Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and today we’re gonna talk about $100K!
Oh yes. What is it about that number? A hundred thousand. It just feels crisp. There’s just something about it. I remember when I joined the industry and that was goals for me. I wanted to be a six-figure earner. I really wanted to outearn my partner, anybody else? I really like the idea of being the breadwinner, for me, and I know not everybody’s wired that way, but I liked it. I liked the idea that I can do this on my own.
For those of you who don’t know my story, I was told at 18 years old, that it would probably be best for me if I found a great man who was able to pay all my bills and to take care of me for the rest of my life. That was the advice that one of my parents gave me. It was a little painful and I went the complete polar opposite direction.
But from the time I was really young, I thought I never actually want to be in that position where I’m relying on somebody else to keep me safe, to keep me housed, to be taken care of. I wanted to be able to do it myself, and in my mind, it was like, “if I could make a hundred thousand…”
There’s something that gives you a little peace of mind around that number, so let’s talk about it. We’re going to talk about $100K gross. We’re going to talk about $100K net. We’re gonna bring in some feedback from our listeners. We’re going to talk about all of it.
Let me first give you some data on the big, shiny, sexy, $100K. So according to Statista, which is a website I go to for statistics quite a bit, the largest percentage of Americans earns $50,000 to $75,000 a year. This website was reporting take-home pay anywhere from no money at all up to $200,000 a year.
When we say take-home pay, that’s net, so what actually hits your bank account to live your lifestyle right after Uncle Sam takes his cut, and if you’re an independent stylist, you paid all of your bills and all those kind of things. The net is what you get to live your life with and the gross is service dollars plus total retail dollars (what your guests pay you).
That’s the difference. So most people earn between 50 and 75,000. Now there was a good chunk of people who earn less than 50,000. Tons of them. But then when we look at those who earn over a hundred thousand, that is 30% of Americans today earn six figures, at least, and that’s gonna be net. That’s what they’re going to take home to their families.
Now just about 10% of Americans earn over $200,000 a year. That’s a much smaller percentage. So 90% don’t earn $200,000. That is reserved for that very, very top 10%.
When we look at our industry, I’m going to guess that the split is about the same. I did do a poll on Instagram saying, listen, for those of you who are willing to share, have you reached $100,000 gross yet? Have you reached $100,000 net yet? And honestly, the numbers shook out to be pretty much the same.
So it’s safe to assume that 30% of stylists today or salon owners are taking home over a hundred thousand with a third of those high producers taking home over 200,000, which would be 10% of the industry and the remaining 70% make less than a $100K.
There’s no doubt—and I don’t think anybody’s trying to deny that—that most of our industry makes less than six figures. So if you’re not making six figures yet, no worries. You’re in the majority of people.
Now for me, my whole goal, the reason I do anything that I do is I want to change that disparity. I want it to be possible. We always talk about one-percenters or “Oh, I want to be that 10% who makes 200,000.”
Why can’t it be 40% who makes 200,000? There’s plenty money to be had plenty, so much. Like you hear statistics about these billionaires, where it’s like if they had enough money to give everybody in the world a thousand dollars, like all of these really bold stats.
It’s not that there’s not enough to go around. It’s that there’s a systematic break and if we were able to as an industry level up the way through, oh my gosh, your earning potential, every single person in the industry’s earning potential would rise.
It frustrates me when stylists are like, “We work as hard as a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, we should make that kind of money.” I agree. So let’s do it. That’s how these things work. As an industry, we have to come together and demand more. If we’re doing weird, goofy, dodgy stuff, where we’re still like not paying our taxes and not charging our worth and we’re not sure about our pricing and we don’t know about our profit margins and we’re not really tracking the money, how are we ever gonna get there? We’re not.
Anyway, I think it’s possible for a bigger chunk of our industry especially to be making at least six figures, if not more, but it’s gonna take concerted effort. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
So I asked on the ‘Gram, I said, “Listen, how many of those of you who earn a hundred thousand dollars gross or net”—I gave the option, I said, “Listen, tell me, do you make a hundred thousand gross net? How long did it take you to get there? And what actions did you take?”
Let me share with you some of the quotes.
