Busy Isn’t Safe. Strategic Is.

Welcome everybody to Hustle Education. I am very excited to bring in Angela from Indie Hair Academy. Now she is somebody that is not new to Hustle Education. She's somebody that has provided some amazing business sessions for us in the past and I'm so thankful all of us here at Hustle and I'm sure you guys stylists that have joined us live here today have appreciated it. she's carrying that on that carrying that support on uh with our industry um so thank you so much angela and look angela she is a founder of indie hair academy she's a seasoned hairdresser she's a coach and an educator with over 23 years in the industry angela has created indie hair academy to empower independent stylists and barbers with the knowledge tools and support they need to build confident, compliant and profitable solo businesses. Through personalized mentoring, structured training and a supportive community, Indie Hair Academy helps Indie professionals thrive on their own terms and do business the way that they want. So Angela, thank you. Pleasure. I will pass the mic over to you. Amazing. That's such a great introduction. And it's the whole reason why I do what I do because there's been such a rise of independent hairdressing and I found that there wasn't any one place for them to get help and support. So I love being here. And thank you so much, everybody, for dedicating your time right now to be here. So thank you. So today, I'm going to be going through future proofing your business. Now, majority of us here, except for Helen, are solo operators. Helen has staff, which is awesome. But this applies to everybody. So the next 10 years is going to be vastly different with the upcoming rise of AI, the upcoming rise of everything that's happening in the world. And we need to make sure that we are set up for success and for our future. So a lot of us went solo for freedom. And how many of you, I'd actually love to know, how many of you are actually feeling like you have the freedom or are you feeling like you're burnt out? So freedom without structure isn't freedom. So we need to have structure in place so we get to have the beautiful freedom that we actually went solo for. The next decade won't reward the busiest stylist. It'll reward the most strategic ones. So this is all about making sure you have things in place. You have structure. You have systems. You have things in place that are going to put you in the right position as to where it is that you want to be in your future. So yes, we have a beautiful salon. I've got my home salon here. I work three days a week in here. And yes, I love being a creative. Every single one of you here love your craft. But are you actually creating a business that is going to support your future? Or are you just working and creating a hobby or just surviving and in survival mode? So this is a really key tipping point that we need to get really clear on. So the world is changing and are we ready? So yes, AI is here and it is accelerating at the speed of light. There is so many studies done and people coming out, whistleblowers, about AI is going to replace a lot of jobs. There's a high percentage, which I'm not going to share because it will alarm a lot of people. But my opinion is AI cannot replace human interaction. It's not going to replace hairdressers, plumbers, electricians. So anyone with a trade is going to be safe, definitely for the next 10 years. So AI is here. Yes, there's some great things about it. There's some scary things about it. But AI is here to help you in your business. And if we don't integrate AI into our business and help us, we will definitely be left behind. I'll be sharing some things as to how you can use AI and integrate it into your business to help you because you are a sole operator and you're doing everything on your own. So you're posting your email marketing, everything like that, your social media captions. AI can help you do this when you integrate it in. It's going to make your life so much easier. 70% of us are solo hairdressers now in the hairdressing industry in Australia, which is amazing. The average small business fails within five years. This is just some stats that are out there. Many self-employed Australians do not plan for their future and do not invest into their super. The world as we know it is going to be different in 10 years and if we're not prepared, we are definitely going to be left behind. So I would love to ask you, if you stopped working tomorrow, how long would you be okay financially? And are you building a job or a future? If you got sick or injured, and you had to have three months off work, would you be okay? Would you survive financially? Now the beautiful Bren, she's a hustle app user. She's not here because she had to go to an appointment today, but she had to have three months off work because she broke her wrist. If she didn't have money set aside to support her while she had three months off, her business would have failed. She would not have survived. So I can't stress to you enough about having money set aside for if you got sick, if your family member got sick, if something happened and you had to have time off, you need to have things set aside if ever that happens. You can also have insurances in place for that as well. So what is future proofing? Future proofing is planning for your future, knowing your financial position. So knowing exactly where you are right now and where it is you want to be. And also your client retention. Because if we don't have clients, we don't have a business. And we need to know how many clients we need to have to sustain our business and to be profitable. So I'll talk about client retention first. So our client retention is a really strong foundation for our predictable income. So Our client retention