5 Auto-Pilot Ways To Passively Grow Your Clientele

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Modern Hairstylist podcast. I just had the pleasure of attending Texture vs. Race by Keia Artistically Neal down in Baltimore, Maryland, and it was an absolutely amazing experience.

I had the honor and privilege of teaching there alongside so many brilliant, talented, amazing educators, and it was such an amazing time. And, um, one question that we got from a student there was how the hell do I focus on, you know, growing my clientele and growing the business and doing all the responsibilities on top of my full-time job of doing the damn hair? And, you know, if you've been listening to me for a while, if you follow me in any way, shape, or form, then you know that's what I'm all about teaching you. It's I'm all about teaching you how can we make things more streamlined, sustainable, more automated, um, and as easy as possible because I get it.

I understand where you're coming from, you know? I grew up in the era in this industry, in the era where, you know, eh, the standard was a lot higher to grow a clientele. You didn't just wait around and ask your clients to send people in and then you grew your clientele o- like magically, you know? Now, you really have to be posting on social media.

You have to have some sort of digital presence, and there is some real effort that goes into building a really strong foundational clientele and then sustaining that clientele, maintaining them, offering an amazing client experience, et cetera, et cetera. And so because of that, it can be really exhausting and the burnout can be so real. But on the flip side, we love what we do and the impact that we make in our clients' lives every single day is so important to us and the potential that this career has to truly, truly provide tons of wealth for us financially and in time and so much more. That potential goes so untapped because we oftentimes don't lean into strategies that make this more sustainable for us, and so therefore, we get burnt out and we start to consider other options.

Um, we try to skip the hard work and we think... and we try to find a magical solution when that doesn't really exist. And so, when it comes to growing the clientele particularly, I know that social media can be painful sometimes. I know that a lot of the work that goes into it can be painful.

And so that's why today, I'm gonna be sharing with you five different ways that you can, quote unquote, grow your clientele on autopilot. Now, of course, some of these things are going to, um, be things that you have to definitely put work into setting up, but then a lot of them will do the thing for you pretty passively along the way. Some of them, you have to put a little bit of effort and maintenance into every now and then, of course, right? Just like anything in your business.

But these are things that don't require much consistent active effort after you get them set up. So if you are looking for cool ways to make growing your clientele more sustainable, then let's 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. All right, my friend, I'm excited to give you all five of these tips and strategies today.

I just wanna first off say, you know, you cannot skip the foundational marketing work that you have to do as a business owner in order for you to grow an effective ideal clientele. Truly, there is foundational work and education that is so important that we teach in Chief Marketing Hairstylist that will really lay down the groundwork for each of these to actually take off for you. I would have never been able to grow my clientele to three and a half months book solid with five new client requests a week if I didn't understand the fundamentals of marketing and how that relates to how I can actually grow a business that I freaking love with clients that I love behind the chair. And so, you know, i- if you're trying to just get a, a free pass, right, and if you're trying to skip that foundational work, it's gonna be really difficult for you to make any strategies work, right?

So if you haven't done that groundwork and you feel like you're just... ye- nothing is working and all these tips and tricks that, um, you're hearing about and posting on social media isn't working for you, maybe we have to go back to the basics. And oftentimes, I find hairstylists do not do a good enough job and a diligent enough job using real data and feedback and proven marketing theory to really make sure that those foundations are set in place. So just make sure that you do some self-reflection because, you know, I can share with you all of these amazing strategies, but none of them are actually going to work if you don't have those foundations in place.

So in Chief Marketing Hairstylist, my short, easy-to-implement program to get you set up with marketing foun- foundations and fundamentals, that's available all the time at hunterdonia.com if you wanna check it out. But without further ado, let's get into this. So the very first thing that I'm gonna share with you is making sure that your search engine optimization is as optimized as possible.

So we call that SEO. And this goes for your website. So you should have a website and we'll be talking about that in just a moment. You should have a proper website that is hosted on a website host platform that's not your booking site.

And within that website, there sh- you should be strategically using that website and maximizing the search terms within that website so that you naturally show up in Google searches and in Google My Business searches as well. So that way, you are more likely to be stumbled upon. That is the entire point of SEO, is that you are more likely to be found when s- when, eh, there is somebody within your area trying to find a hairstylist, right? We have passive marketing, marketing and active marketing.

Active marketing are the efforts that you make to put yourself in front of people and it's very deliberate, where passive marketing is making it so if you have somebody who is interested in services already, that you are an option that shows up first and foremost, um, and that you are able to be found in the first place. I find that this is something that people miss out on a lot. I get this question to this day and it drives me up a wall because people don't think about social media literally enough.People will ask me, "Are hashtags still relevant?"

