Generic Business Advice Might Be Sending You In The Wrong Direction

I had three conversations with stylists recently that made me realize that a lot of us will hear something from an expert or a peer and then immediately start to spiral about it and assign it to be the main thing that they need to fix or change. And all too often, it is not actually the main thing that needs to be changed, or there needs to be nothing done about it at all, uh, particularly when you are in a space in which you are doing very well in your business overall. Because when you hit the 100K-plus mark as a hair stylist, you are normally in a space in which the one-size-fits-all advice no longer applies to you. It may be what got you there, but it's not what's going to get you beyond that, because your numbers are now much more nuanced.

You have a lot more volume to work with. You have a lot more of a baseline of your own to work with instead of having to rely on the industry's and other people's baselines to get you to where you are now. The game now changes to making your own decisions for your own business. And so, the advice that even may- maybe I will say on this podcast, or the things that I warn you about, may not always apply to you based upon your own unique business.

And that's why I'm always trying to caveat with nuance as much as I possibly can while trying to speak to hundreds, if not thousands, of stylists about one topic, right? Uh, and trying to make sure that everybody's included. But at the end of the day, that's just not possible. And so, I think it's very important that you have, like, somebody like me who can have a second set of eyeballs on what you are talking about or what you're thinking about, look at your numbers, cut through the BS and figure out, like, what actually is it right now that is the main priority that you should not be distracted from.

And also, that you are developing your own understanding of your own numbers and wh- how that can kind of cut through a lot of the BS that you may hear, or how you may be able to really understand if the advice given to you or the ideas that you have are actually relevant and important for you to listen to right now. So, this is all coming up because I do a lot of, like, private conversations with- with my stylists, because I feel like, you know, if I'm going to be a mentor, I have to actually know what the hell is going on in your business. And I love how these conversations, first off, educate me about a lot of the things that, uh, are going on in the industry overall. I love how they give me ideas that I can furthermore support other stylists with.

Um, and I also love being able to get people out of their fricking heads. And a lot of the times, it's really difficult to do that, uh, outside of a one-to-one. But I had three conversations recently in which this was the case, in which we may have heard some sort of advice, whether it be from me or somebody else, uh, and I could tell how much it was, like, infecting their decision-making and their focus and their business. And I was like, it- it actually ended up being something that is totally not relevant and that you actually should be focusing in a different space.

So, I'm excited to bring out to you these three conversations that I had today. Maybe it can help you self-reflect a little bit, whether you've had these situations or, adjacently, you're re- recognizing, "Hey, I've been really focusing in this one area, but it actually could be this other thing." So, I'm excited to share them with you today. First, I'm gonna pass it over to Jodi so she can take the lead and position me to give you a great episode today, 'cause I can't do it myself, 'cause I'm helpless and I'm ADHD.

So, what's up, Jodi? How are you? I am so good, my friend. I'm happy to dive into this today.

I think that one of the hardest things once you get to a certain level of business is discerning the most helpful place to put your energy. 'Cause it's not like when you first get started and you have all this time and you have all this drive and you have all this energy. You're running a whole ass business that's successful, and plus you're trying to keep moving that needle forward. So, I feel like learning where to focus your time and learning how to discern whether something is actually a problem in your business is gonna be super, super helpful.

Yeah. And your time just becomes so much more valuable. You only have so much of it. So, where you focus it is going to be super, super important.

So, first example. I have a private coaching person who is grossing 350- 315K working two days a week without extensions. Okay? She has two as- two assistants, granted, so now you're probably listening and you're like, "Oh, that makes sense."

But that's a shit ton of money for two days a week, no? And she's- Mm-hmm. actually on track this year to make 350K, which is wild, okay? She and I just planned a price increase for her, and I would say it's more than just a cost of living or cost of goods increase.

So, my definition of a cost of goods increase is probably, like, $5 to $10. It's more than that, but it's nothing, it's not nothing crazy. It's, like, it's, like, probably, like, $15 overall, all right? And so, that type of, that type of increase, and for anybody, whatever type of increase, the amount m- of, of money that will additionally make you greatly varies between the amount of volume that you are doing behind the chair.

