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, as you’re listening to this podcast—I don’t think it’s any surprise that I record these podcasts in advance. If you’re listening to this podcast in real time, today is December the 28th. And today I am spending my entire day hosting the VIP experience for this season’s members of my Best Year Yet program. Whoo whoo!
So excited to see you all in there. In case you weren’t able to attend as a VIP this season have no worries. This was a very exclusive room. We kept it to 525 members and the experience sold out really quickly. Most of these spaces were invested in by our Thrivers Society members who had first shot at securing their seats. The last remaining seats sold to the public within 48 hours of opening up to the public, and then we did a few bonus seats that we gave out on Cyber Monday, and that was it. Those got snagged up in minutes.
So the VIP spots went really quickly, and the reason VIP was so popular is because with the VIP package, you got an entire day of really focused annual business planning, not just with me. You did get me. You got me for the entire day, guiding you through completing your Best Year Yet planner, open and available for Q and A opportunities, but the best part was truly the community.
We put you into what we call Power Pods, where we paired you up in a group of 10 to 15 different stylists and salon owners who had similar goals to you for 2021. We put you in a virtual table group so you could connect with other Power Pod members all day long during the virtual workshop experience. And also we hope that you’ll keep in touch with these Power Pod members throughout the rest of 2021. They become your hair stylist or salon owner business-building crew.
I know that was really appealing. So the community aspect was amazing.
We’re also doing contests all day today and those who joined at the VIP level got access to the 90 day accountability Facebook group, where I pop in and I do bonus trainings and support documents. And I come in and do additional calendar reminders and I help to keep you on track to create the habit for 2021 of setting goals, creating projects around those goals, and then staying accountable to them.
Accountability and progress in our industry comes from habit. And often when I say that, like, where does accountability come from? Where does progress come from? The first answer that comes to mind for most people is consistency, which is so great, but consistency is a by-product of structure and organization.
How can you be consistent if you don’t have system to keep you organized? It’s an actual impossibility. Consistency is created by habit and habit comes from having structure and organization.
Best Year Yet is designed to give you that structure and organization so you can develop the habit and create your most successful year yet.
So I want to talk a little bit about what we’re doing in the VIP Best Year Yet workshop experience today, so if you weren’t one of the 525 joining me live for this experience, you still get a taste of what it offers. Plus I’ll tell you a little bit more about Best Year Yet.
Best Year Yet is actually a digital course. I taught it live and in person for the very first time in November 2019 at my good friend Deanna Spangler’s salon Studio 37 down in Huntington Beach. She invited me down to teach a live workshop.
The event sold out in less than 24 hours. We had 60 live seats and those who came live, I don’t believe really knew what they were signing up for, but I wanted to really close 2019 with a bang. And I said, “Okay, what if we do like an annual planning workshop? I’ll spend six hours walking them through how to create an annual plan so that 2020 is their best year yet?”
Well, the workshop was a smash. It was huge and I came back from Huntington and I told my team, I said, “This is one of the things I’m most proud of. This is like one of my life’s works. Like I really love this program. I’d love to see if we can take a digital.”
My team kind of did the there-she-goes-again eye roll because I do this from time to time. I gave them about four weeks to turn that live in-person workshop into a digital experience. We hosted it live digitally at the end of December 2019, and it was a smash.
We had over a thousand stylists participate and it was really a baby program at the time. It included a digital download PDF. It was about 27 pages that those who joined Best Year
Yet could download, print out, and use it to follow along with my teachings and trainings.
It was a real long day. It was about six hours of me just talking, talking, talking like this, and it was a lot of information. It was an incredible workshop and amazing experience.
I started hearing in September and October 2020, the tremendous impact that workshop had and it really did take that long to get that feedback, right? Because any sort of annual planning feels really good at the beginning. Like getting organized and making a plan always feels good. There’s always that initial rush of like, “Oh my gosh, now I get it.” But you don’t see the fruits of that labor until months down the line.
And in September and October, I started getting DMs that were like, “Holy cow, Best Year Yet really changed my life.” And I said, “Well, that’s great news because I love Best Year Yet,” and we really doubled the ante this year.
This year’s version of Best Year Yet is way more clean, way more organized, way more streamlined and structured. You no longer have to listen to me talk for six hours straight in order to complete the program, which is amazing. I’ve really condensed and streamlined the opportunity.
So Best Year Yet is a digital course that anybody can log in and access any time until March 31, 2021.
Why?
Because how many of you have invested in digital education? And you have lifetime access. For the rest of your life. And because you have it for the rest of your life, it never becomes a priority.
Raise your hand, let me see you.
It is okay to offer lifetime access to things if you’re an educator. I call myself a coach. And as a coach, I want you to get results. In order to get results, I have to hold you accountable. Results come from accountability.
