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Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick ass career as a hairstylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen? Maybe you're struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe, you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren't seeing any results. Maybe you've already had some amazing success.

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But are craving more. Maybe you're ready to truly enjoy the.

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Freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer. Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you're ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists. I'm Brit Siva, social media and marketing strategist just for hairstylists and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.

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What is up? And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I'm your hostess, Brit Siva and today we're talking about the seven pricing models for hairstylists. That number actually blew my mind. So if it blows yours too, we're in good company. I've done, I don't know, there's probably six to eight podcast episodes on this show dedicated to pricing and we talk about how I suggest doing pricing all the pricing models that they're out there. My concerns about pricing and how it relates to the economy, pricing mistakes. If you just go to Google and do a simple Google search of thriving Salus podcast pricing or thriving sales podcast pricing mistakes or thriving sales podcast pricing methods, they'll all come up. So we've talked about pricing a lot. What I noticed is I'm recording this spring of 2025. What I noticed is people are starting to get very creative with pricing and creative pricing is fragile pricing. Our industry is actually fairly data driven when it comes to what actually works and as it comes to pricing and market position. And so a few weeks back I was like, you know what I want to do? I just want to do like an exploratory podcast that really looks at big picture, looking at small business. What are the pricing options? What really blew my mind is there was like 12 to 15 pricing models that exist and I didn't understand how there could be 12 to 15 different ways to price whatever. And then as I was reading the descriptions, I was like, oh my gosh, like I've experienced all, all of these. And it took me weeks to research this episode because what it made Me realize is we as consumers are getting involved in these pricing mechanisms, pricing formats, I think often without even realizing it. But what hit me as I was going through all of the dozen or so different pricing methods is some of them I like and some of them give me a bad taste in my mouth and some of them I like. But I only like in certain scenarios, right? Like when I'm having some kind of experience. Maybe I only like it when I'm buying a physical good, but I think it's really icky when it's service based or vice versa. And of course, all of that is opinion and biased based. What it made me realize is we need to have a bigger conversation about all of the different pricing models out there. So that when you are sitting in a classroom somewhere months from now and and some educator says something about pricing, that there's a little ping in the back of your brain that says, wait a minute, what was that thing? I heard about this pricing method before, and that's my goal of this episode, is to give you almost like a subliminal foundation around how pricing advice and pricing strategy and pricing method can deeply impact your business for better or for worse. And so that you never are in a situation where somebody poses a trendy or innovative pricing concept that sounds really good on paper, so much so that you pull a trigger and that pricing model or that pricing method actually detours your growth. So my hope is we get kind of a foundational skillset going today and I'm going to run through all seven of these different pricing models. There's only one that I have a really strong preference for, and when I get to it, it's going to be obvious why. But the other six I just really want to share informationally and based on what I kind of put out there, my hope is that you'll listen as I speak and think to yourself, okay, based on what Brit's saying, is this a good fit for me or is this not just kind of an opportunity to explore the pricing world and see what works for you? So let's go into pricing model number one, which economists at call results based pricing. I'm actually going to call it session based. So in our industry there's more like three or four very prominent pricing methods and models. And when I say that, I'm pretty much talking about hourly, a la carte, session based and hybrid. I think those four are the most dominant pricing methods and models, although all seven of these are represented and you'll see them as I talk through. But when I looked up the way that economists describe results based pricing, I think it's what we call session based where it's like, okay, Kelly, you want to be as blonde as you can be at the end of this visit, that's going to be $500. And it's kind of like a session. And when you do proper session based, it's whatever needs to be done in the time that's been booked, cost X, that's it. So if the stylist decides they need to do a K18 treatment or an Olaplex treatment or some some other kind of additional, you need to have three different toners. Whatever needs to happen to get to the promised result is a flat fee. That's basically results based pricing. Now when I coach to more of a results based pricing model, for me that's going to be a stylist who's serving more of a luxury market. I understand that it's simple. I think that it's very clean. It's also not something that would work in the majority of markets. It's something that works exceptionally well in a small amount of markets. And for some of you, this could be a game changer. And for some of you, it would be absolutely devastating. But I want to kind of explain how it works and what it looks like. So this is a quote that I picked up when doing my research. Results based pricing, also commonly known as project based pricing, is a method that determines prices based on the scope of complexity and resources required for the project to be finished to completion. Rather than charging a fixed or hourly rate or a piece rate, a company or practitioner would assess the unique needs of each project and provide a specific quote. This way, the business is accounting for factors like resources, expertise, time commitment required to complete the project successfully. This model fails when the practitioner doesn't have a good grip on their cost of doing business or their speed. And this is where people can get into trouble is what I've seen happen before is stylists will be like, well, I'm session based, but if I run long, it's extra. No, if you run long, it's your problem. It's like, has anybody ever done a home renovation? We had a terrible situation that happened in the middle of a pandemic where our upstairs bathroom sprung a leak under the shower and started leaking into our kitchen. It destroyed a bunch of our lighting. It was horrible. And we had to find a contractor to fix this unexpected issue that