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, a little bit in shock that we are here in this moment, recording episode number 200.
I will fully say that when I launched the Thriving Stylist Podcast, there were no heavy-hitting podcasts in the industry for stylists. There was a couple that had done maybe like six or eight episodes, like some really tiny, shorter-term shows, and there’s a couple that launched right around the same time as Thriving Stylist.
When I launched the show, it had to be released with a PDF guide that said how do you listen to podcasts. People were like, “I don’t want to pay for something.” I was like, “You guys, a podcast is free audio training,” but nobody had any idea. There was nothing like this in the industry. This was revolutionary.
When I created the format for the show I purposefully and intentionally wanted to design a show that was different. And if you’ve been listening to the show for a while—or you just found us welcome—what you’ll notice is the way I show up and how I do things in the way that the show is formatted is different than any other podcast in the industry and different than most other podcasts on the air, to be candid.
I think that’s why the show has done as well as it has, and our industry is teeny-weeny. When you look at how our show compares to literally all the podcasts, like there’s over 600 million podcasts, we are in the top 0.5%.
The top half of a percent of shows and we are a teeny weeny market. When you look at the shows who literally appeal to anybody and everybody, we’re a small industry, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for that.
I started the show on a whim, as mostly a passion project, so I had a place in space to talk about what was on my mind and what was on my heart and the trends that I saw coming. I wanted it to be a place in space that people could go to (stylists and salon owners specifically could go to) to not just get inspired, but actually get strategic advice.
I think it’s why the show has done so well. It’s certainly why the show brings me so much joy. When I sat down to start to plan out episode 200…I’ll be honest, we started talking about this episode probably five or six months ago, because I was so anxious about it coming up. It felt really big for me. This is a place a lot of shows never get to.
For episode 100, I shared my biggest lessons and takeaways from the last hundred episodes or something like that, and that was fun. I could have done that again, but I’m in such a different place in space with my business. I think you’re in a different place in space with yours. And so I wanted to do something different and I wanted to talk about how to grow when your business feels maxed out or boring.
For those of you who are newer to the industry, you might not have experienced this yet. You might be like, “Honey, I’d love to have a business that gets to that place. Like I’m at the place where I just want my career to take off.” Awesome.
But what happens for many of us, especially for high achievers, very driven professionals is we do get to a place where what we’ve built and created almost feels a little too easy, like a little too comfortable in the success, and driven people find discomfort in that stability.
I want to talk about it because there’s actually three different options of what to do and how to grow when your business feels maxed out or boring. I personally got very distracted and almost went down the complete wrong path in the last 18 months, so I thought it would be really great to have this episode focus on certainly something that was a real breakthrough moment for me while recording the last hundred-ish episodes of the show. Something that really I went through as a business owner very recently and give some strategic advice to anybody else who might be at that crossroads of “I kind of aced the business I have, I’m driven and I don’t just want to stop her stay stagnant. What do I do next?” Because there’s three different paths to go down and I want to talk about all three.
We are going to stay focused today and we’re going to talk about the options of horizontal growth, vertical growth, and starting a new business.
When you look at business growth overall in our industry or beyond, generally speaking, it is advised to go horizontal or vertical in your growth. When you talk about economics and business development and marketing, those are really standardized terms to be used. It’s not a Britt-ism, it’s just a business thing, so let’s talk about both so you understand your options and I’ll give you some real-life examples to make it easy.
When we look at horizontal growth strategy, it means expanding products or services to new markets. There’s a couple of ways to do it. You can develop a new market, meaning expanding your target market, expanding your brand, or you can more deeply penetrate an existing market, meaning penetrate that market in a different way than you never have before so you reach new consumers who aren’t yet aware of you.
I want you to even just like close your eyes, listening to this, but please don’t close your eyes if you’re driving or you’re walking. If you’re sitting, listening, close your eyes for a moment and when you think about growth, I want you to think of beams of light.
If the beams of light were going horizontally, they’d be going out from you to the left and to the right sideways, almost like a giant hug, trying to scoop up more business. That’s what horizontal growth looks like.
Picture it that way. It’s like your arms are stretched out and you’re trying to capture more business either in your existing market, by expanding it wider or by developing a new market who may not even be aware that you exist yet.
