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: What is up you guys, and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I am your host Britt Seva, so excited to talk about a topic—my team and I, as we were sitting down, planning out this quarter’s podcast episodes, we were actually shocked to find out I had never done a podcast on this topic.
We’re talking about raising prices: do’s, don’ts, logistics.
And I will say, I dive deep into how and when and the strategy of price increases in Thrivers Society, and because Thrivers Society is so much more strategic than the podcast, it’s been one of those things where I was like, “Well, how do I talk about this at surface level?”
However, there are some very clear-cut rules I can share with you here on the show. We’re definitely going to have some mind-blowing, breakthrough moments here today and I’m so excited to walk into the beast that is pricing yourself adequately and effectively as a stylist.
Now we are going to stay focused on raising prices, how to do it effectively, when to know how to do it. However, pricing is such a complex topic.
Often people say, “Britt, should I do a price increase? How do I know if I’m ready to have a price increase? How do I do a price increase directly?” And if you’ve hit me up in the DMs, you’ve asked me that before, you know that I’ll say, “I can’t coach you to do a price increase just because you feel like it’s time or just because your books are maxed out, you can’t take any more guests.” It might not be time for a price increase. There’s a lot of other things that we need to look at first.
I want to talk about definitely increasing prices—we’re going to go there today—but I want to talk about prices in a more holistic sense, looking at methodology and how we researched before we’d raise our prices, change our prices, put our prices into place, how we talk about pricing, all of the things.
Now I know there’s going to be questions about this topic. It’s just so good and so juicy. So after you’ve listened to this episode, make sure you take a screenshot, share it on Instagram stories. If you have any questions, let me know there in the stories.
Also, if you’re not already in our Thriving Stylists Insiders Facebook group, get in there! Tens of thousands of stylists in there, I’m in there dropping knowledge bombs, going deeper on podcast topics, and answering your questions, so you don’t want to miss out.
Let’s get into the topic. Now I want you to take a journey with me. Let’s go back in time and I want you to think about how you got to where you are today with your pricing.
There’s something a business coach of mine said: “What got you here won’t get you there.” There was this journey you took to end up at the price point that you are at now. Everything that you have going on in your business is the result of efforts and decisions you’ve made in the past, right? Can we all agree on that? Absolutely.
And even as I say that, some of you were like, “Well, I didn’t determine my prices. The owner of my salon did,” but that’s still part of your journey. You chose to work at that salon and for who knows what reason, the salon owner chose this to be the pricing structure and what I want to get to is the-who-knows-what-reason part, because when we’re determining our prices, all of us do this.
We do really silly things, but at the time they feel really logical like, well, what else would I do when you can’t find a better way? You just go for it.
When people ask me how I’ve built this business, my first answer—comes to mind all the time—is I say, “Well, I’m really scrappy.” It’s the first thing I say.
And when I say scrappy, I mean I’m resourceful, I have a lot of drive, I have a lot of passion. I’m just going to figure it out even if it’s wrong. And if it’s messy, I’m just going to do it.
A lot of you are probably built that way too. You’re like, “Well, I decided to do hair. I needed to figure out my prices, so I figured it out.” I can respect that. But what I can also tell you is there is actually a calculated way to determine your perfect price without the whole “so I just figured it out” piece, like you don’t have to be scrappy.
I can acknowledge and appreciate that you are ‘cause I am too, but there is a better way.
Thinking back to how you determined your prices…let’s say you’re a booth renter or you independently determined your prices. Or even let’s say you’re a salon owner and you determine prices for your entire salon team, how did you do that?
Often when I ask that question, one of the first things that comes up is people say, “Well, I looked at what my competitors were doing.” Okay. Except for how did your competitors make up their prices? “I don’t know.” Okay, so then you’re basing your system off pricing that we don’t even know where it came from.
What if three of the competitors you’re looking at are all wildly overpriced, the stylists are struggling, can’t fill their chair, and that’s what you’ve based your prices on?
The funny thing is when we do that comparison game and we take a look around at what others are up to, you’re making a lot of assumptions about that business. You may think from the outside that they’re doing really well. Maybe they’re not turning a profit. Maybe they’re slammed with clients but they’re wildly underpriced, so nobody’s taking home a solid paycheck.
