4 Pillars of a Scalable Business Behind The Chair

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Modern Hairstylist podcast. So, I'm gonna be starting off this episode with a pop quiz question for you, okay? I'm gonna- I wanna see how you feel about this and what your first answer would be, okay?

And so, when you come up with the answer, I want you to tell me what your answer was in the DMs @hairbyhunty on Instagram. And I also want to hear your thoughts about what my answer is to this question. And this question comes from my time being in the high level masterminds that I have the privilege of being a part of. These are masterminds in which I get to join with, um, my peers, other business owners, many of them being way more successful than I am, like, with doing crazy money in their businesses, and then mentors who are very, very experienced, who coach us all and share their strategies and we all get toge- get together, put our mind together to make really cool shit happen for ourselves.

And one time, this mastermind, we- we do in person, um, events every now and then, and one time we all met together for a retreat, and the mentor started off one of our classes with the question, "Out of all of the departments in your business, which department do you believe needs to be focused on and optimized first before you focus and optimize on the other departments?" And the options were as follows. Number one, marketing. Number two, fulfillment, which could be broken down into sales and customer experience.

And then we had operations, and then we had your vision or your mindset. And I thought it was super fascinating because I would normally think marketing. I would normally think like, okay, if you don't have any clients, then you don't have a business, right? Like, if you don't have anybody coming to pay money with you, then there's no point to having the business in the first place, right?

And so my first guess was marketing. And come to find out that was not the same answer that the mentor had, and the way that they broke it down was super fascinating. But if- let me just give you a brief overview of what each of those departments actually are, just in case you need some review. So, marketing is the practice of how you will get, generate new leads to be customers of your business.

So it's, it's the act and practices of getting attention, making people aware of your business, and then nurturing them into becoming buyers or actual customers of your business. Then you have sales and customer experience. I kind of wrap these two together for the hair industry, um, and we can call it fulfillment because it's a- the- it's a- it has to do with the actual fulfillment of your experience and what the person is paying for, right? And so with sales, sales comes down to how you are selling your actual product or how you're selling your service, and then also, how are you raising your average ticket per customer as much as you possibly can?

And so we do that with upselling add-on services and then retail on top of selling our original base service. Then we have, of course, have customer experience, and so that relates to what type of experience are you creating for the customer and how are you optimizing it to be tailored towards that customer so that way you have excellent retention and you're offering great results? And then we have operations, right? So that was fulfillment, tho- both sales and customer experience is fulfillment, and then we have operations.

And operations is all about how you are actually operating when it comes to a lot of the administrative tasks or even the marketing and sales and customer experience tasks that you have. So, in operations, in the operational department, you're focusing on how can I make things as streamlined, as profitable, um, as efficient as possible across the board in all facets of the business, and mostly in the administrative side of things first and foremost? And then, actually, this is one that I added in, uh, myself, which was the vision and the mindset department. I, like- I, like, I call this, like, the visionary department, and this is the space where you as the CEO, right, like, you as the business owner are focusing on yourself, the overall strategy and vision of your company, um, and the future of it all as well, too, and getting education, et cetera, et cetera.

That's where we really nurture you as the CEO, so that way then you can nurture the rest of these departments in your business, right? And I think the answer to the question of which one needs to be optimized most before we actually get into it will be fascinating to you. So, I want you to think of your answer right now while we get into the intro music, and then we'll get back, and you will hear what my answer is, okay? So, if you're ready to get into it, let's go.

What's the tea, friend? My name's Hunter Donia, industry business educator for hairstylists, but my friends just call me Hunty. Whether it be growing your clientele, making more money, or automating and streamlining your systems, in the next 20 minutes or so, you'll be hearing realistic, actionable strategies to create a beautiful career for yourself behind the chair. So if you're ready to get into it, welcome to the Modern Hairstylist podcast.

Okay, you may be thinking, like, what I was thinking, like marketing, because if you don't get a client into the door and if you don't have somebody paying money, then you don't have a business, which kind of makes sense, and it could be argued that that's true. I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer here. You could also argue that the vision, right, like, the mindset of the entrepreneur is the most important part, and that should be taken care of first. My tea is, okay, my tea is, is that your sales and customer experience should be the number one thing that is focused on and optimized first, and that's actually what my mentor shared with us, and I was a little bit surprised by this answer, and the reason why was, th- he explained, and what I have really come to find out in my own business and I even reflected back to my own business behind the chair and noticed that this is actually what I optimized first and probably what led to a lot of my success.

What they shared was, is that if you don't have your sales and customer experience in place, then you have nothing to market, right? So, if you don't have an excellent sales and customer experience process, then you have nothing to be able to advertise, to be able to get new clients into the door. Because your sales and customer experience needs to be absolutely optimized and really excellent to make somebody feel like they can justify spending a certain amount of money with you in exchange for a great experience. And then when it comes to your social content, your copy on your website, um, and just the way that your clients will speak about you and your business to other people, if there's no customer experience in the first place that is actually really great and unique and really optimized and focused on and built out, then there's gon- not gonna be anything special about you, and the perceived value of your services is going to be low.