Examples of that would be opening a second salon location, expanding your impact, or influence beyond your existing clientele. Even asking for more referrals, local network marketing, growing on social media, those are all examples of ways where you can absolutely horizontally grow.
It’s just reaching new eyeballs, reaching new butts for your chair, right? Reaching new stylists to come in and work for you or trying to become an influential or celebrity stylist where clients flying in to see you.
In our salon, we had a couple of celebrities come in, which was pretty fun. We were by a local concert venue and that was cool. We had a few people come in and that was really fun. But what I will say is on the regular, we definitely had clients who would drive for five, sometimes eight, hours to come in and see us, and that was pretty rad. That’s an example of horizontal growth. We were reaching clients well beyond our local community.
When you talk about somebody driving eight hours to come in, like somebody from SoCal. We were in Northern California. That was massive. They had plenty of other choices of where to go, so the fact that they chose us was a big deal. That’s an example of horizontal growth.
A real-life business example that you would be certainly aware of would be Drybar. Drybar is now franchised, right? There’s, I believe, just over a hundred locations worldwide.
When we look at something like Drybar, Alli Webb took this concept that was initially just going to be one location, she’s franchised it out, and now there’s a hundred, right? That is massive horizontal growth across lots of different markets. That’s a great example.
Pros of horizontal growth would be that it’s highly lucrative and it can be simplistic because once you have figured out something that works. All you need are more eyeballs. That’s literally it.
Like when you look at something like Drybar, I’m using that example because I think it’s so tangible for all of us, that is clearly a successful business model. It’s a cookie-cutter format. Allie could allow the facilitation of a thousand to open. She’s already got the format. She’s got the branding, she’s got the poster, she’s got the verbiage, she’s got the blowout, she’s got the product, she’s got the tools. She’s got the apron. She’s got everything. She’s got the training plan. She’s got the management team, the retail. I mean, she’s got it all. That is a great example of horizontal growth.
Cons: generally speaking, it can be a little bit expensive also, depending on how far you want to go with it, right? So that’s a multi-million, maybe even billion-dollar brand, I don’t know, but certainly multi-million. It wasn’t cheap or easy for that to be happening or for that to continue to be possible, but it can be done. No risk, no reward, and look at the reward on a brand like that, right.
The other con is you’ve got to learn new markets to vet your concept. I am certain that there’s tons of research and development that goes in when they’re looking at another location for something like a Drybar, right?
So when I say expensive, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. What it means is you have to realize that when choosing to expand into any market, what do I always say? The business costs cost one of two things or a combination of both time and money, always. ‘
When I say it’s expensive, growing horizontally will likely cost you time and money. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. That’s just part of how business works.
Okay, so that’s an example of horizontal growth. Then we have vertical growth. Like I was using my example of a beam of light, if you are, you’re looking to grow vertically, I want you to think of that light beam coming out from the top of your head, but then also down through the soles of your feet. So up, up to the heavens, down to the center of the earth. That’s vertical growth.
When we look at vertical growth, it means scaling products or services inside the existing market. We no longer have the beam of light going to the left and to the right, like a giant hug, trying to scoop up more people. We’ve got the people, we’ve got the attention. We’re actually cool with that. Now we’re trying to go deeper up or down deeper and expansion vertically versus going wider.
There’s certainly pros to doing it that way, but there’s some cons too.
When you look at vertical growth, that would be something like adding more services, but within your existing target market and existing community, whatever that would be. Existing clientele, I guess we’ll say. Complimentary services that your clientele would naturally enjoy based on what they already come to see you for or becoming more luxurious with the market you already have.
I don’t know why saying that gives me feelings. I just think that’s such an incredible opportunity.
Now, the pros much, much easier. It’s much easier to grow vertically and horizontally because you already have brand loyalty. Now, if you don’t have brand loyalty, you need Thrivers Society because once you have Thriving Stylist Method and then ultimately Scaling Stylist Method, you’ll naturally get the brand loyalty. You’ll get the people who are diehards for who you are and what you do.
Once you have that, growing vertically is almost too easy. It’s very simple. It also allows you to master a specialty versus juggling lots of skills and multiple businesses, which we’re going to get into in a moment.