So, for example, if somebody is doing 20 clients a day versus somebody else who's doing five clients a day, a $5 increase across the board greatly changes how much more money you'll make with that increase for the 20 clients a day versus the five clients a day, right? 'Cause you're multiplying by the amount of appointments that you're doing. So, if you're doing a small amount of volume, a small amount of appointments every single day, a smaller increase is not gonna make nearly much, as much of a dent as if you're doing a lot more. Then it actually can make a lot more of a difference for you.

And so, because this person is working two days a week, she works with a lot of assistants, she's taking a ton of clients per those, just those two days, they, eh, even, like, eh, even, like, a $15 increase makes a massive difference in her income. And the really beautiful part about that is that because it's not a huge increase, her retention stays pretty high, right? And because, of course, I mean, to get this booked and busy, to be at this space, you have to be giving your clients a great experience, you have to be a skilled technician, and you have to create a great relationships with these people. So then that's very much on your side where your retention must be very high as well.

And this person's new client retention, when we calculate it, is also very high. And so with all that context considered, what we were concerned about, and what we're a lot-- a lot of the time concerned about being fully booked, is you always have to have new clients coming in the door, right? Like, and I, of course, share this with you guys all the time. I may have even shared it with you recently, with a recent podcast episode that's coming out.

Here's where the nuance should be considered. There is absolutely business models in which you can greatly increase your revenue year over year without having to rely on thinning out your book to make room for new clients who will then pay those higher prices. This is a perfect example of that, where the increases are actually not, they don't have to be as large in order for you to make huge jumps in your revenue, because you are taking so many appointments, right? And so this person was very concerned about the fact that she oftentimes cannot get new clients into her book at a reasonable time, and so because of the advice I give, and a lot of other industry experts will give about always having to make room for new clients, she was very concerned about the fact that these smaller increases were not going to make that space and room.

And so then my response is, "It doesn't matter. You are not capped by that." You, you are able to increase your revenue significantly in spite of the fact that, and stay fully booked, uh, in spite of the fact that you can't fit those new clients in. Right.

And so at the end of the day, there's no problem, right? There's no issue. However, maybe that causes different issues. And so maybe that would not be changed by a price increase.

So, like, if the issue is not necessarily that you're worried about being able to increase revenue with new clients, right, maybe it becomes a, "My loyal clients can't get in with me, and that's causing frustration within my clientele, that causes administrative stress," right? And so then therefore, we look at operationally and structurally, how do we need to change things otherwise to fix those other issues, right? But the issue here was, the misconcepted issue, I guess you could say, is, "I wanna be able to, I've always been told that if I can't fit in new clients, then my business is failing." But when you actually ask the question, "Why, and how is this advice relevant to me?"

And with all nuance considered, "Is this actually something that's a problem for me?" For this person, it actually doesn't have to be, and we can take a deep breth- we can take a breath and a sigh of relief, and be excited about the fact that we can be fully booked, not have to do massive increases. And the fact that when you do these increases, your s- your clients still stick with you, and you can raise revenue year over year pretty significantly without having to do a crazy amount of work, and without having to get a ton of new client requests all the time either, which I think is pretty badass and cool. Yeah, that is cool.

So, what are your thoughts, Jodi? No, I think that's so true, and I think, again, what it comes down to is, like, instead of listening to the projection of, like, "Oh, this is what could happen," thinking about it and applying it to your exact situation. Like you said, if, if that issue is not coming up, if it's not happening, therefore that tells you it's not an issue that you need to fix, even though it may be in someone else's business. And now a word from our sponsors.