And I'm like, "Abso-fucking-lutely, yes." You should be using all 30 hashtags on every single one of your posts, and they should be strategic to what your ideal client will be searching in their search bar, local to your area. Because why would you not use every single opportunity that you can to make it so you are more likely to be stumbled upon, right? Like, I, if I'm looking for some...

If your client, if your ideal client is looking for a hairstylist in your, in their area and Instagram is their preferred platform to be able to find a hairstylist, which nowadays it very much is for a lot of people, then that person is gonna search those terms, search certain terms in their search bar in Instagram. And if you don't have that, if you don't have those terms under a hashtag or something like that, then you're not going to pop up in that search and they're gonna find somebody else who is s- being smart and taking advantage of that and optimizing their SEO on that digital platform. Likewise with if they're doing a Google search and they're gonna find a website, et cetera, et cetera. So make sure that across all platforms where you're present, where you have a digital presence, where you could be discovered, that you're using search terms that will make it likely for you to be found.

And you can very easily figure that out. We do it by doing real data, uh, research w- and getting, uh, real feedback from actual clients, um, and I teach you how to do that within my programs. The next thing, and we, I touched on this for a second, was you need a website, okay? I taught...

I have tons of podcast episodes about having a website. Websites can do so much heavy lifting for you to grow your clientele on autopilot because they can have all of the copy and really exemplify your expertise and build all the trust that you need it to to make somebody actually want to take the next step with you, right? There are people who may w- may have needed to have a conversation with you, or needed more convincing, or needed a friend who has gone to see you to tell them that you are trustworthy. But if you have a website that they could go on and you've done a really good job at knowing how to speak to that person, and the copy on your website, the visuals on your website, the way that you set it up, you've really set up a curated journey.

If you set up that journey correctly, then that can do the heavy lifting for you and it truly can convert your ideal potential clients into ideal butts in your chair. So making sure that you have a website in the first place, and then also making sure that that website is strategically set up with great marketable and sales copy, and it has a beautiful journey, and has one call to action, um, can be really powerful for growing your clientele on autopilot. The next thing, and this is a really cool strategy that we teach within my program, Previs A Pathway, at the time of recording this, um, is a client-only salon app. Now this client-only salon app is something that I teach hairstylists to set up for completely free, um, and it's really freaking awesome and nobody has to, like, go to the fricking app store to download it or anything like that.

And it's really easy to set up, truly, and you can do such beautiful, cool things with it. But with a client-only salon app, you can have your clients, right, have this app on their phone. And I teach my students how to set up a little, like, referral program QR code all within the app so that way if they're... if one of your clients is walking around in the wild and they're talking to a friend or a family member or whatever it may be, they get asked about their hair, you come up in conversation, um, that person's looking...

thor- their friend is looking for a new hairstylist, they can easily pull up your app and they know that there's an incentive for them being able to send people to you, right? Um, and so therefore, uh, that person can very easily share that information at any time wherever they are, right? You wanna make it as easy as possible for your clients to send people to you. And giving them a digital asset such as that where they can very easily not just, you know, share th- your information with other people, but also do business by themselves without you, can be very powerful from the marketing side and the operational side.

So a client-only salon app can be really, really helpful because then you're having your clients do the work for you, right? And it's super passive and you really don't have to do much there. Another thing that we can talk about a- and, uh, we talk about incentives with the client-only salon app, right, is a what we like to call a brand ambassador program. Referral programs nowadays suck.

They don't work the traditional way that we normally have done it where, like, you send one client, you get $20 off your next service or 20% off your next service, whatever it may be. That stuff does not work. The classic asking your clients to send people to you is d- it just does not work. That is not how we work as human beings nowadays.

If somebody asks me to tell people to go to somebody, it feels forceful, it feels, uh, inauthentic almost. Somebody is not going to prompt their friend and family to go to somebody unless they, that person truly needs it. And so they are more modern ways that we can take the concept of a referral program and actually turn it into, um, something that it actually works and something that your clients actually want to take part in. So incentivizing your clients to talk about you, but in more modern ways through social media channels, taking very specific actions and then rewarding them for those specific actions not necessarily based upon if you actually get a referral or not is how I recommend that you go about putting some sort of referral program into place.

