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, my loves and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva. I’m super excited because this is going to be my last pandemic-based episode for the foreseeable future and I wanted to close it off on the right note. I decided this week, we would talk about how to best prepare for a second wave of pandemic.
There’s a lot of conversation going around right now about like, “Oh my gosh, it feels so good to be back to normal or adjusting to the new normal.” And while I think all of that is wonderful and it does feel like there’s a glimmer of hope, right? We’re seeing some semblance of normalcy after a time of chaos and all of that is really exciting.
I don’t want to get blinded to the fact that it is highly unlikely we won’t do this again. There is a very strong possibility that we will see a full or partial closure yet again, particularly in our industry sometime in the next year. With that, I want to leave this pandemic talk, letting you guys know the best strategies to ensure you’re set up for massive success when, and if, a second wave of pandemic hits or we go through something similar again.
Now, please know, as I bring this information to you, it’s not just cool ideas. I gathered all of this information and the resources I’m sharing are based on the stylists that are currently having their best year ever.
That’s right. If this is not the best year your business has ever seen financially and scalability-wise, tune in because there are a lot of stylists — by a lot of, I mean, thousands — who were having their best year ever this year because of the work they did pre-pandemic that set them up for massive success.
And what made this their best year yet is they didn’t have to stress financially when they were away from the salon. They actually got to enjoy the time without a lot of panic. Then when they went back to the salon, they were busier than ever and when they look at their earnings year-to-date over year-to-date earnings last year, the year before that, they are still on the rise. These stylists were able to take six or 12 weeks away from their business and still make more money this year than last year.
That’s what I want for you all. I want you to have that stability and that confidence in your business.
This week I thought we would talk about projections for what a second wave of COVID-19 could possibly look like, statistics, and where we are now. And the four pillars of stability you’re going to want in place, locked into your business to navigate this, if and when it happens again.
First of all, I didn’t want to just come on here and blab; I wanted to ask some statistics to go off of. I started at the CDC website and they have predictions for pandemic long-term effects from 20 different sources.
So Columbia University, we have Institute of Health Metrics, Johns Hopkins, a ton of different resources. They’ve crowdsourced a lot of scientific study information and you’ll see all of these different places have different projections. The one thing they have in common is that they all believe the worst is yet to come, that we haven’t yet seen the peak of what this is going to hold for us here in the United States.
We also have to face the reality of the fact that some states are still shut down. I’m here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are still very much shut down. So I’m in a county that was part of the six county union here in California that agreed that things would hold off on opening up. My particular county just opened up this week, but with very strong limitations. Nail salons aren’t open yet, skincare is not open yet. It’s strictly hair salons with lots of restrictions, but the surrounding counties are still closed.
And there’s still states that are still closed in full. I know some states have been open the entire time, but what we are also seeing is a tremendous surge in cases right now, in some specific states, some states that took an aggressive approach and then got a little bit more lenient. Some states that opened up in the last three weeks we have seen a huge uptick in.
When we talked about knowing the pandemic was over, when we flatten the curve, we are not seeing the curve flatten, and that’s scary because it means that as attempts are being made to reopen the economy, we’re seeing the surge go back out and as a nation, the entire goal is to get back to normal, right? 100 percent. That’s one thing we can all agree upon is everybody wants to get back to normal.
Well, that won’t happen until we’re able to stop the rise of this illness. And that has not proven to be effective with the measures we’re taking consistently right now. That’s why I want to talk about what a second wave of pandemic might look like because I believe we’re going to see some states head into second round closure sometime in the next six weeks to six months and I want to best prepare you for what that could potentially look like.
One of the things — you guys have probably seen this chatter too — one of the things that people are using as a basis of comparison to see where this pandemic might go is the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, 1919. They using that as a benchmark. And then there’s a lot of argument as to well, that was a hundred years ago and so much has changed.
Yeah, so much has changed, but not all of what’s changed has been great. So when we say, well, that was a hundred ago and medical technology has changed so much. Well, a lot has changed so much. We now have commercial aircraft that transports this virus internationally. We now are way more populated than we were and people are crammed in closer together. Social distancing is much, much harder because of the lives we lead today, right? There weren’t skyscraper buildings full of thousands of people congregating there to work together day in and day out, right? That didn’t exist.
