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 this is going to be a little bit of an unconventional episode, which often are my most favorite and the most fun.
So I am just coming off the heels of Thrivers Live. I want to record this very in the heat of the moment, as in touch with my feelings of the event as possible and I thought I’d come in and share a couple of things.
One, my biggest takeaways and I think the collective takeaways from the group after Thrivers Live. We had 600 people in person and I believe another 600 virtually taking part in this experience, and what was amazing is everybody had a unique experience. There’s no doubt about it. Everybody’s breakthroughs and mindset shifts were unique. However, there were these running themes and these like aha moments that we as a group—like if you’ve ever seen 1200 people have a light bulb go off at the same time, like it was incredible and I want to share some of those.
So if you weren’t there, you’ll get those key high pieces. I want to talk about what I see as the future of industry education, because I think we’re on the precipice of it. I want to share with you what that’s going to look like and I want to talk about what it took to create Thrivers Live.
I opened up in the DMs—I was getting a lot of, like hundreds, like so many DMs coming off of Thrivers Live from a lot of people, educators, distributors, individuals, Thrivers asking me a lot of logistical questions about the event, so I’m going to share with you as much as I can. I’m going to answer those direct questions as much as I can, so let’s dive in.
First of all, talking about what I think you should be looking for in an industry event where I think the future of industry education is heading.
I want you to think about your experience participating in education. I can tell you for me, I’ve gone to a lot of hair shows. I’ve gone to a lot of workshops. I’ve worked with a lot of mentors. I’ve been in a lot of masterminds. I’ve gone to a lot of conferences, like I’ve run the gamut. I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it all. I’ve been in a lot of rooms. I’ve probably spent well over a hundred thousand dollars on educating myself as a human being over the course of my lifetime and career. There’s just no doubt about it, and so I’ve seen a lot of stuff.
What I know to be true is when I think back to a lot of conferences, I remember being like, “that was so fun” or “I’m so glad I did that,” but then when I think about what I learned or how it changed my life, there’s not a one.
That for me was why I created Thrivers Live. I had this realization of we’re spending hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars educating ourself for what?
How often are you investing in education and you’re actually getting a return on that investment? For a lot of us, we educate ourselves because we’re looking to refill our inspiration tank. We’re hoping that if we learn, if we educate, then something amazing’s going to happen on the flip side. That’s the whole point of educating yourself. That’s the whole point of going to an event or an experience, but are you getting that payoff?
Because for me, often what I was getting was a rush, like an adrenaline rush of like, “I’m so excited. I just saw these amazing people. I just heard all these amazing speakers. I feel inspired,” but there weren’t a lot of tangibles and I didn’t feel like I was actually able to make an impactful change as a human on the flip side.
So when I started creating Thrivers Live in 2020, I actually didn’t want to get into the event space at all. But my community was saying, “Listen, we want a place to get together.” If you don’t know, now you know: we have had now to date over 13,000 people join Thrivers Society. Our community is massive and so people were like, “We want to get together in person.” One of the things we did at Thrivers Live 2022 is we celebrated our five-year members, our six-year members, our seven-year members at scale, and it’s like you’ve known these people for a long time. You’ve been building business alongside them. You’re all learning from the same methodology. Can we bring these people together? Well, the answer was yes, but what I didn’t want to do was to create another event where people spend a lot of money, fly across the country, show up there, learn a handful of things, go home and nothing changes. I’m not interested in that.
So I said, “If I do this, I want to create an event where business is first and being a stylist is second. Being a beauty professional is great and it’s the tie that binds, but it’s not the primary focus of this event.”
I think it’s really difficult to find that in this industry. When you go to hair shows, there’s a ton of demonstrations on what I call the Talent: the cutting, the coloring, the extensions, the formulation, the styling, the bridal, the whatever. That’s the Talent aspect of our business. That makes up 20% of your potential success. Literally 20%, yet it is 95% of the education in this industry, hands down.
Now it is critical, it is important, but business education done well is at a lack, and I wanted to create an event that was 99% just about the business. I wanted it to be impactful and I wanted it to be high end and I wanted it to be strategic, but also inspirational. And I also wanted it to be aspirational, which is really difficult to pull off.
