Apr 4, 2016 | SWOT
Become an entrepreneur, or not
Being your own boss, a true entrepreneur, is that where you dream of or do you think you will not be the right person to be the boss of your own hair selling company?
It’s good you have great passion for hair extensions and to make people look and feel great, in a way that should be your first step, after all you are not selling encyclopaedias are you?
But the next step you should consider is if working in the beauty industry as hair dresser, stylist, cosmetologist or focused on selling hair extensions as an independent worker or an entrepreneur, is really your thing. You can learn to use design thinking and entrepreneurship principles to change how you work.
Four quotes about entrepreneurship
To help you to make this decision, we have four quotes for you as entrepreneur, of course , for everybody your own personal motivation matters, but in general there are some things we can share about entrepreneurship that are to be considered as an Advantage or Disadvantage. But again as an entrepreneur, you decide!
EXCITEMENT
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
― Gloria Steinem
| PRO: To be your own boss is a very exciting time, from the idea and start-up to the development and realisation of the beauty service. |
CON: There is also great risk attached to entrepreneurship. The success or failure of the business rests with the entrepreneur. |
DECISIONS
“When faced with two equally tough choices, most people choose the third choice: to not choose.”
― Jarod Kintz
| PRO: If you are the boss of your hair business you can make all of the decisions; you have complete control, from buying stationary to hire or fire people. This allows for a huge degree of independence and a chance to shape your own career. |
CON: Now you are the one to make all decisions and nobody is making them for you, this can be quite stressful and are you ready to handle such responsibility as entrepreneur can be difficult. |
FLEXIBILITY
“The measure of a person’s strength is not his muscular power or strength, but it is his flexibility and adaptability.”
― Debasish Mridha
| PRO: Because you have control over your work schedule and calendar this means you can choose when to take time off and work the schedule that suits you best. You can manage yourself the balance between business and family hours for example |
CON: Not only in the start-up phase as entrepreneur you often have to work very long hours. Your work schedule is never predictable and you must be ready to deal with emergencies that may occur at any time. You have to keep your clients and staff happy, also after salon hours |
INCOME
“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”
― Thomas Sowell
| PRO:You can work hard as employee, but still feel you are not fully compensated for the work you do. Becoming an entrepreneur means you can reap the benefits of all your hard work. |
CON: Becoming an entrepreneur means you have to leave behind the security of having a pay check each month. It is the clients, or your sales, that will decide if you have a good or not so good months as entrepreneur. |
Now what are you going to do?
And now you see the main advantages and disadvantages, what are you going to decide? Can you handle the responsibility to run your own business, or do you want work with your passion for a boss? You must know, not every entrepreneur will be successful, there are many risks attached. Before you spend money or time, you have to take into consideration the potential cost and benefits. Not everything is clear at the beginning and what works for one company does not have to work for you, So never copy paste another business model, not even if they are very successful.
If you know for sure you want to become the boss of your own hair business, don’t wait any longer and get started with our All-In-One Hair Business Package, with coach, hair samples and step by step guide.
Apr 3, 2016 | Get Help
Self-employed
If you are self-employed for tax purposes, you follow another tax regime than people who are working for a chief. But you have to be careful, sometimes in the hair industry salon owners offer self-employed workers to work for them, but except for the monetary reimbursement, the labour circumstances are the same. The reason to call the contract self-employed is because it is more cheaper and less paper work for the salon owner.
In the hair business in the United States of America, for nearly every employee there is one person working as self-employed, making a total of 700 thousand hair dressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists.
You will not be the first one
For example, according to Sarah Leberstein, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) (…) “It has become standard practice in many hair salons … to treat workers as independent contractors, to require them to even rent a chair or space in the salon, not to pay them an hourly wage and instead to have them subsist on tips or payments”. So you should not be surprised if you working as self-employed is not true in the eyes of the IRS.
What does the IRS think of this?
To avoid you only get the bad effects from being a self-employed worker make sure you have a good understanding of the working conditions.
According to the IRS overall, you are self-employed if any of the following apply to you:
•You carry on a business as a sole proprietor or an independent contractor.
•You are a member of a partnership that carries on a trade or business.
•You are otherwise in business for yourself (including a part-time business)
Therefore, it is very important that you correctly determine whether the services you provide are done as employee or as independent contractor.
Usually the salon, must withhold income taxes, withhold and pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, and pay unemployment tax on wages paid to an employee. If you are an independent contractor they do not generally have to withhold or pay any taxes on payments.
Your own hair business
If you get an offer to work as a self-employed, but the company who offers you the opportunity to work in the salon has a list of everyday issues you have to stick to and you have to follow the rules of the salon, there is a great chance your will not be considered as self-employed. It is important to take this into account before you start and to include this in your business plan.
Start Now Selling Hair Extensions
Apr 3, 2016 | Get Help
If you have to decide about what career would give you the best opportunities you seriously should consider a career as Hair dresser, Hairstylist or Cosmetologist. Why? Not only because it’s a fun business where you can make people look and feel good, also because the financial prospects are very good.
