How To Set Your Lash Prices & Calculate Costs per Services
One of the most important but largely overlooked aspects of running a lash business is maintaining inventory and setting your price correctly to ensure you're not only breaking even but making a profit. To figure out the prices you need to sell your services at, you need to know precisely how much the costs are, the costs of everything, from the fixed costs like the supplies, rent, and equipment to the variable costs like the time spent on clients, utilities, etc.
One practical tip for managing costs in your lash business is to save all receipts and track all expenses in a systematic way. I've found it particularly useful to save receipts on Google Drive or send them to my business email address. You can also use accounting apps such as Mint or the good old-fashioned Excel sheets. Excel is a great and one of the best ways to keep track of inventory, but there are software like Zoho now where you can keep track of your stock, but they sometimes incur a fee.
Let's begin by adding up the basic expenses involved in making lash extensions for a client. This includes the cost of lashes, eye patches, brushes, and your hourly wage.
Those are the variable costs, which vary depending on the number of customers you get. Then it's time to add the fixed costs, which will always be the same, such as utilities, insurance, rent, etc.
It is a bit more complicated to add this. The easiest way is to add all your monthly bills and divide them by the number of customers you expect to get in that month.
For example:
Rent: 500
Utilities: 200
Insurance: 150
Booking site: 25
Marketing: 100
Phone: 50
Internet: 50
Total: 1,075
Now we know how much you need to make to break even. As long as you make more than this, you'll be alright. Ideally, you make twice as much as this and save 25% in case something happens.
Now, you take the total, which in this hypothetical case is 1,075, and divide it by the number of days you plan on working.
If you're going to be working 5 days a week x 4 weeks in the month, then it equals 20. So if we take the total of 1,075 and divide it by 20, it equals 53.75, which means that is the minimum we need to make to break even. As mentioned before, ideally, you can make double that, so let's round it up to 100 per day. This can easily be done with two full sets a day!
As mentioned above, the cost of each classic full set would be around 45.10, so we need to charge more than that, ideally double. At 90 a set, it is right up there with the ideal amount to lead a successful lash business!
And that is how you calculate your costs per service and set your prices!
In a future post, we'll talk about when and how to raise your prices so you can work less but still make the same amount of money or more!
If you would like some one-on-one mentoring where we take you by the hand and guide you through all the hoops and issues you could be experiencing as a lash artist and business owner, we offer one mentoring spot a month, so let us know if you're interested!