And I said, “I want people to actually come and be transformed.” So if you were at Thrivers Live 2022, I said on VIP Day when I very first took the stage, I said, “I will have done my job if you are different leaving this experience on Wednesday than you were showing up on Monday. Then I will have done it right.” And you know what? We did. It wasn’t like you come in, you have fun. You meet cool people, you take great pictures and then you bounce. It wasn’t like that. Truly the 1200 souls who took a part of this are going to explode their life in business over the next six months and that’s what Thrivers Live is about and that’s what made it different.
What did it take to create that transformation? A lot of things.
First of all, it took about 18 months of planning. Now I will say we had planned to have Thrivers live in person 2021, so maybe 15 or 20% of the work had already been done heading into 2022. From August of 2021 until June of 2022, a massive amount of work and hours went into Thrivers Live. I mean, massive, massive, massive.
A lot of people asked me, “Did your team do all of this?” Lauren from my team is my director of sales and events. She was at the helm on everything. She was the main facilitator. She was on site running everything. She organized and ran our team. All but three members of my team were on site, so my team was a huge critical part of it.
But Lauren outsourced a lot because we’re smart and we bring in experts to make things exceptional. So we brought in an event designer, AV streaming service. We had it be something that was streamed virtually, but we didn’t want to just do the Zoom experience or replays; it was high end and so we brought in people to do that. We brought in a stage designer. If you were there, you saw the stage. We brought in a space designer. We didn’t have people sitting at conference center rounds. We didn’t have people just sitting in chairs, like we had couches and we wanted people to be comfortable learning. We wanted it to feel like you were amongst friends and part of what makes something transformational is the way you utilize the space.
The other thing for me is I wanted a space that was our own. It’s difficult to find that. What I call it is immersive learning. When you come to Thrivers Live, we’ve taken over an entire space and you’re all in. It’s like you’re home for three days and so we put all those pieces together. We did bring in a lot of help. We brought in a total of nine professional paid speakers. It cost over $300,000 just to bring in the speakers, so we went big there. I knew that this was going to be a key critical part.
I didn’t call in friends or ask for hookups. I was like, “No, I’m going to stack this step properly.”
If you listen to the podcast, I shared a couple weeks ago where I talked about the truth about industry education. A lot of times then creators or event sponsors actually ask brands or educators to pay to be on the stage. That affects the quality of the education you’re learning. If you can just cut a check and get a spot on the stage, how do the people attending know that the caliber of education’s going to be good? They don’t. It’s just a pay-to-play opportunity.
Where for me, as the event host, I’m like, “No, I’m going to pay people and I’m going to hand pick people to be a part of this opportunity.” Now wouldn’t you know, it happened in 2020 and it happened again in 2022. Within 24 hours of wrapping Thrivers Live, we had a myriad of incredible speakers who are like, “I want in on that” because they saw, and that doesn’t happen. Like that’s highly unusual. And that’s when we were like, “Oh, we nailed this.” Because people realized what we created was something different and something special. This is what I think needs to happen in our industry. We need to think about not just throwing information at people, but creating transformation. That’s what it was all about.
A few people asked me about cost. I don’t mind speaking to it. Thrivers Live did cost over a million dollars to produce. I’ve shared that very openly. I’ve been saying this for years. When I put on Thrivers Live, it’s not to make a profit because it’s not profitable. I do Thrivers Live for my community. It’s my way to give back to my community. It’s my way to give back to the industry. So that’s what we did.
We were very fortunate to partner with some amazing sponsors this year, Innersense being our primary sponsor. Sola was massive for us. I always loved working with Sola. Them coming in was incredible, too. Mangomint, my first time working with Mangomint and they took really great care of our community.
So when you look at what Innersense did with the glambot, right? That’s something that they brought in. They were doing their entire demonstration set up. They were doing these incredible cards they brought in. It was very Thriver-y and you’d pull a card and the cards were based on the ingredients in the Innersense line, but they almost like mindset cards. So mine actually said, take time to think about your health. Take time to think about your wellbeing. This is an area of life you are not focusing on right now, and that is true. If you can hear some of the congestion in my voice, I came off of Thrivers Live, I absolutely loved it, but I came off and immediately got a sinus infection right after, and it’s because I will work myself tirelessly to the bone. The card I pulled from Innersense was very indicative of that.
