My $500,000 business mistake - should you offer BOTH hair and makeup as a bridal pro?

If you want to make six figures in your bridal beauty business, you have to offer both hair and makeup. If you've heard that before or it's a constant struggle within your mind. In this week's video, I'm going to be breaking down the pros and cons of offering both hair and makeup and how it actually cost me over $500,000 in my bridal beauty business. So let's jump right in. Here's what I want you to know before you decide to offer both hair and makeup services. And if you're constantly asking yourself, am I doing the right thing by only offering one? Am I doing the right thing by not offering both hair and makeup services? Am I leaving extra revenue on the table by not offering makeup if I only do hair? What I need you to know is that when you offer both hair and makeup services, you're going to start getting inquiries from brides for really big bridal parties. I'm not talking your bridal parties of six, I'm talking your bridal parties of like 15 plus. I'm in the United States, I'm in New Jersey, and over here it's a really common thing to have bridal parties of like 10 plus. Okay, so if you're just, just doing hair, cool, maybe you can handle 10 people doing hair. Personally, I want to do that because I would be dead on the floor. But maybe you got that and you want to do 10 people. However, if you're offering both hair and makeup, you're now doing hair and makeup for 10 people. Thinking about it logically, that's 20 services that you need to perform. So the second thing I need you to know is if you're going to need to perform 20 services, you're going to need a really big team to help you out with those services. If you're not prepared and it's just you inquiries for a bridal party of 10 and you're like, oh, I want to take that on, you're really going to need a lot of hands on help. So you're going to have to start building a team for that. And lastly, before I hop into the pros and cons of offering both hair and makeup services is there's this huge common misconception that by offering both hair and makeup services, you're going to generate more revenue for yourself. You're going to start seeing cash explode in the bank because you're going to have so much extra money from additional services in your bridal business. However, what I want you to know is offering both Services won't necessarily bring in more money for you. And if, if you're someone who's thinking that way, I want you to ask yourself, why do you want to offer both hair and makeup? If you're someone who's like, well, Marissa, I have clients requesting both hair and makeup, or I have clients who email me and say, oh, they want to book a team who does both hair and makeup services. I want you to stop right there. How many people are actually requesting that from you? How many times. Go back in your emails. How many times have clients said or denied you for booking services for their wedding day? Have they said, oh, I want to go with a team? If it's only two people. If you do that research and you go back in your inbox and you see that maybe one or two clients actually asked you or denied you of hiring you for their wedding day because you weren't a bridal hair and makeup team, that's not necessarily a good business decision or a logical reason to switch your entire business model. Because Susie said, marissa, guess what? I'm not going to hire you because I want to hire a hair and makeup team. Rationally, that is not a good business decision to make to change your entire business model. Netflix isn't going to change their business model from in home movies TV services to bringing it to the big screen because Susie over there wrote them an email and said, oh, I really want to watch this movie at the theater. No. And the same goes for you. Absolutely. Listen to your client feedback that you get. But think about it logically. If one or two people are saying that they want to hire a hair and makeup team or they wish that you did both hair and makeup, okay, cool, Take that into consideration. But let's not make a rash decision and go change our entire business model over it. Hey, guys, this is future Marissa interrupting video Because I just had the most amazing DM conversation with another hair and makeup artist. I'm going to keep her name private because that is her story to share. But we were chatting about how she wants to just focus on hair and she wants to stop doing makeup. And there was some really key points that I wanted to make sure that I add into this video. Specifically saying to me that she wants to stop offering makeup and she wants to only do hair. And she made the kind of decision in her mind. However, she got an inquiry from a bride that, that said, oh, actually, I just want someone who does both makeup and hair. So it made her panic a little bit inside. And I want you guys to know that this is totally normal because it means two things. Those two things are your marketing and your social media is working, okay? And it also means that your client, your ideal client avatar is changing. So your ideal client that you have now is somebody who wants one person to do both their hair and makeup. They don't want somebody who one person does hair and one person does makeup. So it's a great thing. That means your marketing is working. However, now that you're switching it up and maybe you sent all your new inquiries that you're getting just hair prices or if you want to stop doing hair, then you're sending them your makeup rates, okay? And they come back to you and say, oh, no, thank you. I want somebody who does both. It's normal because that's the person that you've already attracted into your business, okay? So that's what's going to happen. So it might feel like I'm losing business right now, or maybe I should continue to offer both because people are requesting that from me. But I want you to remember is that's the person you've attracted. So now what you need to do is rethink that ideal client, rethink your ideal bride because she's changed. Businesses change and they evolve. And that doesn't mean that you're going to lose money. That's a short term mindset. I want you to start thinking long term. And in the long term, are you wanting to do just hair and makeup just so you think that you're