How many haircuts a week to earn £40,000

The sum, in one line

Cuts a week = target ÷ weeks you work ÷ your average price.

Forty thousand pounds, over forty-six working weeks, at twenty-four pounds a cut, is thirty-seven cuts a week. Call it seven a day across six days.

For a lot of barbers that is a relief, because it is fewer than they feared. For others it is the moment they realise the target was never going to happen at the price they are charging.

What it looks like at different prices

Same forty thousand, same forty-six weeks, and nothing changing except what you charge:

Going from eighteen pounds to twenty-eight is not doubling your prices. It takes seventeen heads a week out of the target — the better part of two full days of cutting, every week, for the same money.

Why price beats volume, every time

An extra two pounds on your average cut costs you nothing. No more hours, no more rent, no more product, no more standing up. It goes almost entirely to the bottom line.

Two more heads a day costs you the chair time to do them, and you only have so much of that. Volume runs out. Price does not, at least not nearly as quickly as people assume.

This is why the honest first question about any income target is not “can I work harder?” but “what would I need to charge for this to be comfortable?”

Use forty-six weeks, not fifty-two

The most common way to miss a target is to plan on a year that does not exist. Nobody works fifty-two weeks. Two weeks off, the bank holidays, a week of illness and the dead spell after Christmas take about a month out of the year for most barbers.

At twenty-four pounds a cut, planning on fifty-two weeks tells you that thirty-three cuts a week gets you to forty grand. It does not. It gets you to about thirty-five thousand, and you find out in November.

Does it actually fit in your week?

This is the check people skip. Thirty-seven cuts a week is only a plan if there are thirty-seven slots to put them in.

If your week holds sixty slots, thirty-seven is a utilisation of about 62% — comfortable, with room for walk-ins and overruns. If your week holds forty slots, thirty-seven means running at over 90% with no gaps, no lunch and no tolerance for a single late arrival. That is not a target, that is a treadmill.

Work out your slots before you commit to the number. If the target does not fit, the answer is the price, not a longer day.

This is takings, not take-home

Worth being blunt about. Forty thousand through the till is not forty thousand in your pocket.

Out of it comes the shop's cut, products, kit and insurance. What is left is your profit, and income tax and National Insurance come out of that. A barber taking fifty-two thousand with ten thousand of costs is taxed on forty-two, and keeps somewhere around thirty-four and a half of it.

If the number in your head is take-home rather than turnover, you need to work backwards from a considerably bigger figure. Better to find that out now than in January.

If the target does not fit

There are only really four moves, in rough order of how much they cost you:

• Put the price up. Cheapest, fastest, and the one most people put off longest.
• Fill the gaps you already have. You are paying for that chair time whether anybody sits in it or not.
• Cut the no-shows. A deposit is unpopular for about three weeks and then nobody mentions it again.
• Work more days. Last resort, and the only one that costs you your life as well as your time.

Most barbers reach for the fourth one first. The arithmetic says start at the top.