So yes, it’s a different time and yes, technology is different, but lifestyle is different too. Transportation is different. Opportunity is different. You have to take all of those things into effect. When we look at how this could potentially spread…
Now I promise I’m not looking to turn this episode into a history lesson. I’m not a huge history buff myself, but I did some research and will share a link to where I found the statistics I’m going to share with you right now. (That’ll be in the show notes of this podcast.) You can check it out yourself.
But what happened back in 1918 was that the second wave of pandemic was the deadliest wave. The first wave was like a test run and then there was a reaction that happened. Then the world opened back up, and people went back to the movies and people got back into restaurants and people got back to hanging out together. And the second wave was the worst part and then there’s a mini third wave that was very similar to the first.
And by mini, I mean, it was still devastating, but it wasn’t anything like the second wave. So if history does repeat itself, we have to be nervous.
Now the question becomes, why was the second wave worse than the first? Their speculations about if the virus mutated, which this could, right? This is not — everybody’s like, “Oh, it’s just like a really bad flu,” but the coronavirus is not related to an influenza. It’s a different strain. So no, it’s not like the flu. It’s different.
And could it mutate? Yeah, but I mean, potentially anything could possibly happen, but actually why they think that the second wave was worse is we were in the middle of World War I. Because of that, there was more cross border contamination and all of these things that maybe wouldn’t have taken place and those things exist today.
There is more travel. There’s more of this expanded reach than there could have been right in the first wave that 1918 saw. We’re doing a lot of those things that occurred during the second wave. Last time that caused this huge uptick.
The other thing that they noted was that after the second wave, we did see a fairly decent decline because of what they called herd immunity. Which is probably what you’ve heard people talk about before too, is that the more exposure there is, at some point, it’s going to taper off because a lot of people will have had it, which is good, but also scary.
Like if we’re waiting for herd immunity, we’re going to be waiting for a minute. And I just shared those facts. Like I said, this is not going to be a history lesson. We’re going to roll into the content right now, but I wanted to share those facts too, to show you where I’m coming from with this episode and to prepare you for what’s potentially to come.
You know what? I truly hope I’m wrong. I hope I am wasting my time report recording this episode and this content that I’m about to share with you, you never have to put into place. In that we’d all win. That would be the best-case scenario, but in case I am right and in case this podcast is worthwhile, I want to encourage you to take some notes right now and start to make a plan, because what I’m about to give you is an action plan for how you can prepare for an upcoming pandemic.
There are four things that I think set the successful stylists apart during the season of life: financial confidence, communication, organization, and maintained marketing and growth opportunities. I want to break down all four with you here today.
The first we’re going to talk about is financial confidence. I know our industry was hurting real bad when we were all out of work for weeks at a time, right? As an industry, as a whole, we were hurting.
But please know there was a percentage of our industry who was not hurting, who was very financially prepared for something like this. And when you hear me say that and say, “Well, good for them.”
Well, no, not good for them; that should be the goal for you. It’s there. They’re not like wizards. They didn’t do something fancy and special. They just had a strategy. And so I want to share that strategy with you so we can increase that percentage. Like it would make me so proud if I could come on this podcast in a year and say, “Wow, we just endured the second wave, but 50% of you reported that you didn’t have a huge financial impact because of it.” That would be a win, right?
It’s less than 10% right now didn’t feel financial pain going through this pandemic. But 10% of our industry is a lot. We’re looking at a hundred thousand people, right, that didn’t feel pain and that’s a lot.
But I want the other 900,000 to also not feel the pain and that’s what I’m here to talk about.
Step number one is going to be to raise your prices if you haven’t already. Now there’s a caveat to that: If you were struggling pre-pandemic and are still not booked solid, you have not earned a price increase. Please do not do it.
If you were a stylist who was putting off doing a price increase, you hadn’t done an increase in three years, you still had clients like Jessica who seen you for seven years so she still pays your prices from 2006, all that stuff has to stop.
You just don’t have the capacity on your books you used to have. We don’t have that freedom and flexibility anymore. You can’t. So it’s time to balance your prices, stabilize your prices, and really own your price point. In Thrivers, we have a whole module about how to determine your price point and the factors that go into it. (I will say years behind the chair are not a piece of that equation, right?)
It’s all of the other things you need to take into account to ensure you’re charging appropriately. But if you’re at a place where you’re not able to get all of your guests in, if you were somebody who was a double booker before and you can’t double book anymore, please, please, please tell me you raised your prices. Your business model has changed.
And then I saw this came up in my Thrivers Society Facebook group, somebody was like, “Well, Britt says we need to raise our prices because of double booking, but what about when double booking comes back?”