So in order to hold you accountable, I give you access to Best Year Yet through the first quarter of 2021. Why? Because if you have not completed your 2021 annual business plan by the end of the first quarter, it’s just not going to happen. You’ve already lost a quarter of the year. 25% of your year is now gone.
Annual planning must happen in the first 30 days of a year and ideally before the year even starts, which is why the Best Year Yet planners started shipping in November 2020, right?
You have to plan for the year ahead before the year actually happens. If you’re in April and you’re just starting to plan for 2021, we’ve lost it. We’re way too deep, summer’s on the horizon now. We missed it.
With Best Year Yet, you get access to the digital course through March 31, 2021 so I can hold you accountable.
When you invest in the course, we ship you a physical planner, custom-created for the industry. Never before has the industry had a planner like this. It is just for stylists, salon owners, and industry educators, period.
I had some fitness professionals reach out to me asking if they could invest in it. And I said, honestly and wholeheartedly no. I said it is so specific to our industry. I don’t believe it would be appropriate to you. Flattering that you’re interested; unfortunately, I can’t in good faith say yes, buy one. It doesn’t make sense. It is so specific to our industry.
How many of you have bought a planner before and it’s not quite right? You’re writing things in the margins. It’s incomplete and you’re not able to stick with it because it doesn’t truly keep you organized. This is different.
So the Best Year Yet planner—I’m looking at one right now—works in five stages. The very first stage is what we call Reflect. We do a very deep reflection and this is what we’re starting our morning with today, live in the workshop: a very deep reflection of the year past.
We look at what I call the facts and the feels. So the facts, this would be, how many social media followers do you have today? How much money did you make in 2020? Those are all facts, right? We can look those up. Then there’s the feels: What did you put you in your family through to get those things? How many times did your partner say, “Can you please put your phone away?” How many hours are you going to spend on Instagram today? Those are feels.
When we do reflection in detail, it’s—I believe—12 pages of the planner. It’s a really deep reflection and it’s a rating system, and we review all aspects of your business to ensure that we have a really good, hard look at what the year actually looked like, right? Right.
Once we’ve done the reflection mid-morning today, we’re going to be dreaming and I call us Best Year Yet-ers dreamers who do.
Dreams are only empty until you attach action to them. You’re a good dreamer. I am a good dreamer. We’re all really good dreamers. You don’t get into this industry unless you’re a dreamer. You’re creative, you’re passionate. You’re likely multi-passionate. You’d like to chase many dreams. That’s why you joined this creative industry, right? Great fit for you.
The challenge is a lot of your dreams don’t come to fruition, right? You can picture a bigger, better life for yourself, but you don’t have the strategy to get you there.
Very common. Used to be me. That was, it was me for so long. I had these big dreams and visions for what I knew my salon team could be, but because I didn’t have the Best Year Yet system to take us there, we never reached our full potential.
I’ll do another podcast down the line where I talk about why I left my salon and the trials and tribulations we went through and all of that stuff. That’s a story for a different day. But for today, please know that part of my frustration came from the fact that we couldn’t actually achieve the big dreams and goals I had for the business.
Once we’ve done the dreaming, around lunchtime today, we’re going to create the North Star. This is something that I didn’t realize how poignant it would be until we did Best Year Yet in 2019. This was the game changer for most everybody who participated.
Because we’re all big dreamers and we’re big creatives and we’re multi-passionate and we want to have it all, right? This is an industry where we want to have our cake and eat it too. You want to make lots of money while working part time. You want to put your family first and have a thriving career. Heck yeah, me too. Samesies.
How do we make that possible? We create a North Star.
What happens in this industry especially is it’s very noisy. So let me ask you this. This is part of the Best Year Yet exercise, who do you follow on social media and who follows you? Where are you getting your inspiration from on social media? What is influencers are you following? Are you following just industry educators? I’m an industry educator. I would love it if you followed me @brittseva on Instagram, but are you just following people like me or are you also following inspirational stylists, inspirational salon owners who are not educators?
‘Cause if I wanted to be a six-figure stylist, I would follow me, but I’d also follow 200 stylists that I perceived to be six-figure stylists, because as cool as it is to follow me, I need to follow people who are doing what I want to do. That is an aspirational follow. Most of us on social do inspirational follows, which are great. We follow people who are well above and beyond where we want to be, often educators or celebrities, right?
Like a Rachel Hollis or an Oprah, or these amazing people who have achieved so much. A Gary Vaynerchuk. Some of you are Gary V fans. They’re amazing. Most of you don’t want to be Gary Vaynerchuk. As much as I would love to be Oprah, I will likely never get there, so she can inspire me, but I need to follow other aspirational people who truly have the business model that I am trying to create in my life right now.
