6 FIGURE BRIDAL HAIR BUSINESS: 3 MINDSET SHIFTS

Hey, guys. Welcome back to my channel. The perfect place for bridal hairstylists and makeup pros to build their books with clients they love. In this week's video, I'm going to be sharing with you guys three crucial mindset shifts that I had to make in order to go from making $10,000 a year in my bridal business to $160,000 a year in my bridaL business alone. Going from $10,000 a year to over six figures a year within my business did not happen over. So let's flashback to 2013 when I started my journey in bridal hair. For those of you who don't know, my journey into bridal hair I started back in 2013. I was so over being an assistant and only making minimum wage at jobs and doing the shampooing and helping other stylists earn more income for themselves and wasn't ever really able to build my book as a stylist in the salon. So I just totally quit and went left field and I went into a corporate job. Once I was at this corporate job, I got a text from one of my friends. She was working on a bridal hair and makeup team and they needed just an extra set of hands for a wedding. So she asked if I was able to come and assist and do some hair on a Saturday. And since I was no longer working in the salon and I thought, hey, why don't I just pick up some extra cash? Why not do it? So I did, and I helped her out on this team and I wound up being hired on this team. This was back in 2013 when it was really in my area, still kind of a newer thing to not get ready in a salon. So the concept of working just bridal and going on location was totally new to me and it was very exciting and I just fell in love with it. So that is how I got into bridal. Ha. I started working for this on location team down in Philly and it was a very successful team and I did love being there and the experience that I got was great. However, the management wasn't great. So I decided I have this really big passion for bridal hair and I don't want to sit behind a desk for the rest of my life and I want to do something with hair and it really ignited that passion in me. So in 2016, I decided to start my own business. So in 2016, I started my own business and I booked nine weddings of my own, and I think I made about $10,000 that year in my own wedding bookings. And I was so proud of myself. However, flash to 2021, and I was able to generate over $160,000 in wedding bookings alone from my business, which leads me to the first crucial mindset shift that I had to make in order to go from basically making minimum wage to making six figures in my business. And that was just because someone else is successful with a business plan doesn't mean that it's the right business plan or model for you. So what I mean by this is, when I started out, I came from a hair and makeup team, so I saw how successful she was, and I saw everyone in my area were both offering hair and makeup services, and they all had a team. Now, this was very great for them. But starting out, I decided, well, if they're really successful at doing this, then that's the route that I need to take. And I didn't know any other way. I didn't really have anyone to mentor me or any business courses to take in order to get me where I wanted to go. So what I did instead was I saw someone really successful doing this. So I thought, okay, that's the route I need to go. So. So I started offering hair and makeup services, thinking that I was going to get to the same success that these other businesses had, not realizing that it wasn't really the direction that I wanted to go within my business. Even though I did love doing makeup and I did love doing hair, I quickly realized that it is really, really hard to start out doing both makeup and hair when you are just one person and you are a solopreneur. What I didn't realize is that these other teams really started years ago, and they had a lot of experience and a lot of years, and they also had a ginorm team of people to be able to help them with this overflow of weddings and bookings. When you are doing hair and makeup, you need a really large team in order to sustain the wedding bookings that you're going to be getting. For me, I was getting wedding bookings of 15 for hair and makeup. Now, if you're in the industry, you know, as one person, you cannot do hair and makeup for 15 people. I think the maximum I would do is about six for hair and makeup, and then I would need to bring on someone else. Mentally, I wasn't there to really start a team, so it kind of backfired for me, and I really needed to rethink my business model and the route that I wanted to go within my business. Now I started my business in 2016. But I didn't come to this realization until 2020, when we were locked down with COVID and I had no work, and I had a lot of extra time on my hands to rethink my business decisions and the route that I wanted to take my business, what I realized is I really needed to think long term with my business and not short term. So once I started thinking long term, with all that extra time I had with COVID I was thinking, do I really want to have a business where it's hair and makeup and I need a really large team? And at the time, it was no. I really just wanted to do hair and I really wanted to stop offering makeup. So the mindset shift that I had to have was to start thinking long term and to realize there are multiple different business models to get you to that point of success within your business. So I made the tough decision to stop offering makeup services and to only do bridal hair services. I thought to myself, what are my strengths and what do I really want to hone in on and become an expert in? And when I realized that and I did a few exercises such just thinking, if I was making a million dollars a year, would I still want to be doing hair and makeup? And the answer for me personally was no. And then what I also started doing was looking at other experts in this space and seeing if they have the same success that I wanted to achieve. I started looking at celebrity hairstylists like Kim Kardashian's hairstylist, Kris Appleton and Jen Atkins, and they both specifically specialize in just hair. They don't do makeup. And then when you look at Kim Kardashian's makeup artist, Mario, as well as a lot of other celebrity hair and makeup people, it extremely rare. And when I was looking for it, not once did I find someone who does both hair and makeup. I thought to myself that there is a market for this and I am able to just offer one service. So the mindset shift that I made was just because someone else is really successful with a hair and makeup business, I don't necessarily have that passion for both hair and makeup. That's okay. It's okay to find your own route. At the end of the day, if you want to be an expert in something, you're really going to only have the mental energy to be able to focus all your time, energy, and effort into one thing. And for me, that was my bridal hair techniques. The second mindset shift that I had to have in order to go from $10,000 a year to $160,000 a year in my bridal business was to stop fearing social media. I used to put so much value on vanity metrics such as likes, comments and things like that. Instead of really honing in and finding a social media or marketing strategy in order to just market my services. I was afraid to put my work out there because I didn't want people to say that I was something