10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming A Haircutting Specialist
Being a hairstylist is truly a beautiful thing. It’s not an easy career, but it is an incredibly fulfilling one. It has unlimited growth potential. You can become a bridal, cutting, color, or curly specialist. You can be a barber, a salon owner, work on a cruise ship, in film or start your own product line.
Finding your lane, or what you want to specialize in, can have its own challenges, and you’ll need to prepare for them ahead of time. We humans don’t like surprises. We want to be successful and wealthy!
So, as a haircutting specialist myself, it is my duty to share with you my experience cutting people’s hair for a living. Let’s go!
It will take years, many clients, many free haircuts and expensive classes to get good at haircutting.
You may be a great hair cutter straight out of school. You may have been cutting your, and your family’s hair for years before you went to school, but that doesn’t make you a cutting specialist. School doesn’t teach you the fundamentals of cutting.
They don’t go over the architecture of haircuts, head shapes, or textured hair. We know that school is designed to get you to pass the exam, and the rest is on you.
You will need to take classes on your own time to get better at cutting. You will need to learn how to cut curly hair, textured hair, and dive into the basics, like the Vidal Sassoon foundational haircuts. This is key.
Right now organic haircutting is being embraced, so you will have to learn how to cut with a razor (only if you want), and offer shag, pixie, bixie, and bowl haircuts on natural texture.
No two people are the same, so the same haircut can look completely different on five different people (but you probably already knew that).
You will need to offer free haircuts to build your skills, track your timing, and really train your eye. Finding and booking models is another part-time job in itself.
However, the sheer practice of repetition is what will build your automatic skills, your confidence and set you apart as a cutting specialist.
Before you know it, you’ll be so good you’ll just “know” what to do the next time a paying client sits in your chair.
School doesn’t teach you the foundations.
As I’ve mentioned above, hair school teaches the basics, which is different than the foundations.
Teaching someone just enough to have them pass an exam is one thing, and teaching the foundations of haircutting is another.
Most hair schools operate on churning out as many students as possible as fast as possible, because they are private institutions, like any college or university, without a care in the world whether you will actually get a job after graduating.
The school’s job is to give you a general teaching in all facets of hair, like a sampler packet. And your experience doing hair really comes down to the clients you get at the hair school’s salon.
I did a lot of highlights, trims, and some funky pixies at school.
That was how I found my passion for razor cutting. We got Kasho guarded razors in our kits and I just loved cutting hair with a razor, and embraced texturizing and slide cutting hair before I even knew what that meant.
The clients that come to hair school salons are paying $30 for a cut and maybe $50 for a color, so they know they’re not getting a five-star service.
This relieves you of any pressure to be “the best” and enjoy the artistic process. It’s your time to try a bit of everything and find your artistic flow.
After you graduate hair school and start working, you will find your mentors online, on social media, or in real life by working with a master cutter and learning everything from them.
Keeping up with education is key, and finding other like-minded stylists is paramount to your growth.
No matter what industry you’re in, you will always have to invest in yourself, your skills and your growth.
Classes don’t always have to be expensive. I’ve learned a lot from watching free Sam Villa tutorials on YouTube.
You will rely on retail to fill in the gaps in your schedule.
As a cutting specialist there are only so many add-ons that you can do alongside your haircut that add to your revenue, unlike a colorist who can add on toners, treatments, extra foils, etc. You can do treatments and glosses if you’re comfortable with color.
Retail becomes a super important add-on, because with cutting people’s hair comes educating them on styling their hair at home. You get to teach them about the products you use and recommend, which helps you establish a connection with them.
Working with product companies that don’t force you to carry inventory and pay you a high commission is the best thing you can do for your haircutting career.
I love working with Hairstory because 1) their products work, 2) they make my haircuts look amazing, 3) I don’t have to carry inventory, 4) I get paid 25% commission (pure profit) and 5) my clients get 15% off their first order.
If you’re curious about starting out with Hairstory, click here to get your free pouch to try on yourself or your clients.
👉Watch a Free Training video on how to get started with Hairstory here.👈
You need so many more clients than a hair colorist.
This is the one that’s tripped me up the most. I didn’t realize, going into this, that I will be popping out clients every hour to two hours, and have major gaps in my schedule.
Coming from a luxury bridal makeup career where an artist could make thousands of dollars a day, cutting hair put me in a position where I had to have something crazy like 100 clients constantly on rotation to make a decent living.
Unlike colorists who can fill up one day with one to 3 clients, and charge more per hour, you need anywhere from 5 to 8 clients a day to make decent money as a haircutter. Multiply that by 5 days, and you’ll need 100 clients a month. Marketing yourself can get super exhausting.
A hair colorist can have half the amount of clients I have and still make just as much as I do. They also don’t have to worry about their clients coming back in for a color refresh.
Haircut clients don’t come in as often as haircolor clients. Haircolor clients like root retouches and highlights are in every 4-6 weeks, and they always pre-book. Haircut clients, on the other hand, will come in (at least for me) every 6 months.
Six months!
I specialise in cuts that grow out organically. I felt like I’d failed when I looked at my schedule and found that my clients weren’t pre-booking because their hair looked amazing 4 months after the cut. I would even touch base with them to see how their hair is feeling, and they’d send me the most beautiful selfie of the grow-out.
This meant that I either had to introduce new services on the menu, get models and charge them 50% of my rate to make income on my slow days and create marketing content, or run ads on Instagram.
All of these options meant more work, more hustle, and more panic.
It’s a labour intensive job and there’s a high turnover.
Hairstyling is labor intensive and can get pretty exhausting. Sometimes you will work for 8 to 10 hours a day. Since we mentioned that haircuts don’t bring in as much as color services, and you need more clients, you will most likely be working on clients back to back with little to no breaks.