That’s why we can’t look at what others are up to and then take their business decisions and apply them to our own. Can you see how risky that is? You’re not playing with a full deck. When we do that, we don’t know all the cards in play. We don’t know all the moving pieces. We’re making a lot of assumptions. So we cannot base our pricing on what anybody else in the area is doing.
Another thing that we do that’s a mistake is we’ll move. Let’s say you were in a hot market. You were in New York City and you had been there for 10 years and you were a successful stylist. Then you move to Iowa, because you got your partner got a job transfer, who knows what happens. So you move thousands of miles away. Do you think the market is the same in New York City that it is an Iowa? Probably not. The pace of life is different. So you can’t—while I can respect that you were charging those prices in New York City, that’s based on that market.
When we move to a new market, we have to shift and we have to actually reevaluate our prices from the ground up. So while it would be amazing to be like, well, take those New York City prices and move them here to Iowa and do really well, we all know that that’s not going to work.
But then the question becomes so what do I shift them to? Then we do the thing where we look around what other stylists and salons are charging and we fit ourselves into the equation. We’re like, “Well, it looks like most people are charging $40 for a haircut. I’m kind of a big deal, so I’m gonna charge $50.” You can’t. You have to do this very strategically.
Let’s lay a new foundation and decide how we’re going to raise our prices and structure our pricing.
The very first thing we do as we balance our prices. Often the very first thing we have to do is undo all of the pricing mistakes that were done up until today.
As I was talking about pricing for the first few minutes of this episode, you probably realize you made some mistakes or made some emotional decisions or thought, “You know, I’m pretty busy. I better raise my prices,” but that’s an emotional-based price increase. When we do things like that, what happens is our prices become unbalanced. Before we actually do a price increase, announce a price increase, decide that this is what’s right for our business, you must balance.
Balancing your pricing is number one. We talk about how to do that in Thrivers Society.
Then if I was in your salon and you’re like, “Should I do a price increase?”, I would walk you through a balance. We would do that first. Then we need to get consistent with our monthly new guest requests.
If you are not seeing plenty of new guests a month, a pricing increase can be devastating for you. I watched this happen to a stylist in my salon. Very busy, doing really well, and so an emotional decision was made to give this person a raise and their business flat lined.
It was terrifying to watch because they had this existing base that was doing quite well, but because they didn’t have the new guest traffic to fill in for the natural attrition that just happens in every business year over year, it was devastating. There had to be a price reduction. I mean, it wasn’t pleasant. It was a really uncomfortable situation.
If we’re not seeing those consistent monthly new guest requests, a raise is very tricky. This is one of the reasons I don’t coach to ever closing your books. It’s fragile. I’ve seen it go wrong too many times.
I was coaching a stylist back in 2015 who just shot off like a rocket ship, decided to close her books, and I told her, I was like, “Please, please don’t do this. I promise you’ll regret it.” And 18 months later, she was—I mean, I could see on social—really begging to get clients in.
We don’t ever want to do that and making sure that there’s that consistent new guest flow is important when we’re deciding if we should raise or not.
Next, we have to look at our consistent new guests and existing guest retention. I coached how to do retention calculation quite a bit. I do like week-long trainings two or three times a year, almost always all coach to retention. So if you’re not in Thrivers Society, make sure that you come to any of our upcoming free training experiences. 85% of the time retention is going to be part of what we’re talking about and I’ll walk you through the calculation.
A lot of people talk about retention as just one number. It’s always going to be two. You have two versions of retention. You have your base clientele retention and your new guest retention, and if you don’t look at both, that’s a blind spot.
Because some of you are great at retaining your base clientele and just absolutely terrible at retaining new guests, and some of you are flip-flopped. You put on the really good show for your new guests and you love it and it charges you up and it lights your fire, so you show up with a different energy. Meanwhile, your base clientele is slowly dwindling because you’re only at 70% retention there and we’re not paying attention to it. So we continue working harder and we’re like, “Man, why is my income not increasing? I’m seeing plenty of new guests. I’m working really hard. My books are always full, but I’m not making more money.”