You guys, if double booking comes back, we’re about 18 months out from that. We are far out. I want to clear up the misconception that we’re almost to the end. We’re not even close to the end. It could be 18 months, two years, three years, or never before we’re able to double book again. This is a more permanent situation our industry is experiencing and you need to make strategic changes.
So if you were a former double booker, you need to raise your prices. Guaranteed. If you were seeing high volume demand, if you were booked out more than three weeks, if you are not able to see all of your guests within a reasonable amount of time, a price increases something you should strongly consider because we can’t double book.
The other thing I want you to do is put extra money into savings, right? I mean, savings is like that fun, sexy thing where we’re like, “Yeah, I’ll save when I have time.” That’s the funny thing about savings is it’s always when the time comes where life happens, where you’re like, “Why didn’t I save?” We always say we have more time to save.
If there’s one thing that we just learned, life can throw you a curveball any time the heck it wants to. And so the time to save is now.
And even if you’re like, “Well, how am I supposed to save? I’m just now financially recovering” I want you to think of this like a tsunami. I was explaining this to my Thrivers community that way. When we first were told to shelter in place, it was like the water was receding.
Do you guys know what happens in a tsunami? It’s not like an immediate onslaught of water. What happens is the ocean like eats itself up; it recedes and then there’s this massive — you could call it a wave, but it’s not really a wave. It’s like a six-foot wall of water that comes into the shore. And it just drowns anybody that comes into contact with it, right?
A lot of us are more into the tsunami part right now where the water is rushing ashore. That’s why you’re feeling overwhelmed. Trying to take care of all of your guests and learning to work with a mask, right? That’s the water hitting the shore to me. So what’s going to happen again is there’s going to be another recede where the ocean sucks all the water back up. You’re going to need savings if that happens.
There is no, there is no other way, right? Now is the time to plan for it.
What I want you to reflect on is how long did it take you to get unemployment before? Cause if you think it’s going to come faster this next time, you’re crazy. You are crazy.
If you think unemployment will come faster, it will take longer if it is even possible so you need to financially prepare now. Did you qualify for PPP or EIDL, how did that work for you? Do you feel like that was a good option or would you have preferred to have been able to manage it on your own? My guess is you would have rather managed it on your own, right? So you need to be set up to make that possible.
How much would you realistically need if history repeated itself so that you could pay your rent, so that you could pay your lease, so that you could pay your mortgage, so that you could buy groceries, so that you could make your car payment, do pay your cell phone bill, do all the things. How much do you need? Oh my gosh. $15,000.
So then your goal is to save $15,000. I want you to put a deadline on it and I don’t know what your deadline is going to be, but if you say, “Okay, in the next four months, I want to save $15,000”, what does that end up being? You need to save what four grand a month or something like that, whatever it ends up being. Do it. You need to make that happen. You need to prepare for the future.
And even if four months comes and there’s another shutdown and you don’t have the 15 grand, at least you’ll have 7,500. You’re still way better off than had you not saved, right?
Do your absolute best to gain that financial confidence.
Now, number two, communication. This was the big killer for anybody who did not navigate this pandemic properly. It almost all boiled down to communication.
And when I say communication, I mean with the in-salon team and with your clients. The biggest business destroyer through this pandemic, you know what, it was one word: abandonment.
This was the biggest reason why clients abandoned their stylists, right? When clients chose to walk away from their stylist is because they felt that the stylist abandoned them. When stylists chose to walk away from their salon owner, it’s because the owner abandoned them. Always.
Some of you were like, “No way. I was totally there for my team. I did everything right.” My question to you is if you did everything right — like you were communicating with them weekly, your head was in a really good place, you were still showing up as a leader through this pandemic, which let’s face it, that’s very difficult. If you were doing all that, were you a true leader, pre-pandemic, or were you just kind of going through the motions?
Because most people make business decisions based on their experience over the previous six months. So if a stylist chose to leave you, it’s not like they were a ride or die, and then the pandemic happened. It’s they haven’t been happy for a while.
So I ask that you reflect over the last six months and think about what you may have done differently. Cause that could have changed your team 110%, right?
But the biggest factor for all these stylists and all these clients who chose to bounce during this pandemic is they felt abandoned by the person they wanted there for them the most. So communication is going to be key all the way around.
If you’re a stylist and you’re a booth renter or a commission stylist, I want you to ask your owner what their second wave pandemic plans are. If their plan is, “Well, fingers crossed that doesn’t happen again,” scary. Have them listen to this podcast episode. That’s not a plan. That’s a hope and a prayer. And how did that work out for us last time? Not that great. We need to be making plans. What is the plan for the second wave?
