Get a behind-the-scenes look at how he successfully runs nine salons, plus take away three actionable tips to help you soar in 2024—exclusively available for Virtue Pros who attended all three Mini Masterclass sessions.

Join us for a conversation with Jaye Edwards, independent education pioneer, innovative colorist, and Virtue Ambassador, where he reveals how he sets his rate, inspires his team, manages finances, and more. Plus, watch until the end for three tips to help you soar in 2024.

How do I avoid burnout during the holidays? I think that burnout for me is a bit of a buzzword. I think it can happen, but how I avoid that is by planning things that reward me for my hard work. For me, everyone gets vacation time, and it’s really important you plan that vacation time. If you’re working and working and working, for me, anyway, without a reward, then I get burnout because I’m doing things that have no end to them. Or I’m just doing them to do it. I know for some it’s harder to schedule vacation time, but it doesn’t have to be a vacation. It can be as simple as going on a hike. For me, every morning, I have to walk along the river by my house. If I don’t do that, it’s like I get angsty and almost heading towards burnout. So I think it’s really important we listen to our bodies first and understand what we need and what makes us happy. And if we follow that path of what makes us happy, we can avoid burnout.

I also think during the holidays, when you’re going home to see your family and everyone wants you to do their hair, maybe say no. You know? I think that vacation time is vacation time, and it’s important that we don’t go on vacation just to do the same thing we’ve always done at work. Sometimes it’s hard to say no, but if you don’t say no, then you have to go back to work without properly resting, and that’s a bad thing. If you have to say yes, just limit the number of people you do—do one a day—and don’t do huge color transformations. Do a grey coverage. And I think that’s really important.

Make sure when you’re on vacation, you actually vacation and take the time. Otherwise, you will get burned out.

For me, it’s important not to, I guess, give in to people’s need to have an appointment before the holidays. I think it’s human nature to go, “I’ll come in early,” or “I’ll stay late,” and that’s all well and good if you do it every now and then, but if you do it all at once in a condensed amount of time, like the 4 weeks before everyone goes on holiday, then I think that can be super overwhelming, and then it actually doesn’t serve you because you get to the end and you’re so exhausted, and then you can’t enjoy your vacation.

So, I think it’s really important that you don’t come in early and you don’t stay back late. I know that’s hard sometimes, and there will always be VIP clients you do it for, but I think it’s important that you limit the amount you do that so you don’t actually feel fully exhausted and fully depleted before you get on to your holidays.

I think that, firstly, inspiration can come from many different places. And I think it’s really important that as hairstylists we look for inspiration outside of our industry—and I actually think that should be applied to every person in every industry. The reason for that is that if you compare yourself to people in your own industry, it becomes comparison not inspiration. So for me, what inspires me is traveling to really beautiful places and just seeing the people in those places. That, for me, is really really inspiring. I’m inspired by nature, the colors in nature, textiles or patterns in textiles, all that kind of stuff. I’m inspired by that, not so much hair itself. I look for business people outside of the hair industry for inspiration. Codie Sanchez, I find a super inspiring, incredible businesswoman. She has done some incredible things, made millions, lost millions, made millions again. It’s so far outside the hair industry, which I love, so I think that’s really important to look outside for inspiration.

In terms of education, I do go to classes, I go to a couple of classes a year from stylists who I find inspiring. I don’t go to them too often because I also do think that sometimes we have to get our hands dirty and make a mistake—and kind of f*ck it up a little bit—because by doing that, you’ll learn more from making mistakes than you will from watching someone else. And I think that is really, really important. But, if there’s a new skill you want to learn, for example, I just learned how to do extensions, I didn’t know how to do them a year ago, so I’ve been focusing my education this entire year on extension education, and it has changed the way I do hair.

How do I encourage stylists to apply what they’ve learned at one of my masterclasses? I think it’s really, really important that after you’ve been to a masterclass, you actually just grab a whole bunch of models and try and apply the techniques to models. It’s great that you can film in the class, but let’s be honest, no one goes back and looks at those videos. Ever. Name a time that you have. I bet you can’t.

So, it’s really important that you grab some models on a day in the salon where there’s no pressure, you can take as much time as you want, and put them into practice. I find that is the best way to, firstly, understand what has been taught in the masterclass, but then also get your hands dirty and really start to pull it apart and put your own twist on it. Because, in my opinion, there’s no use in going and copying the exact technique without putting your own twist on it as well because no two hands are the same and no two hands are yours.