Like if I said, I want to be Oprah in one year, that is unrealistic. That is an impossibility. It’s not going to happen. That is her life’s work that I’m admiring. I can’t achieve her life’s work in one year, no matter how hard I try so I can follow her, but I need to follow people who are doing what I want to do this year, right? Who are just two steps ahead of me, not 40 steps ahead of me.
And so we are going to really refine who we’re following on social. One of the things we’re doing in Best Year Yet VIP is crowdsourcing those people to follow, which is going to be really fun. I’m super excited about that. We’re refining what podcasts we’re going to listen to, and then we’re creating our benchmarks for success.
One of the things that really messes us up is when we set goals, we’re like, “And I want to make a hundred thousand dollars in 2021.” Then what happens is if in November 2021, you’ve only made $80,000. You’re like, “Well, I’m a loser. There you go again. I’m going to come up short. Still didn’t do it. Still not a six-figure stylist still. No good.” And the negative self-talk starts.
Then you really can start to spiral and say, “Well, I’m never going to get what I want. Maybe it’s just not for me. Maybe I’m not lucky enough.” Then we start to get jealous and envious and all of these wacky emotions come into play.
The problem was not the financial goal. The financial goal was good. The problem was you didn’t create micro goals to support the financial goal, and in Best Year Yet, we create the micro goals and I send you a sticker sheet to track those micro goals so that all year long, we are making sure that we stay on track and that is the North Star experience.
Once we’re done creating that North Star, we create this strategy to support it and this is where most of us go sideways. We’re good at making dreams. We’re even good at setting big goals and small goals and choosing who we follow on social and that’s amazing.
But what is your strategy to make the a hundred grand? What is your strategy to finally step away from the chair and be a full-time educator? What is your strategy to rent out all the booths in your salon? ‘Cause I know you have half of them available.
How do you plan to fill them? “I don’t know. More marketing.”
Okay, what kind of marketing? “I don’t know. Posting?”
Okay, what kind of posts? “I’m not sure.” Right? ‘Cause you’re missing the strategy.
You have some good ideas. Those things fall into the dream category. Those are just dreams. Those are not strategic. Those are just open, empty ideas.
What we do next is we create the actual strategy, not the what-to-do, the how-to-do-it and the how-to-do-it is the game changer. Because once we finished the strategy, then we can spend our entire year in the final section of the Best Year Yet planner, which is called execute.
The execute section walks participants through an annual plan, a quarterly plan, and a monthly plan, and it keeps us on track so we achieve everything we set out to accomplish in our dream that was filtered into the North Star, that we create a strategy around, that is then executed on all year long.
And all you have to do every single week through the rest of 2021 when you have a Best Year Yet planner in your hand is flip to the execute section, look at the week you’re on, and do all the predetermined tasks and you will achieve your goals and more.
It is that simple because you have a system and a framework to hold you accountable, keep you consistent, and actually give you progress. So today in the Best Year Yet workshop, we are working through all of that in just one day.
I know it sounds like a whole heck of a lot. The only thing we’re really going to carry with us into next week is the execute section ‘cause it does take a bit longer to really plot out the full breakdown of all of our projects for the year ahead. But it’ll be done by the end of next week.
And the stylists participating now walk into 2021, they will never sit down at their phone or their computer and say, “Now what do I do today?” They have a roadmap. They have a framework. They also have a caption bank. They’re never going to say, “I don’t know how to caption this photo.” Yes, you do. Go back to your Best Year Yet planner, we have a whole bank full of captions for you, right? So they are given a roadmap to success in 2021 then to hold them accountable.
A lot of people said, “If I’m in Thrivers Society, do I have to do Best Year Yet?” Well, first of all, you don’t have to do anything. Nobody has to do anything, but Thrivers Society and Best Year Yet are not the same in any way. Very different programs.
Best Year Yet is an annual planning and business organization system. Thrivers Society is a marketing and clientele development system. Very different programs, serving very different purposes. They go hand-in-hand.
The vast majority of Thrivers are doing Best Year Yet, but you don’t have to be a Thrivers Society member to do Best Year Yet and there’s no crossover. There are very, very different programs.
So for my VIPs, I am so excited to be in the room today, working with this live. If you are a Best Year Yet self-study member, high five, biggest hug, I am still here cheering you on so big. Hit me up in the DMs and send me screenshots of the inside of your planner ‘cause I want to see everything that you’re working on.
I hope you’re logging into your Best Year Yet modules and working hard to make those dreams come true. And if you’re interested in joining the Best Year Yet experience, you can head to brittseva.com/BYY only for the next few days.
We are going to close sales of the Best Year Yet course and physical planners in the next few days. So make sure you head to www.brittseva.com/BYY. This is one of the last chances here to get your hands on the course and the physical planner shipped right to your doorstep, totally free and included in the course. It’s the only way to get your hands on both for the upcoming year ahead. So www.brittseva.com/BYY.
You guys, so much love, happy New Year, happy business building, and I’ll see you in 2021.