It’s what I call bleeding out. It’s like this blind spot that you don’t see this happening. It’s like half your business is running out the back door while you’re not paying any attention. That’s why we look at both of those retention numbers whenever we’re looking at pricing.
Then last but not least, predetermined and structured service timing. I always say, you’ll know your pricing is done right if I was to run a contest and I was going to say you won! For a week I’m going to come in and help you run your business, and I’m going to be up at the front desk. I’m going to check all of your guests out and I’m going to run your social media and we’re going to do coaching together. But I am going to run your desk.
If I could run your desk effectively without you having to come in and adjust each person’s price every single time, you have structured service timing and predetermined pricing. That’s solid.
If every time I was going to check out a guest, you’d be like, “Oh, Maggie, let me adjust, let me adjust the ticket. Let me adjust the ticket. Let me adjust the ticket,” you have a systematic issue. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We want to make sure that we have all of the pieces in place before we even look to adjust our pricing, right?
But think of it this way. Look, if you were going to sell a physical item, let’s say that you decided to be a handcrafted soap maker. Well, before you started selling those soaps, you would need to have structure. You wouldn’t just say, “Oh, this soap is a little bit smaller. I’m going to give it to you for two bucks” versus “Oh, the slab ended up being bigger. I’m going to give it to you for six,” right?
When I say it like that, it sounds so simplistic. Like, well, yeah, if you’re selling soap, every bar is going to be the same price.
But when we do goofy things like Maggie pays $40 less, Shereen needs a $10 add on because this, that, and the other thing happened, there is a problem with the way that we are running the business.
And listen, I’m not saying you don’t charge your full worth, and I’m certainly not saying that if somebody gets more services than another, or spends more time in your chair, that they shouldn’t have to pay for that time. Yeah. Heck yes, they should. But we need to be systemic about how those things are happening.
Let me ask you this. Do you ever do the thing where Charlene is checking out and she wants to prebook an appointment? And so she wants to get a root touch-up and a haircut. So you book it, but then you drag her haircut out for an additional 30 minutes because she has so much hair and you know you’re going to need the time.
That’s a faulty system. We need to get those things in check before we can even really look at pricing and what to do next.
Okay. Let’s get into it.
Whenever I’m looking at a stylist or a business and determining if we are ready for a price increase, we first go through all of those exercises, make sure all of our ducks are in a row, and then the first thing we look at is location and what the location can withhold and withstand and what is appropriate based on the location that we’re at, kind of like I was using that example of New York city versus Iowa or Idaho—I can’t remember now—this is what happens.
When we’re looking at different locations, the pricing is going to be different, right? I always try and use myself for example. I live in California, but I am in a smaller beach community, definitely a beach town, but I’m not living out in Malibu. Like I don’t have palm trees. It might not be what you think if you don’t live here. So it’s an agricultural community and I wouldn’t be able to charge Orange County prices here. It wouldn’t make any sense.
You have to look at the pockets and the demographics and what each community can withhold, right? Even somebody was asking me recently, she was like, “I’d really like to be a vivid specialist. love doing fun, poppy color. It’s just my absolute favorite thing. I would love to do that all day, every day. Is that possible?”
And I said,”Well, of course it’s possible, but you have to have the market to sustain it.” If that stylist lived in my town, it wouldn’t work out because there’s not enough people who want that desired result, right? So that’s why with our pricing, we always have to look at our demographic, the demand for the services that we’re offering, right? We have to take all of those things into account.
So location then demand on your time and how far out you’re already booked. Just because you’re booked out to the moon and back does not mean you’re ready for a price increase for the reasons that I talked about two, three, five, six minutes ago.
Often what we do is it’s emotionally-based. We’ll do these price increases where like, “Ah, I have too much business. I can’t handle it. Raise my prices $10.”
You can do it—some of you are going to laugh when I tell the story—you can do that, but it’s not going to change your reality at all. I’m seeing the heads nods through the microphone here, right? It doesn’t because that was not a systemic change. That was an emotionally-based decision.
