Why I Regret Having a Friends and Family Discount, And How to Set Boundaries to Save Your Relationships

I want to admit to you one of my biggest regrets in my business…If I could go back in time to the beginning of my career, I wish I had never given a friends and family discount

This is actually a topic that has come up a lot recently with my students inside of my group coaching program, so I thought it would be a good conversation today to breakdown:

• Why I no longer choose to discount any of my services.

• What other boundaries I have in place when it comes to friends and family in my business.

• How I would recommend navigating this situation if it’s something your struggling with in your own business.

I want to begin by saying not all situations are back and white. Maybe this is something you genuinely don’t mind having part of your business and that’s totally ok, but for me I found that discounted services led me down a slippery slope of resentment and boundary issues. 

I believe this all-too-common friends and family discount is a habit we form in the early days of our careers. When we are in cosmetology school we are just eager to do anyones hair that will let us, and then as baby stylists we are desperately seeking the approval of the people closest to us. I know personally I wanted them to be proud of me, I wanted to prove that I was worthy of doing their hair, and that I made the right choice by becoming a hairstylist. 

Sometimes there is the expectation from these relationships that they are entitled to a special discount that they out right ask for, and other times it’s an unspoken obligation we feel completely on our own for a thousand different reasons. 

It’s no secret that I was not producing the same quality of work in the early days of being licensed as I do now. Some of my family members paid the price of some slightly crooked haircuts, and imperfect colors as I was learning to navigate these new skills, and I’m very grateful they were willing to go along the journey with me as I worked on improving myself. However, I was also not charging regular clients the same prices back then as I do now, and some of those early clients have followed along this journey with me too.

I’ve made it a point throughout my career to try to set my pricing to match my value, and if I am doing that properly there should never be a need to discount in the first place. If I were to be able to give myself the perspective I have now, I would have preferred to start off by charging a fair price for my services across the board from the start.

Now, this doesn’t mean there is never a time and place for generosity. There are some scenarios where giving away free services makes total sense. For example, I always give my husband free haircuts (as long as he comes to the salon because I refuse to break my back at the kitchen table) and when I was young and broke in my early twenties in a complicated situation, a family member offered to let me stay in their guest room rent free for a year, and in that time I gave them all the free haircuts they wanted because it was the least I could do for their hospitality. Maybe you have a family member that paid for you to go to cosmetology school and you want to repay the kindness, or on the other hand maybe you have a loyal friend going through a rough patch and you want to offer them your services out of the goodness of your heart.

I view my role as a stylist to be a beautiful act of service and I love having the opportunity to use my unique skills to give back. I have volunteered to do haircuts for a local homeless shelter, i have given haircuts on all of my previous mission trips, I have gifted free bridal hair as a wedding gift to close friends, and I’m always excited to gift a color service as a mothers day present to some of the special people in my life. Having boundaries around your services doesn’t mean you can never be generous, but it does allow you to have clarity on when and how you can best utilize your generosity. 

My personal test for any given situation when I’m feeling either led or pressured to discount my services is: if I wouldn’t be perfectly happy and fulfilled doing the service for free, then I shouldn’t discount it to begin with. I prefer to operate by the moto that “my services are either free or expensive, but they are never cheap” meaning I will gladly giveaway a service for free when I’m feeling generous, but otherwise I charge full price.

You might be wondering how giving a service away for free is better than offering a discount, but let me explain. 

In my experience discounts are the bigger issue when it comes to boundaries. They are less defined, hold more expectations, and are much messier in comparison. The discounts are what lead me to feeling devalued for my services and bring up the heavy emotions of burn out. It’s much easier for me to recognize when I would be happy and content gifting a service completely for free than it is to define where the line is for who is entitled to get a discount and how much is fair for that specific person. 

I want you to ask yourself, how would you define what a fair discount is anyways? Is it 5%, 10%, 50%? Do you have different discounts for your grandma that is heavily involved in your life vs a different grandparent you only see on the holidays? What happens when you normally discount your friends but then one day you start drifting apart and only see them when they want their hair done? It becomes an anxious game of weighing the pros and cons list of every person in your life. The lines get blurry and the blurrier the boundaries are, the easier it is to let your emotions weigh in. 

