On my first day behind the chair I had zero clients. On my second day behind the chair I had one client.
One of the biggest misconceptions of the beauty industry is you'll have a full clientele the day after you graduate from beauty school, but this simply isn't true.
In this episode we're talking about how many clients you need to see per day and how long it takes most stylists to get to reach this number. I'll walk you through some of the strategies I've used throughout the years and how I encourage stylists to grow their clientele straight out of school.
Can I ask you a favor? If you enjoy the show, will you follow us and leave a 5 star review? This helps our show move up in the charts to help more stylists. Thank you!
On my first day behind the chair I had zero clients. On my second day behind the chair I had one client.
One of the biggest misconceptions of the beauty industry is you'll have a full clientele the day after you graduate from beauty school, but this simply isn't true.
In this episode we're talking about how many clients you need to see per day and how long it takes most stylists to get to reach this number. I'll walk you through some of the strategies I've used throughout the years and how I encourage stylists to grow their clientele straight out of school.
Can I ask you a favor? If you enjoy the show, will you follow us and leave a 5 star review? This helps our show move up in the charts to help more stylists. Thank you!
Welcome to the Aspiring Stylists Podcast with Tracey Franklin. Where to begin, grow and aspire to become the best stylist you can be. Whether you're thinking about becoming a stylist opening a salon, or developing your skills as an experienced stylist the next step of your beauty career starts here. Each week we'll discuss strategic ways to design, plan and execute on becoming a stylist that excels behind the chair and above the bottom line. Here's your host, Tracey Franklin.
Tracey Franklin:
Before I became a hairstylist, I can't remember a time when I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck. I worked in early childhood development so that I could be in the facility where my children were. And that was pretty much the only benefit. The pay was horrible and the stress levels were so high. I knew I needed to find another path. So as soon as my kids were both in public school, I enrolled in beauty school. I knew all throughout school that I was going to love this industry and I landed my dream job after graduation, and I started building my clientele. I really had no idea what a solid clientele would look like. But the guy I worked with had back to back clients, so I at least had a good example of what it could look like. However, after finishing my apprenticeship program, I had my first day behind the chair, and my day didn't look anything like that. I didn't have one client on my first day behind the chair. The next day, I had one client, followed by another day of no clients. By day three, I came home crying, I just knew I had made a huge mistake. But when quitting is not an option when you have two kids at home and you realize this is the path you've chosen, and not making it work isn't a choice. The next day I went to work and a local radio station called the salon and asked if anyone wanted to donate haircuts to their working women's Wednesday series. My boss said I could do whatever I wanted. So I gave away eight haircuts. And would you believe that one of those eight haircuts is still my client today after over 20 years, honey, those free haircuts have paid off tenfold. I also created the cringy used flyers and had them out wherever anyone would let me the Tech campus outside of Kroger like wherever I needed to. And I had a fat stack of business cards on me at any given time and had my elevator speech on lock. And after a few months, I was seeing an average of two to three clients per day. That's pretty great. When you're coming up from zero. I even started seeing repeat clients come in to me that felt like a huge win. I still remember the moment I realized that my paychecks would never dip below $500. Again, I had reached a level of consistency in my income that I could count on and it felt amazing. A solid clientele is going to look different to everybody. I got to the point where I was seeing between four and eight clients a day depending on how many colors I had. And I was booked out a couple months at a time. To me that's when I felt built. But for someone else their built might look different. I will say the industry standard for growth is being booked 85% of your scheduled time behind the chair. So once you remove your lunch breaks, and your doctor's appointments and anything else that wouldn't be available for clients anyways, you're going to take the hours that you were booked and divide it by the hours you had available. And this is going to give you your percentage. So how many clients do you actually need? Well, there isn't really one answer to this question because it really does depend on the services that are booked and not the number of people you serve. And here's an example. If I'm doing haircuts all day, I need like eight clients. But if I've got a client that's getting a base color and a Bolyard and a full set of hand tied extensions, well I probably only need three clients that day. This is why I encourage stylists to look at percentages instead of butts in the seat. I always tell my students no matter how many clients you think you're going to need when you leave school, I promise you will need many, many more. Again, this is all related to what type of services that you're offering. And I know not everyone will agree with me on this but I do not believe that a stylish should go straight into booth rent after graduation. I've talked about the many reasons on previous episodes, but client recruitment is among my top reason. If you're going to work in a salon with a good reputation and an effective marketing strategy. You are going to build your books so much faster, you just will. The amount of time that