Secrets of a $10k a Week Stylist!

By Mitchell Parkes

Mitchell Parkes of Next International Salon Group on Queensland’s Gold Coast was overwhelmed with response from other hairdressers when he shared on socials before Christmas that he’d just achieved a $10,000+ week in individually generated income.

Wanting to know how he did it, Stylists asked him to share his secrets so they could do it too.

Mitchell has been kind enough to now share with the industry what he believes are the essential elements to success at this level, having mastered his productivity after 19 years on the floor.

Here are Mitchell’s 10 secrets to success:

1. Master the Middle:

Everyone enjoys starting their apprenticeship and loves the idea of achieving the end goal as this is when everyone cheers you on the most. But the middle is where the winning happens: where you master your craft. The middle is where you have to cheer yourself on if you want to get to the end goal. Master the middle and the start and finish take care of themselves.

2. The best loser wins

You’re gonna lose sleep.

You’ll doubt whether the colour will work.

You’ll stress if the client is happy.

You won’t finish on time.

You’ll turn someone’s hair into jelly.

You’ll burn someone.

You’ll cut someone

You’ll stuff up. A lot

You’ll wonder if you made the right call and have no way to know. This is what losing feels like….. and that’s okay.

You’re going to have clients who’ll be those sacrificial lambs and you will be forever grateful for the valuable lessons those losses teach you. The game isn’t about not losing. It’s about not quitting when you do. Losing builds your character.

3. Choose your hard

Every choice has its difficulties. Being the busiest stylist is hard, being the quietest stylist is just as hard. Making commissions week in and week out is hard and so is not making any commission. It’s up to you whether you face the difficulties of change or the difficulties of staying the same.

4. There is more to a relationship than just sex

There is more to the Client-Stylist relationship that runs deeper than hair. It’s not just about playing with scissors and colour, it’s about figuring out the lessons around sales, psychology, and body language, adapting to diverse personalities and having the ability to make clients and work colleagues feel comfortable and heard.

In my 19-year journey, I’ve learned that it’s about continual growth, making connections, and creating an experience that goes beyond the visible hair transformation. The learning never really stops.

5. It was easier to make $10.3k in a week than it was $3k

I remember the first time I earned $3,000 and received my first-ever commission. It was mentally challenging, and back then, I thought it was the hardest thing I had ever done. I remembered thinking “How can I do this week in, week out?” Reflecting on it now, I can’t help but laugh.

The harder you work, the more your capacity grows as a hairdresser and the more you realise that what you used to think was hard work is now easy and not even close to what you’re capable of. I often think about myself as a young stylist, undertaking the correct actions, but I didn’t do them enough and when I did them, it wasn’t for long enough and it took me a while to figure out what was needed to be able to achieve the success I was looking for.

As you grow as a hairdresser, getting better and more confident at your craft, your capacity grows. You learn to juggle tasks and utilise help from apprentices. At first, doing $3k was tougher than $10.3k because I was doing it all on my own. But as your clientele increases, you get more efficient and can handle more work yourself, plus the salon can afford to hire/allocate you more apprentice help and that allows you to help more clients and make more $$$. The key is working smarter, not harder, but you gotta work hard to get smart. There’s no way around it. The work needs doing.

6. You don’t become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror

To become confident in yourself and your ability as a hairdresser, you need to do something over & over again, so many times that the skill loses that excitement, that it feels like second nature. Then, you start reading the salon and predicting what will happen next, because it’s the same thing that’s happened the last 1000 times you’ve done it. People call you confident, but all you do is state the facts and react to what you’re seeing in the salon. Confidence doesn’t create proof. Proof creates confidence. Winning builds your confidence.

7. Build, peak, losses, rebuild

As a hairdresser, you’re going to see the team change the longer you stay with the salon. It goes through cycles. The average employment lifespan within a salon is approximately 3 to 5 years.

People come and go, but are you conscious enough to recognize the potential for growth in the face of these departures or do you buy into the doom and gloom? Embracing change not only offers the opportunity to grow your clientele but also positions you for advancement in your career, making yourself more valuable to the salon. By putting in the work, you can navigate through the small percentage of clients changing salons or not resonating with your style of hairdressing but you will find a large percentage will like you and stay with you, ultimately growing your clientele.

8. Hairdressers don’t make money! No…. impatient and passionless hairdressers don’t make any money.

I hear this saying all the time and yet I continue to work with Stylists who demolish this stigma from celebrity stylists to suburban mum stylists. What I’ve come to learn is that the reason people get confused or disillusioned about hairdressing is that their only goal is to make money in the beginning and since there are so many ways to do it, they can’t figure out which one to pick.

If you get into hair to be artistic, to solve problems and make people happy, you’ll make money. If you get into hairdressing to make money, you’ll have problems because you won’t have the patience and definitely won’t have the passion that’s needed to be patient. Figure out what you want to do and what brings you joy, then within that context, which version makes you money.

The reason enjoying the stuff you do makes you more money is because of consistency and longevity. You do stuff you like and if you do stuff for a long enough time, you get good at it and when you get good, your clientele grows and you can make money doing it. There are no shortcuts

9. Block out the noise

Don’t expect underachieving people to support your big aspirations and goals. They are generally the laziest, victim-minded, and loudest complainers. They want you to stay the same because it helps them justify the decisions & actions they’ve made or the risks they chose not to take, the work they chose not to do.

You’ll be happier and make more money more quickly by ignoring everything except for the things that matter most in the salon. So, if you always feel like you don’t have enough time in the day, have no energy, you’re not busy enough, you’re too busy, (“insert excuse here”), you’re probably doing the wrong stuff and listening to the wrong people!

10. Business within a business

As a stylist on the floor, I approach work and my role as if it’s my own business within the salon. I train my clients and educate them on how I do hair and what to expect as a client of mine.

I’m 100% responsible for how busy I am and how much $$ I make, but for me to be able to do that and do it well, it’s crucial for the salon to adopt a business model that allows me to make uncapped commissions and more importantly, charge the right amount.

Striking the right balance prevents being stuck in a high-volume/low-price cycle or catering to just one client at a time and not charging enough. It’s about finding the sweet spot of accurate pricing and productivity for sustainable success.

www.nextinternational.com.au