But when you grow vertically, you’re essentially just continuing to refine your craft. You’re not trying to learn 16 new crafts. You already found something that it turns out you’re pretty darn good at so you’re continuing to get better at the business that has proven to be successful for you, right?
I mean, if we talk about how to grow your business when it feels boring or like it’s stalled out, it should feel boring or stalled out because you’ve already hit all your goals. If you’re like “I’m bored and my business has stalled out, but I’m also not making enough money to pay the bills,” okay. Then the problem is more like focus or strategy. It’s not that you’re actually bored.
At true boredom or true “I feel like I need to be re-stimulated again in order to be professionally developed” or “I’ve truly maxed out my clientele and I can’t take any more people,” okay, that’s who I’m talking to right now. That’s when we can look at that vertical or that horizontal growth.
If you’re still in the place where you’re like, “I just need more clients so I can pay my bills,” you’re definitely growing horizontally, like there’s no doubt about it. You need to capture more of your market. You don’t need luxury services. You need more eyeballs on your brand and business, right? Horizontal is for you.
I’m talking about the person who’s already really grown horizontally, doesn’t want to continue to grow horizontally, and wants to continue to consider other options. That’s somebody who could consider some vertical growth.
Let’s talk about the cons of vertical growth. When we’re choosing to grow vertically, we end up with capacity problems and scalability problems. Meaning if you’re saying, “Listen, I love the market I’ve got. I want to dive deeper with them,” you can continue adding things on until a point, but then you’re only one person. You reach this scalability or this capacity issue where there might be more demand for what you offer, then you can fill.
The question becomes, “Do I raise my prices? Do I start training people to do what I do without expanding into new locations or expanding, but more like training in-house? Like continuing my methodology, continuing to be high touch with who I serve and what I do, but looking at deeper ways to grow within this vertical,” right?
Somebody who I think has done this really well is somebody like Tracy Cunningham. Tracy Cunningham is like an industry legend. I was just watching her on—I’m a huge fan of really cheesy reality TV and she was just on an episode of Million Dollar Listing LA. Anybody a fan out there? And she was looking at, no joke, it was a house I think that was valued at like $8 million. Like good for you, girl. You get it.
And when you look at Tracy and what she’s done, she’s essentially chosen to go deeply vertical. And oh my gosh, has it served her well.
When you look at Tracy, she still does clients’ hair. She’s not like, “Oh God, get an exit strategy. I got to get out from behind the chair.” No, no. She realized a long time ago, “I’m really good at hair. People like working with me.” She decided to go deep vertically and go up as well and she works with a really high-end celebrity-based clientele and she was able to grow that vertical really well. Now she’s also a salon owner, but she doesn’t have 17 salon locations, right? That’s just part of her vertical is having that physical location.
She also is releasing a new book called True Color, and to me, that’s within the same vertical because when you look at Tracy’s business, she’s captured this specific market and she’s stoked on it.
When you look at Tracy, she’s got enough business coming in for actually doing the hair. She’s got that cornered. So when she looks at the attention that she has, she knows that beauty professionals are like, so how’d you do it? And what Tracy does not want to do—I’m making this assumption based on her actions, right?—is grow horizontally.
Because if she wanted to grow horizontally, she’d make this big, huge educator brand and she’d be flying around the world and teaching a bunch of classes. Doesn’t look like she wants to do that. She likes staying where she’s at. She’s like, “I’m good. I’m happy with what I got. I don’t need to own the whole world. I’ve got this super sexy vertical. Why don’t I just stay here?”
Instead of spending, I don’t know how many, nights a year away from home traveling hair shows, classes, workshop facilitation, she does a little bit of education. She’s now a published author. She focuses on the salon. She owns being a leader there, her celebrity clientele to the tune of considering $8 million houses. Like that’s pretty bad-ass. So she, and she’s not the only example, but she’s a really good example of somebody who didn’t say, “I need to do all the things in touch all the people and be anywhere and everywhere,” which would be an example of horizontal growth.
She said, “I found my sweet shot spot. I’m going to go down deep as far as I can And up to the high heavens with it.” And she’s very well, well aware of the attention she commands, to the point where she got a pretty killer book deal. She has a great clientele. She’s not saying, “How do I get out of this skillset that built this empire for me?” She said, “How do I maximize this by becoming a great leader in my local location, writing a book about what I’ve learned, what I do and what I’m already an expert of, and live a pretty good life, right?”