is how many times our clients come in and see us throughout the year and how many times they come back to us. If we don't have a high retention rate, we're not going to have guaranteed income, right? It's just the way that it is. If we don't have clients sitting in the chair, we're not earning money. So I like to see the client retention and the client experience as the 80-20 rule. So the 20% is the actual result of the hair that you create in the salon. And the 80% is how they actually feel in the salon. So how they feel, how they are welcomed into your salon, it's the whole customer experience. and this is what we need to get really really good on so that when clients come in they have such an exceptional experience they get something amazing that they can't get in any other salon a lot of home salons are really good at this because it's one-on-one customer experience if you're freelance you can still create this but you may be surrounded by other people so if you can create something where you're in your own little bubble, you get to have beautiful conversations, and they get all of these extra little add-ons that you offer, they're going to come to you time and time again. And this is where you create lifelong customers and lifelong fans, rather than just new customers all the time. So future-proofed salons have seamless online bookings to make this really simple for clients. So this is still with your client retention. So it's seamless online bookings. They have deposits in place. It's going to guarantee that they're coming and it's also going to safeguard all of your no-shows, which is amazing. Professional, relaxed environment for all of your clients. So this is your client experience. Provide an exceptional customer experience. They've got excellent communication and that is a massive one for us as hairdressers, making sure we're all on the same page and same wavelength. Follow up with their emails and SMSs and it's an easy rebooking system. If it's not easy and if it's clunky, you're going to miss them. So Hustle has an amazing online booking system as we all know. It's 24-7 bookings. It reduces your no-shows. It's a really professional way for clients to come and see you. And you can, you know, do some social media posting and say, online booking, link in bio. It's super easy. And this also protects your time when you're at home. So a lot of you are not going to be messaging late at night to all of your customers if you have an online booking link. If they message you, you can simply send them a link and say, you know, find the time that suits you. Here's my online booking link. It's really easy. Can I just ask how long Hustle has had the online booking? From day dot, pretty much. Oh, has it? Yeah. yeah yeah okay i only thought of it as the um product yeah there's no three parts of hustle so you've got your drop shipping your ordering of your wholesale and then you've got your appointment booking system so there's three different ways that you can use it um so is your booking system working for you or are you working for it and a lot of um hairdressers are still using the paper form and up to you however you wish to do it. But my opinion, if you are not using online bookings, you are working so much harder than you have to. Like the online bookings is just super easy, streamlined and you can send clients a link. There's no more phone tagging and trying to find a time that suits them. So your client retention equals your business security. So if you retain 80% of your clients, you reduce income anxiety of, you know, how much money am I going to be earning next month? If you only rely on consistent new clients, you live in stress mode, literally in stress mode, hoping and praying that you're going to get new clients come in the door. So in Hustle, we have the weekly performance reports. Now, these get emailed out to you, which is amazing. There's already things done there for you. So you can check your retention rate of new customers, of like reoccurring customers that are coming back into you. So this is a little screenshot from the email of your weekly sales and performance report. All right. So the big one, planning for the future. If we don't have a plan, you're literally just working hard. And how long do you actually want to be working for? Are you setting yourself up for the future? Or are you just working day to day in survival mode? So a lot of us have future plans of whether it's buying a house, whether it be starting a family, whether it's having investments, having an investment property, whether it's growing your super, whether it's investing into shares or into crypto, or maybe moving into a bigger salon space where you can set up a freelance space and renting out chairs. or you know what is your retirement age like do you want to be hairdressing at 67 like how long do you want to be hairdressing for so these are big questions for you to get really clear on and are you setting yourself up for your future because if we don't have a strategical plan in place to set us up for our future we're literally just winging it and hoping for the best So retirement age in Australia is 67. And I know certainly myself do not want to be doing back to back colors at age 67. No, thank you. So just some numbers for you to think about. If we were to save $150 and invest this over 30 years, we're going to be saving $234,000. If we started at age 30, we're going to have $288,600. Or if we started at age 45, we're going to have $171,600. Obviously, if we started younger, we're going to have more money in the bank. Now, if this goes into your super retirement fund, this compounds interest over time. So yes, it's this amount here, but it's actually going to be so much larger and compound to be so much larger that you can access this at retirement