earning more income? Because for me personally, that's why I held onto it for so long, was because I thought this was the fast track to a six figure business. This is the way that I'm going to bring in the most clients, because that's what clients want. Because those were the clients I was attracting. Once you start only offering one service, once I started only offering hair, my inquiries did decrease. So I want you to understand that your inquiries might decrease because your client, your ideal client, your ideal bride has changed. Changed. Therefore, every way that you show up is going to be changing as well. Your marketing is changing, your Instagram should be changing because you're no longer going to be showing both services, you're going to be highlighting that one service. And also remember when you are removing that one service and now you're only offering hair, you're only offering makeup, you are changing essentially your entire business model. You're pivoting, you're evolving. Celebrities and big companies do this all the time. Think about mgk. If you guys are familiar with him, Machine Gun Kelly. He dates Megan Fox, Love of My Life. He started out as a rapper. He was basically like the new modern day Eminem if you know. But now he's switching over to like rock and roll and he's hanging out with Travis Barker. He's totally switching his fan base. His fan base has totally changed now. His marketing has totally changed. So that's essentially the same thing you're doing. You're switching your audience, you're switching your fan base when you're niching down and you're removing one of those services. I'm sure MGK saw a decrease in his sales at first, but now he's been out there and now he has that fan base, that new audience that he wanted to attract. So the same goes for you. So I just wanted to pop in here on this video and let you guys know that if you see a decrease in your inquiries once you take away one of those services or if you're like, oh my God, I need to go back and revert back, but that's not really what's in line with your long term goals. I want you to feel that uncomfortability because that's what's going to happen that happened with me. But push past it and I want you to know that you're essentially creating a new ideal bride and that's going to be your focus. All right guys, with that said, here are the pros that I found when thinking back on my journey of doing bridal hair and makeup. So the first pro that I found is that you have the opportunity to build a team and really build a culture as a bridal beauty pro. Sometimes because we are always working solo and we don't have a team that we work on, sometimes it can be pretty lonely. So if you, if you're somebody who really wants to take the initiative, be the leader and start building an amazing team with an awesome culture. And offering both hair and makeup is a really big pro to that. Another pro of offering both hair and makeup services for a bridal is you're more marketable for a team. What I mean by that is if you're somebody who wants to work on a bridal team and maybe you don't want to do all the logistic things behind the wedding day such as emails, administration work, creating your contracts and scheduling with brides and maybe you just want to work on a team. You want to show, show up on the wedding day and just be in your element and be creative doing hair or doing makeup. When you do both services, you're a lot more marketable for that team that you're looking to be hired for. Meaning that normally teams, especially my area, usually offer a variety of different services such as engagement sessions, event hair and makeup. Sometimes they do commercial things like that, so it's easier for them to be able to send out one person for that job as opposed to two people for that job. So two pros of offering both hair and makeup services in the bridal industry is you have the opportunity to build a bridal team and have an awesome culture. And you're also more marketable for bridal teams if you want to get hired and work on it. When I think back to my journey into the bridal business, I actually got into hair and makeup because of the team that I was working for. So flashback, before I even knew what a bridal business was, I was offered a position to work on a bridal hair and makeup team that service the Philadelphia area. So at the time, I was somebody, you know, who always worked in salons. I liked makeup, I. I like doing makeup on myself. But looking back, I was somebody who always had a strength in hair. I never really had an idea to go into makeup or to offer both services until I was hired on that team. Because when I was hired on that team, they offered both hair and makeup services. Now, in order for me to be more marketable for her clients, it was best for me to know how to do both hair and makeup. So I learned makeup and she was able to offer my hair and makeup services and it was easier for her when booking, when a bride inquired for hair and makeup services to send just myself out for one job as opposed to needing to send out all these other artists and stylists. But at the time, I didn't realize that that's what was going on in my mind. I was thinking like, oh, I love makeup. I love doing hair and makeup. I love doing both. I love seeing the full outlook, I love the full transformation. I don't like just doing hair. And also, when I was on the team, you made more money if you did both hair and makeup. So of course I'm going to want to do both hair and makeup if I'm working on a team now. I also saw how successful she was with her business because she offered both and because she had a really long team. But what I didn't realize is that she was doing this for 10 plus years before I even signed on. So with all those things in my mind, when I went to start my own business, that was the background that I was coming from, not realizing that maybe I should have stopped to think to myself, like, hey, am I really passionate about this? Hey, is this something that if I wasn't on the team, I would have done? Like, if I wasn't on that bridal hair and makeup team, would I have started doing makeup in the first place? And that's just something I wish I would have asked myself years ago, because when I started my business in 2016, I started offering hair and makeup because