That’s an example of vertical growth. Then we have start a new business. So start a new business is like the curse of the entrepreneur, because the irony about being an entrepreneur is that we get bored.
We like the game. Most successful entrepreneurs live for the game, like it’s so fun and exciting to be in the throes and figure out the marketing and have the wins and have a victory.
And we did it. We did it. I didn’t know if I could do it, but I did it and that’s can be a rush. The problem for entrepreneurs is that often when we achieve everything we sought out to, meaning like life feels pretty good, we feel pretty wealthy, our schedule’s pretty good, the money’s pretty good, we’re pretty healthy, our relationships are pretty good, it starts to feel stable.
And for really driven people, unfortunately, the cure for stability is chaos. I don’t know why we do it. I personally happen to be wired this way and I run with a lot of people who are wired this way. ‘Cause I talked to you in the DMs. They know it to be true.
It’s like, “Wow, everything’s going well. I created a business model that’s highly profitable, makes me really happy. I’m pretty darn good at it. It builds a good life for me. I’m starting to gain some stability in my schedule. So what should I do? Let’s add some chaos.”
I don’t know why we do it, but we do, and part of it is because we love the game. The problem is it is incredibly irresponsible and also the reason why a lot of entrepreneurs hit the high ceilings do really well and then come crashing down.
How many documentaries have you seen or stories have you heard about somebody who had it all and then lost it? That rush can do that to you. It’s a really dangerous addiction. So I want to talk about why we choose to do that.
Often when we’re at the crossroads of, “You know, what I think I’m going to do..” We call them passions. I’ve got this new passion or somebody complimented me on this new thing. Or I saw this, I read this book about something and I think I could do that too. Like we get an idea or we see something or somebody gives us a compliment or we have a bad day and we decide, “You know what? This is the catalyst for me to start. I need to start something new.”
The new beginnings of anything are so exciting. Think about the new beginnings of a relationship and not like the dating game, which is so exhausting, but like a good relationship where you click with the person and it was love at first sight and there’s butterflies. That rush is so exciting, but it doesn’t last. Inevitably, instead, you gain trust and confidence and all of these wonderful traits that you get in a long-term relationship, but the butterfly excitement shifts and changes.
As entrepreneurs, we live for the butterflies, we live for the race and the chase and the hype of like, oh my gosh, how exciting is that? That can be something really enticing.
What happens is often when our businesses reach this place of stability. Some might call it stagnation. Our business feels boring, or we have some bad days, and we say, “I don’t like how things are going,” or “I’m really bored and I need a new challenge,” or “Somebody told me I’m really good at blah-blah-blah, so maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Whatever plants the seed, we decide, “Well, I’ve done this one thing successfully. It’s time for a new challenge. I’m going to do something totally different.” I myself have gotten caught up in that, and when I look at the triggers of why, there’s a couple of different reasons why I personally considered that and I’ve considered it a couple times. Really recently in the last few months, I actually considered it, and when I—now this is why this is episode 200.
Over the last few weeks, as I took a step back over my business in recent years, and I asked myself, “Man, why did you think about truly starting a new business?” Like taking a hard left? And the reality is it wasn’t necessarily—I’m not bored in this business. It had nothing to do with boredom for me. I certainly haven’t achieved all my goals. It was that I had hit a wall. I had hit this roadblock of like, things are good, things are stable, but there’s these cracks appearing or it’s not as fun and as exciting as it used to be, like new levels, new devils was part of it for me.
And I thought, “Man, I like it better when it’s simpler. When the team is happy all the time when we don’t have all of these issues.” My solution to that was maybe I should start something new because in the early stages of my business, I didn’t have these problems. Even as I was growing this business, I didn’t have these problems.
Some of you might feel that way about the clientele you have or the salon you have. Man, this used to be a whole lot more fun when I was riding the wave to the top. And then once I got to the top, there’s this new challenge that starts to brew.
When you look at entrepreneurs, and I’ve found this in the last three years as I’ve started to take more classes on entrepreneurship, there’s these different plateaus that you reach as you build your business, and as we hit these plateaus, you start to get a little stir crazy.