If you’ve chosen to move to a new salon — there’s a lot of you who took this opportunity to leave your existing salon and go somewhere else, what is their plan for the next pandemic? Are you going to have to pay rent? Are they going to be able to supplement income for you? What does it look like? You need to ask them if and when a second wave happens, what does that look like for us? How are we communicating with clients? Is my booth going to be secure? Am I going to have to pay rent? You need to ask all of these logistics.
Now, how many of you did not like coordinating that on the fly? Everybody. So let’s have the conversations now, even if they’re uncomfortable.
You also need to get all of your client’s contact information right this second. And I want you to remember that communication goes two ways.
So remember I said, abandonment is the number one complaint I’ve heard from clients during this time, they felt their stylists abandoned them. How do they feel abandoned? They felt these stylists did not reach out enough to let them know what was up. They didn’t feel prioritized, they didn’t feel cared for, and they felt like the stylist went dark on social media.
For those of you who see or hear me say that, and you say, “You know what? This was hard for me. And I didn’t know how to show up,” I get it. I so understand. But at some point over the six weeks, my ask of you is that next time you say, “You know what? I want to grow and be bigger on the flip side of this. What can I do to show my clients that I am their pillar of hope?” because clients needed that. And it is our responsibility to be that pillar of hope. That’s kind of what we signed up for when we chose to take on this profession.
So it’s okay to take downtime. It’s okay for you to not post four times a week, but could you have posted maybe twice a week, right? And here’s the thing too, is I don’t want you to just be posting about the pandemic. We saw plenty of that. I don’t want you to do that.
I want you to do what you do best, right? I also want you to be checking in with your clients. If you’re like, “You know what, Britt? I didn’t even want to look at Instagram for six weeks,” that’s fine. But were you texting or calling or sending notes to your clients weekly?
You guys, these people felt abandoned. Abandoned was the word I had used. If you’re a salon owner or you are not checking in with your staff weekly, if you’re a stylist and you were not checking with your clients weekly, you missed the boat. And I ask that next time you don’t make that same mistake twice.
Communication is how you hold onto your business through a time like this. Allowing the overwhelm to get the best of you is not how it’s going to happen. You have to rally. You’re choosing to be a leader. When we all got cosmetology licenses, we chose to be business owners. We chose to live and die by our business decisions, right? You have to own that.
Number three organization. I want you to make sure you have an effective website set up and email system.
I watched brilliant stylists turn their websites into COVID-19 update hotspots on the fly, right? Amazing. Within a week of a shutdown, they had entire web pages dedicated to how they’re navigating this time, and check in here for updates, and here’s a contest for you. I mean, just amazing. They were doing these incredible things because they had an up to date website and had the power to do that, right?
If you don’t already have 60 or 90 social media photos in the bank ready to repost at any given time, now is your chance. How many of you went dark on social media because you didn’t have any content? I see you raising your hand in the back. You don’t want to be in that boat again. So prepare yourself now so that you’re not in that position, right?
I also want you to think about what your business hours will be. How many of you — I’m raising both of my hands right now — how many of you felt like homeschool really got the best of you? And it was like post on Instagram, I have to learn to do algebra all over again. That was me. I have a high schooler. I know exactly what that looks like. It’s brutal. I totally understand. However, if a second wave hits, that will happen again. I live in California. My kids are not going back to school in the fall. That’s already been determined. So what are we going to do to keep things moving forward? When homeschooling comes back around, you can’t become a victim to it again. We went through at once. Now we have to learn the lesson.
My ask of you is that you carve out eight hours a week to work on your business. If there’s another pandemic, you can do 90 minutes a day, Monday through Friday. You can do two hours a day, Monday through Thursday. You can do eight hours on a Monday. I don’t really care when you do it, but if you’re going to keep your business moving forward and not just treading water and not slowly drowning, eight hours a week is going to be by requirement.
Use this time now to think about how you’re going to carve out eight hours to schedule social media, stay in contact with guests, manage your books, right? All of those things with that, if you don’t like how you reopened your books or shifted your appointments this pandemic round, make a new plan for next time.
Don’t just think about it. Don’t be like, “You know what, I’m going to do is I’m going to get more organized with it.” Uh-huh. And then what? “Well, I’m just going to research some stuff.” Okay. When are you going to start that research? I want you to actually make the plan now.