How do I keep my team motivated and connected to industry trends? This is a struggle in my opinion for any business owner, and no one is the exclusion. So, for me, there will always be someone on my team that don’t stay motivated and takes constant poking to be motivated. There’s also a large part of the team that doesn’t want to go to classes, and doesn’t want to give their time to education because they think they “know enough.” Kudos to them. That doesn’t work for me, though. 

I think it’s really, really important that when you have a team and people are constantly unmotivated or people are not staying on top of trends and education, firstly you need to ask, “Am I doing the job that I need to do to keep them motivated? Am I doing enough to make sure that they go to classes? You have to ask yourself first are you doing what they need? That’s a tough question to ask yourself. And sometimes, you have to go, “I’m not doing enough.” And there are moments in time I’ve thought to myself that maybe I’m not doing it right or doing enough. That’s fine, it happens to everyone because you have to stay motivated, too. So, start there, and then take one step past that. 

Motivation has to come from within the person, so if the stylist is feeling unmotivated, I do believe it’s their absolute responsibility to motivate themselves. You, as an employer, the first thing you need to provide is a safe working environment and to pay their salary. That’s what you need to provide as an employer. Do you need to provide motivation? I don’t believe you need to provide motivation, but you can do things to help motivate people. So, for example, we do monthly one-on-ones with every stylist in my salon just to check-in. We call it a Happiness Meeting. And that’s more about understanding what the stylist might want to help them feel motivated. So some people are very financially driven. Ok, so let’s say in the next 6 months you hit these targets, we’ll give you this as a bonus. Motivation. Some stylists are motivated by the experience of being able to go to a shoot or set or something like that. Ok cool, if you do this in the next 3 months, we’ll send you on a shoot with this stylist, so you can get that experience. Motivation. Some stylists are motivated by traveling with me to do my classes. Ok great, if you can do this in this amount of time, then you can come with me to these 2 classes and travel with me and see how I do it. You’ve gotta understand what each person is motivated by. If you do it in a group thing and put everyone together, that’s not going to motivate, it will motivate some but not everyone, so I think it’s important you understand what motivates each person. 

And I think, as well, when people are not staying connected to the industry in terms of trends and education, it’s a hard conversation to have because some of my stylists who I’ve had for like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 years think they know enough. The reality is they might do great hair, but EdwardsAndCo makes an effort to stay with the trends and stay on top of what people are wanting. So, if that stylist gets left behind, they will start losing clients. And that’s just the reality of today within a digital world. Everything is accessible via TikTok, via Instagram, Pinterest, whatever it is, so the trends are moving faster than ever before. So, if you can’t keep up with that, you will lose clients and you’ll go from being a busy stylist to a stylist who doesn’t have many clients at all. I say to those stylists, if you choose to stay invisible, you’ll never be visible, right? What I mean by that is, you’ve gotta be visible during those trends to maintain that business. If you get pushback from stylists–and you always will, it’s inevitable, there will always be some–I think you have to take all the emotion out, which I know it’s really hard to do we’re hairstylists– we can’t do that sometimes–but you kinda have to go, “Is this person right for my business now? Will they help me in the future achieve my business goals?” And that’s OK if the answer’s no, that’s totally OK. 

I think it’s more about protecting your business’ sustainability and making sure you’re able to grow into the future. I mean, that’s kind of an extreme case, but I think it’s important if someone isn’t fitting into what you need in terms of staying on top of trends and being educated, then it is really important you take action for that. Otherwise, long term, it could affect your business.

How do I stay organized with my salon group and packed travel schedule? It’s with great difficulty. It’s not easy, I find it really hard sometimes, but for me, the reward of what I do outweighs the stress of being unorganized. I’m very, very lucky to have the job I have—sometimes I don’t even believe I have the job that I have. I love doing it, I love education, I love educating people and sharing my knowledge and seeing that being put into practice.

It takes a village. In Australia, I have 9 salons along the East Coast, and then for half the year, I’m traveling teaching classes in the US and Europe. But that takes an EA, a hair assistant; I have to then also film all the content I work for for other brands, so I have to really make sure the people who support me are organized. I’m not a very organized person. I’m all over the place, like crazy, so the people who support me have to be organized so that I can do my job properly.

My favorite apps for a traveling stylist: so, I have so many apps. I have editing apps for my videos when I’m traveling. I use SPLICE, InShOt, or CapCut. CapCut is the best but the hardest to use. Give it a go, though.

My other favorite app when I’m traveling is ClassPass. I use that when I want to use the gym in different cities. It’s great because it is actually available in pretty much every city I’ve traveled to in the US, Australia, and Europe. And it has many different gyms on there, so pilates, yoga, CrossFit, a regular gym, whatever you want is on there and it’s really, really affordable.

