You've watched the YouTube videos. You've read the Facebook group threads at eleven at night when you should have been asleep. You've probably bought at least one course that's still sitting half-finished on your laptop. And you're still asking yourself the same question: is it worth paying someone to help me grow this business, or should I just keep working it out myself?
What DIY growth actually costs you
DIY isn't free. It feels free because no money changes hands, but the real cost is time, and time is the one thing a working salon owner has the least of. Every hour spent piecing together a pricing strategy from three different podcasts is an hour not spent on the treatment room floor, or with your family, or simply resting. I've watched brilliant beauty therapists spend two years reinventing something a coach could have handed them in a fortnight.
There's also the cost of the mistakes you don't know you're making. A price rise done at the wrong time, a hiring decision made on gut feel alone, a marketing spend with no plan behind it. None of these show up as a single bad day. They show up eighteen months later as a business that's still exhausting you, which is exactly the pattern I wrote about in why running a salon leaves so many owners exhausted.
Where coaching earns its keep
Good coaching won't do the work for you, but it hands you a shortcut past the mistakes someone else already made, plus a person whose job is to notice what you can't see from inside your own business. When you're the one doing the treatments, answering the phone, and managing the team, you lose the outside view. A coach's whole value is standing where you can't stand and telling you what's actually there.
The other thing coaching does that DIY struggles to replicate is accountability. It's one thing to know you should raise your prices or have that difficult conversation with a team member. It's another to actually do it by Friday, because someone is going to ask you on Monday whether you did. I've written before about whether hiring a business coach is worth it for a salon, and the honest answer is that it depends less on your budget than on whether you already act on what you know, or whether you need a nudge.
When DIY genuinely is the right call
I'm not going to pretend coaching is right for everyone, at every stage. If you've only been open six months and you're still working out whether you even like running a business, spend that year learning on your own terms. If money is genuinely tight and a course or a coach would mean not paying yourself, DIY is the responsible choice for now, not a failure. And some owners really do enjoy the process of figuring things out themselves, reading widely and testing as they go. If that's you and it's working, there's no rule that says you have to change it.
The cost that matters most is time
The number that actually matters is how much longer you're willing to spend stuck at the same level, doing the same twelve-hour days, before you decide the DIY route has cost you more than the coaching would have. Salon and clinic owners rarely regret the investment itself. What they regret is waiting three more years to make it, while the business stayed exactly as demanding as it always was.
The first step if you're not sure
You don't have to leap straight to one-to-one coaching to find out whether it helps. A lower-commitment way in is worth trying first, something like Salon Spark, a weekly group coaching and accountability programme built for exactly this stage, where you want outside structure without a huge spend. It's a reasonable way to test whether having someone else in the loop changes how much you actually get done. And whichever route you take, it's worth reading what I've said about what to look for in a salon business coach before you commit to anyone, DIY habits included, since the wrong fit can waste as much time as no help at all.
Whatever you decide, decide it on purpose. Drifting between DIY and half-started courses for another year is its own choice, even if it doesn't feel like one. If you want a second opinion on where you are and what would actually move things forward, that's exactly the conversation I have through my coaching work with salon and clinic owners.
Phil Jackson is a salon business coach and the founder of Build Your Salon. He spent over twenty years running his own salon before moving into coaching, and works with salon owners across the UK and beyond through his programmes Salon Spark, AI By Your Side, and the Evil Genius Retreat.
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