I teach really deeply about how to set up that program within Modern Stylist Movement, which is our PvP alumni only program, um, and it's been really cool to see our stylists take it and run with it because genuinely, like, once you have this thing set up, you genuinely do not really have to do much with it. You may have to remind your clients about it every now and then, but, um, they, they... it literally, it just incentivizes those clients to just do the really large things that make the biggest impact. Like your clients, your clients that you have in your chair right now have the ears of so many people in your local area, so many ideal people in your local area.

And as we've moved into this age of digital marketing and just marketing and consumer behavior in general, people are just so untrusting of everyone nowadays that is directly marketing to them. And so therefore, when you can have a trusted source post on a social media platform about you, that is really magical. And to incentivize that and, like, set up a platform where it's very easy for both parties to manage those things, you as a business owner and for the client to be able to redeem those incentives, then really magical things can happen. And that is a very hands-off thing that you can set up and have work for you in the back end.

So, um, using your clients to get more clients into your chair is super, super, uh, there's a lot of potential there, right? But making sure that we're tapping into the poten- that potential in the most modern and, um, effective ways possible is super important to focus on. And I think the, the ways that we've traditionally focused on that in the past just unfortunately aren't working for us anymore, and that's why I love sharing the brand ambassador program strategy within my programs for my students. Um, I think it's, p- personally, I know I'm biased, but personally I think it's a really, really cool way about going about it.

Um, the next thing is having a ex- excellent customer experience. Now I know that this is, you know, classic, but there's a lot of different subcategories of this strategy, of having an excellent customer experience. Number one, of course, make it sh- make s- make it so your in-the-chair experience is excellent. And this does not just mean having a scalp massage for every single visit now, um, or having a thorough consultation every single visit.

Those things are things that should have been done anyways. Those things are not things that are gonna set you apart from other salons in your area. Um, a personalized experiences, that is what blows clients' minds. I cannot tell you the amount of people, the amount of testimonials that we get from my students, and the testimonials I've gotten from my own clients, and the referrals I've got from my own clients from having a such a personalized experience, a modern personalized experience for every single one of our clients.

Truly, it will make people talk. You want your clients to be talking about you. And the way that you get your clients to talk about you is by having a client experience that absolutely blows them away that makes it like it's something to talk about, right? You don't tell your friends, um, you don't gawk to your friends about an experience that you just had that you know that they've probably already had too, because it's a boring piece of conversation, right?

But if you've just experienced something super unique and something that absolutely blow your mind, you, you, that blows your mind, you're gonna wanna share that with everybody, right? And then the person who's actually listening to it is gonna be super intrigued as well. That's gonna be more likely to get you referrals into your chair. And so the way that we teach personalized experiences and the way that we implement those things within behind the chair and what we teach in Prévis as a pathway for people to set those things up truly will set you apart and make it so that client experience isn't just the same old luxury, amazing experience that salons claim to have nowadays.

It truly will make your clients actually wanna talk about you and send more people your way. Plus, it'll allow you to charge higher prices because they can see the value in what you're delivering because you're not just delivering the hair. You're also delivering a true reprieve and one that is customized and tailored well to every single one of your clients. Not to mention with customer experience, um, the in-the-chair experience is absolutely so important.

Um, another thing that could go for in the chair experience, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go off about this. I'm gonna talk about so many different things with this. There's so many things to cover. With the in-the-chair experience, um, also making sure that you're actually delivering great results.

I mean, uh, we forget about this. I think we've gotten really obsessed with the business side of things, which is so freaking important obviously, but we cannot forget about your technical skills. Like truly, like if you are having people who are not coming back to see you, and, and/or if you're getting a lot of redo requests, like an abnormal amount, you really should take a step back and you should be looking at your strategy and, and your technical skills. And maybe you need to take a class, particularly if you're independent and you don't have many people around you who you can compare your work to and people who can give you constructive criticism within reason, right?

With kindness, of course. Then it may be difficult for you to have, to be able to really get good perspective of whether your work is really great or not Or if you can be d- uh, confidently delivering those results. I mean, especially if these are newer services like extensions, right? Like, I really wanna make sure that everybody has really great technical skills.

And I think especially with this new generation of hairstylists coming in, people are just skipping through hoops nonstop, um, and cutting corners a lot. And, um, I think it's really important that we go back to the basics sometimes of just being un- u- understanding how to really deliver great hair and the results that people are actually looking for. Um, and that also goes into communication skills, not just technical skills. People, uh, 95% of the industry will say that they have a consultation with their clients every single time, and like 5% of clients will say that's true.