My favorite app for food is the MICHELEN Star App. So I’m a foodie, I love eating good food when I travel all over. But it doesn’t just recommend restaurants that have a Michelen Star, it has other recommendations, too. It has never done me wrong. I highly recommend it.

How do I train my front desk? For me, the front desk is probably the most important—second most important—part of any salon. The first and most important part for me is the assistants because, without them, the wheels don’t turn. The front desk manages everything in the salon. My front desk are not stylists. It’s really important for me that they are not stylists because I don’t believe that—in the size of my salons anyway, I’ve got like 40 stylists in each location—in a salon my size, it’s really important the stylists focus on what they do best, which is hair, not management.

So, for me, my front desk I’ve hired from hospitality backgrounds because it’s customer service, customer-facing; so, I prefer to hire from hospitality because they’re going to have better customer service experience, better customer service skills, and they’re just going to be overall friendlier to the client. 

So, how do I train them? First and foremost, it’s all about booking the appointments. The core of their job is to make sure the schedule is full. That’s number one above all else.

The second is to make sure that the stylists are happy and working on time. At the end of the day, front of house, it’s a people’s job. It’s all about people. It’s about the clients, it’s about the stylists and keeping everyone at a happy medium and happy, right?

Beyond that, the salon has to be run efficiently. If they’re taken from a hospitality background, you can see where they’ve worked on their resume, look those places up and see how efficiently and effectively they’re run. So, if I can look that up and see that the place they’ve come from is run in a great way, then they’re probably going to run the salon in a pretty good way. Most hospitality places have a pretty high expectation of how things are run, so I like to go down that path. 

My perspective on how you charge for your services and how you charge for “your worth,” I think that’s kind of like a buzz thing in the industry at the moment. The most important thing for me is understanding what you charge and why you charge it.

A lot of educators will get up and be like, “Charge your worth! Yeah, increase your prices!” But there is no point in doing that if you don’t understand why you’re doing it or where your money’s going. For me, pricing should be based only on two things: direct expenses and demand. That’s it. Nothing else, right?

Direct expenses firstly. Let me go into more detail around how that works for me. By using a formula that’s similar to this, you’ll be able to understand what your cost of chair is, per hour that you are open in salon. So, with all of your expenses, you’ve got your direct expenses, which is rent. And then you have your variable expenses, which are electricity, water, gas, towels, color, etc. And then we have you. You are the most important expense in that equation, right, so you have to work to your goal salary. Let’s just say your goal salary is $80,000. You’re going to divide all that down into how many chairs you might have in your salon, and if that’s 1 that’s okay, and then divide that down by how many hours you want to work per week. And then you’ll get your cost of chair per hour that you’re open that includes paying you. So you know you have to make that amount of money per hour to get paid that salary. 

And then if you want to make one step further, because right now you’re only paying yourself, you don’t have any profit in that equation. Zero profit. If you want profit on top of that, then you add margin. And margin is where you’re going to save profit. So for me, all my margins for services in the salon start at 50%. So, if I have my cost of chair is $100 per hour for a stylist that’s on $80,000, then I’ve got to add 50% margin, so that hourly fee comes up to $150, right? With that hourly number, I can then create an a la carte menu based on how long each service takes. For me, that’s the most important part. I don’t charge hourly in my salons it makes no sense for me to do that. I charge a la carte. The a la carte menu is based on what that fee would be hourly. So if a full head of highlights takes 90 minutes, that cost of product would be $225 (that’s $150 + $75). So very, very simple equation but very, very effective and it will make sure that you’re profitable. Because that’s the most important thing, that you’re profitable. If you’re not profitable, you don’t have a business. It’s kind of that simple. 

When you have a full book, if you’re working 4 days a week and you’re full and you have a waitlist, then you have demand. And demand is where you can increase those prices even more. You can work 2 days and be fully booked and still have a wait list, that’s still demand. So whatever days you want to work, if you’ve got a waitlist, then you’re probably not charging enough. So then, you can increase your prices from there, and then you can wait six months to see if that alleviates that waitlist. If you increase your prices and say, “Hey, I’m going to be charging $400 an hour or $400 for a full head of highlights,” and you still have a three-month waitlist, then you can probably increase them again. 

See how that kind of works? So you know what you’re charging, why you’re charging it, you know that you’re profitable; then, you have demand and you can increase even more, and your profit grows even more. So, rather than saying we should charge our worth, I think we should come from the perspective of let’s be profitable. Because then you know why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, and how you can be better. 

