Money & pricing

The Mentor Chair · Money & pricing

What are my bread-and-butter services?

The situation

The biggest tickets get the attention while the steady, repeating appointments quietly hold the book together.

From the mentor chair

Your most expensive service isn't necessarily your most valuable service.

One of the biggest lessons in building a steady book is understanding the value of repeat business.

That $300 transformation might look great on social media.

But the haircut client who comes back every three weeks?

Or the root-retouch client who is sitting in your chair every four weeks?

Those clients can quietly become the financial foundation of your business.

I call them your bread-and-butter clients.

They're predictable.

They rebook.

You know approximately when they're coming back.

And over the course of a year, what looks like a smaller appointment can become a surprisingly valuable client relationship.

Look at the year — not just the appointment

Imagine two clients.

One spends $300 but comes twice a year.

That's $600 in annual service revenue.

Another spends $75 every four weeks.

That's roughly $975 a year.

The $75 appointment looks much smaller when you're staring at today's schedule.

But over the year?

That client is actually producing substantially more recurring service revenue.

That's why I don't want you judging your clientele—or your menu—only by ticket price.

Frequency matters.

Look at your numbers

For each service, look at:

Average ticket

Typical rebooking frequency

Appointments per year

Time required

Product cost

Annual client value

Then ask:

How predictable is this revenue?

A service that reliably brings someone back every 3–4 weeks creates a different kind of business stability than a service someone books once or twice a year.

You need to understand both.

Try this

Identify the services that create the rhythm of your book.

Ask yourself:

“If every client who receives this service disappeared tomorrow, how much would I feel it?”

Those might not be the services you post most often.

They might not be trendy.

They might not have the highest ticket.

But they may be quietly paying your rent.

Don't misread this

This doesn't mean you should fill your entire schedule with lower-ticket services simply because they're frequent.

Time still matters.

Profitability still matters.

Your goals still matter.

The point is to understand what role each service plays in your business.

Some services create larger individual transactions.

Some create recurring stability.

Some bring new people through the door.

Some lead into other services.

A strong menu can have room for all of them.

Mentor note

Don't overlook the clients who come in like clockwork.

A healthy business isn't built only on the biggest appointments.

It's often built on the people who quietly come back again and again and again.

Annual Client Value

Coming during beta

See what a client is worth over a year once rebooking frequency is factored in.

Mentor principle

A healthy business isn't built only on the biggest appointments — it's built on the people who come back.

Connected to your business

Run this situation through the tools you already have.