goes into recruiting one client will surprise you. So as a newbie in the industry, you need some big salon energy in order to start strong. To be perfectly honest, if you're not effective at marketing yourself and you may not do good ever In an independent setting, once you are a small business owner and running your one chair, salon, all the marketing, all the self promotion is on you. So if you're great at this, and you're probably going to have a better chance of maintaining your business, and if you're not, you're gonna have a hard time replacing clients that fall off your book, because trust me, they're gonna fall off your book. So how many clients will you come out of school with on average, um, very few, very few, probably your friends and family and a few clients here and there. But most people going to a school for their services are going because of the availability and the pricing. And that's going to be hard for you to match. And you will find that most of the schools clients stay with the school. This means recruitment has to start before you even graduate. Hopefully, you have decided on a salon home before you graduate so that you can start telling people where they can find you. If there's any kind of lag time between graduation and starting your time behind the chair, then you need to make sure that you keep your social media audience engaged and stay in touch with clients that plan to follow you out of sight out of mind. And people will lose interest quickly if we don't keep them updated. Realistic goals are important, or you're going to constantly feel like you're letting yourself down. So set yourself a goal of having two clients in your chair every day. And then once you are consistently hitting that goal, it's time to level up. Keep adding and reinventing your time behind the chair until you find what works best for you. And what keeps you excited, not exhausted. So you need to start taking the steps as a new stylist to attract your initial clients. And the first step starts in school. And that's with creating your professional Instagram page. If you think your future or potential clients aren't interested in your education journey, I promise you they are. First of all, people are so nosy. And second, it's really fun to go back and look on your journey and see how much you've grown while you're in school, how much better you got at things and how people have supported you throughout your entire journey. These people are your tribe and you need to start building that tribe first thing, your challenges are going to change as your career progresses. At some point, your availability or lack thereof is going to cause someone to move on. Or maybe you're experiencing a ton of success and your prices just keep increasing. Well good for you, you're doing the thing. But not everyone's gonna come along for this more expensive, less available version of you. And that's okay too. But they will need to be replaced. This is why you need to always be building. Some people want it fast and cheap. And that's just who they are. And the more successful you become, the less available you will be for this particular type of client. Looking back, I can identify a time that significantly accelerated my growth. And that was when I started doing Bali asure, I was the first artist in my salon to offer this new way of doing hair color. And people were so intrigued and Facebook had just started becoming wildly popular, and my social media journey got kicked into high gear. Another one was hair extensions. You guys hear me talking about hair extensions all the time, there were only a few stylists in my area that were offering them but they didn't really promote themselves. So when I did, I became known as the go to extension girl in my area. And this increased my popularity and my income immensely. Some marketing strategies are more effective than others at attracting new clients. And I do think that all marketing strategies work. That's why it's so important to have a few different avenues. I've done billboards, I've done bathroom stall marketing, I even had a full page ad in the Yellow Pages a million years ago. And I'll never forget how expensive that was. All of these marketing platforms are still available and still effective. But I don't believe anything is as effective as showing up in person in your community, and marketing yourself on social media, there just is no comparison. It's easier than ever to share your greatness with the world. I will not accept any excuses when it comes to my team being present on social media, if they cannot at least do that for themselves, invest in their selves and in their future success in this way, then why would I want to invest anything? When something is this free and this effective? I'm sorry, no excuses. I don't think there's one particular service or product that's really the answer and helping you attract a dedicated client base. I think it's when you make a decision on what type of stylist you're going to be that you're going to see this huge pivot. When I decided I wanted to be a luxury stylist I put myself under an umbrella of opportunity, meaning that as long as I stayed educated and good at what I did, I could continue to do offer the best luxury services out there to my clients, I prove that I was someone they could count on, I was someone worth paying a little more for I was someone worth booking out an entire year's worth of appointments for, you can decide what your it factor is. And as long as you stay true to that, services will come and go and your loyal clients will remain. I found my niche through the process of elimination, the more successful I became, the more I was able to remove services from my menu that no longer spark joy that no longer felt rewarding, I was able to hone in on the ones that did and made them my niche. I don't encourage stylists to find their niche from the start. I know that may sound a little weird, but you got to get out there and you got to experience this industry. I always ask my students on the