The Brutal Truth Behind $10K Months As A Bridal Hairstylist

If you're a bridal hairstylist or makeup artist and your goal is to get to $10K, $20K, maybe even $30K months, but you're still stuck around $5K or under $10K months, there's a brutal truth at every single income stage that's keeping you stuck there. Today I'm breaking down for you what you need to change at every single income level so you can consistently hit $10K, $20K months in your bridal business. I'm Marissa Grace, I'm a bridal business mentor. I spent a decade as a bridal hairstylist and I went from cashing out my 401k, barely able to pay my bills, to generating over $700,000 in my bridal business. So these are the patterns that I lived when increasing my income at every single stage and that I help my students with on a daily basis. Let's start at the bottom at $2,500 a month. That's going to equal out to about $30,000 a year. If this is you, you're likely starting out in your bridal business. Maybe you're still working for teams, maybe you're side hustling and you have a 9 to 5 and you do this on the weekends, or maybe you're still in a salon. Likely you are in some situation where you are just starting out or you're like side side hustling and you really want to go full-time. That's around $2,500 to $30,000 a year. At this income level, what held me back was skipping steps. I didn't want to be a beginner. I didn't want to have to go back to the foundations. I didn't want to have to learn everything because I was already like almost a decade into my hair career at this point when I started my bridal business.

I was like, I know hair, I don't need to take classes.

I had no focus, no goals, No beyond next week. I was very short-term mindset and only thinking day to day versus, okay, where do I see myself in the next year? Where do I want to take this bridal business? What's my actual income goal here? I was stuck in the mindset of how can I pay my bills next week? Valid. I get it. But here's where most pros go wrong at this stage. You stay stuck there in that short-term mindset and you never allow yourself to get out of that panic mode. And so you stay stuck in that survival mode. And what that looks like is constantly pivoting. You're constantly changing your prices for every single bride. Everything is custom. You will work with any client just so you can make money, and you'll probably likely even do additional services.

So even if you love bridal hair, you're like, uh, I guess I'll add on makeup because I can make money doing that, or I guess I can still take salon clients on the weekend, or I guess I can still take weddings from the team.

So you're kind of juggling. You have one foot in, one foot out, and you're not going all in. You're just constantly pivoting with your branding, with your business strategy, with your pricing, with everything. If it doesn't work, you pivot, you start something new. So what does that look like? You start something new and then you realize, oh, this actually takes a lot more work than I thought. And then you're like, okay, I don't feel like doing this. This isn't maybe giving you the dopamine rush that you want. So then you go and you find a new strategy, you buy another course, you do a new Instagram strategy, you change your bio for the 100th time, believing that those things are going to get you the business that you want. But what ends up happening is you're pivoting so much, you never give anything a chance to actually compound and work. So you're not sticking with anything long enough to actually see it through. So what you want to do instead is you want to set a concrete plan that you're sticking to for 12 months. If you give me 12 months and you stick out a business strategy, I can almost guarantee you will hit $10K months. So set a concrete target. Is it $10K months? Is it 40 weddings that are your own? Is it leaving the 9-to-5, going full-time? Is it hitting 6 figures in your bridal business? What does that look like for you? Set that goal. Next, you're going to pick one core offer and one core platform. So one core offer could be bridal hair services, and one core platform could be Instagram.

We're not mixing both because you're gonna say, ah, this didn't perform on Instagram, let me post it over on TikTok, let me go on YouTube, let me do this.

And again, that's you pivoting, starting and stopping a new strategy, girlfriend, and we're not doing that anymore. Okay, then you're gonna commit 90 days to boring, consistent action. I know it sounds boring, but that's where you're gonna be able to get out of that $30K a year or $2,500 a month that you're likely stuck at at this stage. So those boring, consistent actions can look like showing up daily on Instagram, posting on stories, talking about your offer, getting more brides aware that you exist, following up with every single inquiry even if it feels cringe, saying no to brides that you really don't want to work with. That'll get you out of that stage. Then when you get into the $5K a month, which looks like around $60,000 a year, that's pretty good. That's some people's salaries. At my 9 to 5, I was making about $40K a year, so that's still pretty good. What held me back at this income level was ego. It really hit me at this stage because around this stage was when I decided to quit my 9-to-5. And I had already been a hairstylist working in salons, working for wedding teams for around a decade at this point.

And I'm like, I don't need to practice on mannequin, I don't need to go to hair classes, I already know everything that I need to do, I don't need social media.