“Took me 20 years to earn $100K gross.” So gross is top line, not take-home, but total service dollars plus retail, right?
“20 years and this is my first effortless year making a $100K gross.” Effortlessly. So this person is finally at a really good place in their business where she feels like the money’s really coming in and it doesn’t feel painful.
Here’s another one: “Took me 26 years to generate a $100K and it wasn’t until I started working four days a week with six weeks of annual vacation that I crossed six figures.” Did you catch that? It wasn’t until this stylist and salon owner who I respect deeply started working less, taking more time off that the income soared.
I know some of you are already doing like the quirky head tilt with the squinty eyes and you’re like, “Wait, what? That doesn’t make any sense.” This was the follow-up notation: “My problem was I was doing it all wrong for over 20 years so I wasted lots of time.”
So it’s not like the only thing this person did was cut a day off their schedule and take a bunch of vacation and the money came in. It was systematic, but it just goes to show that 26 years later, this person is actually living a really beautiful, balanced life and the money is there, right?
Then we shift gears a little bit. “Graduated in 2012, I hit a $100K gross in 2018, four years later, working seven days a week.” Now the stylist who messaged me is somebody that I clicked with instantly. When I met this person, I respect this person so much. If this person listens, I’m here to tell you that you, my friend, are mega-talented and I certainly hope you have scaled that schedule way the heck back since then, because you could be smashing that over 200,000 working part-time/ I just have no doubt. That’s my little bitty advice for you.
Here’s another one. “It took me four years working three and a half days a week and I crossed $100K.”
Here’s another one. “This is my first year hitting $100K gross. I’ve been a stylist for three years and a Thriver for all three of those years. I work four days a week.” This is somebody new to the industry. They would’ve joined in probably 2018, been a Thriver for three years, a stylist for three years, and they’re making $100K working four days a week.
Then we have those few who are netting over $100K. All of those people were grossing $100K. It’s not what they’re taking home, but they are producing it in the building.
Then we have those who are netting $100K.
“It took me 12 years working five days a week to net my first $100K,” so 12 years. But now this person says, “now I’m four days a week netting $140K.” So again, somebody else who’s scaled their schedule back and is dialing the income up.
Now here’s another one. This is an incredible stylist I admire deeply. “It took me three years to hit a $100K gross and five years to make a $100K net.”
So as I’m sharing those stats again, you might be doing like the quirky head tilt with the eyes up, like, “Wait, what? That was a lot of data and it was all over the board.” That’s right. That was my whole point and I’ve got probably 200 responses on this. This very well sums it up.
It’s some people it took a couple of years, like 2, 3, 4, 5 years. I just shared with you a handful of examples, and then we had a lot of people where it took 25 years or more.
The bottom line is it is going to be what you make of it. Then the question became what was it that was the turning point, whether it was three years, two years, 25 years, what was it that made the difference that allowed you to hit that $100K mark? These were the responses there.
“I improved my guest experience.” I got a lot of that. A lot of “I improved my guest experience.” “I improved my guest experience, niched down my target client, raised my prices and started offering less services.” I can’t even tell you how many people said I started doing less services.
“I finally found my specialty. I narrowed down my service menu and then the money came.” I can’t even tell you how many of those I got.
Then I had “Implementing Thrivers, started offering a specialty service, and marketing directly to my target market clients.”
Now this was one I actually have to offer a verbiage correction to. I have one stylist who said “hourly pricing, including gratuity.” Hourly pricing is one of the ways that we talk about pricing in Thriving Stylist Method. I offer a ton of different pricing models, hourly is one of them.
And when I talk about pricing, I talk about looking at all the different models and analyzing your business to know which is best for you. There’s several really great models out there right now. There’s a la cart, we got hourly, we got session-based, we got package pricing. There’s tons of great models, they all work. It varies depending on your clientele and what you’re looking to do with it.
This person changed to hourly, which is to me, is just saying, “I got my pricing structured,” because you can do it a lot of different ways. As long as you have the structure there, the money will come.
But when this person said including gratuity, so then you realize that’s just a part of your base pricing. It’s no longer gratuity.