age. Does everybody put into their super? I would actually love to have like a show of hands. Yes? Amazing. If you don't, it's now is the time to start putting into super. And another great thing to note is it is a tax deduction and it makes your income less. So there's ways around this and I can show there's a form that you do have to fill out to put into it, into your super, but this is a really great thing for you to start doing if you don't already do it. Your business should fund your future, not just your lifestyle. So your lifestyle is how you live right now on your day-to-day. We need to start putting away for sick and holiday pay, your super contributions and an investment fund. So I call your investment funds the future you. So whatever it is that you want, wherever it is that you want to be, having some bank accounts set up so that you can start saving for your future and really set yourself up. Even just doing a hundred dollars a week is going to put you in a better position than if you didn't. So knowing your numbers, this is a big one, knowing your numbers and you can do all of this in the app which I love. You can track all of your numbers all through all of your reports and track all of this in your app. So your average client spend, knowing your your revenue per hour, your retail percentage. Every client should, every second client should be walking out with retail. Your rebooking rate should be between 70 to 90 percent. In a salon, traditionally, it's a little bit less. But for solos, this needs to be a lot higher because this is your guaranteed income, your guaranteed business. Your weekly revenue, currently where you are right now. Now we can track all of this in the app and I'm going to show you the reports in a minute. And also your weekly revenue target. So it's great to know where you're currently at, but where do you actually want to be? So maybe there's a gap in between and then if when you know your numbers, you're able to see what the gap is and where you need to either increase or where you need to move some things. So this is the reports and the analytics in Hustle. So this is the amazing feature here, the reports and analytics that I've underlined in your profile, if you can see. So it's amazing how Hustle can show a snapshot of what your weekly revenue sales are. So that's total. So your services and your retail, and if you've had any commissions, dropshipping commissions paid as well. It'll give you a breakdown of your services, your products, your dropship commissions, and then a total. It also takes out your GST. If you are registered for GST, you have to put that into the app and it will calculate this for you, which is amazing um it's it's so simple and easy so at the end of the week you don't have to try and work out how much gst do i need to put aside in a different bank account it's already programmed here for you which is amazing have you got anything else to share on that mommy yeah no there's um it is something that we have been working on for quite some time to to actually add the reporting um the reporting data into your hustle app because what we used to do is we used to automatically email you every week month quarter and year your sales report so you'd have the body of the email which angela had sent a script showed a screenshot of it before but then there is an attachment to it a pdf attachment which is your sales and transaction summary report now this is the breakdown of every single itemized you know sales at the very bottom it says how much commissions you've earned for drop shipping if you've discounted it it actually mentions that as well and if you with online booking if you have opted to take deposits for online booking requests it'll talk about all those obviously important things and and of course the different payment types whether if it's cash bank transfer or by card so that was great that's what we used to do however as a hairdresser as a business owner instead of waiting at the end of every week waiting at the end of every month and things like that we wanted to put into the app so this is where the sales and performance uh the reports analytics is now into your app you can check it on demand 24 7. What I love about it as well is that you can email yourself or your accountant or bookkeeper directly. You can actually email the sales report and or the performance report because there's two tabs within that reports and analytics in the Hustle app. You can directly email it to yourself as much as you like, anytime. You can also do a duration. So if you just want it to be from a weird Tuesday, second of whatever to a Wednesday, whatever, it doesn't matter. You can create those customized date ranges and get that result sent to you or directly to whoever you want, your partner, because you can actually add that email address in there as to who you want to send to. So, yeah, there you go. If you have any requests on what metrics you want to see in the Hustle app, please tap on Get Help in your app. Okay. So it actually says Get Help. Please tap on that. Type my name, Mami, and then just type in, hey, just a request. I would love to see this type of metrics in the reporting in the app. Okay. So please let us know. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Little income strategy, just a quick one. If you were to increase your average client spend by $20 and you had 20 clients per week, that's an extra $400 a week to the business. So that equates to $20,800 per year. So that extra $20,000 could go into a super fund, an investment fund. It could be building a buffer for your emergencies or it could be a deposit for a house. So if you're looking at increasing your prices at the moment, that's just a really great breakdown for you. If you were to increase your spend by $20 or say you were to do a treatment at the basin and you had a hydration mask and it was an extra $20. Even if you did little things like that, it's going to mean so much more for you in your business at the end of the day. All right. So what if our business works while we rested? Now, this was a big one. A lot of people were like, I want to, with the questions, was like, I want to, I'm interested in knowing how my business can work without me working harder. So this is setting up your online bookings, obviously, number one, because that's 24-7. You don't have to answer calls and try to navigate where to book people in. Automated reminders, which is also done in the app. You can integrate AI into your business to help you with content, to help you with scheduling. You've got dropshipping retail. So this is where you earn 20% commission off every single product that you sell. So this isn't you working harder or actually working in the salon. You can start selling retail online all over Australia. And I know Vic did a great session on it last week. She's the dropshipping queen. This is a really big one where you can just have links in your stories or links in your bio and you can sell professional retail. You could create a digital guide and sell it. You could do workshops and events. You could become a brand ambassador. You could become an affiliate for other brands. You can also monetize social media. Now, if you start creating really good content and educational content, you can start being paid from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. So all of us are amazing at our craft and there's something that you are really good at that no one else is good at as like as is as good as you. I can't say that right. I'm sorry. So once you start sharing your craft, you can become monetized and some people are earning $300 a day. Like this is amazing. So start talking about the products that you're using. Start talking about the curly hair technique that you're doing and you know what you're doing and why you've used this color and the mixations and all of that. Investments, once you've got these set up, these can start paying you money as well. So a house, you've got crypto, you've got shares, you've got super, all of these things can start paying you money once you've got it set up. So yes, we have to set them up in the beginning, which can feel like a lot. But once they're set up in the long run, it's going to pay off and they're going to help refund you in your future. This is an email report that we get from Hustle. So it's the snapshot overview of your revenue. So here, you'll be able to see 93% was of services and only 7% was of retail. So it gives you a snapshot of exactly what your average week is, what your average client spend is, and how much you've made for the week, which is great. We also have a breakdown of your services and your current week of how many transactions that you've done, the average week, month to date, year to date, and everything like that. So it's amazing. The more you use the app, the more data you put in there, the better numbers that you get. So future proofing with Hustle is knowing your numbers, understanding your Hustle reports, and actually tracking this in the app, which is really simple and easy to do. But if you don't know where you are, you can't grow and you can't be any better if you actually don't know what your starting point is. So first things first is to actually look at your reports and track everything in the app. Having your online bookings and your automations set up so that this is super easy for you and it's going to simplify your life. start putting into your superannuation and your retirement fund up leveling your customer experience and your client journey because no one can replace you and your human experience just make sure that the experience that they get in your in your salon in your business is far better than anywhere else that they're going to go like the home salons that i've seen set up are far more professional and far more bougie than some of the traditional shop salons. So like whatever you're doing, just make it amazing. Make you the best. Like if you feel like you're not knowledgeable enough, go and do some education. Go and up-level yourself so that you are the best and you are giving the right information to all of your customers. AI, implement this to help you in your business so you're not doing all of the boring admin jobs. Like you can get AI to be the person, like be your helper in your business and outsource all of the boring jobs that you don't want to do, which is great. So three immediate actions that you can do now to future-proof your business is to check all of your sales and your performance reports in Hustle. Turn on your optimization bookings with your online bookings and make sure all of your links are in, all of your online booking links are in your social media. So for your Facebook, your Instagram, if you've got TikTok, make sure all of your online booking is there. And then I would recommend doing a pinned post that says how to book with me. And then you could do this in a way of a carousel where they flick through of how to book with you. And it's telling them that the online booking link is in the bio. Otherwise, it could be a video of you explaining how to book with you. But if you don't want to do that, just do a simple carousel post and pin it to your, yeah, you can do three pinned posts and like how to book with you is essential that you do that. And OPA, a bank account that is going to be a future fund and I would do that this week and start putting even just a hundred dollars a week into that bank account and it's going that's just going to save and compound over time so that when you go to retire or when you go to you know need to dip into