wrong. I didn't want to put my ideas out there in captions or talk about the stories or share things that I wanted to on stories because I was afraid that I would get a negative comment or I would have negative feedback. Fear and overthinking kind of mindset really held me back from posting the types of content that I wanted to post, which is the stuff that you guys see out there today. I started my Instagram in 2016 for my business and it wasn't until about 20 end of 2018, 2019 that I started actually showing up on stories. That's a full two years that I wasted of having a social media presence presence for my ideal clients to find me. I don't want that for you. The shift that I had to make inside my mind was instead of focusing on the vanity metrics, I started focusing on the message of my brand that I wanted to get across to my ideal clients. Once I made that simple mindset shift, I was able to start showing up consistently and posting on my Instagram. I was able to build my confidence to want to post on Instagram. I was able to build a small tribe of like minded people, of stylists and brides who were waiting for someone to show up to share that information. And of course at first when I changed my marketing marketing strategy on social media and I was posting different things and talking about different topics that nobody else was at the time, I was not seeing the vanity metrics such as likes, comments, shares, anything like that. At first it was hard to push through that uncomfortability, but once I pushed past that, I was able to see such a return on getting more inquiries into my business because I was getting the message out there. My ideal Brides so if you're someone who doesn't have a consistent social media marketing strategy for your business, ask yourself some simple questions to figure out exactly what is your is holding you back from wanting to show up on social media? Is it because you're not confident in your skill in order to post your work on social media such as your makeup post or your hair styling? Or is it something that you Fear you're not going to get likes, or you just don't know what to post, or you're afraid of negative feedback or no feedback at all. I think we all, anyone who's putting something out there, you're putting out a piece of yourself out on social media. So we all kind of fear getting like a negative comment. And trust me, I've gotten negative comments. And the best way that I like to handle it it is just say thank you for your feedback. You're waiting to show up on social media and you're delaying putting your work out there. You're essentially playing the success of your business. So switch that frame of mind from being fearful of social media and think of it as an opportunity to get your message out there for your ideal client to be able to find you. Don't worry about the vanity metrics, just worry about how many inquiries and how many bookings you're getting behind the scenes. The third shift I made in order to go to six figures within my bridal hair business was to stop thinking I could DIY everything myself. When I started out my business, I was heavy on the YouTube, I was into all of the blogs, and I was just trying to DIY everything myself, which is great if you're someone who's just starting out your business or maybe you're only six months in. It's good to be scrappy because then you know the ins and outs, the inner workings of every little piece of your business, such as the emailing with clients, your contract, your deposits, you know, all of those inner workings, the sales, the marketing, the social media. But what I want you to understand is there's two phases of your business. You have the building phase and you have the scaling phase within that building phase, which is where you are when you're starting out. And for me, I hung around in the building phase a little bit too long because I was so scared to make actual financial investments back into my business for fear that I wouldn't get that ROI or return on that investment within my business. And this is totally wrong. So if you're in that building phase, if you're in that first six months or year of your business, understand that within that building phase, it's okay to be diying everything, to be doing everything yourself. But if you want to eventually scale your business and get it to grow to six figures, you're going to need to start investing into things like online courses, courses, hiring mentors, investing into marketing strategies, investing literally within your business, as in like up, leveling your tools Your products, things like that. If you have a home studio, maybe up, leveling it to an outside studio for a more professional vibe and things like that. DIYing your business in the beginning is absolutely great, do not get me wrong. But if you want to scale your business and grow it, you're going to need an outside source in order to show you and take you where you want to go. Investing financially back into your business is where I see most bridal pros cringe. And I was one of those people myself. I didn't believe that I needed to hire mentors or invest in systems for my business. I believe that I could do everything, the cheap route and the DIY route and what it led to was just more burnout for me in the long run. In the beginning, it's so smart to use all the resources that are free and are available to you. But if you want to give your clients a better experience and really scale your business to six figures, you're going to need to make a financial investment back into your business. So some of the financial investments that I made for myself in order to get myself to that six figure level was investing in online courses, hiring mentors. I invested thousands in offline education. I would invest in my skill. When you're investing in your skill, when I say that, I mean my hair skill. I would invest in my techniques to really refine it. And that brings so much more confidence as a hairstylist. So maybe for you it can look like taking one on one lessons with someone who's local in your area, doing an online course for marketing, sales, whatever it is you want to learn, investing in systems that can automate parts of your business. So that way you're stopped trading time for dollars. Because remember, as you're going to be taking on way more clients. So if you're going from only working nine weddings a year like I was in 2016, to working 85 plus, which is kind of crazy, that's a lot of brides to manage. You're going to need some things in place to make it easier for you. Otherwise you're going to be hogtied to your computer trying to respond to all of these brides as well as work the weddings. When you finally start earning more and you start seeing a profit within your business, it's super smart to make a savings account, to be able to have some kind of a savings to put back into your business. When you start earning more capital, you have more capital to put back into your business to make it a better, running, more efficient machine. For you so you can stop trading time for dollars. If you love this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up. And if you have any feedback for me, leave it in the comments. Make sure you guys are following me over on Instagram at Marissa Grace Artistry. It's a great day to create something beautiful and I hope you guys have an amazing week and I'll see you in the next one. I.