And so, for the reason of if you focus on marketing first, you wouldn't have anything to bring to marketing because you haven't already first focused on creating an excellent client experience, right? So, that's the first reason. Now, operations. You would think that operations would come a little bit later down the line, maybe even after marketing, right?

So, like, we first get int- get sales int- into place first, and customer experience into place first, and then we get our marketing because now we have something to bring to market. But, in reality, marketing can all too often be the most time-consuming, most painful experience for the entrepreneur. And I'm sure that 99% of the people listening to this, including you, my friend, will agree with me that marketing your business and figuring out how to get new clients into the door and all the actions that it takes to make that happen is probably the most painful and time-consuming part of your business, right? And so therefore, first focusing on the sales and customer experience and then focusing on the operations is really advantageous for you before optimizing the marketing because when you focus on the operations, you're able to streamline and automate and delegate a lot of bullshit tasks off of your plate so that you regain the time and freedom and the energy and white space that you need to be able to actually have the time to go ahead and market your business and focus on optimizing the marketing department.

And that's exactly what we teach within Pre-Visit Pathway. The first section of Pre-Visit Pathway, kind of, like, our signature three-step process with PVP is we first walk you through how to really elevate your client experience to a whole other level in which your pre-visit experience and your in-the-chair experience and even your post-visit experience is completely optimized so that way when y- clients actually come into the door, you're giving them that amazing situation. And then, we take that customer experience that you've created and we streamline the hell out of it. And we make it so your operations are as smooth and well-oiled as possible.

And not just with your customer experience, but also client communication and the way that you're collecting their info, the way that you are scheduling, the way that your pricing works, um, so that way everything can be really nice and smooth across the board. And then, we also set boundaries within those operations, so your boundaries and the way that you make sure that you are as efficient as possible but- and, and still professional, but setting a boundary between you as a CEO and your actual business that also has to do with your operations as well. And so that's the second part of Pre-Visit Pathway because now we have an amazing client experience, we wanna make sure that it's nice and automated, and then the rest of your business that has to do with your admin is also streamlined and organized. So then now you have both your fulfillment and your operations really, really well-oiled, and then you can bring that to the market, and now you have so much time, freedom, and space to then focus on optimizing your marketing, right?

So now you can go all-in on your marketing and very importantly, and I kinda touched on this a little bit, another reason why this is so important to focus on before your marketing is because if you don't have the systems in place to be able to very quickly and conveniently and organizedly communicate with new clients and onboard them and get- respond to them within a very quick, convenient circumstance, and to be able to offer them then a next-level experience and blow them away from the very beginning, then you're going to be wasting any marketing efforts that you make. You're going to be wasting any new potential client requests that you're getting, right? We need to make sure that your new client retention is really nice and high, and your new client acquisition rate, the conversion rates that you have, are very high as well. And the only way we can do that is if your operations are well-oiled and your fulfillment/your sales and customer experience is as optimized as well, too.

Not to mention, with the sales side of things, like I said to you before, we are- what we're taking is, is we're, we're, we are squeezing every dollar out of each appointment, out of each customer that you could possibly get per appointment so that way you are raising your average ticket. It is much, much, much easier for you to make as much money possible with the current clientele that you have than it is to a-acquire a new client. There's a statistic that I've shared on the podcast before about this, and there's actually- it says, like, I think it's, like, eight times more expensive to a, a, a- acquire a new client or something like that, and it's very true not just in the money that you may spend on marketing but the time that you spend on marketing. And so making sure that your sales process is also streamlined and, and automated and delegated as much as possible, systematized as much as possible is very important as well, too, so that way you are offering a consistent client experience that is next level, that will retain that guest, and then simultaneously make it so that guest will be more willing to spend more money with you on top of the base services that they're getting.

That will immediately raise your profit margin exponentially and will make sure that you're making so much money off the bat and getting that client back into the door, not to mention a high average ticket and a high average retail per client.... makes it so you are preparing your client for success in between the visits, right? And you are planting seeds of retention just with those things because you, you're, you know it's an indicator that you have done your job of actually fulfilling that service from beginning all the way through to the end when they get home and then every day that they exist, right? Because now that they...

now they have the tools, they have the education that they need to be able to feel beautiful on a daily basis, and they're reminded of you every time that they're doing their hair, they're using those tools, and every time they get a compliment on their hair as well too, right? And so, the sales, customer experience, and operations side of things, I truly believe is what is most powerful in getting taken care of first because you can market your ass off, right? And you can get a bunch of new client requests, but if you're unable to onboard them and acquire them in the most efficient, quick, convenient, and excellent way possible, and then offer them an amazing client experience where you're fulfilling on the sales and the X- CX side of things, then your marketing goes to waste, right? All the time, the effort, that new potential client that could have been retained, that could have given you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars over a long, beautiful relationship, that all goes to waste, right?

And so there's no point in marketing until you have those two things taken care of first. And that's exactly what we share with you and teach you how to take care of in Pre-Visit Pathway. And then like I said, that is also going to allow you to bring your marketing to the next level because now you actually know what to market, right? Because you're confident in your client experience and your client experience is something is- that is unique in solving different pain points.

