How to get your salon staff to hit 3x what you pay them
My staff cannot hit 3x wage help! Are you a busy salon but wonder where all the money disappears to? Do you find that once you pay your bills there’s nothing left? You might even pray at the end of the month you have enough money left over to pay for everything and not get caught out. I know how stressful it is waiting and praying that you have enough money in the bank to cover everything. Some months sweating and checking the last few days’ appointments hoping no-one cancels and takings remain strong. It’s been very close on occasions, too close. One of the main reasons that there isn’t enough money at the end of the month is that the staff are productive enough. They could seem busy, even look like they are booked out, but this is where you need to investigate first. Staff must be productive for you to make a profit. Your wage bill will be the biggest bill your salon has. It has the ability to make you more profits if you get this right, but also, on the flip side, it can steal all your profits if you get this wrong. You must help your staff hit 3x wage You will first need to figure out what this amount is [hour wage x 3] x [hours in a week] = 3x wage goal. How close are your team members to this figure? If they are over this amount, then GREAT if not, then you’ll need to know where you need to focus your attention. There are two numbers that make up the takings. How many clients do they see? How much does the client spends. If your average spending is low, then you need more appointments. If your average bill is high, you will need less. Don’t fall into the trap of having a low average bill and giving clients lots of time. This is unproductive. Help your staff hit this important goal by getting these numbers right. If you need help making this happen, feel free to book an appointment with me. Lets chat Richard
How to stop your salon leaking money
To have a successful salon, you MUST have a basic understanding of how you attract clients and more importantly how to convert them into your clients. Most salon owners put a lot of time and effort into attracting clients, but pay little or no attention to keeping them. Remember, you are nothing without clients. Two key elements that you should be obsessing over when owning your salon are Why do they leave other salons and why do they come to you? How many clients are returning to your salon and how often? If you’ve been watching my webinars over the last couple of years, you would have noticed a pattern. I teach salon owners how to ‘attract’ the right client, how to convert that client to return again and again and how to ‘deliver’ a remarkable experience so they become loyal fans of yours. Attracting new clients When a good client decides to leave the comfort of their current salon they will shop around and look for a new salon that satisfies their needs. People don’t just leave a salon for no reason. Something has happened. That salon didn’t deliver on their promise to the client and the client is in search of a new salon to help them get what it is they want. This is as far as your marketing goes. It just says “Hey this is what we do!” If the prospective client is considering your salon as their next salon of choice they will not do it lightly. They WILL check you out. They WILL look at your sign above your salon, Google your website, they will head over to your social platforms and get some understanding about what your salon’s vibe is. If they like what they see and feel secure they will reach out and book an appointment with you. After all, people don’t want to move from salon to salon, they want somewhere that is reliable and looks after their needs. This is one of the main areas that you need to concentrate on. You need to know why they left their last salon and why they chose yours. These two important questions hold the key to attracting clients to your salon anytime you want. This is so important. It’s one of the first things we teach you at Lifestyle Salon Systems in Module 1. It takes a little bit of effort, but once you master it you will see a huge increase in new clients. Once you know what they’re looking for in a salon, you can start letting them know that you are an expert in it, or that it’s your passion. It will open up a whole new market of people that will start seeing your salon, where you were previously invisible to them. Client retention Then there’s what we call ‘the leaky bucket.’ There’s no point in trying to fill your salon with new clients if you are losing them faster than you are attracting them. Sounds like common sense but it’s the number 1 mistake most salon owners make. You are in a repeat business, business. Your sole aim is to attract clients that will love what you do and return again and again. So why do so many salon owners get this so wrong? Well it’s easier to throw out an ad or post to attract clients. It feels good to think that you can attract attention to your salon and it’s always nice to hear a client say ‘they chose your salon.’ But by focusing all your efforts on new clients and forgetting about the ones you have will have an impact on your salons takings. Your staff will always struggle to hit targets and you will always see gaps in your appointment book. You need to take control of this and have a plan to get your clients back. Some clients leave because you didn’t deliver on what they expected from you. This could be a marketing issue, where you’re attracting the wrong clients or your client journey is sub- standard and needs work. Take a look at both of these areas and decide which one is your problem that needs fixing. The benchmark for new client retention is around 25% and for your current clients it’s around 76% so potentially you can easily be losing close to half thousands and thousands over the year. Now that’s some major leak…… Most salon owners don’t know what to fix next and this is where having a coach separates you from the rest. Imagine being able to chat to a salon expert who has done all of this in their salon and lives and breathes these types of scenarios day in, day out? No wonder salon owners that have a coach make more money