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Like, that advice will apply to the majority of individuals, but when you have a more unique circumstance, and all too often, again, when you've gotten to the 100K mark, you have, you must have a more unique circumstance that has gotten you to that point, or that has, or you have now created one. So, like, if you're a more niche-ed down stylist, which oftentimes very much brings you to 100K, if you are doing, like, crazy amount of volume, uh, if you're doing a, a, a super-interesting service, whatever it may be, like, those things bring that unique nuance, and those things are oftentimes when you're different, you oftentimes will succeed differently, and then therefore you'll be very successful. And so that one-size-fits-all advice is for the person a lot of the time that is going to, th- uh, for the person that is not there yet. Now that you're there, you need to think about things more critically.

And I'll leave it at that. I had to really deprogram... the, all three of these people. I had to, like, really, like, pull people back, like, to earth, you know, and, like, show people, like, the actual truth about their own situation.

Yeah. Well, there is- And the second is- ... an exception to every rule. Go ahead.

Oh, I just said there is an exception to every rule, right? 100%. And, and, yeah. And there's no rules in business.

Mm-hmm. Like, there really isn't. Like, any entrepreneur, like, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Like, that's the whole point of you owning the business, you know?

The second example of this, this was very much my own doing. I had just recently, uh, I've recently been talking about SEO and how freaking important SEO is and how it's, like, the magic, it's, like, j- and it's just, especially right now, it's increasingly so becoming, like, massively, massively, like, a cheat code for people. Mm-hmm. Okay?

Especially if you do it right, if you understand the nuance. Right. That's the magic word of the day. If you understand the nuance of it, um, if you understand what's working right now, it is genuinely, like, a really, really, really badass thing to get into, um, and to really optimize.

So recently, I had the client experience glow up party, was talking about SEO a lot, got on the phone with this, uh, one salon owner who is getting, who, who was sharing with me that she feels as if her salon should be more booked up than it is. Okay? So she's like, "I have this curly salon. We have a ton of followers on Instagram, we're posting consistently.

We, uh, uh, get a bunch of requests online." And I was like, "Well, how many requests are you getting?" She's like, "10 a day." Oh my God.

So she's, like, s- coming to me and she's like, "Well, I think maybe, like, if we had better SEO, then maybe we'd be more booked up." I'm like, "How many of those 10 clients are booking an appointment with you?" Mm-hmm. And she's like, "Definitely not as many as we would like.

Like, we get ghosted a lot of the time." And I'm like, "Well, there's your fucking issue." Mm-hmm. Like, just because I'm talking about how important SEO is does not mean that that's your, that should be your main priority or that it will be the fix to your current circumstance and what you're experiencing, right?

Like, of course, this may be something that you should definitely look at and we can get into place, but it's definitely not your number o- it should not be your number one priority and it won't be the fix for the problem, right? There's, like, the concept of, and I've, uh, shared this before on the podcast and I've shared it with my students before, but, like, there's, there is, there is the right problem and the right way to fix it, or there's the wrong problem and the wrong way to f- to, to fix it. And there's, like, four different variations of how you could go about that. You could, you could know what the right problem is, so you know- Mm-hmm.

what the problem is, but you're going about the fix the wrong way. Right. Or you are, you are thinking that you have this issue, right, so you have the wrong problem and you are doing it the right, you're fixing it or approaching it the right way. So, like, maybe you think that the client experience is the problem when actuality it's your marketing.

So you're making this amazing client experience, but nothing in your business growth is changing. It's like because you're focusing on the wrong department, right? So that was kind of similarly with this situation, it's like marketing is not the issue. You are getting ten new clients a day.

Where we are actually needing to fix things is the sales and client experience department of things. It's the conversion of all of these, and operational. It's the, it's the conversion of these requests, ten a day. Do you know how much I could do with that?

Yeah, no kidding. It's so insane how, like, I hear this all the time, like, how, like, people will get tons of leads and the leads aren't converting. Right. It's like obviously you've done something right to get them there.

How much of a waste is it- Yeah. that they're not moving over, you know? Yeah. And so then I looked and saw, like, what they were doing right now, and I was like, duh, like, no wonder we're not converting.

Like, there's so many more things that we could do to make this so that way more of these people are actually converting to butts in the chair. And so SEO is not the priority. The website is not the priority. It's the what are we doing, what happens after somebody finds you and after somebody requests you where the disconnect is happening, and how can we get more of those people to actually follow through with sitting in the chair?