So bringing in sponsors certainly helped financially, but my business massively fronted the majority of the cost of the event, right?
This was no small feat and I don’t want to minimize that. But it also, when you come into the industry the way that I do, where, when I say it’s not about the money, I want the impact and I will feel good if I’ve actually changed the industry, these are the kind of things we do for it, right? So that’s what it looked like to pull off. That was it, logistically.
People also asked how we found our speakers. Again, I think it’s playing a long game. So I networked for all but one of my speakers were referred to me, asked to be a part of it. One speaker, we got through an agency, but for the most part, it’s network and connection, and that’s why I talk about this too. Your network is your net worth. When people say that, they’re not kidding, and a lot of people say like, “Well, I’d like to network with some of the people you network with, Britt. I’d like to do that kind of thing.” No, your peers are your network and then you grow together. That’s what a really great network looks like.
So you’ve already got it built in. You just might not be leaning in the way that you need to. Think about the connections you’re making. Think about the relationships you’re nurturing. Are these the ones that are actually going to take you places or do they just feel cool and shiny? Really think about it because it makes such a huge difference.
Now, when I think about—a lot of people were saying, “How did I recharge after the event?” Like I said, I really went all in on Thrivers Live and I do think that’s what made the event exceptional, but it is a lot for me. One of the things I’m getting feedback on, and it actually makes me emotional to think about, the amount of people who told me, “You had 600 people in that space, but I watched you, and every time you had an interaction with any individual, you knew their name, you knew who they were, and it felt like they were the most important person in the room.”
The reason why it makes me emotional is that was my goal going in and that’s not easy. If you’ve ever had a community at scale or an event at scale, you want everybody to feel seen and heard. It’s incredibly challenging and the fact that people notice that I really tried so hard to do that means so much to me because I did it from such a place of integrity and a place of I actually am extremely grateful for my community, so it made it easy. But I also had to pour a lot in.
Lisa Huff, actually have to give her a shout out, she sent me a DM after on Instagram, and she was like, “I saw you in a different light at Thrivers Live because I watched you. You’d be up on the stage and every free moment you had between your speaking, you were doing photos, you were saying hi to people, you were walking around, you were connecting, you were giving hugs. You were helping to build people up who were having breakdowns.”
There was a couple people I ran into in the bathroom. They happened to be crying. I stopped everything I was doing for 10 minutes and workshopped with them, right? This was my time to give back to my community, which was amazing, but it was long.
And so when people ask me, “What did you do on the flip side?
The day after I came home from Thrivers Live—I am not a napper. I’m a doer, I’m a goer. I unexpectedly slept most of the day. My body gave out finally. And then the following Friday, I had a day of gratitude and I strongly suggest this for anybody who pours in any amount of work. I wrote thank you notes to vendors. I wrote thank you notes to students that had a deep impact on me, my team and I thanked each other profusely. I looked back at photos. I thanked my family for supporting me. I just spent a day in gratitude and that was super massive. My company and I took five days off to recover. It was like five days on, five days off, and that was huge for us. And now we’re back at it.
A lot of people are asking when’s the next one? We have wheels in motion. We’re doing a lot of research. Something that people asked us, like will it always be in California? No, and actually 2022, wasn’t guaranteed to be in California either. We researched Chicago, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Las Vegas, and California. We came back to California because it checked all my boxes.
I learned each time I host an event of this scale what is important to me and what’s not, and the California venue was the one that checked the most boxes. It didn’t check all the boxes. It was located next to a teeny tiny airport. Transportation in and out was difficult. Walkability from the venue was amazing, food around the venue, amazing. There was a Starbucks that was a stone’s throw away. We had two hotels attached to our convention center. So for the convenience, once you got there, you couldn’t beat it. It was right on the ocean and on the water. You could be at the beach. In fact, Kristen Soseman held this amazing sound bath for our community on the beach, the second evening of the event, right?