that's what I knew. That was all I knew. And I never stopped to ask myself if that was what I was really passionate about. And because I started off my business unsure of that business model, kind of copying somebody else's business model, because that's all I knew at the time. I was never really an expert in either or. And since I wasn't an expert, it really hindered my success as a bridal business. And it actually cost me over five hundred thousand doll hundred thousand dollars in revenue within my business. The reason why it cost me over $500,000 in my business was because as soon as I stopped offering makeup services and I specialized and niche down into only offering hairstyling services, I was able to scale my business from making about $60,000 in sales to making over $160,000 in sales. So if you think about it, if I actually niche down earlier and was only offering one service, I would have probably been able to scale my business to six figures a lot sooner. Biggest both hair and makeup in a bridal beauty business is you're not going to be able to split your focus and your energy into becoming an expert in both of these services. So I want you to imagine that you have 100% energy to give into your business and learning and updating your skills and taking classes and courses and all of those things. So with that 100% energy that you have, you can invest it into hair and makeup. If you're going to be offering both. Now imagine if you took 100% of that and put it into into just hair, or you took 100% of that and put it into just makeup. That's a lot of energy you're going to be able to put into either of those things. Now, if you're doing both and you only have 100% energy, you're going to be splitting that up and it's probably going to be 10% here, 10% there, 10% there, and you're going to be expanding all of this energy and it's going to lead you into A severe burnout pretty quick. If you're only putting 10% energy into all of the different things that you want to learn into your business business. Or if you're only putting 10 energy into learning the new trends and the latest makeup techniques, as well as the latest hair trends, the latest hair techniques, and up leveling your skill year over year, you're really going to split your focus and it's going to be really hard to level up and be an expert in when you're only putting 10% energy in. However, if you're putting 100% energy in, you're going to be able to upload a lot faster. For myself, as an example, when I was doing both hair and makeup, I really wanted to take educational classes on both both. So my time was split right there. I wasn't able to take on as many classes as I wanted because I was working with clients. I was working behind the scenes doing the email administration as well as taking my off days to go on classes. And then after a class, I would want to practice those new, new things that I learned. So I would be having a model in doing one or the other. And it was really hard for me to keep up and kind of split it in my brain of switching over from thinking makeup focus to hair focus focused. And when I kept going back and forth, it really was such a struggle for me to put 100% energy into learning and really honing in on my hair techniques. If you guys follow me over on Instagram and you see the hairstyles that I do now, that is nowhere compared to what I was when I started. And the only reason that I've been able to up level my hair skills and really have that time to practice is because I'm only focusing on one. I can tell you right now, if I was focusing on both, my hair skill would not be where it's to be going at today. In hindsight, you can tell yourself that, oh, it's okay, I can take classes for both and I can practice both. But when you're actually in the weeds of it, I'm telling you, you will burn out. Because obviously you want to be the best and you want to show up the best for your clients. You want to be an expert in both. It's just going to really prolong your success on up leveling your skill unless you have a lot of time to dedicate to learning and becoming an expert in both of those skills. There's a saying that I heard a while ago, when you have 10,000 hours and in a skill or a trade, it's then when you become the expert, it's going to be really hard. When you think of it that way, you would have to double that 10,000 hours for both of those traits. So you need 10,000 hours in makeup and you need 10,000 hours in hair. That is a lot of time you're going to need to put in if you want to become an expert in either of these skills. Which leads me to the next con of offering both hair and makeup is you're going to need a really large team. I kind of touched on this in the beginning of this video, but let's dive a bit, little bit deeper into that. Where I actually went wrong in starting my bridal business was starting a team way too quick. I hired a team because I was offering both hair and makeup services, which led to me attracting those really large bridal parties of 15 or more. So that's 30 services that I need to have done for this client. But I don't have the manpower because I can't do 30 services myself. So I brought on friends that would help me out and different freelancers and I started to want to build a team. Now I started to this off probably six months into my journey because I was offering both hair and makeup services and I did not have the manpower, so I had to start hiring a team. But because I did this so early on in my journey, I didn't have systems or processes in place. So what I can say to you, something that I learned from that experience, is don't start a team before you have your business systems in place. So some things you're going to want in place before you start hiring a bridal team because you're offering both hair and makeup services and you just need extra hands on deck for the wedding is you're going to want to make sure within your business you have a clear booking process for your clients. You're going to want to make sure you have a space to host trials for your clients and for your team members. You're going to want to make sure that your branding messaging is clear. You're going to want to make sure that you have a strategic marketing system in place so that you're able to get clients in the door. You're going to want to