Don’t wait for it to hit and then email somebody and be like, “How did you do it? It didn’t work well for me.” If it didn’t work well for you now is the time to connect with somebody and get a better system in place, right?
Listen back to other episodes of this podcast where I share with you some ideas of how to do it. Now is that time.
And then last but not least pillar number four: marketing.
I had my Thriver Society coaching call earlier this week, actually, and some of these stylists were emailing me questions saying, “I have 45 new clients, not existing clients, new people that this stylist has never met before on a waitlist. How do I get them in?”
That’s a coaching call question. I mean, dozens of Thrivers who were like, “I’m seeing 10 new guest requests a week and I’m considering working two extra days a week to make that possible. Should I do it?”
This is what some stylists are dealing with right now. Overwhelming demand. Why? Because a lot of other stylists and salon owners lost clients that they abandoned. Those clients are now up for grabs. You don’t get a second shot at those people so these other stylists are scooping them up, right? And you want to be a part of that system, especially next time.
Here’s what these stylists who have 45 new guests waiting lists and are seeing 10 new guest requests a week did: They didn’t just post about COVID during the pandemic. If you look at their social media, it’s not, “We’re sad.” “We can’t wait to see you miss doing your hair, touch up kits available.” “I’ll keep you posted.”
I looked at all of your social media. A lot of you are posting once a week and one post was more dismal than the next. It was like, Oh my gosh, you were supposed to be a pillar of hope in the community. And I know it’s difficult, you guys, I know it’s so difficult, but I want you to think about your business long term.
What can you do to set yourself up for long term success? Not in the moment stuff, long term success. This is our chance to create FOMO. These stylists who have crazy in demand, waitlists right now created FOMO. Clients have been waiting for you for weeks. And when they see, “Oh my gosh, do you see that blonde? As soon as I’m allowed to go in there, I need to see that stylist. She has to do this for me.” Clients are craving normalcy right now, and they’re falling into the open arms of stylists who chose to use that time to show up. I want you to use that time correctly next time and show up too.
The other thing you can do with marketing and structured business planning is growing your business through the pandemic: selling at-home color kits (which I didn’t coach to), making your own color kits and selling them door to door, or whatever. I know a lot of stylists did that. I respect you if you did it; my stance was do what you gotta do to feed your family. And I understand that, but I also can’t coach too illegal.
For me, I coached my Thrivers to using legal root touch-up kits, permanent root touch kids, doing something more streamlined to get their guests through this process. That’s part of the non-abandonment. I saw the campaigns that were like, “Save your roots for us.” “I’m going to grow up my roots. You grow out your roots.”
A lot of these men and women who were staying at home during shelter-in-place still had to stop on hop on Zoom meeting calls, like they were still working from home. Some of these people are like CEOs or high powered salespeople. They don’t want to have two inches of gray roots. They can’t wear a ball cap like something; they needed a solution. And the stylist that showed up with a solution won their business and not just in the moment, but for the long haul.
Think about what you can do to support your guests when they can’t be in your chair.
Digital experiences was something I saw go really well too, and stylists were getting creative. I saw some book clubs and some wine tasting clubs and styling classes and, cocktails with the stylist — that was so cute. There was one stylist who did a cocktail hour and it was paid. I don’t know how much it costs, but it was a paid experience. And it was like BYO drink. So you just show up on a zoom call or whatever, and you can even do this over coffee. It doesn’t have to be a drinking thing, but it was like 10 – 15 minutes show up, support your stylist, and we can just chat.
You guys, your clients love you. If you show up for them, they’ll show up for you. I would have 100% paid $100 — I’m not even kidding — to have coffee with my esthetician. I don’t see a hair stylist, but I get a facial every month because that’s my jam. I would have a hundred percent paid a hundred bucks because I know all I’m doing is supporting her, right. But to have coffee with her and have a coffee date and just to see your smile and to hear her voice, I would have 100% paid a hundred bucks to do something like that.
I saw a lot of stylists having really, really great experiences, doing really creative out-of-the-box things to stay connected with their clients to produce some income. So think creatively about what you can do to support yourself and your clientele.
If a second wave hits, you guys, I hope this episode has left you feeling inspired, wheels-turning, prepared for what’s to come. My promise to you is next week, we’ll get back to some more regularly scheduled programming. We’re going to hit the pause button on coronavirus talk, get back to some strategy so I can change a business.
You guys so much love, happy business building and I’ll see you on the next one.
