5 Important Lessons In Scaling a Multi-Six Figure Beauty Business

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to The Modern Hairstylist Podcast. This episode is going to be the episode that Hunter a couple years ago really wished that he had. Um, I'm gonna be sharing with you five really important lessons that I learned in scaling a multi-six-figure business.

And this is gonna be for those of you out there who may have been in a space where I was, in which I had created a really strong foundation for myself as far as my beauty business went. I had a strong established clientele. I was getting new client requests on a consistent basis, and I was looking to really scale those efforts as far as my marketing goes, expand beyond that. I was looking to gain back some of my time in my business and in my personal life as well, and I was also looking to start a new endeavor, my education business.

And I knew that this was just more advanced stuff, right? I was in a more advanced space than a lot of hairstylists normally are, and because of that, right, because the majority of people in this industry don't normally get to those spaces, there weren't a lot of resources out there for me. People like me who really needed more advanced, personalized, sophisticated approaches to learn how to actually get to another level, to move to the next level, right? Therefore, it can feel really lonely and can feel really confusing, and sometimes you have to just figure it out yourself, and sometimes that's what I just had to do, was just test, fail, try again, and I had learned a lot of hard lessons along the way, and interesting ones as well, too, that I think that you will definitely find fascinating, particularly if you are in that type of space in which maybe you're considering what your next step is, how you can scale even beyond the success that you've created for yourself now, really evolving to your next level, whether that looks like just continuing with the business that you have now, not hiring, but really figuring out how you can work a very minimal amount but make a lot of money doing it, or that looks like you do wanna hire, whether that looks like for somebody to take over your operations on the backend with your marketing and your client communication, or that looks like you wanna hire a co-stylist or an assistant or you wanna open a business, right, uh, another business that coincides with what you're doing right now.

All of those things require a very different approach than what you have done and learned up until this point. What got you here is not what's gonna get you there, as the saying goes. And so, therefore, this is going to be a great episode for you, my friend. It's gonna be the one I wish I had because there wasn't many things out there that talked about this stuff, and so I hope that it's very helpful for you.

Now, if you are not in that space yet, if you are still getting to a space where you have a stable business foundation and you're still just kind of trying to establish a solid clientele for yourself, then I still think that this episode is gonna be valuable for you because it'll give you a glimpse into what's ahead for you, um, and it'll also give you some takeaways about what I wish that I was not focusing on when I was in your position as well and what I needed to focus on way more later. So, if you are ready to get into it, if you're ready to learn what big business scaling actually looks like and the hard lessons that come with it, then let's get into it. Let's go. Okay, so I think a great lesson to start out with with this conversation is, uh, the boring stuff becomes the most important stuff.

And I wanna just really quickly talk to both audiences here, whether you are in a place where you're still trying to gain some momentum in your business growth or you're in a space in which you really are ready to scale your business, right? So, to those of you who are still just trying to create some momentum in your business, what I'm gonna highly recommend that you do is focus on what moves the needle first. 'Cause when you're just starting out, it's really easy to get caught up in the idea that you need to do everything perfectly from day one and you hear from other coaches and experts and gurus in social media that you need to make sure that you have a trademark for your brand and you need to have an LLC and you need to have a professional bookkeeper and all these things, when in reality, trademarks, advanced bookkeeping aren't the most important parts of your business when you're just trying to create a business in the first place. Like, that stuff can be expensive and time-consuming and distract away from the things that you actually need to be focusing on, such as your marketing strategy to actually get clients into the door and the money that you should be investing into your client experience to be able to create stable momentum, retention, and organic referrals.

And this may be a controversial opinion, I get it. The trademarking and the legal and the bookkeeping and the taxes and the budgeting, it is important, yes, but it is not nearly as important and should not be spent a ton of time or stress around when you're just trying to get your business off the ground in the first place Now, for those of you who are in a space in which you have hit a critical point in which you have created a really strong, stable business for yourself and you have a lot of momentum going on, that is a perfect opportunity for you to start getting that shit together and spending money on professionals. And don't be afraid to spend a fair bit of money on professionals. If they understand your business, your specific type of business inside and out, if they are full service, if they're gonna do your bookkeeping for you, if they're gonna do your tax filing for you, and if they're gonna be doing your financial projections for you and giving you advice, that is the type of person that you want, and you want to be spending money on somebody who you trust, who knows what the hell they're talking about and preferably understands our industry.