When you look at what gratuity is, it’s additional revenue given to any service provider without being told to do so. So what you did is you just implemented a beautiful price increase, which I’m all about it. Like I coached to price increases all the time, but I just, I hope you’re not saying like no gratuity. And then if you say like, “No, no, no, I don’t say that,” well, then you didn’t include gratuity. You just gave yourself a price increase, which is rad. I’m totally here for it. I love a good price increase, especially when it’s earned, but we never want to eliminate the opportunity for somebody to give a little bit more if they’re feeling like it’s worth it.
So just a thought on that to the person who wrote in on that one, if you’re including gratuity, essentially you’ve just given yourself a price increase, which is fine, but it’s not the same as gratuity.
Then we have “Using the Best Year Yet planner”—which is my planner system—“shifted my mindset resulting in my first $100K year.”
The reason I felt it was so important to share that feedback is that mindset is a huge part of the difference between a $100,000 earner and a $20,000 earner, and certainly a difference between a $100,000 earner and a $200,000 earner.
You meet a stylist that is netting over $200,000, let me tell you their mindset, their energy, the way they speak their confidence is unmatched. If I’ve met several stylists who are earning at that level. It is very different. It’s tangibly different. You can feel the difference and mindset is a huge, huge piece of it. If your mind isn’t right, your body can’t possibly get there.
I agree the mindset and it’s humbling that the Best Year Yet planner, which is now called Wealthiest Year Yet, helped you to get there. It’s a huge mindset tool. But when we think about what it takes to become that level of success, there’s just no doubt that mindset’s gonna be a key component.
Here’s another one. “I was behind the chair less and really started working on my business rather than just doing hair and doing as many clients as possible.” That was a key.
When we heard stories from all these stylists who were like, “Oh, I scaled my schedule back,” it doesn’t mean they spent more time playing racketball. It means that they are taking clients less often and are using that time more wisely to work on their business. If you don’t know how you would spend that time, you can check out one of my programs. There’s just tons of education out there these days. But if you’re spending all of your working time taking clients, I guarantee you’re losing money. I guarantee you’re leaving money on the table.
So when this person says, “I started working behind the chair less and getting strategic about my business,” I have no doubts that that helped them to earn more money.
Here’s another one. “Join Thrivers and branded myself, put automated systems into place,” which is something we coach to in Thriving Stylist and Scaling Stylist Method.
This was one I really loved: “Firing the clients who don’t align with the business philosophy, which made more room for the ones that do.” Double snap for that. I loved it.
“I chose to scale instead of just grow by being smarter about my time, my resources, and my efforts,” which is what scalability is all about.
When we hear all of that, it comes down to getting organized, doing less better, and we heard that over and over and over. I refined my service menu. I became a specialist and this, that, or the other thing, I started working less days a week.
When we are the all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s really difficult to charge top dollar there. I talk about this in-depth in my pricing program, but there are a couple high-end buffets out there. The one that always comes to mind for me is Fogo de Chão in my area. I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s an upscale Brazilian steakhouse and it is a buffet style, but it is extremely expensive. It is, I don’t know the exact price these days, I think it’s over $150 a plate. That is what you pay. There’s not like, “Oh, I’m just here for the side salad today.” That’s the price of admission to walk in and you can eat as much as you want, but that’s what it’s going to cost you to get in the door.
That’s the minority when it comes to buffets. Most buffets like Italian buffets where it’s like pizza and salad or Fresh Choice. When I was a kid, me and my family always used to go to Fresh Choice, which was a buffet out here in California. That’s a meal that’s like dollars or less.
For the most part, when we look at something where it’s like, “I do everything,” it’s going to be a lower cost. That’s why I always say be special, have a specialty. You have the ability to charge so much more when you specialize.
We always think, “Well, if I work more, I do more. I offer more. I’m trained in more, then I’ll make more money.” It is very rare that you find a high producer who literally does everything. They’ve all specialized.
People are willing to pay more for a specialist than a generalist, so that’s going to be a key once you start crossing over that threshold. We’re going to talk about when you can start scaling in just a second, but the bottom line with all of this is you can’t just keep hammering away doing the same thing, hoping if you work hard enough, a miracle will happen because statistically, that’s actually impossible.