And so I took all of the hard roads because I was avoiding doing what I knew I had to do. You have a running to-do list and you know there's things that you could improve on and that you need to do to get better at your makeup skill, to get better at your hair skill, client experience, and And if you're only working on those when you're actually working a wedding, that is a massive disservice to you because it is a time-constrained appointment. So you don't have the time to take details, try something new. You're constricted to the amount of time you have with that client. And because maybe you're not bringing in consistent income right now, you avoid investing money back into your business that's actually going to give you the biggest return on investment that you could ever have. Because maybe right now it's your entire paycheck if you invest in a course, a hair or makeup class so you avoid doing any of that. And where most bridal hairstylists and makeup artists go wrong at the $5K a month income level is they tell themselves they don't want to be a one-trick pony. I used to work for a team, and the owner of the team, her makeup style was like very signature, very recognizable. She would kind of do the same thing on every client, and I would tell myself like, oh, I don't want to do that, I want to do something different. So I offered it all. I did hair, makeup, salon services. I would offer prom services, photo shoot hair and makeup, anything a client wanted, which is great in beginning so you can get your feet wet, so you can learn different hair types, skin types, and how to work with those things. But there comes a point with what got you here will not get you there, because when you are working with every single kind of bride, you do not have a signature service that is repeatable, that you are known for, that stops you from getting price shopped. Because if you look the same and you're doing the same thing everybody else is, and there's no one core signature look that you are known for, all your bride is going to have to compare you on is price. You become a one-size-fits-all artist because you don't want to turn brides away. You see money coming in your inbox and you don't want to turn it away even though your dream bride is a couple inquiries away. And then you likely end up severely undercharging your rates just so you can stay getting booked, believing that nobody in your area is going to want to pay your rates. So here's what you're going to want to do instead at the $5K a month income level so you can start leveling up to $10K. Choose one ideal bride and one signature look that you want to be known for. Then you're going to increase your rates to match positioning because you're going to start earning more. So then you can take that profit and invest it back into your business, giving your bride an even better client experience. So then you start getting referrals on repeat. You're going to take that one signature look that you want to be known for, understanding deeply what your one ideal bride's true core problems are, because it's not that she needs a bridal hairstylist or a bridal makeup artist, it's that she suffers with severely oily skin, no products ever work on her, and she needs somebody who's a professional that's going to make get last in the humid weather that she's getting married at the beach in July. So it's truly understanding those problems and posting about that on social media until you are so bored to tears of talking about it. That's when the brides start to catch on. That's going to look like behind the scenes of you working with clients, before and afters of clients. You're going to lose the wrong brides and you're going to finally start attracting in the right brides. And remember, at $2,500 a month income level, we said we're going to give it 12 months, 90 days of consistent action. So we're gonna keep doing that here. Now let's move into $10K months. What's going to keep you stuck here, some problems that might start happening, and how you can handle it, what to do instead. So at $10K a month, that's going to look like $120,000 a year. At this income level, what it looked like for me was putting in so much grunt work but seeing little, if any, results and still having to show up anyway. And you might be like, but you're making $10K months. Well, when you start hitting $10K months consistently, it's likely going to start happening and you're not even going to realize it because at this level you likely already have a signature look, an ideal bride mapped out. You're likely working at the same venues and you know the transformation that you offer, showing up consistently on social media. Now what held me back at this income level was I was so afraid to automate and remove myself from those repeatable tasks in my business that wasn't really leveraging my output, my energy, and were kind of just like time sucks, but I didn't believe anyone could do anything better than me. So I would tell myself like, my brides need to hear from me.

I can't automate follow-up. I can't automate scheduling trials, keeping everything manual, responding to texts, DMs.