I hit one. I’ve identified it since then, and what I realized is that it wasn’t that this successful business that I’ve built was wrong or that I fell out of love with it or that I was even bored. It was that the structure wasn’t working for me anymore. And wouldn’t you know, once I took a step back and change the structure, I’ve never been more in love. I’ve never, ever been happier in my business professionally at all, and it’s because instead of blaming the business as a whole or blaming the career I had chosen, I started getting analytical about who doesn’t work for me. What doesn’t work for me? What are the things that I’m doing that don’t make me happy anymore? Who were the people I have to interact with that don’t make me happy anymore?
I encourage you if you’re somebody who is considering starting a new business to, instead of starting a new business, ask yourself, is there a potential for me to go vertical, like really deeply with the business I’ve already built that has proven itself to be successful. Like I’m already amazing at it. People are complimenting me on it. Maybe that means I should do even more work in this already successful business, not like, wow, this is going great. I should start something else.
I was talking to a business coach recently, who was basically saying that’s almost a recipe for disaster. He was actually looking for an investor. This person I was talking to owns two businesses and the investor told him straight up, “I would actually consider investing with you if you’d get rid of your second business.” This person was like, “Well, I love both businesses,” and the investor was like, “I know, but I don’t know any CEO who stood the test of time who owns two businesses.”
Whoa. That’s some powerful stuff.
That really hit home for me of, are we making decisions out of boredom? Are we just feeling like I needed a new challenge, so we create chaos instead of working the vertical, like somebody brilliant like Tracy Cunningham has done, or are we missing the opportunity to go on the horizontal, like Allie Webb did and use the format that has already proven itself and just expanding upon it, right?
Are there opportunities within the skillset we’ve mastered? The thing that feels easy, this stuff that’s already making us money. The schedule that’s already serving us. Is there opportunity left there to become more lucrative?
And when I say more lucrative, I mean more savvy in our investments of time, money, relationships, and health. Is there a way to just be smarter with what we’ve already got versus saying, “I’m bored. Let’s make a new business.” “I’m bored, let’s scrap it and go back to the drawing board.” “I’m bored. I need to quit my salon and go somewhere else.”
Really take a step back and look at the moving pieces of whatever it is you have cooking and ask yourself, is there room on the horizontal? Is there room on the vertical or is it really time to close this chapter and start something new? And I want you to really ask yourself that.
I think that there’s a lot of salon owners listening to this—I’m going to call it like it is—who’ve maybe been salon owners for a decade and are like, “Wow, I gotta be honest. If I had heard this Britt’s advice, if I had heard Britt say this 10 years ago, I never would have become an owner,” which essentially would be going horizontal, right?
If you are a stylist and you decide, “You know what I’m going to do, I’m going to become an owner and maximize there, and that’s where my profit is going to come from, and I’m looking to step away from the chair.” That’s essentially going on the horizontal, which is not what Tracy Cunningham did, right? She worked the vertical, she still does hair. Totally different.
=A lot of salon owners decided to work the horizontal and decided to start thinking about things like an exit strategy, which believe me, I respect and understand that. Very smart for some of you. It was incredibly smart. I’m not saying that’s a bad option. Some of you became leaders and should have well done. Bravo.
What I’m talking about is the people who became salon owners, not leaders, but thought that owning a salon was the horizontal that they wanted. Now that they’re in it, they’ve essentially created two jobs, both of which are fairly exhausting, and they’re like, “Wow. I thought this was my expansion plan. I thought this was going to help me with my boredom. I thought this was the next chapter, and now I’ve created chaos and I’m slipping away from the beautiful lifestyle I had built for myself.”
I almost got myself caught up in that and so I want to just invite you to really ask yourself at this place in stage of my life in business. Is it time for me to grow in the horizontal, grow in the vertical, or start a new business or start a new industry? What is it that’s going to make me happiest? What is going to serve me in my highest and what is going to make me feel the most wealthy?
I want to thank you at this episode.Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day, your week, your morning, whenever you tune in, thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey and your business through the industry. I know there’s no shortage of business coaches to work with and it never ceases to amaze me when somebody chooses me and my voice and my message and my methods.
So as I always like to say so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