And actually, it infuriates me a little bit because when I was a kid, I was born in the eighties and those are of who are my generation or born before were likely raised the same way, and it was like blood, sweat, and tears. If you work hard enough, the reward will come. Then you become an adult and you sweat a little bit and you work really hard and the reward isn’t there and you learn pretty quickly, “Oh, so I guess it’s not just all hard work if you work hard enough.”
No, there’s not necessarily a prize at the end of the rainbow. It’s just not how it works. There’s more to it than that and I really want wherever you are in your business, that is the mindset gift I’d love to give you today is like, no, just working hard enough is not it. You can work seven days a week for 20 years and still never get to $100K because that’s not what it’s about.
A lot of people in the survey—and I didn’t wanna give all, all the feedback because I don’t want this to be a big Thriver sales pitch. But of course, those who follow me, the majority are those who have taken my programs and a lot of people in the survey said Thrivers was the tipping point for me.
It’s not because I think that I’m just the smartest person ever or I’ve unlocked some secret door. It’s because when you join something like Thrivers, it gives you a success path. I lay out for you the 14 steps it’s gonna take to get there. You do them in order. You’ll get there, right? Versus what a lot of us do is we start chasing cool ideas. “I like that Instagram post. I’m gonna do one like that.” “Oh, TikTok. Yep. I better hop on that platform.” “Ooh, this person’s charging $15 more, better do it.” “Ah, I just took a class last weekend. Now I need a price increase.”
That’s not going to get you there. It might, but it’ll be a slow path and you’ll work really, really hard. Or at some point, you have to get very strategic about your business, like all of our friends who just said it really clicked for me when I spent less time working behind the chair and instead shifted my time to being strategic about my business. That was the tipping point.
Let’s look at some real numbers. This is my favorite part. Can we get a little number geeky for a second? So entrepreneur.com but a ton of other resources too, like if you Google this statistic, it’s basically the same from whatever resource you find. They’ll tell you that to sustain your business, just to sustain, your business must grow by two to 4% annually. To sustain.
And by sustaining, it means your lifestyle will never change. You can’t rent a nicer apartment. You can’t buy a nicer house. You can’t get better groceries. You can’t throw better birthday parties, like nothing changes, but also your lifestyle doesn’t decrease. To sustain your lifestyle, your income must grow by two to 4% a year at a minimum.
That’s widely publicized anywhere you look because the economy’s always growing. Even when we’re down years, when you look at the correction that always happens after a tough market, there’s always a correction and we always come out ahead. So you need to be growing at that rate in order just to sustain, just to survive.
Now, when we look at healthy businesses, healthy businesses grow by 15 to 45% a year, and that’s the kind of growth that those who are making $100,000K in two to five years have done. So when we say what somebody did in three years, that’s impossible. No, it’s not impossible. It’s actually very statistically possible.
I’m going to rattle off some numbers for you here in a second using data in a minute. It is possible. It’s just a question of what did that person do that over 70% of the industry is not doing. That’s the gap and that’s what we’re here for.
Now, even when I say 15 to 45%, I see you. I see you over there. I see you raising your hand and being like, “Oh, but my business grew a hundred percent last year.” I know. My business grew those really, really rapid rates the first few years as well. So when you were in the startup phase, which is usually the few years of business, you can grow 100%, 200%. That’s common in really well-designed startups, but then it tapers off. It’s generally speaking not sustainable.
Even when we look at a multi-billion dollar company like Apple, they’re not growing their income by double. It gets to a point where it is not doable. So yes, you might be growing at that rate right now. It will taper off, so I’m giving you the healthy statistics that to watch for over time.
You might be asking yourself, “Okay, cool, so I’m buying into this. What would it be for me to get to that place?” You can do the very simple basic math, which would be something like, “Okay, I want to make a $100K,” and I like to say that you should be working 50 weeks a year because you should be taking two weeks vacation a year. I’m going to base this on you taking two weeks vacation a year. So the basic, basic math would be like, “Okay, I want to make $100K and I’m working 50 weeks a year, so I need to make $2,000 a week.” Then you could look at how many hours a week are you working and then determine how much you would need to make a day.