first day of school what they think they're going to specialize in. And then I asked him again, sometime in the middle, and then again at the end, it always changes it has never stayed the same. When I decided to stop taking haircut only clients, I lost a huge percentage of my clientele, which was something I accepted, and I made sure I was prepared for it. I knew that in creating holes in my schedule, I would run the risk of decreasing my income. That was a chance I was willing to take. I was a well known stylist in the luxury salon community. And I knew that as long as I did my part, I would attract the right clients to my chair. And I did but I just don't think it's the right move for a stylist in the beginning. One thing we haven't talked about yet is word of mouth, I still find word of mouth to be wildly effective and amazing marketing tool. And you know why? Because a happy client is a really loud client. And an unhappy client is also a really loud client. So when we find a client that just loves us and loves everything we do, we need to let them know how much we appreciate them and use them in our marketing strategy. Let them know how valued they are and that you're looking to add more people just like them to your book. Let them know about any discounts that you offer when they refer their friends and family. Give them some referral cards and ask for your help. Now they have what they need and the assignment is clear. Send your friends honey, send your family, I find that people are willing to help in most situations, we just have to be willing to ask, Are you ever really done building your clientele? Well, the short answer is no. Unless you are in transition to retirement clients will continue to fall off your book. And in order to maintain your level of income you will need to keep building to replace them. The long answer is sometimes, as your career evolves and progresses, you may find yourself interested in other aspects of the industry like education or leadership. And a situation like this, you may find yourself with more clients than you can handle if you're trying to add something else. I haven't been recruiting clients in over two years now and continue to place my clients with other amazing stylist as I transition away from the chair. And sometimes you just decide to slow down for some of us we can't fathom that. But for others, they get to a place where they want to spend more time with their family or traveling or doing something else that they've always wanted to do. The best strategy for long term client retention is consistency. Again, be someone that is dependable and great at what they do. Not sometimes every appointment every time, people crave consistency and their hair is no exception. Also be someone they can trust. No doubt if they're like most clients, they go deep with you. Make sure you're someone that can bear their soul to and trust you to keep their secrets. I know this may sound like a no brainer. But I've heard some pretty private conversations happen in a break room that shouldn't have. And that trust is also extended professionally meaning that they can trust that you will always bring the latest and the greatest to the chair. Trust is so important. For me what's changed the most about my recruitment strategy is the sense of urgency. In the beginning, you're working with almost no clients. So everything you do is about building and attracting people to your chair. And then it transitions into something that requires consistency, but it's not as urgent because now you're able to pay your bill. So instead of trying to build an entire clientele, you're just trying to fill holes. So now you can be a little bit more selective about the clients you want to serve and lean more into your niche. Managing a schedule that supports work life balance is really not that hard when you maintain healthy boundaries. When you decide on a schedule and you stick to it. There will always be special circumstances but the standard needs to be Hey, this is my schedule. This is when I'm available. I'm sorry if that doesn't work. Are you bending over backwards for clients who continuously reschedule or don't respect your boundaries teaches them bad booking habits from the beginning. So you just need to nip that in the bud. I can't say this with any real certainty. But after being in the industry as long as I have and leading so many professionals to success, if I had to put a timeline on building a sustainable clientele, I would say you need to give it two years. That doesn't mean you're going to be scraping by for two years. Okay? That means it's going to take at least this long to build a book of clients that feels solid and a book that you can actually thrive in. So just know the exception to this rule is crazy amounts of effort. If you hit the ground running, if you're doing everything humanly possible to build your clientele, given it all you got day and night, I mean, you're obviously going to build faster than someone that takes a part time approach. So at the end of the day, your success is up to you in the beginning. And in the end, the type of professional that you are is truly up to you. My last piece of advice is to always act like Gone isn't gone for good. I've had countless clients leave and come back to my chair. So when for whatever reason you find one of your clients in someone else's chair, treat that situation with love and respect, because you never know when they're going to realize what they had in you. And come back.
Morgan Franklin:
Thank you for joining us on this episode of anytime soon. The Aspiring Stylist Podcast with Tracey Franklin. If you enjoyed listening and you want to hear more, make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. The Aspiring Stylist Podcast with Tracey Franklin is a Morgan Franklin Production. Today's episode was written and produced by Morgan Franklin editing and post-production by Mike Franklin. Want to find out more about Tracey and the Aspiring Barber and Beauty Academy go to aspirebarberandbeauty.com