something it's there and it's there for you to safeguard yourself. Can I just quickly jump in for a minute it's really interesting when I'm onboarding stylists or stylists that have been on hustle for quite some time and i've actually had quite a lot of stylists say that they've opened up like when you mentioned like a like a um future fund like a future account they've actually linked they've they've put all their dropship commissions to be put into that future account and so that's really cool um and i thought that was yeah i thought that was really cool I love that. That's awesome because then it's just like I earned all of this money from like all your 20% commissions from dropshipping. And you get exactly how much you've earned. That's amazing. I love that. So does anybody have any questions? I know that we are going a little bit over time and I'm conscious of everybody's time. So is there any questions that anybody has that I can answer on any of this? I have a question. Yeah, what sort of fees for the booking system? Is that your area? Hustle is completely free. There's no fees for hustle. It's a free app for you to use The only fees that we tend to put back on to the customer is when you use stripe as your payment system because your phone turns into an f-post machine and and you can do the surcharge back to the customer and that's 1.9% plus 30 cents. Is that right, Mami? No, okay. So, the Stripe bank system is integrated into your Hustle app, right? So, like what Angela mentioned, you can do tap-to-pay, which is great. Now, the fee, it's a Stripe bank fee, obviously not fee for us at all. It's 1.75% plus 30 cents. So that's very competitive actually. It's actually within the Australian kind of rate, which is good. Now the great thing about the Hustle app, and this is what makes us very different, is that at the point of sale, let's say you finished a blow-dry, $100, in that one checkout in the cart, the client's cart, you can have the blow-dry, $100. but if you want to drop ship a product, you can add it into that same cart, as well as if you want to sell one of your physical retail products. You've got three different types of different transactions there, but Hustle is the only app that can actually, and this is why Stripe is really important, Stripe's the only bank system that can take that one total payment of the blow dry your own physical product and a dropship product the client does a tap to pay one action and stripes the only bank system that can actually automatically split up blow dry plus your physical product goes to your account and then the dropship product goes to hustle okay and then within 24 hours you'll receive a notification saying congratulations helen ka-ching you've received commission for blah blah blah and it's three taps in your app to automatically um like send an auto generated invoice to hustle and you'll receive it in your account within the week within a week i did this the other day and i did it i'm like oh wow it's actually so easy to invoice for your commissions well matt bollen hello we've got the dropship awards winner in this session today we can't wait he knows how that works um so yeah uh so helen yes i hope that um answered your question um i hope that answered your question yeah yes okay yeah oh no i've got to jump in quickly um so just very quickly um helen just to make it clear to clarify for you the app is free a download with no subscription fee the only fee if you choose to is if you want to send sms appointment reminders which is nine cents per text but you can turn that on or off in your app anytime right the bank fee which is a stripe fee which i've mentioned um there is a toggle on or off if you want to pass it on to your client okay now i'm most of us want to pass it on to our client right because when we pay for coffee at a cafe we pay for the bank fee right um but you have the opportunity to turn that off if you don't want to um so the reason why the app is free is because we are a retail marketplace now people forget this right we sell professional hair care dropship or wholesale through the app and that is how we make our revenue and the reason and because we are able to make our money that way, we don't have to charge people for the booking system or the online booking system. Does that make sense, Helen? Very different way. We're not traditional software. So once you understand how that business model works, you go, ah. Now Matt has his hand up. Go for it, Matt. Just to add to that for Helen, for your understanding of what I, Marmee mentioned that you can pass on the banking fees or the Stripe fees to your customer. So what I do is I always ask my customers, would they like to pay by card? If they choose to, they're going to pay the fees. But if they do a bank transfer or they pay you cash, then obviously the fees are taken off. So some people think that it's beneficial just to collect their credit card points and other people are happy to save a couple of dollars here or there. So if that helps you, I certainly offer that to every single customer. Sometimes it's more than a couple of bucks, isn't it? Correct, yes, yes. And if they can save some money, I'd rather them pay me more than pay a financial institution that's making a massive amount of money anyway. Absolutely, yeah. And the great thing is that, thanks Matt, and the great thing that, yes, you can reconcile a bank transfer in-house a lot, and you can also, obviously, you can choose cash in your hustle app as well. So when it comes to the reporting, like I mentioned, that sales transaction summary report, the PDF attachment in your emailed reports, it will have at the very bottom, you know, X amount bank, X amount cash, X amount, you know, card. So good questions. Good questions. Is there any other questions that anyone