If you took the $2,000 a week divided by, let’s say four days a week, you work $500 a day, that’s fine. That’s very simple, basic, basic math, but we can get a lot more precise than that, and I think when we bring in the precision, we are more likely to get a faster result because it feels more tangible.
Like if I came on this podcast and I was like, “Hey, you, you there in the back, you could go from making $5,000 a year to $500,000 a year. Here’s your target,” it’s such a massive gap that you’re like, “Okay, but it just seems so intangible.” Versus if we break it down smarter into bite-size chunks, it feels doable.
A tool I introduced to the Thriving Stylist Method, Scaling Stylist Method, and Thriving Leadership last year is called the freedom number calculator (for all my Thrivers, this is available to you in your portal) and what it does is it breaks down for you exactly what would need to happen monthly and daily in order to achieve your one-year, three-year, and five-year financial objectives.
I’m going to use this calculator in real time as I rattle off some numbers. Let’s say that you’re currently making 25 grand a year and you’re working four days a week, 25 grand a year. So where a lot of us started in the industry, right? And let’s say you want to grow at a rate of 30% annually. That’s some aggressive growth, but some of you listening to this podcast are already growing at 30% annually or more so 30% annually is very doable.
If you were going to grow at percent a year in one year, you could go from 25 grand a year to 32,500. Okay, I mean another $7,000 a year is some money, another 500 bucks a month, that’s life changing, right? So that works.
In order to do that, you’d be making $2,700 a month or $167 a day, so those would be your production goals.
This is where it gets cool, so if you sustain that 30% growth in three years, you’d be making $54,925, and your daily goal would be $286 a day. In three years, you’d double your income. You’d go from 25 grand a year to 54 grand a year, not bad.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. If you continue to sustain that 30% growth in five years, you’d make $92,824 with a growth goal of $483 a day. You went from 25 grand to just about a hundred thousand dollars in five years with strategic growth goals.
That’s why I love this tool because it breaks down into small pieces.
If you’re like, “Okay, I love that, but I’m probably not gonna do the 30% growth. What would it be if it was 15%?” If that feels more doable to you, I can run the calculator of 15% and in five years you’ll make $50,000, so you’ll double your income. It’ll take you five years to double your existing income.
If you’re earning 25 grand a year right now and you want to grow at 15%—so that’s up to you. Would you rather make $50,000 five years from now or $92,000? Can you see how this calculator really empowers you to feel very in control of your business?
Now the problem is, and the reason why a lot of us are like, “this is so odd, because some of these people are making this money and I’m not,” remember I said that 70% of the industry is not making six figures. 70%.
The problem is that most of the industry is probably more like the statistic of their growing by like 5% a year, which is honestly across a lot of small businesses, it’s disparaging, but it’s also true.
At that 5% growth rate, which is fairly standard, in five years, you’d be earning 31 grand a year. Can you see how much slower that is? Five years, five grand more.
That’s why so many in this industry get burnt the F out. It’s why people choose to leave. It’s why there much back talk about it. It’s why salon owners get burnt out because it feels incremental. It feels like you are never getting anywhere because you are not. All you’re doing is barely scraping by and we have to change that narrative.
You want to hear another fun number? If you’re earning $100,000 right now, and you want to hit that $200K mark, 15% growth. If you’re a $100K earner right now, $100K, and you’re doing a 15% growth trajectory, you’d hit $200,000 in five years.
I break that fully down in the freedom calculator, do the math. It’s powerful and it’s possible, and suddenly that doesn’t seem so scary for a lot of people. Even if you’re making the $100K, you’re like, “Oh, but $200,000 feels like miles away.” Nope. It’s 15% away. Are you down? It’s just not so much. It’s very doable.
Big takeaways from this one: rather than shooting for the full $100K, break it down into annual incremental bite-size pieces that are going make that goal achievement easier. Shift how you spend your time if you want to shift how you make your money. Get structured and learn solid business skills ASAP. Like I said, my goal is that much more than 10% of the industry would be earning that high high-income level, that more than 30% would be earning over $100K a year.
There’s more than enough to go around. It’s about how many are willing to show up and do the work to earn it.
Y’all so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
