So I have a tool for you. If you head to thethrivingstylist.com/SBS (as in Small Business Saturday, but just those initials).There is a seven page PDF workbook that will walk you through preparing for Small Business Saturday.
I’m going to verbally share things now, but that worksheet literally has a countdown day 14 do this, day 10 do that, day eight do this, day three do that so you can’t miss anything. I have you covered there.
Make sure that you download your copy, but let’s go through what I would suggest you do instead of asking people to come to you.
The very first thing we’re going to do is think about 10 local, small businesses that you would like to support. I definitely want you to think with your heart, but also with your head.
So let’s think of some from the heart who really stood out this year through the pandemic, who went through a challenging time, who really stood up and supported you that you’d like to give back to. That’s the heart-centered give back.
Then we have the head-centered give back. When I’m doing a head-centered give back, I say, “Hmm, what businesses could I partner with that would give me the most target market clients?”
So for us, we partnered with a local spa. Whoo. That was a landslide victory. We got tons of particularly women right within our target market on Small Business Saturday. I mean, we hit them hard and this spot had a clientele of, I don’t know, a thousand regulars, so it was just a jackpot for us. That for us was a good place to think with our heads and promote for Small Business Saturday.
Network within that spot. Maybe there’s a local coffee shop, a local clothing boutique where a lot of the men and women who work there are within your target market. Think logically like, “Okay, who do I want to give back with just cause it feels good? Where do I want to gain some potential new clients from?”
Okay, I want you to think that way and get creative but also be logical. Like these people were hoping that they’re going to become regular clients so you can’t go too far away from your salon. Really think about who you could network with.
These don’t have to be businesses that you know already. That part doesn’t matter. Just think about 10 local businesses that you would like to know more or have employees or clients who would be a really good fit for your business, okay?
That’s going to be step one. Step two, let’s decide what our budget’s going to be for the year.
So if you’re a California stylist, you’re like, “Whoa, Britt, we have been unemployed most of the year.” I get it, so your budget is going to be quite small.
If you’re a stylist who’s having the best year ever, which I know some of you are financially, even with all the time you took off, you’re still up financially—which congratulations, it just makes me so happy to hear. If you’re in that boat, maybe you have a bigger budget.
I like to set the budget first. So say, “Okay, so of these 10 businesses, I’m going to spend $200 on this promotion,” or whatever. That only gives you 20 bucks a spot, so then we’re not going to be doing any big juicy gifts.
Can you afford more? Are you a bigger salon where you’re like, “Oh, we could honestly probably do 2000 bucks”? Okay, well, I mean, now we can do something really cool.
So that’s 200 bucks a business and maybe some businesses are bigger and some businesses are smaller, so we can allocate differently, but really decide how much you can spend to promote yourself on this day, because this is going to be a marketing expense.
Then what we’re going to do is really take a look at each of those businesses and look at each of the opportunities. So if it’s a clothing boutique, get a sense of how many people work there. Are there maybe six employees? Okay, perfect.
What about, is there a coffee shop? And it’s really just one woman who always works there. Okay, well you could do something really nice just for that one person. So do you need to do something smaller for the masses or bigger just for that one woman?
‘Cause here’s what it’s going to look like: you’re going to put together something incredible—I’m going to give you some ideas in a second—some sort of gift, some sort of acknowledgement. And you’re going to go into these businesses, whether you end up choosing five or seven or 10—go into a handful of these small businesses and say, “Hey, I’m Britt. I’m a local stylist in the area. You may or may not have heard of me. Today is Small Business Saturday and I really want to celebrate you. I’m just so thankful for what you do for our community. This is my way of giving back. I hope you know how much you are loved and appreciate, and I hope to connect with you soon,” and that’s it.
Their jaws are going to drop. Nobody has ever done that for them before ever. Gone out of their way just to give a gift.
They’ll be like, “Wait, what? I—oh,” and you’re like, “No, no, no. I really want to give back to you.”
So some ideas for a gift. If it’s just an owner, like a single owner business, you can do a decent-sized retail basket. That’s one of the cool things about retail is often we can by-product for $10, $14 a bottle, but the value is like 40 or 50 bucks, right?
You could just do a nice shampoo and conditioner duo and then put a gift card to come in to see you—that’s where the money shot is—and give it to them as a gift basket. I can’t even imagine. I would probably cry if I was somebody who owned a local deli and I had been serving sandwiches like crazy over the last year and gone through all that stress, and then on Small Business Saturday, you came in and literally just handed me a bottle of moisturizing\ shampoo, conditioner, and a cute little gift basket with a $25 gift card to come in and see you, I’d probably cry right there.
I mean, think of the huge impact on that and it would cost you the cost of the shampoo and conditioner, the gift basket, which you can probably buy for a dollar at the dollar store or at a craft store. And then the $25 gift card is money in your pocket because as soon as that client cashes in on that, it is now the opportunity for that client’s value to be thousands of dollars.