That is something that is massively important when you get to this space because it's going to allow you to make strong decisions. Your biggest responsibility and the biggest thing that you will learn is that as you grow a company, as you scale a company, the majority of your time is just spent making decisions. Instead of actually working and executing, it's really making decisions, and you wanna have as much clean data as possible to make those decisions, and clean data goes back to, a lot of the time, your bookkeeping and your financial projections, and you want somebody who's gonna get that together for you. And another lesson that's a part of this conversation is, you wanna be buying back your time as much as possibleAnd so, the really strenuous, stupid little tasks of getting your numbers together, doing your bookkeeping, and organizing those things by category, filing your taxes, that should be handed off to somebody else at this point.

And it's worth handing it off to somebody else at this point, so that you get that time back, you know it's done well, and you can make clean, easy decisions moving forward. And you have an expert who understands your business and the way that your money moves who can give you advice about how you spend that money in the future when you're making big decisions, right? And not to mention, when you're growing a big- a bigger business, maybe if you're starting a new endeavor such as an education company, if you're starting a salon where you have multiple employees, whatever that may look like, then yes, trademarking does become a smart idea. And absolutely doing an LLC becomes a smart idea, and maybe even S corp-ing if you have the profitability to do it.

But when you're in the beginning, this stuff does not- just does not matter as much. But when you are at that space, it absolutely does, and you wanna pay for people to help you who know what they're talking about in making that stuff happen. Period. This stuff becomes very important.

Here's the other part of this when I say the boring stuff becomes the most important stuff, is oftentimes the things that you have to do to scale a business are not fun. The marketing and learning how to post on social media and creating a really cool client experience, although sometimes can be painful, yes, they're sexy. It's sexy stuff to learn. It's things that people will think are fun and creative and cool at the end of the day.

When it comes to the advanced stuff, when it comes to scaling, HR, and all of that, it's really not sexy. It's very boring. It's doing the same shit over and over and over again. It is looking at numbers.

It's learning how to hire and learning how to train and creating SOPs. It is not fun at all. It is very, very, very boring, and it's really easy to get distracted from the things that you actually need to be doing to actually grow the business because of how un-sexy, and also how fucking hard they are. And that brings me to my next lesson, which is when you are getting to a space, a critical point in which you decide that you are ready to scale a business, whatever that may look like for you, you genuinely have to step into a entire new version of yourself.

When I was in a space, in that space, in maybe your space right now, where I really had to make the flip from I'm just focusing on growing the clientele and getting the sales and creating the client experience, and I really had to figure out what my next advance steps and decisions were, it was so humbling for me. Because I had a lot of confidence in my skills. I had a lot of confidence in my business acumen as far as marketing and sales went, and things like that. But it punched me in the freaking face when it came to focusing on how I'm managing and investing my money, when it came to more advanced marketing strategies, when it came to how to hire and fire and have tough conversations, and how to scale that business.

It was absolutely a really uncomfortable thing to do, to evolve into that new hu- new s- version of myself. It was so uncomfortable, it's stuff that I never wanted to do. I almost gave up because of it. And it's just what is essential for you to go through if you want to evolve to your next level.

So, be prepared that uncomfortable things will be required for substantial and significant growth. And it will hit you like a truck. It will hit you out of nowhere, you will not be expecting it. But it is also really beautiful at the same time.

Because as we know, if you're not uncomfortable, you're not growing, right? There's discomfort that you had to go through to get to where you are now, and there's gonna be discomfort that you have to go through to get to where you wanna go All right. So, the next lesson that I wanna talk about here is buying back your time and what you do with that time. And so first off, buying back your time, as I talked about a little bit already in this episode, is massively, massively important, particularly when you start to actually scale a business.