Demand on your time is one of the factors. It is never the only factor, right? So we want to take into account how far out you’re booked, what the demand is to come in and see you. It’s definitely rational to say the more popular a stylist is, the more guests that they’re seeing on a weekly basis, the more they can charge. It only makes sense.
But for the reasons I talked about earlier, just raising your prices can sometimes be devastating and risky. So demand on your time is one of the factors, but it’s never the only one.
Then we get down to amenities and I’m using amenities kind of as a catchall. There’s all different kinds of amenities. A desirable location can be an amenity. A lot of times when I say amenities, people are like, “Oh yes, coffee, tea. We serve fresh baked cookies,” whatever. Those are all amenities too.
But when a guest is looking for a stylist or a salon, they come with their own preconceived idea of what amenities are. So for me, amenities would be that you’re close to my home, the salon is impeccably clean, no clutter. That’s desirable to me. For me, it’s an amenity if the salon is cultured in the way that like everybody gets along really, really well, there’s no drama, it almost feels like I’m coming into a salon family. For me, it’s an amenity if I’m going to be bumping into people I know in there.
We all have different amenities. Other things to look at would be if you sell an exclusive and or upscale retail line, that’s actually an amenity because if I walked into a salon—this is probably about a year ago—and it felt like walking into a Cosmoprof or SalonCentric. Like they had so many products where I was like, “Oh, I feel like I’m in the beauty supply store.” That’s actually going to bring the possible price point down. Versus have you ever walked into a salon where they only have one or two retail lines and it looks super clean and super cohesive.
When we look at pricing, perception is a huge piece of that. When I walk into a place or a space where it is perceived to be strategic and organized, you can raise prices for them.
Let me give you an example. Has anybody ever tried to shop at a store like Forever 21 or have you ever gone thrifting where when you walk into the store, you’re like, “All right, I got to mentally gear myself up for this. The prices are good, but I’m going to have to claw through all the racks to find anything I’m looking for.” You have to be patient, you have to go in really ready to do work, and then you’re clawing through the racks and you find four things.
Versus if you go into an upscale boutique, they maybe only have a hundred items total in the whole store and maybe only two of each size, and you could stand in the middle of that store, take a spin around, and in about 90 seconds, see with your own eyes everything they have in the store. Can you see how it’s a different perception of what’s going on?
When we look at things like retail, we look at how cluttered are your station tops, those are all things that I factor into what I call amenities because to especially today’s consumer—consumers in the last year or so have become even more particular about their guest experience. So when we take a look around, these are the things that they’re looking at as amenities.
I always say I joined the industry in 2007, I was in cosmetology school, and at the time, there was no social media. Stylists grew by word of mouth and doing good hair was enough. You could just do good hair and you got it.
Well, the salon culture has changed. And I always say, I’m here to revolutionize an industry. I’m not here to sell programs or teach stylists to make more money. Although I’ll do that along the way, for sure, I’m here to revolutionize an industry, change the perception of the beauty industry, which fires us up because we think bam!, we’re going to get more respect, more revenue benefits, like amazing things that people have never gotten before.
But with that comes a tremendous responsibility and we have to show up to the table. We have to show up and elevate our experience. We have to show up and elevate the way our business is presented. We have to show up with standardized pricing.
Imagine if you went to buy a new cell phone and they’re like, “Oh, you want the red one? It’s $200 more. Oh, but actually the other day you said I had a nice shirt on, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna knock $50 off that.” And it was a negotiation when you’re going to buy your cell phone.
That would be so goofy, but that’s what we do in the salon with our prices. Oh, Elsa’s has been coming in to see me for eight years, so she gets the special premier pricing. What? We can’t do, goofy things like that. If we want to elevate ourselves, we have to elevate holistically and a big piece of that is getting the reins on our prices.
I hope you’re having some clarity around pricing today. If you want to hear more about this topic or any other topic, make sure you take a screenshot of this episode, share it on Instagram stories, tag your girl Britt Seva in, and or join us in the Thriving Stylists Insiders Facebook group, where I will be diving deeper into this topic for insiders only!
You guys, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you in the next one.