If you can retain that guest for cut and color services, you’re going to come up thousands of dollars on the flip side, and that’s how marketing works.
Marketing is funny because a lot of times I’ll talk about promotions like this, and people will be like, “Oh, that sounds too expensive.” Well, this is not money out the door. This is an investment if you do it correctly.
And in business, everything costs what? Money or time. So for this, there is a paid aspect to this. You can budget however you want to. If you’re like, “You know what, Britt, I like your retail idea. I just can’t afford to do it. Or my salon owner would never let me,” it doesn’t even have to be so complex.
Another thing that we did is go to—Target has these, Michael’s Crafts has these, I’m sure you could find them online. They’re cellophane and they’re called treat bags. They’re these plastic, clear, fully see-through bags and you could get them at Target. There’s 20 in a pack and I want to say they’re $3 for 20. So we’re talking cents for each one, a piece, I don’t know, something like 15 cents.
So you take this 15 cent bag, we would put two Dove chocolates inside. So again, the entire bag’s probably worth 50 cents and then a printed gift card in there for $25 off a first visit with me.
The entire gift I was giving out was less than a dollar, but the value to the guest was $25. Plus they’re getting a $25 off their first haircut with me, $25 off their first highlight with me. That promotion always did really well for us. We would probably get, I don’t know, somewhere between 15 to 20% return.
So if I dropped off a hundred bags, I get 15 or 20 new guests. I mean, that’s a really good rate of return. When you look at how much time and money I have to invest, it’s well worth it for me.
And with that gift card you’re putting in the bags, you want it to be less than a cost of a service. So if your haircut’s $25, the gift card should be like a $15 off, right? We don’t want anyone getting anything away for free, but it can’t be cheap either. $5 off, not good enough. $10 off, not good enough. $15 off marginal unless you’re at a lower price point 20, 25, 30. Now you’re going to start to see some motion.
So that gift card is key and it needs to be enough to make somebody consider seeing you making the leap of faith. I mean, you’re a stranger walking into their business, but you can see this can be really high impact fact and what makes it so special is that nobody else is doing it. This is shock factor.
We did this at our local Starbucks, I mean, years ago and we did the small cellophane gift bags with the Dove chocolates and the gift cards because it was a Starbucks. There was no owner that we were connected to, but we knew there were seven to 10 employees there on any given shift. We dropped off about 25 so everybody who worked that day could get one of the gift bags, and it was around three o’clock in the afternoon three of those Starbucks employees came back into our salon with,I think three trays, like 12 frappuccinos for us.
And they were like, “We just don’t even know what to say. We’re all going to come in and get haircuts. Here’s a bunch of free frappuccinos.” Like they were just floored that we had gone out of our way for them because who does that for Starbucks employees? Nobody.
And then on the flip side, we got a ton of new clients. So think about, instead of “Help me,” “Help me, help me give back to your community,” and you’ll be amazed at how that comes back around.
More details on how to pull that strategy off if you get your download, and to get that download, you’re going to head to www.thethrivingstylist.com/SBS. You can have your planner, I break down all the details and exactly how to do it.
I have a new strategy for you. This is one we’ve never talked about before, and because we’ve never talked about it, they’re kind of pie in the sky ideas. I can’t say that these are going to work, but they’re innovative and I think they’re worth a shot.
The reason I want to share these two different kinds of ideas is because we’re living in a really different time. These ideas are both some that I wouldn’t have recommended in times past. In times past, they would have felt almost scanny or spammy, but now businesses are a little more heart-centered and the way we’re able to be acknowledged by our clients, and what we’re able to ask for, and what we’re able to participate in have changed dramatically. Because of that, we can do some really different things that I maybe wouldn’t have suggested in the past.
My first idea is a testimonial contest and this only works if you do email marketing with your clients. Where my Thrivers society members at? I know you ladies and gents can pull this off. What we do is we send out an email to our clients and we say, “Hey, Small Business Saturday is coming up and in appreciation of all you do for me, I want to do something for you.” Okay, watch where I go with this.
So this Saturday, which this year happens to be November 28, so you’d send out this email on the Monday before or something like that, and then you’d send another reminder the morning of Small Business Saturday.
Okay, so you say, “Coming up this Saturday on November 28, it’s Small Business Saturday. I want to give back to you if you’ll give back to me. So anytime this week, if you can share a photo of the work I’ve done, a selfie of yourself, a picture of you, a video testimonial, anything like that. If you can share on social media a picture of my work, you looking beautiful, and have the caption be just a story about how much you’ve loved working together and tag me in, you’ll be entered to win a $200 service gift certificate.”
You will have 40 testimonials all over social media about how amazing you are for an entire week and the people reading those testimonials don’t have to know they were shared because it was a contest and clients who don’t actually love you won’t do it. So it’s not scammy or spammy. Only the people who truly care will be incentivized.