I promise you. There's actually a real statistic about that, um, that I don't remember off the top of my head, but it's something like that, where the majority of hairstylists say that, "Yes, I have a thorough consultation with my clients every single time," and then the very small minority of clients actually say that that's true. The me- the majority of clients do not feel as if we as an industry are doing a good enough job of actually communicating thoroughly and making them, and making sure that both the stylist and the client are on the same page. So make sure that that consultation is really good so that you're delivering those results, and make sure your technical skills are good so those results are actually great, right?

And they, they make your client actually wanna come back and talk to their friends about you. Not to mention, making sure a part of delivering those results that will get you clientele on autopilot is making sure that you are truly equipping your client to feel good about their hair every single day I know this is old school advice, but it's so fundamental and important. If your client is walking around super confident and loving their hair and their hair looks beautiful, right, from an objective perspective, then they are naturally going to get asked more about their hair. And they're go- and you are naturally going to get more referrals, right?

If your client is truly walking around every single day with a hair, with hair that they love and hair that other people will perceive to be beautiful, then you are going to naturally going, you're naturally going to get more referrals. And that goes into not just the education and teaching that person how to do their hair at home in a way that makes sense for them, in a way that they'll actually do it, but also sending them home with the correct retail recommendation as well, right? Because we know how important that is as well tooLast thing when it comes to customer experience... See, these are, like, bonuses 'cause I'm giving you a ton of strategy here.

The last thing when it comes to customer experience that can grow your a- clientele on autopilot is a really excellent pre-visit experience and post-visit experience. In the pre-visit experience, even if it's a new client for their first visit, you can get your new clients so excited about their hair appointment, sharing about yo- your, your pre-visit experience, b- even before they come into the door with their friends, which will get their friends and their family even more intrigued and more nurtured and more trusting and excited to try you even before that person even has their first appointment with you. So, setting yourself apart in that way, in a way where, you know, again, in the chair experience, like, there's tons of things we can do to set yourself apart and make it something that's worth talking about, absolutely. But in the pre-visit experience and post-visit experience, it's almost foolproof that the majority of the industry is not taking advantage of the opportunities that you have to nurture and blow away your client in those spaces, right?

So you are, we are losing the opportunity to really impress our people within those, within those, uh, parts of the experience. In the pre-visit experience, we teach our students how to send a welcome email sequence that gets the client to feel much more comfortable, gets them to be excited to come to see you, gets them to know you and vice versa a little bit more. So that way everybody is really excited and has good expectations when they walk into the door, and it absolutely blows away, um, our students' clients. We get beautiful testimonials about that all the time.

And then in the post-visit experience, sending personalized post-visit follow-ups. Um, ones that are really nice and, um, thorough and set the client up for success in between the appointments, right? Um, that also goes into email marketing, et cetera, et cetera. And I said these were all on autopilot.

Those things can be very low maintenance and super automated and very easy to maintain, like, truly, like, they can be... I mean, especially the pre-visit experience. We teach people how to set up a pre-visit experience that is completely hands-off and automated, like, truly a click of a button and all of it is taken fo- taken care of for you. And even with the post-visit experience, as personalized and customized as it is for every single client every single time, it takes you less than a minute to be able to send a very extensive and thorough and beautiful post-visit experience that will blow your client away.

And also ask for more Google My Business reviews and referrals, et cetera, et cetera, things that will grow your business on autopilot, right? So you'll notice a lot of the things that I shared with you today, they are things that have to do with ta- y- taking advantage of the clients that you have now. Those are your largest assets. And all of these things are things that are very low maintenance to set up and/or once you set them up, it's very easy to maintain and implement them as you move forward.

Um, and I teach all of them within my programs. So, if you want to check out what we have to offer, if you want, if you have a difficult time sustaining all of the responsibilities that you have on your plate, but you still want to be a business owner and you understand the importance of the business, but the tasks just seem so overwhelming to you, I highly recommend that you check us out at hunterdonia.com. I highly recommend that you check out Pre-Visit Pathway.

We're about to open up the doors at the time of recording this right now, very, very soon. If you're listening during a time where we are closed for enrollment, then you can still go to hunterdonia.com/pvp and get on the wait list. But, my friend, I promise you, these things can truly bring you m- much peace and so much energy and time back into your life and be very great complements to the active efforts that you still should be taking to grow your clientele.

These aren't gonna completely, um, uh, grow your clientele for you, you know, without you having to do any effort at all. However, they are going to make your efforts that much stronger, and they're going to make it so you don't feel like you have to be on and doing things all the freaking time, um, and exhausting yourself and burning yourself out. So, I hope that this episode was helpful for you, my friend. I would love to help you get set up with all of these things if you are willing to commit to them.

So much love. Peace out, girl scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2024 Hunter Donia LLC.