Because you want to be able to have time, space, and energy to be able to focus on the things that actually move the needle forward the most. And you can only do that if your hands are out of the day-to-day weeds of the business, that are just things that are just maintaining it instead of growing it. You guys have heard me talk about this before. And for any of you guys, I teach you how to automate and systematize so you can get as much time back as possible without having to hire somebody else, right?

But at a certain point, if you really wanna buy back a lot of your time, you wanna also start to maybe think about hiring out things so that way you can gain a significant amount of your time back. And that is going to allow you to then leap into next levels of revenue, because you'll be able to focus on just the things and have a lot of time and energy to focus on just the things that grow the business. However, here is what all too oft- often happens, and I am, you know, this is coming from personal experience of doing this, being there and done that, okay? Like I said, this is the episode that Hunter wished that he had a long time ago You have two options.

What, uh, you have two options with what you do with this time when you buy it back. The first option is to take all of that time and reinvest it back into the growth of your business. And then your business will grow substantially if you are focusing on the right things and you know what you're doing. The other option is to take all of this time that you have back and now put it into your personal life and focus on your personal development, and not necessarily into your business.

And of course, you can have a balance of both. I think it's very important to think very critically about how you are spending this time. Because what can end up happening is, is we com- we become very jaded and we prematurely invest too much of this time back into our personal lives, and then we see the consequence of that later. So, for example, let's say you've never had free time in your life and you finally buy back some of your time and you decide that you're gonna take all of that time just to be able to focus back into your personal life, whatever that looks like for you, right?

That is great, fine, and dandy. Like, absolutely go ahead and do that if that is what ali- is aligned for you. I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong here. That's another thing that you'll learn when you're scaling a business.

There is no such thing as right and wrong. It's just making your best educated decision with what you have at that p- at that moment. What will happen is, is let's say that you take all that, you put it only into your personal life, you don't invest any of that back into your business. A year later, your business will not growAnd you even risk the possibility of your growth declining, as far as your opposed revenue, et cetera, et cetera.

Because your absence, where you could have been leaning into opportunities, also maximizing the time that you have now had gone to waste, right? Now, let's say that you spend all of that time that you have gotten back and only invest it into the things that actually grow the business. Then a year from now, your business is most likely going to be growing at a very fast and steady rate, and you're going to be really shocked at how much it actually grows because you were able to finally have that time and energy back to pour into that. And I think there can be an absolutely balanced approach to having the best of both worlds, for sure, but honestly, what I wish I did back in the day, and what I did do sometimes, was spend all of that time just focusing on the business growth because it sets you up for a much more stable space when you do want to reinvest that time back into your personal life.

And the consequences of you spending that time in your personal life aren't as severe, and your growth can still be steady or grow at a faster rate when you have gotten to a point where you hire multiple people, possibly, that are in charge of the growth of your business while you are absent from it. So, long story short, is when you start to buy back your time, just remember that you now have the opportunity to focus on the things that can really get you to your next level, and if you don't spend your time doing that, then it can actually have the opposite effect. And like I said, you can approach it in the most balanced way possible. I don't think there's a right or wrong here.

Just be mindful of how you're making your decisions, and make sure that they're intentional. My next lesson, which is a scary one, probably the scariest one of all, is that you need to take big swings, make big risks, and make big, scary investments sometimes. You inevitably have to do something bigger, uncomfortable, and scary if you want to evolve to another level. Doing the same thing over and over and over again can, yes, give you slow growth, but every minute where you could be growing faster because you were making bigger swings and learning faster, most importantly, you lose out on potential for long-term growth, and you take on even more risk because you're not building a substantial cushion for yourself, right?

So, I don't know if you've ever heard of the saying of, yeah, right now, it may be scary, and there may be risk to the big swing or decision that you're making, but what about the risk of not doing it in the first place, right? That is very, very true, particularly when you are scaling a business. And you get to a point where taking big risks, yes, can be scary, and there is potential of consequence for making the, the, quote-unquote, wrong decision. However, you still have a stable foundation under you that will catch you.