The majority of stylists are emotionally invested in their careers, I know I am, and I don’t think with healthy boundaries place that it necessarily has to be a bad thing. Part of what sets some of the top stylists apart from the crowd is how our passion influences our creativity. But, the more you allow the discounts to creep in, the more you begin to realize that some of these people (maybe not all of them) view your business as a hobby rather than a respected career. They want your art, but they would rather let you fall victim to the starving artist trope than actually pay for the value of the service.

I’m a firm believer that anyone who truly wants to support your business will be happy to pay full price regardless of their relationship to you. Any friend or family member who sits in your chair should be valuing your services and time just as much (if not more than) the general public. And if my services are not in their budget, or they prefer to go to a different stylist for any reason, I am in no way offended or hold that against them. Our relationship doesn’t obligate them to be my client any more than it obligates me to provide them a discount. 

Another issue with discounts is that if you book them during regular business hours, you’re taking that appointment away from full priced clients and ultimately costing your business income. To accommodate their discounted price and still cover your necessary expenditures, you would ultimately have to increase your regular rates to compensate for the difference. Your business expenses do not decrease when your price decreases, and your prices should be carefully crafted with your expenses in mind. 

I find that it’s easy for us to forget sometimes that there are far more expenses than just the tubes of color used and your time. Your time is valuable, and not something we need to think of as a cheap commodity to give away. Every hour you spend behind the chair you are assuming other expenses such as rent, utilites, booking system, continued education, insurance, and more. If you are doing discounted services you now have the added burden of covering these expenses with a lower than expected revenue. In some ways this is actually costing your business money to be able to provide these services at a discounted rate.

When all of those factors come into play, there is no denying that we feel them whether it’s on the business side or the personal side of our finances. Often times this causes us to start cutting corners, lowering our quality standards because we are “giving them such a great deal” while they are left disappointed because they wanted the same standard of service all of your other clients get. Even though they are paying a discounted rate, there is still an exchange of money which leads them to expect the full value of the service to be delivered. And why should they expect anything less? The agreement was to pay you the discounted rate for the service they asked for, I would bet that they never requested to receive a lower quality experience in exchange for that discount. In the end everyone is given a disservice through the friends and family discount and it starts to deteriorate those relationships outside of the salon as well.

However, the whole dynamic shifts when you are gifting a service for free. In this scenario you have the freedom to be in control of how you want the appointment to go. You get to decide when it’s most convenient for you to do the service, and it also doesn’t lock you into a never ending expectation that you owe this person something just because of your relationship. Its rare for anyone who respects your business to expect you to do their hair for free forever, but if its clear that it is for a specific occasion like a birthday, holiday, season of life, or simply out of generosity, they can accept graciously without you feeling resentful or awkward because now you feel committed to offering them a discount long term. The expectations are completely different with a gift than a discount, and I find that it makes the exchange much more enjoyable for both you and the person getting their hair done.

The tricky thing is, many stylists find themselves stuck in the discount pattern before they realize just how much stress, resentment, and anxiety it causes them. It’s always much easier to set a boundary up front, but things get complicated when trying to redefine your boundaries later. Especially with people you have close relationships with outside of your business. 

I know that the key to setting successful boundaries is all about how you communicate them, and having the right words to say can be the most intimidating part of the process. You don’t want to offend this person you have a relationship with, but you also know you need to take action, so in order to make things easier for you I have created a completely free guide with 5 different scripts you can choose from to fit whatever scenario you find yourself in. 

There are customizable templates for how to set the boundary up front so that no one expects a discount, there are other examples you can use for when it’s a friend or family member you’ve been discounting for a long time and need to bring up to your full prices, and even templates for how to amicably explain that you no longer want to be their stylist so that you can maintain your relationship outside of the salon. Whatever your situation is I think you can find these copy and paste templates extremely helpful. 

All you have to do is visit caseytaylorstylist.com/freeguide and once you input your email I will send the fee download to your inbox. 

I understand that having conversations like these with the people you’re closest with can be way more intimidating and complicated than a client whose relationship has always been strictly professional. Sometimes the people we have relationships with outside of the salon don’t view our boundaries the same way because they have always been given the impression that they have a different set of rules. No ones reaction to boundaries being set is 100% predictable, but if you use these templates to communicate clearly and kindly I can promise that anyone who genuinely loves you and respects your business will be understanding of these boundaries. Remember, the only people who are offended by boundaries being enforced are those that benefited from crossing them. But any time you are sacrificing your boundaries for the satisfaction of someone else, you are surrendering you own peace in exchange for theirs.  

- Casey Taylor