Wow, did you catch the utter nonsense from yesterday? Who is this Hair Strategist trying to be? Does he think he’s a financial genius? Puh-lease. He might think it’s easy to make $100,000 as a celebrity hair stylist living on Easy Street, but let’s be real here: That won’t happen for most of us. What chance do the rest of us have if we don’t live in his golden world? Absolutely none, right? Yeah, that must be it…

And life ain’t easy nowadays, is it? Prices keep rising, wages stay the same, and your hard-earned cash isn’t doing what it used to do. It’s rough out there. Clients got little left after paying for rent and groceries, and that’s money they won’t be spending in the salon. So how come some stylists make a killing while others are just scraping by? Is it luck or actual skill?

Let me put it this way: The line between a six figure hairstylist and a broke one is thinner than you think. Allow me to illustrate this with a simple thought experiment:

Let’s start with one $25 luxury treatment?

Here’s your lesson for the day, let’s say you’re a busy stylist – 50 grand is going through your pocket every year but you’re feeling stuck and unable to achieve a truly care-free lifestyle, or maybe you want to save for a house or car but you can’t squeeze a penny out of your paycheck after making ends meet.

Then all of a sudden you stumble across this Hair Strategist guy, and he tells you to offer a luxury treatment to EVERY SINGLE GUEST EVERY TIME and you decide ‘what the hell, I have nothing to lose” and you do it. Every day, one out of six clients say YES. One client a day and boom, thats an extra $25 in sales. At the end of the week you’ve grown your service sales by a humble $125. Will this magically boost your income to $100,000 a year… NO, but it is the first step, and a step that pays you. So let’s keep the math simple and after expenses (if you’re self employed), or commission, you actually earn an extra $50 in your take home due to your efforts.

$50 maybe doesn’t sound like much, BUT

$50 a week = $200 a month
$200 a month = $2600 a year

An extra $2600 a year boosting your $50 grand salary is more than a 5% raise

But I can hear you crying, “$2,600 isn’t all that much.” YES IT IS

It’s a downpayment for a car, a nice vacation or decent contribution to your retirement. This is also the first step to earning six figures. You won’t get to six figures without a little sweat, and after this everything follows. I call this the first step because you can ‘know’ all there is to know, you can read this blog until your retinas swell, but until you ‘DO’ you will never reap the rewards of your studies.

So here is my challenge to you, dear reader. GO DO. The Hair Strategist wants you to offer an additional service to every guest who sits in your chair this week. No excuses. This valuable exercise will not only boost your paycheck, but will teach us many valuable lessons that will frame our conversations going forward.

Oh, but your clients don’t like being upsold, and besides you don’t have the time in your day?

Offering extra services is the key to success as a hairstylist. A few complaints? Don’t sweat it – those are two more seats for clients who recognize your worth and are ready to pay top dollar for it. Sure, staying busy looks good on paper, but it won’t get you to the hundred-grand mark.

So the lesson of the day is:

  • Give yourself a raise. Offer an additional service to every guest to see an instant boost in income.
  • The willingness and discipline to DO is the key to earning $100,000 or more a year because the line between being broke and earning six figures is narrower than you think.
  • Do not stress about guest reactions to an offer, positive and negative reactions are part of the growth process. (I will show you how to deal with these more in depth in a later article.)

So what if the stylist above had a day where half or more of their guests received luxury treatment services? The quick answer is that the same person would have increase their income by more than $7000. Thats an extra $70k over 10 years!

And that’s just luxury treatment add-ons – we can do much better than that, with some careful, and surprisingly easy, fine tuning. Read on!

READER CHALLENGE:

This is the link to this Readers Challenge Discussion. It contains a downloadable PDF and instructions for how to complete. While you’re there, why not spend a little time getting to know other like minded stylists? Say hello, ask a question and get to strategizing.