faster than salons owners that don’t. But clients not returning is not the only leak you have. Clients have started to drag out their appointments and visit your salon less and less. This is having a MASSIVE impact on your salons takings and success rate. This alone is setting your salon back thousands and wasting years and years. Look at the impact this is having on salons today. This happened in my salon too. Back in 2008 when the recession started to hit, my client visits between appointments were sitting around 8.2 weeks. That’s 6 times a year. I noticed more white spaces in my appointment book. I always checked my client retention and I knew I wasn’t losing clients, so this baffled me. My computer system was telling me my client visits hadn’t changed but I knew something wasn’t right. You don’t start to get gaps that appear for no reason. I spent all weekend looking into my numbers round and round until ‘BAM’ I found it. I called my software company to check why their client visit number was different to mine. I was shocked. Their system only tracks the last 90 days, which is ludicrous. Of course, your favourite
How to earn more money in your salon without working more hours
Either you can work harder in your salon or you can learn how to get your salon working harder for you. How do you get your salon working harder for you?You always need to be working on areas of your business that grow the salon takings. We call them Salon Foundations. Foundation building is spending your time in the ONLY 3 ways to increase any business – attracting quality new clients to your salon, filling your white spaces (because if you have them, you are losing clients) and lastly, by building the best client experience the client has ever seen. That way they pay more and get more value.You can work the same hours in a day and get the same result until you learn how to get maximum results for the same time in your day. Everything you do should be on perfecting the foundations of your salon. Every salon owner that works on their salons foundations can expect up to 30% growth in takings and beyond, without adding any more working hours to their day. Now thats getting their salon working for them. The 3 Foundation-building core systems Attract- Become the ‘Authority’ salon in your area. Everyone wants to go to the best! This is when you take ‘what’ you do in your salon and explain this to prospective clients that don’t even know you yet. By using this foundation technique you should expect a 10% increase in new clients to your salon. Convert- In a world where clients are less loyal than ever before, (resulting in white spaces in your salons diary), you need to set up a ‘keep in touch’ system. With new client retention sitting at 25% and current client retention at 76% it’s apparent that most salon owners are losing a lot of clients. You need a foundation system to ‘keep in touch’ and do your best to stop losing so many clients. With little effort you can the impact the statistics in your favour and increase client visits by 10% over the year. Deliver- The biggest and best foundation you need to be building is the ‘client journey’. This is where you get to make your salon the destination, not you or any particular staff member. This foundation is so important because it not only increases your average client spend by 10% with ease, but it protects you from superstars leaving and stealing all the clients (if you have ever had a key staff member leave you, you know it hurts financially for a long time). Working on these three salon foundations takes no more of your time than what you are working on now. They take no more money but the result is outstanding to your salons takings. If you are finding your salons takings have stagnated or you’re not growing at the pace you would like, I guarantee you are missing 1 or 2 of your salons foundations.How many do you need to work on in YOUR salon? If you are interested in learning and implementing these foundations, I’d love to have a 10 min chat to see which roadblocks are stopping your salon from working for you.
Salon Marketing Success
Marketing will NOT get you clients! So many salon owners mess up their salon marketing and actually turn off good salon clients. Salon owners need to realise that marketing is a way to get your salon noticed – Good or Bad, not to attract clients to the salon, that’s why most fail at this so badly. It’s almost impossible to try and attract clients to your salon instantly, without giving away a massive discount. Wouldn’t it be great if clients would ring the salon when we needed them? There is a time and place to offer discounts, which I’ll cover later on. But for now, I want your salon busy with high paying clients, and I’m afraid they are not sitting around waiting for you to call them. Trying to attract good clients only when you’re quiet is not just the old way, but it’s stupid. That’s still what most salon owners do, and I don’t want you to be one of them. Salon owners see a gap in their appointment book, and they panic. They throw out a special offer to try to get clients in quickly, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, they’d put out another special, or give up saying, “Facebook doesn’t work for me”. Then two or three weeks down the line gaps appear in the appointment book again, or a bill is due, and they panic, and they start marketing again. We call that helicopter marketing, and it means you’re just marketing here and there whenever you need it, up and down, up and down. If you want to get your salon really busy in today’s modern world, you need ‘momentum’. MOMENTUM is what makes salon marketing successful If you are anything like I was, I would sit in front of a computer, and I didn’t know what to write. Or I would just get around to it when I was quiet and then I would stop when I got busy. I would post on a Friday sometimes, and then I would forget until next Monday or get called away from the computer and forget what I was doing. Or I’d leave it a couple of weeks until I had time. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d just throw any stuff out there and hope it worked, hope that people would call the salon, I never had a plan. I would only look for new clients if it was quiet, and I would usually stick to what I did before, even though it didn’t work the first time. I guess most of you are the same! If you’re anything like me, I’m easily distracted when I don’t really commit myself to it. I move on quickly if I get bored, or I’ll pass it on to somebody else, give it to any staff member to do. It just seems too hard sometimes, and I just give up. When I ask my salon owner clients about their marketing now, they say they have good intentions, but they are always putting fires out all day long. It reminds me of what I did. Nothing practical! Nothing changed! You may have great intentions, plan to book an hour out in your diary Really good-paying clients will not leave their current salon until they have found another salon to go to, so right now your prospective client is checking you out (we’ll cover this in more detail in another blog). But you need to market your salon every single day, even when you don’t need clients. What I want you to get from this blog is you need a ‘Marketing Rhythm’ Everything you do is either attracting or repelling your prospective clients… By keeping your marketing moving with momentum, and never stopping even when you’re fully-booked, you will see your salon continually growing. All you need to do is go into passive mode when you are fully-booked. If you can build a momentum and a rhythm with your marketing, you know exactly when you’re marketing is going out and who you’re talking to and what action you want them to take. Then your salon will get booked out very, very soon. You’ll book every single day out in your business. You won’t have to worry about quiet days again, and you won’t have to worry about your staff not hitting their targets. Knowing exactly what to post, when to post it, and what result you want to happen is what a true salon owner, leader is called to do. Momentum marketing doesn’t come naturally to salon owners and needs to be built into your every day habits. But that is easier said than done………. On January 1st millions of people around the world declare to their friends and family that this year is going to be different. They say goodbye to their bad habits and behaviours, and they make a promise that this New Year will be different from the rest! They make their resolution to lose weight, be healthier, stop smoking, to go for a run every day, join the gym, drop a dress size, be more successful. They all promise to have a better year than the last. Whatever it may be, they declare to their friends and family that this is their year it’s going to happen this time. But did you know that only 8% of people actually keep their New Years resolutions. That’s an astonishing 92% of people who fail every year, who never follow through to actually do what they promised they would do. It’s not for lack of trying, they really want to achieve this, but it’s hard. That’s why we attract so many salon owners joining us at the Lifestyle Salon Coach because they need that accountability to keep them motivated when things get tough. I’m sure you are the same! So when it comes to your marketing, you need to make it part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth. Finding
Why make it so difficult running a salon and making profit?
With only 3 ways to make more money in your salon, why do so many salon owners not even make enough to pay what they are worth? I’ve been a salon owner all my life and now I help salon owners make more money, while working less hours in their salon. That gets me to see 1,000’s of salons set-ups and the findings are astonishing. It’s not your fault, salon owners. You are creative, you’re loving and you’re givers and that is your magic. Its also your downfall. I’m seeing more and more BAD advice being dished out from so-called experts that have NEVER owned a salon, NEVER walked in your shoes and they’re telling you how to run your salon by something they have learned from an online course. How to sell to clients in your salon How to get clients in the door with discounts How to lock people into long term payment plans How to increase prices How to……… Add what you want here. What I do know by being a salon owner for all my life is this… You and your staff don’t want to sell. You and your staff don’t want to do cheap clients. You and your staff don’t want to lock clients in that don’t want to be there. You and your staff want to give value to your clients. And guess what? The clients don’t want you to sell to them, give discounts away to non- clients, be locked in to 12 months payment plans and they surely don’t want to pay more without added value. So why do salon owners fall for it? Because you are just like me. You know something isn’t working, you know you are winging it, you know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong. And that sick feeling of not being able to pay bills on time and juggling money to pay wages is something that only a salon owner feels. It’s easy to say “do this” to a salon owner if it’s not their money, when the pressure of not being able to pay bills isn’t there. I’ve seen product companies, employees friends, coaches that have never been there give advice, but if you have NEVER been there, you will never know that feeling. So you try with the NEW thing that might just make it work, that might just make you money. There is NO fast money to be made in the salon world. Those that grow fast, usually crash and burn fast. Those that work on TODAYS money usually are not here tomorrow. The ONLY way to make money as a salon owner is to concentrate, implement, build foundations and work bloody hard on 3 pillars. 