What’ll happen is Sally will read that email and she’ll be like, “Oh, well, first of all, I love Britt and second, I would love a $200 gift card.” So she’s going to post a selfie of herself on Instagram and be like, “I just have to tell you guys, I love my stylist, Britt Seva so much. She always makes me feel X, Y, Z. When I go in to see her, my favorite part is blah, blah, blah.”
You can have criteria. You can list what they need to share. And then one of my criteria would be, “I need you to tag the location of the salon and tag my Instagram profile into the post. That will enter you into the contest. Then on Saturday the 28th at 5:00 PM, I’ll announce on my social media the winner of the contest and you’ll get your $200 gift card.”
The win for you is that five, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 of your clients will be drowning Instagram and Facebook or whatever their platform of choice is in testimonials about how epic you are for an entire week. There is no better sales and marketing pitch than a client talking about how amazing you are to their followers. That’s where you win and I just think this is a great time to have that conversation point.
I would not run this promotion any other time of year. I think it would—it feels scammy and spammy, but I think this time, because it’s Small Business Saturday, you could fully pull it off. So I’d recommend giving that a shot.
The other thing you can do is the opposite angle: you can start a small business loop. Now I got to tell you I’m not generally a fan of loops.
So you’ve seen loops before. It’s a contest on Instagram and it says, “Hey guys, I want to introduce you to a few of my friends. If you follow me, and Sarah, and Shelley, and Amanda, and Joelle on Instagram, and then tag in two friends, you’re entered to win a Ferrari,” right?
Have you seen those kinds of contests? Okay. So you could do something like that in your salon. If you partner with other local small businesses, this is the only way it would work and for you.
You’d go down to the Italian restaurant across the street from your salon. You’d pop over to the day spa next door. You’d go to Joanne’s clothing boutique down the street and you’d also go to the coffee shop, okay? So you choose five businesses or something like that. Ask them if they’re interested in doing social share promotion with you for Small Business Saturday, say we’ll each pick a winner and the winner will get it a gift basket from our space or all of us.
You could do this a few different ways. So if it’s five businesses participating, five winners get chosen. Each business gets to choose a winner. I’ve seen this done a couple ways: either each of you contributes to baskets—so you as a salon would have five gifts and your five gifts would go in all five of the baskets—or your gift would be just a salon basket and you would just create one juicy basket for one lucky winner.
For me, I think it’s smarter to do five combo baskets, but you do it however you want. Lay out the ground rules with each of the businesses participating. So you say, “Okay, we each need to contribute 50 bucks towards this basket” so the cost per business is $250 to potentially be exposed to lots of new guests, okay?
So for me as the salon, I’d probably do a $50 gift card to come in to see me, because for me, my win is not if you use the styling aid I give you. The win is if you come in to see me.
You could even all do that, you could say $250 in gift cards to come and see our businesses. I would love to freaking win that. I would totally enter this. So what you do is on Small Business, Saturday, you each create a carousel post on your feed featuring all of the other businesses, so everybody gets a picture of each of the businesses. You get a picture of the pizzeria, the coffee shop, the clothing boutique, the spa, and your salon. Everybody has the same five photos and you each share a carousel post, which is one of those posts where multiple photos are featured in the post, okay? It says support downtown Gilroy, support downtown Livermore, support, Sonoma, whatever, whatever the name of your community is super important. And it could even say “Contest! Support, blah, blah, blah,” okay?
Then you say the five of our businesses are giving away over $1,000 in prizes this week ‘cause that’s what you’re doing, right? You’ve each contributed enough. The value is over a thousand dollars. We’re choosing five lucky winners to enter. What you have to do is follow each of these businesses.
So you’re posting this on your Instagram, the pizzeria’s posting it on theirs, the spas posting it on theirs, the clothing boutique is posting it on theirs. And who was the other one? The coffee shop. So everybody’s posting this. You have to like each of these accounts, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You each list each other, tag in friends, and you’re entered to win this contest. One winner is selected from the entries on each page.
So if Amanda enters on your page, she’s entered to win your basket, which is shared. You all have the same prizes, but what’s going to happen is you’ll all pick up an additional 100, 200, 300, 400 local followers in one day because everyone in your community who’s already following those businesses is going to be vying to get a piece of that thousand dollar gift card.
Now the only reason I’d consider this is because you’d be getting out in front of real local clientele. Usually with loop contests, you end up with spam followers, but because you’re partnering with other local small businesses, I think it stands a chance to work.
So you definitely make it a Small Business Saturday promotion. If you have other really well-aligned small businesses around you with decent sized social media followings, I think it could be a real victory for you worth a shot. If you try it and it works, let me know. I love to shout you out from the rooftops on my Instagram story.
You guys, the most important thing to do is to not let Small Business Saturday pass you by. Do something amazing this season. Think of how you can give back to your community and celebrate the small business owner that we all love and trust so much. You guys, head to thethrivingstylist.com/SBS to get your hand on this download. So much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