So for the opportunity you couldn’t beat it, but it wasn’t perfect, so we’re looking at other venues. We’re thinking about timelines. We’re thinking about logistics. A lot of people wish they could have been VIP. I mean, the vast majority of people were like, we just wanted to be VIPs. VIP sold out in 17 minutes, so those 150 people got a really exclusive experience and a lot of people were like, “We want that”, so we’re taking all these things into account and thinking about what comes next.
But this is what you do when you host an event like this, at least this is what I wish the industry would do is instead of saying, “That was great. Let’s do it again.” Thinking about the feedback, always asking ourselves, “How can we do more? How can we do better?” is critical and I think that that’s a piece that’s missing. I think our industry has become very formulaic. “Well, every year we do this thing…” No, what if you did something different? What if you thought outside the box? What if you looked at giving back in a different way? What if you looked at what it looked like to truly elevate and allowed that to lead the way? So that’s what we’re thinking.
As far as what I think is important for education moving forward, it’s what I call immersive. I’ve used that word now twice on this podcast. When people DM me asking, “Can I have the soundtrack to Thrivers Live?”, well, we had a DJ. You saw him in our custom Thrivers Live DJ booth, right? I can’t give you the soundtrack to that, but what are people trying to do with the soundtrack? They’re trying to recreate the experience. When is the last time you went to another event where you were like, “Ooh, I need the soundtrack for this. Give me the playlist for that”? It doesn’t happen. What people are trying to do is they’re trying to hold onto the transformation. They’re trying to hold onto the energy, right?
Thrivers Live is a lifestyle event. It is truly something that is a catalyst for change and I wish more industry education was that way. It was truly immersive. It was truly—and here’s the thing. A lot of people are like, “Ooh, making a note, better have a great soundtrack.” Y’all, I can’t even tell you what music played at. Thrivers Live. If you’re like, “What’s the soundtrack you made, Britt?”, I didn’t. I hired the right people. I created the right energy.
And the reason people ask for the soundtrack is not for the music. They actually don’t give a rip about the music. They’re trying to recreate the energy and that’s the part that’s not formulaic. That’s the part that takes the right person coming in and putting the ingredients together and making it happen. This is what we need is more people in the industry to come in with like the heart and the vision. And to say, “I’m not just doing this to make money,” or “I’m not just doing this to look fancier. I’m not just doing this to teach a bunch of stuff. I’m doing this to actually make a change.” And I think that’s the future of the industry.
I want to get into the biggest takeaways. One was going to be from Hal Elrod. He was our opening speaker on Core Day 1 and he talked about the simplicity of habit. I’m watching now hundreds of people in my community take advantage of his Miracle Morning. It’s neat to see hundreds of people choose to hold each other accountable and do it together. It’s been pretty incredible. And what he talked about was the simplicity of gratitude, the simplicity of letting things go, really being grateful for what we have in our life.
I’m going to tell you friends, we’re living in a time where people are very angry and a part of me understands that, like there’s certain things that make me angry too, so I get it. But we’re almost allowing anger to be the first emotion. Like we wake up and we’re like, “Great, what am I going to be angry about today?” He reminded us, “But what if you started with gratitude?” And it doesn’t mean that you won’t become upset at some point in the day. It doesn’t mean that there won’t always be things that we wish were different, but what if instead you started with gratitude and what could that do for your life and what relationships might you cultivate, right? Coming from that place and it really reset the room to be like, “Wow, we have collectively been angry for a really long time. It doesn’t mean that our issues have gone away”, but the idea of you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar if you go into it from a place of gratitude and partnership and actually, how can I make a change without just being angry? It’s incredible what can we get done.
On that, another thing that came up was the power of money. A lot of us feel like we want things to change. There’s a lot of things that frustrate us and we just sit around and we’re angry about it and we were like, “I wish there was more that I could do, but I’m just one person,” or”Nnobody’s listening to me,” or “I have no power”. Money is power and if you want to have more power, making more money is a huge part of that, right? More money in your community, more money for your family. It does give you a place where you get more opportunity.