1. Get more clients that love what you do, because you are meant to serve these people. FIND THEM. 2. Get them to be loyal by making connections and delivering on your promise to these people. SERVE THEM 3. Deliver a remarkable service that they will pay you more, tell their friends how great you are. WOW THEM. These and only these are your foundations for success. NOTHING else. I should know, I did these every day for over 20 years and any salon owner that is making money is also obsessed by these 3 pillars. If you think the golden egg is a bot, a sales banter, Groupon etc, you are just clutching at straws. Yes, these help. Yes, these can turbo-boost takings. But they are not the way to true, long-term salon success. I have given my life to hairdressing and salon ownership and I have been just where you are. I’ve been successful and made money. I’ve spent it too. I’ve juggled the bills, delayed paying tax, managed a staff walk out and even had to sack people because I couldn’t afford to pay them. I’ve learnt my skills by mistakes with a NEED to feed my family. Yes it may have took 20 years. But now, I live a beautiful life. My salons (I have now sold) gave me a very comfortable life and I now teach other salon owners to get off the rollercoaster of working hard for little reward, the right way. I have a community of salon owners that I am doing life with and they are breaking free from the pack. Today I want you to ask yourself this question and be honest. ‘Is your salon the success you thought it would be?’ If not, what are you going to do about it? This success you will pay for. Either with money (by getting a mentor) or with time (you’ll need to learn by trial and error and that can take years) I want to invite you to check out how I help other salon owners and how I can help you. Please do your due diligence and check out who you want to do life with. I believe foundations for your salon are the only way to grow a true salon business. Like building a house without foundations, your house will never withstand the first storm. If you would like an informal 10 min chat to discuss your salons needs and what roadblocks might be in your way, feel free to book a chat in my diary here https://calendly.com/isaloncoaching/salonstrategycall It’s time to work smarter and leave the harder to others
The real outcome of not being able to fill the salon appointment book
The number one sticking point for salon growth is attracting new fresh clients into your salon at the right time… Being a salon owner in today’s world is scary, with lots of you struggling to cover bills and pay your staff correctly. Then, there’s the added pressure of your cash flow being so tight. It makes you desperate to get clients in your salon fast, so you react to empty spaces and throw out specials and discounts, but to no avail. Resorting to heavily discounting your prices to try and fill your staff up quickly isn’t the smartest plan. This is the start of your demise and takes you further and further into the War Zone. I call it a War Zone because we have hundreds and thousands of salons trying to attract the same clients, in the same way, with the same discounts And guess what …. they’re all having the same problems. Every week seems to be a battle to juggle the bills and keep your team motivated.They cannot find clients to fill their staff and the staff are sitting around bored. This will result in consequences…… Here’s the problem… If the flow of new clients is inconsistent in your salon and you stop and think about your attraction strategy for getting new clients to your salon……..is it working? Does it attract the right or wrong type of people? Is it non-existent, maybe you don’t even have a strategy? Or it could only be bringing in one or two clients each week? Is your phone not ringing at all with new enquires? Do you wish it was ringing off the hook, new clients desperately trying to book an appointment and you have to turn people away? Here’s what is happening. There are not enough new clients because either you don’t have time to do marketing properly. You just jump on the computer and push the issue, sending out any old posts. And if the new prospects get an inkling that you are pushing they will pull away, and you just end up working harder and harder for no results…. So what does that mean? What you end up with is annoying gaps in the appointment book and staff just standing around getting bored. If you fail to motivate your team members, your staff will demotivate themselves, and that’s a hard place to try and pick themselves up from. Bored staff start thinking about being anywhere but there, even working for another salon. What that means is. It’s then a never-ending battle to grow your salon, a war zone. If it’s an issue for you now, it was probably an issue for you 3 months ago, 6 months, a year. Unless we fix it, it’s probably going to stay that way, so let’s fix it today. Let’s do this Instead of having inconsistent new clients calling the salon, you want people booking into your appointment book consistently. Instead of having you push last minute, not knowing what to post, you’ll have a system doing the hard work for you. You’ll be organised, and every post is attracting the right clients. Our job today is to turn the gaps in the appointment book into a fully booked column for every staff member with quality clients. Then when you employ a new team member or have team member move onto the floor, you can turn on the tap and book them up fast. Instead of you doing all the pushing and battling to fill the salon, you don’t have to work hard each and every time. The salon will grow, profits will grow, and the staff will be loving each and every day. This is important because….. …. there are too many salons in your area all feeding from the same pond. The average salon needs 2000 clients per salon to escape the war zone.I want to share with you a new way, a simple way to attract clients to your salon who don’t care about price. You need to be an Authority, ‘the expert’. In fact, they don’t care how long the wait is, how much you charge or even which staff member is doing it. You need to set your salon apart from every salon in town. So the price is not the driving force. Every new client that comes to your salon has a problem which the previous salon didn’t fix. You need to learn more about that problem than anyone else and be the expert in that subject. Every time you do a consultation in your salon, the client is letting you know what their issues are because you know that that client has come to you from another salon with something wrong. It could be: Their colour is too yellow The other salon makes them wait It takes too long The greys are not covered The hair cut doesn’t last The nails fall off They all have a problem, listen at your next consultation and see if you can spot what is annoying them enough to have left their previous salon. That is their biggest problem, and your job is to solve that problem, whatever it may be, solve it and you have a client for life. So what would happen if you could possibly write to these people before they go looking for a new salon and say, “Hey, I know you have this problem, and I am the expert in that, would you like me to fix this for you?”