has? No. Sorry, can I just also add something so what i do is after every um figure or payment lands in my bank account i transfer money over to a tax holding account yes and this is something that i think a lot of people forget is that we do have to pay tax on what we're earning um irrelevant of whether we're um registered for gst or not we still have to pay for that so i put that into an account which does gain some interest so that way I've got money sitting there so when I have to pay my tax bill the money is there I'm not searching for that yeah hundred percent that's so important so my rule of thumb is like 20% to put aside some do 15 but I like to do 20% because then it's overestimating and like you say Matt it can accumulate interest but yeah hundred percent have to have a tax account and I actually like to have multiple different bank accounts put aside and then you can transfer money outside of that and then when you have time to do your stock order or you have bills come in you've got money set aside and you break this down into percentages of your revenue. So I do go through this in greater detail with all of my academy members if any of you are unsure of how much you need to put aside or where it is that you're at. But yeah, it's really important to have different bank accounts. So yeah, thanks for that, Matt. And Matt, you have another thing that you want to mention? Yes. So this is from me having been a sales rep in the past and relates to owning, purchasing physical products to stock in your salon or your space. So we would often have people say, you know, trying to place an order and it's up, well, you can't order anything because your account is outstanding. So what we always recommended to people is to, when you get your retail sale to come in, you can have a separate account for your retail values to go in. And then when you're going to repurchase more stock, again, you've got money for that. You're not taking that out of your normal trading account. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that would tie in with your dropshipping, like what you were saying, mommy so all of the commissions from your drop shipping you could put that into the product account so that that's there to buy well yeah and that's another way that you can kind of utilize the commission or um commission you've earned is by putting it into that retail account and go right oh wow actually i did pretty well i've got x amount here great now i can actually get that extra you know new k18 product that just got launched or something like that um yeah now just before i forget um angela now if anybody wants to reach out yeah and matt says and professional stock absolutely for sure um so if anybody wants to reach out to angela and want to uh get a little bit more insight um have a look at certain areas of the business that what and that is what angela is for hence in indie hair academy independent she specializes in independent hairdressers please copy that link that's a website to all of the courses with angela or a way obviously to reach out to angela as well is there anything else you want to add to that have i missed anything angela um no but yeah if anybody has any questions i'm here for anything so you can send me you know Facebook Messenger or whether it's on Instagram, I'm happy to give out my phone number. So if there's ever any questions, like I'm here for you 100% solely. So even if it's just a quick question, I'm happy to answer anything. I find that a lot of solo hairdressers don't have anyone to bounce off. So that's why I've kind of put my hand up and to be the person that can be here to help and support you so no matter whether you're a part of my program or a part of my community i'm here to help and support you regardless yeah and look angela's next webinar is going to be on monday the 28th of april now daylight savings on there for victoria new south wales would have finished by then so it'll be 11 30 australian eastern standard time please watch this space um i'm sure I think most of you are actually on our socials and things like that. So please watch our social posts for that. And topic will be announced as it gets closer. But as you can see, Angela, she's the founder of Indie Hair Academy. She knows her stuff. She specializes in indies. And yeah, you'll know it's a great topic. Please reach out to Angela, as she mentioned, Instagram, Facebook. Have a check of that link that I just sent through in the chat box. Matt Bolin says thank you Angela and Marla. No worries, thank you. Thanks so much for being here because you know you guys have actually taken time out of your business to learn and to educate yourself and it means so much to us to have you here and that's why we do what I do. So thank you so much for everyone for being here today.

Webinar Replay: Future-Proof Your Business with HUSL
Hosted by: Angela Lindrea, Founder of Indie Hair Academy

This webinar is a must-watch for independent hairdressers and barbers looking to stay ahead of the curve. Angela shares the strategies that will help you turn your solo business into a future-proof powerhouse using HUSL.

In this session, you’ll discover:

Why being busy isn’t enough - how to build a strategic business that works for you.

The secret to client retention - and why it’s your most powerful income protector.

How to use dropshipping and automation to earn beyond the chair, without extra hustle.

With AI, changing market dynamics, and new tools disrupting the industry, now is the time to make the shift.
Don’t wait to be left behind.

Ready to future-proof your business?

Follow us for updates and be the first to know about upcoming sessions.

#IndependentStylists #SalonSuccess #HairdresserBusiness #Dropshiphaircare #HUSLApp #FutureProofYourBusiness #FREEindependenthairdresserApp