And so when we say things like, “Well, it’s frustrating that wealthy people get their way or wealthy people have their opportunity.” You can’t—anybody listening to this can be wealthy. That is so possible for you, right? I just shared, I’ve coached over 10,000 people to do it. Why can’t you do it? Like you could do it any time. And that money does give you that voice and that power, we can be angry about it. That’s totally fine. But it’s also the truth is which is what makes us angry. So thinking about it, right?
It’s one of the things Anthony O’Neal said, he’s like, everyone talks about money being such a bad thing. He’s like, “I don’t know about you, but money is what has given me the opportunity to actually change shit that makes me upset.” And I thought that was really huge. It was like that breakthrough of like, wow, we really villainize the tool. That is the tool for change. Really interesting.
The other thing that Anthony and Omar Johnson both talked about was culture bombers, and they talked about people we keep around it in our life, in our company, in our business who are actively tearing us down. A lot of times they’re like high producers or really great people or people that we’re friends with, but they’re actively destroying your life in your business. They’re not supporting you. They’re angry. They lead with the anger, not with the gratitude.
You’ll always play small if you keep the culture bombers around. You’ll always play small if you allow those who are not working towards collective goals that you are to stay in your space. You can just kiss your future goodbye. You can’t keep ’em.
And they talked about really great active strategies to improve culture. I mean, huge. They got real strategic on that, but I love that thought of not what is holding you back, but who is holding you back? That was a collective theme.
But without a doubt, the thing that resonated with me the most, and I didn’t even realize it at the time, was Jamie Kern Lima walked us through an exercise and the thing she was asking about was how are you hiding in plain sight? When I first did the exercise, what I wrote down, yes, it was correct. But as I was driving home—I drove home at like 11:45 at night on Wednesday, and as I was driving home, I was like, “Oh my gosh, what I wrote down in my journal was the safe answer”. The real answer of how I’m hiding in plain sight was so much deeper.
Y’all, do you know that my friends and family don’t know what I do for a living? They have no idea. I jokingly am like if it’s like I’m living a double life, but it that’s actually not that cute or funny. It’s weird. My husband came to Thrivers Live. My kids came to Thrivers Live. It was my first time introducing them to the community.
And so seeing my husband there, people were asking me, “What does he think? Does he think this is so cool?” And I was like, “He’s almost like shocked and in numb.” Like cool, yes, but he was so far removed from what I do professionally that he doesn’t even know how to comprehend what is happening right now. And it’s because I have this massive separation and I call it being all in.
Like when I’m at home with my family, I don’t sit down the couch and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’ll never believe the day I had at work.” I don’t do that. I just don’t, I don’t find it to be a healthy part of my familial life. So I don’t do it. But with that, when I’m not absent for my family and friends, they become really resentful. But it’s because they have no idea what I do on the daily. I live a very small, humble life in my day-to-day life and a lot of that, I don’t want to change, but I’ve almost been hiding the impact I’ve been making. I’ve been hiding the fact that I’ve 65,000 followers on Instagram. My family and friends have no idea that I have a podcast that is in the top 1% of podcasts in the world. Nobody knows that. And when Jamie says, how are you hiding a plain sight and how is that making life more difficult for you? It’s made me realize it makes me really misunderstood.
And so that for me was such a breakthrough of wow, I want to be seen as a whole person. Like, love it, hate it, can’t stand, don’t understand it, totally fine, but I want to come out of this being a hundred percent who I am. I’ve watched myself—so in just the last few days, I’ve watched myself choose to eat better, dress better.
I don’t feel any type of way when I say yes or no to any commitments, like the way I’m showing up in my life, coming out of Thrivers Live is so radically changed, so radically changed. And I’m just grateful for the opportunity.
And when I put on something like this as an event, it’s as much for me as it is for y’all, and so if you were in that place and space, I hope you know how much you deeply affected me, impacted me, how grateful I am to know you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to pour in in this deep way.
If you have any additional questions about Thrivers Live, you can hit me up in the DMs. If you love the experience, I’d love it if you left a rating or review on the podcast and let me know what your highlights were so I can be sure to include more of them next year.
But thanks for letting me share a little bit of the behind the scenes. Y’all, as I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