How do I manage my finances? I think that I’m not great with money. But that’s okay. Not everyone is good with money. Like, I can’t read a spreadsheet, there’s no chance on the planet I can read a spreadsheet, good luck. But, it’s important for me that when I have my support people around me, whether that be my accountant, my bookkeeper, my EA, they give me information that is easier for me to read.

I used to feel bad about asking for things that were easier for me to read because I thought they had done their job by giving me the spreadsheet. That’s not true. You need to give it to me in one paragraph. Is it red or is it green? Red and green I understand, red is bad, green is good. And I know how to get from red to green because I did that, not them, right?

So firstly, trust yourself because you already built what you have.

Secondly, make sure your team around you are able to give you things that are more easily understood by you. Because if you understand it, you can take action. And that will make managing finances more exciting.

I used to hate managing finances. I used to hate it. I used to get really overwhelmed, and just not do it all and not even look at it because I couldn’t understand it. And then when I started asking for documents that were easier to understand, easier to read, less information, and more about, "Is it red or is it green?" kind of thing, it became a little more exciting for me. I want lots of green—lots. So by understanding that part, it became exciting for me.

So, ask your support people to give you things that are easier to understand to make it fun for you.

I always say to my team, “If you choose to stay invisible, you’ll never be visible.” And what I mean by that—social media is terrifying, it’s scary, it’s overwhelming, it’s all of the above, but if you’re a new stylist and you’re still building—it’s imperative that you are on social media and that you use your time to build it.

It will take 10x longer by word of mouth than it will with social media. So, to make it a little less overwhelming, what I like to do is schedule 1 hour every day to do my posting. If I don’t get it done, that’s okay, but at least I’m scheduling that hour to attempt to get it done. The first week, you might only get 3 days done, that’s cool, as long as the second week you get 5 days done. I do it only in that hour. I don’t do it outside of that hour to make it less overwhelming for myself. 

So, I think it’s really important you focus on social media. It doesn’t have to be TikTok and Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook—doesn’t have to be like that. Choose one. Start with one. Make it a little less overwhelming. Maybe it’s TikTok. TikTok you’re gonna get a quicker reach in a shorter amount of time, especially if your content goes viral, whereas Instagram takes a little time to get momentum. Then, you have to be really clear about your audience and who you want to attract. Is it stylists? Is it clients? What is it? And then create content based on what you want to attract.

Not those influencers. That term is used very loosely. I think that people think of influencers all the time as people on social media, but that’s not the truth. The original influencers were people in your local community who owned businesses: retail, restaurants, and cafes who know everyone, right? How many times do you go into your local cafe and the same person is always on that coffee machine, making the same coffee for every single person that comes in there, and they’re probably seeing 1,000-2,000 people per day—per day. That is an influencer to me. That is someone you want in their chair, so you know they’re going to talk to everyone about them having their hair done with you. That is more powerful than social media.

So what I do with my salons, wherever I am in the community, all those businesses will get a “locals discount” (I don’t really call it that, I call it a VIP Service), and that way, you’re more easily able to grow in that specific area. And then it just grows and grows, and grows. 

When I opened a new salon, my most recent one in Noosa, Queensland, I went around to every single business in that whole area and gave them credit for their first appointment. And then in that credit, it also said they would continue getting the VIP discount. 

If you go back to my profitable pricing method, you can factor that discount into your margin, so you’re actually not missing out. They get the VIP Service, while you’re still making the same amount of money, which is really important.

I think that we, as hairdressers, get very caught up in attracting new clients—which is good, we all need new clients all the time—but it’s important that we also focus on the clients we already have and how to give them more value, so that they feel appreciated, too. For example, we have a points-based system in my salons: it’s $1 per 1 point, and the more points you get, the more you’re rewarded, so that keeps clients coming back. Once they get to, say, 300 points, they get a $10 credit to use on retail.

Another thing we like to do throughout the year is a gift with purchase. If they spend $500 on their hair, then they would get a complimentary leave-in treatment. That complimentary leave-in treatment might only cost you $5 or $6, but the value that the client perceives that to be is much higher than $5 or $6, they see it as $25 or $30, and then you create loyalty and a long-term client. 

So that is, for me, one of the most important things in building a business: you need to reward your loyal clients. Yes, focus on new ones, but those new ones will eventually become loyal clients, and then you can keep that cycle going and continuously create loyalty. 

A client lifespan in a salon is usually 3 years and then they will move on to another salon—and that’s in Australia, I’m not sure about the stats in the USA. So, it’s really important that if you break past that three years, you’re more than likely going to keep that client for a long, long time. It’s important that you build loyalty through programs so clients buy into you as a business.