How To Make More Money As A Hair Stylist or Salon Owner

Are you a hair stylist or salon owner aspiring to boost your revenue? Well, here's the reality check - the key to making more money lies in understanding that your clients are your pay-check.

In this blog post, we'll explore some strategic approaches to increase your revenue without compromising your style or sanity.

1. Time Saving Techniques:

Efficiency is the name of the game. While it's crucial to provide high-quality services, finding ways to streamline your process can significantly impact your earning potential. Experiment with different sectioning patterns, use larger foils, or leverage heating tools to cut down service time without compromising the quality of your work. I know it can seem scary but practicing these things can drastically shift your earning potential. Perhaps you still allow x amount to see new clients but once people become a regular you should have a better understanding of how long it takes to do a service.

When I worked in London, we were given 45 minutes to deliver a full head of highlights - wild I know but goodness me, it made me work quickly!

You don’t need to compromise on quality with time-saving practices, it’s just important that you start somewhere. Try starting by taking 15 minutes less and build up to 30min, 45 mins plus over time. Do you really need to pack in a full head of micro highlights? I don’t know about you but usually for me, I really don’t and I prefer the way spaced out, conscious placement looks.

2. Team Up with an Assistant:

Consider working with an assistant as an investment rather than an expense. Doing so can elevate your earning potential. While working solo might bring in $700 a day, collaborating with an assistant could potentially double your income to $1400. Start slow, have assistants work with you on busy days, and gradually build a strong partnership for mutual growth. This is why I loveee apprentices and I do believe they are key to building a sustainable salon brand. I did a podcast on this recently, check it out here

3. Regularly Reevaluate Your Pricing:

Your pricing strategy should be dynamic, not static. Regularly revisit and reassess your prices to ensure they align with your overhead costs. Understand the total cost of your business operations and adjust your rates accordingly. This proactive approach ensures that you're not leaving money on the table and that your services are adequately valued.

How do you price yourself out correctly? Check out your profit and loss statement - it’s always good to audit where you’re overspending but ultimately, we want to see what your overheads are coming in at. Once we know that, we can understand what we need to make per week to break even.

With that powerful number we will calculate the dollar per minute that we need to charge just to cover overheads and labour costs, add your products onto this and voila, you’ve got yourself a clear and accurate pricing framework.

4. Explore Add-On Services and Retail:

Expand your revenue streams by offering add-on services and retailing beauty products. The key here is passion; choose products and services that genuinely excite your guests - now we don’t wanna sound like car sales people, so it’s important we take the approach of solving peoples problems rather than forcing unwanted products onto them.

Find a brand you absolutely adore or create a bespoke treatment menu that is irresistible for your clients - the more you love it, the higher the chances they will too.

5. Monitor Your Average Client Visits

There are so many reports that we want to be on top of as a kick-ass stylist or salon owner. Lost client reports are an absolute goldmine and will tell you a lot about your business but one that is of equal value is your average client visits. Now we all love “low maintenance hair” but let’s be honest, toners are NOT going to last 3, 6 and absolutely not 12 months without a refresh.

Low-maintenance colour made us lazy as professionals - there, I said it. While I love the results, we need to make sure that we are still creating seamless hair journeys with our clients to ensure customer satisfaction and client retention. Even if you created a refresh package valued at $150 that was only to be bookable with emerging stylists, it could greatly impact your bottom line.

We shouldn’t be letting our customers go monthly upon months with high-ticket colour services without future bookings - the results will simply not last anddd it’s lazy biz practice.

Calculate how many clients you see in a year and then calculate how much revenue you’re losing by only seeing them once or twice a year.. if those guests where to come back 4x per year (even if just for a micro service) you would EASILY make an extra 6 figures per year.

No kidding, I fell into this trap myself…