And so, this is the time where, eh, you have to be willing to make bigger swings and to be more hard and fast in the way that you're moving if you actually want to grow at a substantial rate. Now, not to mention, the investments that you make into your business are going to be larger because you want more personalized advice. Because as your business grows, the moving parts of it all become much more nuanced, and so do your goals. Therefore, you start to outgrow one-size-fits-all advice and strategies, and you are better off working directly with a mentor, one-on-one, who has been where you want to go, who understands what it actually looks like to be at your level.

And all too often, that is going to be a much higher investment than your good-old, one-size-fits-all, entry-level education program or mentor, whatever it may be. So, therefore, you need to make big investments. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars for having mentors who are sharing with me what I would need to do at this point to get to where I wanted to go, because they had been where I wanted to go, and they absolutely helped me multiply my income and work through the growing pains of scaling a business and the advanced things that I had to do, and I would not have been able to do it without them. And also, being surrounded by peers who are in the same similar level as me was absolutely essential as well, because I didn't feel alone, and I could gain so much advice from an outside perspective, from people who understood where I was, right?

That is absolutely invaluable, and those are going to be big, scary investments. You're going to be spending more money than you ever had before, and you're going to be spending money on things that you've never spent money on before, maybe such as ads, paid ads, right? And it's scary, and the risks that you're gonna take are big. Even, like, let's say you are gonna be niching down your services, and you're gonna be letting go of a lot of clients or making really large price increases, or making big changes in your schedule.

Like, that stuff is very terrifying, but all too often is the most essential things that you need to do to be able to actually scale a business and get to your next level. Now, my last and final lesson that I wanna share with you today, which I actually believe is one of my biggest factors of my success, personally, is that you no longer are just selling your clients and your customers on the vision and why of your business. You are now selling your team as well on that. And it's very important that you do so intentionally and consistently.

Like, you wanna breathe and live your brand and your why and your core values so that they have as much buy-in as you do and that they naturally trickle that down into your brand and your customers, right? So, many stylists grow from being solo practitioners to then having a team, and all too often, we hear of the stories of people hiring an assistant or a stylist and thinking that they're just there to make them money, or they're not there to actually help them in their growth and development, and they just think about them as something, somebody who's just doing things, right? And so, they don't really focus much on making sure that that person is living and breathing your brand. And what ends up happening is, is that that person is not gonna give a shit about what they're doing with your business or the growth of your business at all, and it's gonna be really hard for you to grow.

But when you have a team who is just as bought in as you, or at least as much as they possibly can be, then really beautiful magic happens. That's when you have somebody who is on your side, who is looking to support you, who is moving and driving the growth of the business with the, with a similar motivation to you, that will actually move the needle forward at such a substantial rate, that you would never be able to accomplish if you're just hiring people to do things for you, and you never focus on, how can I make sure that this person is aligned with this vision and is bought into this mission as well? So, the same way that you sell your mission and what you do every single day to your clients, and even yourself, you want to be selling that to your team on a consistent basis as well. All right, my friend, so those are my five important lessons that I've learned in scaling a multi-six-figure business.

I really hope that you enjoyed them. I hope that you learned something from them. And no matter where you're at in your journey, I hope they give you a glimpse into what you can look forward to in the future. And no matter where you're at in your journey, I am here to support you, and I have resources for you.

If you are particularly in a space in which you are really looking to scale, like you have an established business for yourself, but you're looking at what your what next is, if the same old business advice that's out there is starting to get a little bit generic for you, and you need a more of an, uh, personalized approach, feel free to reach out to me one-to-one. You can reach out to me on Instagram @hairbyhunty or however you wanna reach me, and we can talk about possibly what you have going on and what your goals are and what you like to do. And I can hopefully give you some great personalized advice, because like I said, I wish that there was somebody who I could trust, who was within this industry, who understood where I was at and where I wanted to go, who was willing to give me this advice, right? So, so much love to you.

Hope that you have a blessed rest of your day. Thank you for tuning in to the Modern Hairstylist podcast. Peace out, girl, scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2024 Hunter Donia LLC.