Seasonality will depend on your location, how long you’ve been in business, what your work ethic is like and the type of clientele you cater to. I’m almost 2 years in, I work 6 days/week, 9 hours/day minimum, even back when I started and I had nobody coming in.
Where I’m at, we have to deal with cold and snow. Mixing my own experience with that of other local electrologists I know, in mid-late February through early March, people have this sudden realization that summer is coming and they want to be hair free, this resulted in 28 new people last March. From March until September, it’s basically a sprint of busy-ness. September comes and, between summer winding down and kids going back to school, people need to adjust schedules, so sometimes things fall off a little for September and October. November, things pick up again since we have all the family holidays coming up and people don’t want to deal with their hair all the time. New Years hits, people realize that the family holiday stretch is over and it is cold, really cold, and they don’t want to go out, so January and February slow down again.
Short version: September, October, January and February are the slowest months… until you get to the point where you’re in demand enough to stay busy year round.
Which gets me to my next point… my first year pretty much followed that pattern perfectly while I built up a client base from scratch, without the benefit of being in a salon, or even in a retail store front. I’m buried in the basement of a mixed use office building with minimal exterior signage. The first 6 months were pretty tough. Through dedication, hard work, strategic marketing and doing a very good job of actually practicing electrolysis, by the time I was a year in, I had about 70 clients and was averaging 20-30 hours of paid work per week.
Flash forward another year and I have more clients than I know what to do with and I’m working 60-80 hours per week. I never slowed down last fall, in fact, I kept gaining more clients and hour. We finally got a taste of winter 3 weeks ago, and business has dropped in half because of it, but I already have 40+ hours booked for next week, with appointments booked as far out as the end of March.
All of that said, I’m not the typical electrologist that just works on grandma’s chin hair or maybe does someone’s brows here and there. There are plenty of electrologists that just do that, and are relatively successful, but they’re going to expect to see those clients every 2-6 weeks at most, with a fair number of them losing interest once they see that it’s going to take some dedication and isn’t going to be a “one treatment and done forever” thing. Rather, I’d say that 60% of my work is the dirty, gritty, big project stuff that nobody else around here wants to do because it’s just too much work for them - transgender faces, male backs, paradoxical laser hypertrichosis messes, full bodies, etc.
Take tomorrow, I have 1 hour on a trans face, 1 hour on a cis female that was rewarded with a full beard from laser, 2 hours on a trans face and surgical prep, 4 hours on a cis female doing her entire body, and finishing with 5 hours on another cis female that had laser growth on her face that is also wanting her full body done (that likes my work so much, her family members from another state come to see me since I’m better than the electrologists they tried there - and in fact, one of them just booked 2 full days in March). Yes, that’s a 13 hour work day for me with no lunch break scheduled, since I gave it up to someone at the last minute. My location is actually an advantage there, because my clients don’t have the pressure of having to appear in front of all the pretty people in a spa.
I recognize that most people don’t want to work that hard… but I told myself I would do whatever it took to make it work the first couple years. Now I’m at the point where I’m going to be expanding and taking on a second person to work for me, so I don’t have to work so much and can begin enjoying the results of all that work. I’m probably pretty atypical with how quickly I established and grew my business, but it shows you the type of potential that is there.
As far as writing your business plan goes, be far more conservative than that… and realistically, take whatever revenue you think you’re going to do that first year, and cut it in half again while also realizing that your expenses are probably going to be 10-20% higher than what you thought they were going to be. Don’t plan on paying yourself much, if anything, the first 6-12 months and, even when you can start paying yourself, pay yourself what you need to survive while reinvesting as much as you can back into the business.
Don’t waste money on print advertising unless you recognize it for what it is - a way to build familiarity with your business that might, maybe, months down the road, bring someone in because they “heard of you somewhere” before. DO offer free consults, referral credit, etc. Network. Forget what you were taught in school and be willing to experiment to find what works best for you - try different probes, modes you don’t normally use, etc.