Then we get to marketing, right? And optimizing your marketing, yes, it's something that you should be kind of f- like thinking about from the beginning, right? And it- you should have some sort of solid idea on how you're gonna make it happen, but when we get to the step of actually really optimizing your marketing, which also we do at the end of Pre-Visit Pathway in our third section with your website, when we really get into optimizing your marketing, it really gets down to being super systematized and focused on your demographic that you're targeting and how you're gonna target them, what your specialty is, and then the advanced ways of systematically and strategically attracting those people and then focusing on each part of your funnel and tracking the numbers and the conversion rates at each part of that funnel. So you're tracking the awareness, you're tracking the views, where those, where those views are coming from, and then optimizing your presence in each of those channels, tracking those numbers over time, experimenting, seeing how they change, trying new things, staying ahead of the trends, et cetera, et cetera.

And you'll notice with all the things I'm talking about with marketing, you would never have the time, space, or energy to do any of that if your operations weren't first streamlined and all of your low-level tasks as a CEO weren't taken off of your plate first. So again, in Pre-Visit Pathway, we teach you how to automate, streamline, and systematize all of that stuff so that way you can show up big and bad in your marketing and actually put in the effort needed to get new clients into the door, right? So, then your marketing is op- uh, is optimized. Fantastic, great, and beautiful.

Oh my God. I forgot about vision or mindset, right? I actually didn't forget, but that's maybe what you're thinking I- I did, right? The reason I'm waiting until the end to talk about this is because the vision and mindset isn't going to come yet.

Okay? It's not going to come yet. Confidence, the courage, really, uh, solid in your strategy that you're implementing, not having imposter syndrome, being able to even think about the future, all of that stuff only comes with action. It truly only will come with action.

It's only going to come with you embracing your fear, showing up when things don't feel sexy, when things don't feel aligned, when you just know that you have to show up and do the damn thing anyway, that's when the vision and the mindset actually comes into play. Of course, we're working on those things all the time, right? And we're working s- on those things as you're going throughout optimizing each of your departments, right? But the key really is...

And I've... And, you know, this is from my own experience of running my own business for at least five years at this point, and then not to mention the education I've done before that with brand education, and then I've been doing hair for a fricking long time at this point, probably 12 years at this point. At this point, I have gone through enough of my own fearful decisions I had to make, the big risks I had to take, and just showing the hell up and doing the damn thing anyway even if I didn't feel like it to know that if I wasted a bunch of time trying to prepare and get ready for things, than I would have never gotten to the place where I am now I did everything before I was ready. I did everything before I at least felt ready, right?

Or I didn't feel scared anymore, because guess what, honey? The biggest, baddest, scariest things that you can implement, the biggest uncomfortable changes and shifts and innovations that you will make in your life and your business are going to be uncomfortable ones and scary ones, right? Now, I am in a space where now I understand that me focusing on my vision and my mindset and the future of my business is where I need to show up the very most and foremost now. That is where I understand it will bring me the most success and where I can confidently show up on the day to day.

I know that taking a walk and listening to a book and thinking about the future is so freaking important, but I would not be able to do those things clearly with a confident return on investment if it wasn't for me first taking the education I needed to optimize all of those departments first so my business was actually working so I could see results. And the results and that experience has allowed me to make better decisions and actually use the white space that I invest in and I take from, right, wisely at the end of the day. So, I hope that that makes sense, my friend. So when it comes to the four pillars of a scalable business model and each of these departments that you as the hairstylist CEO have to operate within, I encourage you to take a step back..

And look at where you're spending your time. And actually start to compartmentalize each of the tasks that you have in your business into departments so you can get a little bit more focused on the things that may be most important to you right now. So like I said, in Pre-Visit Pathway, we're mostly focusing on your fulfillment and your operations first. We get that stuff taken care of, off of your plate, super streamlined.

You're offering a next-level client experience that nobody in your area could touch, right? And then when you come into our alumni-only group, Modern Stylist Movement, that mastermind that we have, then we focus on optimizing all of your departments, including your marketing, making things better and better and better and more and more advanced, maybe even focusing on your next step in your career as well too if you don't want to just do hair, right? But simultaneously, if you want to just do hair for the rest of your life and just be a badass doing it, we teach you how to do those things as well. So my friend, I hope that this episode was insightful for you.

My actionable step for you is just gonna be plain out honest and real. I have taught a thousand hairstylists and then some how to automate, streamline, and delegate, and optimize each department within their business that I talked about here today. And at the time of recording this and releasing this, we just opened up the doors to Pre-Visit Pathway. So if you are not already a Pre-Visit Pathway alumni, then I highly recommend that you check it out at hunterdonia.

com/pvp. And I would love to work with you to get you to a point where you're creating a scalable business model, where you have more work/life balance, and you're creating a business and working towards a bigger vision that truly grants you the wealth that is possible for you and that you deserve. Okay? And that's on motherfucking period.

Thank you so much for tuning into the Modern Hairstylist podcast. So looking forward to talking with you in the next one. Peace out, girl scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2024 Hunter Donia LLC.