we didn't want to have. And our contractor underbid himself and had to do a bunch of Work for free. So sometimes you've been in a situation where a contractor will say like, oh yeah, sorry, it's gonna be 10% more or 15% more based on the contract we signed with this guy. He didn't have that option and so he unfortunately screwed himself. But we as the custom did not have to pay more. So in true results based pricing, the result that we had asked for was for the ceiling of our kitchen to be repaired and all of the electric to work again. He said, I can do that for X amount of dollars. That was our agreement. So when things went sideways, not our problem, his problem. That's true results based pricing. Where I see a lot of stylists get themselves into hot water and have nasty tiktoks made about them is they try and do something simple like this, but then they also have like add ons or but what ifs or whatever. In true results based pricing, that's it. Whoever is quoting the price, promising the result, has to have such a good grip on what happens in their business that the price is what the price is. That's why I say that model works great for luxury stylists. Usually when they've gotten to that place where they've built that very specific niche and they know exactly what they're doing and they're all dialed in, they can pull this off. Up until that point, often they can't. Now when I say luxury stylist, that doesn't just mean our salon is fancy. We charge a lot. I talk about four different market positions. I talk about economy, premium, economy premium and luxury. We have a lot of trainings for that too. Luxury is different than our salon is pretty and we charge a lot. Luxury is something else. It has a whole bunch of other factors that determine if you can actually pull that off. If you know the four different market positions as I coach to them, and you know you're in the luxury category, that could be good for you. Then we have bundle pricing. Bundle pricing is something I think a lot of stylists fall into by accident. Have you ever seen those progressive insurance commercials? And they talk about like bundle and save. And by bundle and save they mean if an insurance company insures your car, your house and your renters insurance. I don't know, I don't know. You're insuring multiple things with them, an umbrella policy or whatever. The more policies you have, you get to save 10 or 15% off every single policy. So the more you invest with them, the bigger percentage they'll take off. However, at the end of the day you're still paying them more. Right. Because you're getting more services with them, but they're discounting the cost. So if your car insurance was $100 before, as soon as you add on your home insurance, well, now they're gonna knock your car insurance down to 80 bucks because you're adding on this additional, you know, $200 a month policy over here for your house or whatever it is, that's bundle and save. Some of you have done that by mistake and you don't even realize it. And what's happened is somebody will come in and get, let's say that your haircut, standalone haircut's 50 bucks. Your standalone root touch up is a hundred dollars. Yet when somebody comes in and gets a cut in color, it's 135 bucks. Like somewhere down the line we lose $15 and we kind of don't know why it happened. That's an accident. That's very dangerous. That's one of the places that stylists bleed out unknowingly. So if you have those built in discounts that you didn't intentionally put into place, and by the way, we should never have discounts like that. Bundled pricing is unnecessary and it costs you to lose when you don't need to be. So one of the first things we do when you join Thrivers is we unbundle. It's actually step number one. But bundled pricing is still very prevalent. It's not highly marketable and there's not data to show that stylists who bundle make more or grow faster. So I would get rid of the bundling if you have anything bundled right now. Okay. Another really common model is called the competitive pricing model. In some industries it works. In ours it does not work. And this is so common. Competitive pricing is looking to your left, looking to your right, seeing what the people you see as competitors are pricing themselves at and then putting yourself emotionally somewhere in that mix. Like, well, Sally looks a little bit fancier than I do and I'm definitely fancier than Joe. So I'm going to put myself somewhere in the middle. What if Sally and Joe both have failing businesses and then you've based your pricing based on what the two of them are doing and they don't know what they're doing. So I call competitive pricing blind leading the blind. When I coach you through pricing, I don't care at all about what your competitors are doing. There's no point in the process where I'm like, and then let's do a little research, like that doesn't happen. It's not necessary in our specific industry. Now, when if we were releasing a smartphone together, like, we're in the tech space. Yeah, of course we have to look around at what other tech phones are going for and look at what our feature are have that theirs don't. But that's a totally different market. So I don't like competitive pricing in our industry either. I would scrap it. If your prices are based on what the salon down the street is up to now of all times, is a chance to get a grip on that. Then there's hourly pricing. And hourly pricing is common. Like in the automotive industry. Right. Parts and labor. We are very familiar with the idea of parts and labor. Parts and labor is kind of the same as, like, hourly pricing. It's like if you were to use a system like a salon scale and then do an hourly rate, it's like a parts and labor thing. I think that there are some stylists in some salons who can pull off hourly pricing. Personally, when I track the success of the model, at least with those I work with, it's the minority, not a majority. And again, it's something that would be earned over time. For a stylist who has already developed a specialty and has really dialed in what they do and how they do it, and their marketing is exceptional. It's not for somebody who doesn't already have a grip on their demand, it can be very detrimental. I want you to think about how you feel when you go to the mechanic and they say, well, okay, so you need a new transmission. The transmission's $4,000, but with labor, we're actually looking at more like $9,000. Often it's the labor that makes us pretty bitter. If you've ever done. I'm using mechanics because I think it's the most tangible and common. We're all gonna work with a mechanic at some point in our lives. And then you go on and you start googling like, okay, what would it cost to replace the transmission? On my Subaru, we had to replace my daughter's transmission. Oh, my gosh. We cried. We cried. It was so hard and expensive. So you look at how much the transmission costs, and it's one thing. And then you layer in the labor, and you're like, man, I should learn how to do this myself. Because the labor is so expensive. Generally speaking, the bitterness is around the labor. And if you look at when people complain about hourly pricing, they say things like, well, my stylist puts the color on, and then she Walks away and does somebody else, but I'm paying for her time. What happens?