Yeah. Love that. My third example, this one kind of disheartened me the most out of all of these. This person, 'cause this was not my doing.

This was not me, this was, I'm not taking responsibility for this one. Somebody came onto a call with me and was like, "Um, I've done a lot of business education. I listen to all these podcasts," like, yada yada yada. Um, "And I'm excited to be working with you.

I really like your approach," blah, blah, blah. "I want you to look at my brand and I want you to tell me what you think of it and if you think it's speaking to the person who I have defined as my ideal client." And I was like, "I don't even need to see the brand." Like, I don't, like, I'm not in the business of, like, looking at your brands.

Like, I'm in the business of seeing, like, especially if we're trying to see if it's something's good or not, right? I'm in the business, first off, if, if, if we are... I'll look at the brand if I actually think that there's a problem with the brand, right? Right.

Like, I was, I'll, I will actually then go and look at the brand. I'll analyze it. I'll see what the T is. But if you're just asking me for shits and gigs, like, if the brand is good or not, right, I don't, that's, it's a waste of time.

Right. Unless we actually think or know or are hypothesizing that the brand is an issue. Right. So I'm like, "Before we even look at it, are you getting new client requests right now?"

Yes. She's getting, like, seven to ten a, a month. And I said, "Are they ideal people?" She said, "Yes, most of the time."

I'm like, "So then there's no brand issue." Like, that's your answer right there. She was like, "Well, like, I heard recently, like, if I made a brand that, uh, I had myself in mind or that I liked the brand, but it wasn't my clients who liked the brand, then it'd be an issue." And I'm like, "Well, your clients obviously like the brand.

You're getting the ideal person, so, like, what's the fucking issue?" Like, just because you inherently created a brand that you like does not mean that your clients won't like it. Exactly. A lot of the time, the people that you work with the best are going to be the people who are gonna vibe with what you like too.

Yeah. And that is not necessarily th- that ... And here's ... This is, this is like, the whole point of this, this is very meta almost, like, just 'cause I said that does not mean that you should create a brand that you like.

Like- Yes. Like, it's like, it's completely like, it dep- it completely depends on who you are and who you're trying to target. For example- Yep. my brand, honestly, is not one that I really fuck with myself.

Like- Right. I ... Do ... I like it.

I enjoy it. I think it's aesthetically pleasing. I do like ... My eye is, is, is, is attracted to it.

But it's not what I as a actual, in my personal life, consumer would be fucking with. Right. That's fine. That's great.

That's dandy. I also know people who have a really cool brand that is very much them, who they are finding clients who are, who are very ideal to them. And so there's no right or wrong. It's just like- Right.

is it working? Was it intentional? Is it strategic? Or not?

Mm-hmm. And in this situation, it's working. The numbers are there, so there's no issue. Like, I get the question all the time, I hear the question all the time, "How often should I be rebranding or consider reconsidering my brand?"

And I'm like, "As little as possible. As little as possible." Like, that's the whole point of a brand. Like, do you remember recently, Cracker Barrel?

Don't know if you saw this, Canadian Jody. I don't know if you're, uh, so- Oh, my God. So Cracker Barrel is this, like ... I don't even know how to fucking explain it.

It's, like, this farm style, western-y, woody restaurant chain, okay? Mm-hmm. They recently took some branding out of it? Mm-hmm.

That ... And it, it felt a little bit more general. I feel like maybe they were trying to, like, modernize the brand or something like that. People freaked the fuck out.

Like, everybody was freaking out, and everybody was very upset. And it was just not T. Like, and it w- and, and it really did, like, strip away a lot of, like, the personality that, like, made Cracker Barrel, like, what it is. Mm-hmm.

And so it's a great example of, like, people already are bought into your brand as of right now, right? If your numbers are working, like if you're booked and busy, like if you got into a good space, your brand is working as it is right now. Why are you trying to eff with it? Because now people are associating their ideas and everything like that with what you've already created.