make sure that you have your niche and your signature style figured out. You're also going to want to make sure when you start bringing of all those team members that you have a hiring process, a way that you're going to pay out your team members. A way that you're going to book them for the day and give them all the information that they need. These are things that you're going to want to have in place before you sign on for that wedding booking of a bridal party of 15 for hair and makeup. And then you're just figuring it out as you go, which is kind of what I did. So if you have all of those things in place before, I just find that having a really big bridal team is super glorified within our industry. Not to say it's bad. If it's your goal and that's what you want to do, that's amazing. However, if you are a beginner in your business and maybe you're only a year in, don't rush into doing it just because you see everybody else doing it. Because that was one of my biggest mistakes. If you're someone who's like Marissa, I am genuinely so passionate about both hair and makeup and I really want to offer both of those in my business and my dream is to have a bridal team. That's amazing. This video isn't to discourage you. It's just to open your mind a little bit so that you can really understand the business model that you want to move forward. And if there's anything you walk away with from this video, I really just want you guys to understand One of the most important things in your business in order to scale is becoming an expert and niching down when you niche down and when you're an expert, you're going to start attracting more of your dream brides. Content creation is going to be a lot easier for you. You're going to be able to show up on social media a lot easier because you're going to know exactly what you're talking about and who you're talking about. For when I was doing both, it was really hard for me to show up on social media because I would second guess everything in my head. Like I just post a hair photo, now I need to post a makeup photo. How is it going to look on my grid if I'm posting both hair and makeup? Maybe I should do three hair photos, then a makeup photo or maybe I should do four makeup photos and then a hair photo. It just got really confusing and all the back and forth and I really wanted to simplify my business. That way I could start showing up more for my ideal bride because I am all about working smarter and not harder. A common misconception too that I didn't understand when offering both hair and makeup Services is I thought that by offering both hair and makeup services, I was going to make a lot more money in my bridal business. Beginning because I was at a corporate job that I was so unhappy with, I really wanted to make a lot of money right now within my bridal beauty business. That way I could quit my corporate job and do this full time. So in order to do this full time, I told myself that I would need to make the same amount of income with my bridal business that I was to able making in my corporate job, which was about $35,000 a year. So my goal was to make $35,000 within my bridal beauty business. And the only way I saw this happening was by offering both services in order to bring in more revenue in the short term. And I feel like a lot of you guys think the same way too. You want to bring in a lot of revenue right now. However, in the long run, you're missing out on a lot more revenue. And here's why. When I switched my mindset to think more long term in my business and exactly where I wanted to see myself in five years, and in order to reach that six figure goal of making $100,000, I realized I wasn't an expert in anything. Because my focus was so split on trying to learn the latest and greatest and be the best at two separate trades, it was really hard for me to put my focus into both. I didn't understand exactly who I help. I didn't know what my brand message was. I couldn't focus because I had two things going on, two separate businesses. And it made it really hard for me to mesh the two together and get my brand messaging on point, get my content strategy, know exactly who I was helping, know the bride that I was serving because I was thinking about two separate things. So what ends up happening is when you're thinking short term, yes, you'll make some revenue right now in the short term by offering both hair and makeup services because you're taking on more boys. What you don't realize is that you're getting those bigger bridal parties and you're paying more team members. So if you're making $2,000 on a wedding booking, you're actually taking home much less because you're paying out team members. However, if you take the time, get your brand messaging in place, understand exactly what business model and expertise you want to specialize in and the niche you want to specialize in, in the long term, you're going to be able to make a lot more. So in the short term, financially, you might take a little bit of a hit and you might not be making as much as you want up front, but you're not going to burn out and you're going to be able to show up so much more consistently on social media because you're going to know exactly what you want to talk about. Which may take a little while for that momentum to kick in for you to start seeing the inquiries and that return. But in the long term, it's really going to help you out. So if you guys made it this far into the video, you should have learned some of the pros and cons and experiences that I learned in my journey by offering both hair and makeup services. Again, this is not to discourage anyone, this is just sharing my experiences and some pros and cons that I think would be helpful for you when deciding if you want to offer both hair and makeup or if you want to stay single services. Personally, I wish somebody would have gave me this video so I would felt a little reassured. Thank you so much for tuning in. And if you guys love this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe because I post videos weekly to help bridal beauty pros build a business they love. Sure. You check out these other videos I have where I share all things Instagram, tips, marketing strategies tips every single week and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye guys.