I was the complete sales system. So where a majority of people go wrong is they stay stuck here. They believe like AI is going to destroy your business when in reality it's actually going to enhance it and remove you from those time-suck tasks. So that way you can do more of working with your clients, giving them a better experience, having better energy when you're with your clients. Because again, what got you here is not going to get you there. So if you stay stuck in everything has to be custom, one-on-one, needs to be from you, your business is going to burn out because it's going to manually rely on you. And you can't handle more weddings, more clients, more inquiries, more visibility on social media because your time is attached to it. So what you want to do instead is build automations, build a simple booking funnel. You can also automate comments and DMs. So a simple booking funnel can just look like having an inquiry form and then she automatically gets a reply as soon as she fills out the inquiry, giving her a clear next step of what you want her to do. And everything's automated that she can do on her own because we all know brides are impatient these days. You want to start using templates for your emails and DMs, and you can also use a system like ManyChat. ManyChat can get your bride everything that she needs without your time being attached to it. So if your bride comments on a post or if she replies to one of your stories, she can automatically get your inquiry form. So then you can start actually getting more inquiries again when you're offline. You want to let automations and a CRM handle follow-ups, payments, reminders, scheduling trials, so you can spend your, your time and energy on your artistry and with your clients instead of boring admin. Now going from $10K a month consistently to $20K a month is a pretty big jump, and there's a lot of brutal truths that will keep you at the $10K a month even if you want to hit $20K a month, $20K a month is going to look like $240,000 a year. So multiple six figures. And the brutal truth that I realized when I stepped into this level was distraction is going to kill your income. You will constantly get distracted at this level. At this level, you likely have automations, habits, systems, repeatable transformation, repeatable client experience that anybody who comes in, it's easy for them to get your signature transformation. You have referrals, you have demand, you likely even have a waitlist for brides who want to book with you. Now, what held me back at this level was getting bored, because when you're at this level, everything is repeatable. You have a system in place that's working, and then all of a sudden you're like, ah, I'm kind of bored. You're talking about the same thing on social media. Again, everything is starting to compound, and you finally hit that level, but then you start getting, I'm doing the same look, I'm talking about the same thing on social media, and you kind of want to switch it up. So what ends up happening is you're like, what's the next level here? What can I do now? How can I change my business? How can I make it exciting again, right? So maybe what you end up doing is you're like, let me get into education. I have people requesting to do hair classes with me or makeup classes with me. So you're like, let me go and try and do that. And what you don't realize is you're starting a new business, you're starting an entire new offer of education. And that's what I wound up doing was I started doing hair classes, building an entire other business, and my focus dropped. And so did my profits. So where most pros go wrong is when everything starts working, all of their effort and their consistency, their systems, their habits, everything is starting to compound, and then you get bored, so you start something new. This is shiny object syndrome, and your narrative becomes, let me start a new passive income, let me get brand deals, let me do education, let me create a passive online hair course that people can just buy, let me start a wedding team, let me open up a studio and offer blowouts during the week, let me get a team that does weddings without me. And all of those are great and amazing, which you can do, but what we don't realize is that is starting an entire new business. So when you do that, you drop all of your focus from your wedding business, and now you are focusing on that. So what is going to end up happening? Your income, inquiries, and focus is all going to be dropped from your wedding business, and all the income is going to start dipping. And then we don't realize that that's what we're doing, and we're like, oh, I gotta change my social media strategy, maybe the Instagram algorithm is broken, and we start blaming it on external sources when in reality you took your eye off the ball, you took your eye off the business and everything that was already working because now it's working. So you think, let me go and start something else when you really just need to let it compound. So what you want to do instead is focus on the business that you already have. You want to max that out instead of starting something new. How can you go deeper and make it even better? Because even if we get bored, there's different avenues we can take that's not starting a new business. So that can look like, what's something that I can give my brides? Or what's something that I can take this extra profit and put it into my client experience? Are there new systems that you can get inside your business? How can you streamline, refine your client experience, making everything better? You want to make everything better and max out your efforts there before you start doing something new. So that can also look like maxing out your calendar. How can I work less weddings? How can I raise my rates? How can I get even more demand for my services? How can I max out a waitlist strategy and get brides booking me a year in advance. So I'm walking into every single year with predictable bookings. You also want to look at ways that you can delegate and automate everything that doesn't require you with your literal hands doing hair and makeup, right? And when you have consistency in a multiple six-figure bridal business with just bridal hair or bridal makeup, and you've maxed out all of your options to do more of what you're already doing and do it better, then you want to start thinking about, okay, What's another business that I can do if that's education or if that's adding on a wedding team? But if you don't have everything that's consistent habits, systems, especially starting a wedding team that you can transfer over to that, you're going to be dropping your focus from one and you'll feel that in your bank account. And if you're somebody who wants to start earning more per bride instead of working more weddings, you want to grab my 3-step framework that's going to teach you exactly how to raise your rates without getting ghosted so you can start attracting more ideal brides, becoming her number one choice Choice, Not Her Backup Plan. You'll find it linked down below in the description. Tell me in the comments below what income level you're at right now and which one you want to get into. What's making you uncomfortable? What's making you stuck? And I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!