Lots of hairstylists get into the industry and leave after a few years not because they don’t enjoy the job, but because the physical labour becomes too much to bare on their bodies.
Your back, legs (hello spider veins) shoulders and neck can get very tense and can cause major issues.
You will need special shoes, strength training, a chiropractor on speed dial, and a massage subscription.
Obviously this goes for anyone working on their feet, but colorists have it easier because they can sit in the lunch room and chill out while their client is processing. With haircutting, though, you have to be there to cut the hair and you don’t get any time to step away unless you build it into the schedule.
Self care becomes very important, and you may wonder to yourself if this is worth it.
Scaling down and only working a couple of days a week may be a better fit, which means you would have to increase your prices to make up for the difference.
Clients’ booking habits differ based on your location.
When I was a junior stylist in downtown Toronto, I noticed a pattern: downtown living is transitory. Once those clients got coupled up, or life got too expensive, or they got a job offer at a new shiny tech company, they would buy a house in the suburbs and move.
Or they would move within the downtown area and go to a different salon, because people in downtown Toronto don’t like to leave their bubble. They’re not going to commute farther than 5km outside their condo. They want everything - their gym, their coffee shop, and their hair salon to be within walking distance.
They will commute if you’re really, really good. Which brings us back to point #1 - you will have to be really good at cutting and invest heavily into your education.
Working downtown Toronto, I felt like I had to constantly get new clients.
You may think, well duh, with any business you are constantly selling; but the feeling I had was a constant state of instability because I couldn’t predict my client’s buying behavior. Compare that with a color client whose buying behavior is very predictable.
People who lived in Toronto liked to salon hop as well, which made it harder to retain my clientele. Even though I had a full book, and a high rate of retention, there was always that sense that they might bounce at any moment, and if I wasn’t fully booked, I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent.
Once I moved to the suburbs, I found that my clientele habits changed dramatically. Clients in the rich ‘burbs are regimented. They like to come in every few weeks, and they love pre-booking. They don’t mind the rate I charge ($150 an hour) and that has given me so much peace of mind.
Know your location and your clientele. If you live in a conservative town, you won't find enough clientele wanting shags and razor cuts and fun bobs to keep you busy, so haircutting may not be the best way for you to go. If you want to do fun haircuts, you have to relocate to the city, or at least to a town where there is a significant amount of young people who want to stand out in their look.
You’re looking at San Francisco, New York, Austin, Toronto, Montreal…
Pricing haircuts can be a little challenging.
It’s wild what some people think a haircut should cost. Maybe it’s because for years, hairstylists were afraid to charge for haircuts and added them on as an “add-on” to make a few extra bucks on top of a color service.
They didn’t improve their skills and just did boring cuts. Clients then thought that all cuts should be priced at no more than $50. In order to specialize in cuts cuts you are now in a position where you have to teach your clients why you’re different and why you are charging more than the market price they’re used to.
Marketing becomes incredibly essential to set yourself apart. Show people what they can have. Show them how incredible you are at sculpting hair and how detailed you are when it comes to choosing the correct length of bangs based on the client’s eyebrow shape and hair growth pattern. You are creating a brand new business that not a lot of people understand, so you will have to push to be seen.
Some people will think $100 for a haircut that lasts 3-6 months is expensive, but gladly pay for $100 for an updo that lasts two hours.
When I saw that people were willing to pay me $100 for an updo but gawked at the $100 rate for a haircut, it blew me away. I’m thinking, “But I’m using $1000 scissors! And I trained, and I take continuous classes! I can give you hair that you just wash and go!" Isn’t that worth something?!”
Marketing yourself is essential.
Because not everyone understands what goes into a haircut, and they don’t understand the value, your job now is to show them who you are behind the chair, how you meticulously section the hair and why your touch is different.
Talk to them about your shears, your tools, and the different ways you cut your client’s hair.
You cannot rely on word of mouth. Visuals are everything in haircutting, so get on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and show off your skills. And be consistent.
If you’re having a tough time coming up with ideas on what to post, I’ve created a FREE downloadable 30-day Content Calendar just for you to help you show up online. These ideas and prompts can be re-used as many times as you need.
You provide way more than just a haircut.
People come to you to become more of themselves. Haircuts give people identity. They come to you not just to feel good, but to literally change their lives, and reveal a new identity.
Clients tell me the haircuts they get with me elevate their identity. Whether it’s a butterfly haircut or a pixie, they tell me, “This is me. I love my hair and when I look at myself in the mirror I feel more sexy and brave.”
You are literally helping them see themselves.
Bold haircuts like shags, pixies and mullets scream individuality, non-conformity and a person with a story.
You have a low overhead.
I left the best for last. I love nothing more than the sweet sound of more money in my pocket because of low overhead.
I don’t have to buy color all the time. I don’t have to panic that I don’t have my clients’ toner and carry every shade of N and NN and NA and GI and P in demi and permanent. I don’t have to carry my entire color cabinet with me to my chair rental.
All you need are your tools - scissors, razor, combs, styling products, a cape, a hairdryer - and you’re on your way. It’s easier on your body and your accounting.
My overhead consists of my tools, which are already paid for, my chair rental, insurance and my car.
Final Thoughts
I’m not saying colorists don’t have any issues and you should become a hair colorist and throw out your haircutting dream. The world needs more experienced, passionate hair cutters who understand the beauty of the craft and dedicate their lives to it.
What I am saying is that color services are in much higher demand and an easier sell. It will take way less effort to book in clients.
Haircuts are not as easy of a sell, and I wish someone had warned me about this before I dove in with both feet.