6 Best Career Websites To Discover Your Dream Job
We made a survey based upon the information of the United States Department of Labor and if you take a good look the figures look very good. Let us tell you why we think you should consider a career in the hair business.
How many people have a career in this business?
If you have the ambition for a career in the hair business, like Hair dresser, Hairstylist or Cosmetologist, you are not alone. In 2015 the total number of people, including Self-employed, in this part of the personal care business are 707,000. Roughly for every person that works as a Self-Employed there is one with a career working for a boss. In 2012 there were 785,000 people, working in this industry, so one out of ten changed career.
What kind of services
If you work in the hair business you will provide beauty services, such as shampooing, cutting, colouring, and styling hair, and massaging and treating scalp. But is also may apply makeup, dress wigs, install hair extension, perform hair removal, and provide nail and skin care services.
What will you earn if you prefer a career in the hair extensions business
If you have the ambition to work for a boss in this industry you can earn on an average 3% more this year than last year, taking into account an hourly wage of USD 13.83. This is nearly 25% above the average salaries of all Personal Appearance Workers, not bad right. Imagine if you are self-employed, then you can make even more, especially if you combine the selling of hair extensions. Because the sales of the hair extensions are not related to your working hours, as a hair treatment does you can make more money.
A bright future ahead for hair dressers
Since 2012 the number of people with a career working for a boss in the hair business has declined, until last year that is. In 2015 there was an increase of 1 % (nearly 5,000) workers. If you compare this figure with the total number of people with a career in Personal Appearance Workers, thus including Hair dressers, Hairstylists or Cosmetologists, every year there was a growth.
For the people working as Hair dresser, Hairstylist or Cosmetologist as self-employed one can see the last two years a reduction, less people are self-employed. The increase of the people with a career in a hair salon working for a boss did not increase enough, so people who worked as self- employed before left this industry.
By the way, the Hair dresser, Hairstylist or Cosmetologist is still a female business, because 94 percent of the workers is a woman in 2015, with 93% in 2012.
The average US family showed an increase of their spending on personal care services and products, so not only on hair related services, of 6% measured against 2013 (figures 2015 not published yet). You can be in the race to benefit from this.
Thus if you are interested in a career in an Industry with less competition and an increase of consumer spending the hair business could be your place to be!
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Hair Salon Startup: Start a Hair Salon in 30 days or Less
Apr 2, 2016 | Get Help
Your client will tell you what they want
A well designed market review, will tell you what your target audience is thinking about, how you can beat the competition and gives you a great opportunity to get customers.
Next to collect data about what your target audience is interested in, a market review or survey is a very legitimate excuse to let people know about your new venture, your own hair extensions store. You would be surprised to experience how many people get a positive attitude towards you if they hear you want to start a business. So the perfect time to perform a market investigation.
So my first advice if you approach people to perform your market review, is to share with the listeners that you want to start a business, this will open your audience to be more interested and positive towards your list of questions. So you can use this moment to ask for their contact details. I recommend to start to build up a newsletter list while you keep the market survey and even before you launch your business you can for example share (but without giving away your unique findings of course) the conclusion of the market study.
Nine tips for your hair market review
In order to increase the response rate, thus the number of people that will return the market review, think of the following:
1. Tell your audience why you are interested in their opinion about the market. Make sure they will feel motivated to help you and to spend their precious time on something that’s not helping them. People love to help and share their knowledge though, so feel free to make an appeal to this
2. Think on how to structure the market survey, make sure there is a logical order of the questions, start with questions that will make your audience feel at ease and put the difficult or more complex questions later. Allow your audience a warming up
3. Reward your audience for the time they invest in you, this reward does not have to be big, research shows a little reward in most cases does the trick. So consider instead of opening a contest (when was the last time you won a competition?) to share a small, cheap but original gift to everybody (and give them the feeling you respect them for sharing their knowledge and vision). This reward will also encourage people to answer all the questions
4. Use a free survey tooltool to perform your survey in a professional way
5. Divide before you ask any question your total audience group into sections, for example young versus more mature women, Students versus people with a job and thus higher income, end users versus stylists or salon owners. Make sure you put your questions at the interest level of the segment, this will increase the value of the market survey
6. If you have your audience segmented, think of the way they would appreciate to receive your market assessment, online or on a piece of paper, standing in the shopping mall or relaxed sitting on a chair and table
7. Less is more, also if you prefer to understand every single step of the decision making your target audience is going through before they purchase hair extensions. Limit the number of questions to say 25 closed end questions or 10 open ended. Make sure your survey will not exceed more than 5 to 10 minutes
8. Always tell your audience what you are going to do with the info and if possible give feedback. Consider to share only those pieces of information that will not give away your unique selling point
9. If needed, remind your target audience once or twice for the survey, possible people have forgotten it due to a busy live. But if they still do not respond, too bad you did not get their answers but at least you have their names and contact details.
Are you planning to perform your market survey as part of your business plan for your own successful hair business, we recommend SurveyGizmo to get your information without any risk and for USD 0.00 using their Free Online Survey Software