Yeah. And disrupting that is not very ... It's not exciting. It doesn't feel comfortable to the psyche, like from a primal perspective.

Like, human beings really enjoy consistency. They like to be able to expect things. They don't love surprises, and it does feel very against the grain. And so you shouldn't be just changing your brand just 'cause you feel like it or just because somebody said, "Oh, in today's day and age, having a really next level polished brand that is not just what you like but what your ideal clients are gonna like," just because you hear that does not mean that all of a sudden it's time to change your brand.

There's probably another part of your business that needs to be fixed or optimized and that your numbers will actually tell you is the case, versus just this random thing that you're working on 'cause it's like you are convinced to do it or you are, are shiny objecting and you just don't know what else you should actually be doing right now. Yeah. So true. I think it's, it's really interesting.

It's like diagnosing the problem is half of the solution. It's like if we- Oh, yeah. can't figure out exactly what it is that's, that is causing the issue that's manifesting, it's very, very difficult. And it's easy, I think, especially as, like, creatives, like, we're very artistic as hairstylists, like, we would rather it be something that's fun to work on.

Um, and all of that stuff's important. Like, your brand is important, but if you are getting the result that you want from your marketing, then it's very unlikely to be the problem just because someone, like you said, you saw it on Instagram that it's something you should be working on. Yeah, I think it's ... I, I completely agree.

And I love that you said that, like, figuring out what the actual right problem is is half of the solution. I completely agree, because then it does become very simple. Yeah. I think what ends up happening is, like, one of two things, is the you don't know what you don't know, so you don't know, you don't keep track of your numbers, you don't know how to read your numbers, you don't know how to h- how to have a educated guess or a educated theory about what's actually going on.

And I think that the second thing is maybe in your gut, you do know what's, you actually have to do, but it feels uncomfortable or it feels boring so you don't do it, right? Um, uh, uh, and you avoid that at all costs. And we all want these, like, magic bullet solutions. Like, we'll be sold that, like, the brand is exactly ...

If you just change the brand, like, it changes everything else in the business, and that's just not true. Like, you have so many different levers that you need to be pulling and maintaining, so many different fires that you'll always be wanting to put out, so many jagged edges that you'll want to refine and round out. Like, throughout the entirety of your business, for the lo- for the lifetime of your business, there will always be more to do, there's always gonna be more that you could or should do. And what truly ...

Like, if you wanna strip all of that away, if you wanna strip all of your overthinking away, if you wanna strip away, like, the fog that we get lost into as entrepreneurs, and I very much ... This is affects me every single fucking day. I mean, Jody has been having to hear me ... Ugh, I feel.

I always says, I don't understand how Jody deals with me. I really don't. I really don't. I, I've been like, I, I'm, I'm in my own death spiral right now and Jody has to hear me and, and, like, going through my fucking fog in my brain of, like, being so disillusioned in my business, because I'm an entrepreneur.

Mm-hmm. When you strip all that away, if the goal is make more money, make my business easier, more efficient, a lot of the time the answer's actually really simple. It's like, look at these three numbers. If we just get all these three numbers up, we figure out the strategy for each of them, you will make more money, you will make things easier.

Like, truly it can be that simple. But it's about the diagnosis and how you actually go about it and understanding the numbers, knowing how to read them. That's exactly what I help my mastermind people go through right now on a very personal, uh, uh, and consistent basis. So if you are in that space right now where you've hit a point in which you're like, "I really don't know what the next best step is for me to be able to grow beyond this," which is oftentimes what comes up in that type of space when you're ready for something like mastermind, then go ahead and shoot me a DM, and I would love to chat with you, my friends.

Make sure that you take everything with a grain of salt. Look at, like, self-reflect on, is this actually relevant to me right now? And is there proof or disproof that I can find to be able to validate or invalidate if this is relevant to me right now? Thanks for tuning in to the Modern Hairstyles podcast.

Peace out, girl scout. Bye-bye.

End of transcript. © 2026 Hunter Donia LLC.