One of the biggest questions that stylists and barbers ask is ‘How much should I charge for a haircut?’

It’s a question that takes consideration. You don’t want to just use the same pricing as your fellow hair professionals. You want to price your haircuts based on your own personal goals and needs. But how do you do that?

Many hair pros determine what they should charge by looking at what their fellow hair pros are doing. They might call up different local salons or barbershops and ask them what they charge. They might look at their websites to see if pricing is listed there. Or they might just ask their friends who are also hair pros what they charge. Then they might take an average of those costs and decide this is a good price to use.

However, this is a terrible way to price your haircut. First off, if you are new to the industry, know that the price of the haircut you start with is important to your future pricing so take careful consideration. According to Ivan Zoot, you need to know 3 numbers about your business in order to determine a price.

HAIRCUT CAPACITY

How many haircuts can you do? And what is considered full for you?

Let’s just work with some numbers for the sake of an example. Say you can do 2 haircuts/hr, work 10hrs/day and 5 days/wk. This means you can do 100 haircuts/wk or 400 haircuts/mo.

400 haircuts/month is your maximum capacity. However, you don’t ever want to work like this because you need to take into account the time needed for lunch, to go to the bathroom, for adding services, for discussing with clients about take home haircut product or even just resetting your station. There are many activities that need and will be done outside of just haircuts. In the hair industry, if you are 80% occupied, you are considered to be full. Therefore, 400 x 80% = 320 haircuts/mo.

320 haircuts/mo would be your Haircut Capacity

COST PER HAIRCUT

How much does it cost you to do a haircut?

This is a very important number to calculate because you need to be able to cover your costs and then make a profit on top of that. So how do you determine the cost?

You must take into consideration items such as rent, supplies, equipment, education, license, insurance and marketing. Of course there could be more, but let’s assign numbers to these just to stick with our example. Your numbers will be different, but hopefully you are following along!

Breakdown:
a) Rent – $200/wk x 4 = $800/mo

1. b) Supplies (neck strips, laundry, shave cream, razor blades, color, shampoo etc.) – $25/wk x4 = $100/mo
2. c) Equipment (new clippers, shears, blades, razors, combs, brushes, blowdryers) – $100/mo
3. d) Education (often is not consistent throughout the year so take your yearly cost and divide it by 12) – 1200/yr = $100/mo
4. e) License – $9/mo
5. f) Insurance (should have at least $2M insurance coverage) – $159/yr = $14/mo
6. g) Marketing (buying sponsored ads for Yelp, business cards, flyers etc.) – $250/mo

Total monthly expenses: $1373.00/mo

total monthly expenses/haircut capacity = Cost per haircut

$1373/320 = $4.19/haircut

PROFIT PER HAIRCUT

How much profit do we need to reach our goals? First you have to have a goal. Do you want to earn $60k? $85k? $100k?

Say you want to earn $60k. In order to take home $60k you have to first incorporate taxes. If you’re in the 22% tax bracket, you will need to make approximately $73,200 to take home $60k because:

$60,000 x 1.22 = $73,200/yr

$73,200/12mo = $6100/mo

$6100/ total haircut capacity (in this case it’s 320) = $19.06

So in order to meet your income goal of taking home $60k/yr, you need to incorporate $19.06 in profit on each haircut

Now you can calculate how much you need to charge per haircut in order to meet your goals:

$4.29 (cost/haircut) + $19.06 (profit/haircut) = $23.25 (minimum haircut price)

NOW, call 6 salons or barbershops to get an average haircut price in the community. If you discover that the average price in the neighborhood is $26, you’re golden because you only need to charge $23.25 in order to meet your goals and this is under the $26 average in the community. People will desire your services.

But if you discover that the average price is $20.50 but you want to charge much more, you have to be unique, special and deliver fabulous service. To be more than the average in the neighborhood you have to deliver more than average service.

Don’t just make the decision without intention. Do the math and the numbers will tell you what you need to charge. Say the math tells you that you need to charge $23.35/haircut in order to make your goals but the average haircut price in the community is $20.50. If you don’t think you can charge $23.35 you can lower your expenses where possible such as marketing. If you reduce your marketing budget to $150/mo. This will make your cost/haircut $23.03. If you need to lower your haircut price even more, you’ll have to find other ways to reduce your costs or make yourself more special.

The bottom line is that pricing should not be arbitrary. It should be based on this system. This is how you price your haircut. If you want to watch the full Facebook Live with Ivan Zoot where he explains this all in detail, click here.