. Do you think that the client will come to you on price or come to your salon because you can fix their problem? I know for a fact that price is not an issue for that particular client, they just want their problem fixed. So you have two options right now, the old way or the new way. Now let’s imagine that the clients are mice and we want to catch as many mice as possible, there are two ways in which we
Train People Well Enough So They Can Leave, Treat Them Well Enough So They Don’t Want To
I believe that a lot of salon owners don’t have the skill or the know how to grow their salon correctly! Let me explain why…. …they seem to have missed something, and this something is really, really, important.I don’t know how they missed it, but they did……. Every successful salon will have a great team behind them Without a great team, all you have is a bunch of mercenaries who are only looking after themselves. It may seem like the quickest way to make money, but to me, it’s just climbing higher before you fall, and believe me, you will fall. I’ve owned salons all my life, and I started this way too……… I would get fully qualified staff and fill them with my clients. Now I don’t want to tar everybody with the same brush, but I see this all the time in salons which I coach. Salon owners who desperately need staff, so they take on a staff member and fill them with their clients. Why Is That A Problem? The problem with this is that the new staff member isn’t aligned with the salon’s philosophy, they seem to do what they want. I call these staff members ‘superstars’ because they are usually high performing staff members who seem to make you lots of money. So what’s wrong with that? LOTS!!!!!!!They are transient workers, they will come, and they will go, taking your clients with them and the clients that stay get annoyed that yet another new staff member is leaving.I learnt this lesson with my first salon. I was very busy, and I had to take on staff to help me out, they were good workers and made me money fast, and all was good until… That day, the day I was dreading, they wanted more money………. or they would leave. I was being held to ransom, they knew it, and I knew it. If I paid them what they wanted, they would want more…….. it was a scary time. So I had a decision to make, do I pay or do I not? I like to think that I’m a very quick learner, so I didn’t pay and they left. I worked harder and I promised myself I would never let this situation happen again. So, I had to learn what system needed to be in place for this to never happen ever again. I decided to go old school and see what other salon owners did in the past. What I found was that they didn’t take on many seniors, most staff came through the ranks, they trained their own. Nowadays people are scared to train their staff to be better than them, I don’t know why? Because back then there was never a shortage of stylists, therapists or apprentices. The circle of salon life wasn’t an issue. They took on apprentices who they trained to become became seniors, who then became salon owners. It just kept the circle alive! Somewhere along the line the chain has broken Salon owners today just want seniors, and there seems to be less and less apprentices moving through the ranks. But no apprentices coming through means that there are less and less becoming seniors. Hence why we have the biggest staff shortage ever around the world Speak to any salon owner today about business, and one topic is red hot! The staff who are coming into the industry are just not good enough… but that’s always been the case. The difference now as opposed to back then is that back then the salon owner would do something about it. He would invest his time in training in them, inspire them and educate them. But most salon owners today have been burnt once and don’t want to invest time or money into apprentices. In the earlier days of my hairdressing career… In the town where I came from the top hair salons were all owned by people who worked in one particular salon. He trained his staff so well that he always had a great team, and yes, some would leave and open up their own salon and train staff the way they were trained. It kept the flow, it gave back, it regenerated itself. A lot of salon owners wouldn’t like to train their staff so well that they might leave and open up and be a competitor. The difference between these and the mercenaries are they usually left under good circumstances, and all were giving back to the industry. This particular owner has owned his salon for over thirty years, and he’s still going strong. In fact, he has built an academy on the side of his salon, so you cannot say that training staff to leave is bad and a waste of time, I believe it’s the opposite……. Train your staff well or you WILL struggle The salon owners who don’t train their staff, who don’t invest in them, who just want it all on a platter, are the salons who struggle. They just don’t know anything else, and it’s bad for them and bad for the industry.When I realised this in my very first salon that I had to take on apprentices and train them my way. Yes it was the long route, yes I had to think a year or two ahead. But once the ball started to roll, I always had an apprentice to work through the ranks. That way, I would never be short of a new staff member ever again. I built a system that fast-tracked my apprentices onto the floor quicker and better. I believe most people that come into our industry want to do hair or beauty. The problem most salon owners have is they want a tea and tidy person (a helper) and then turn them into a senior. By this stage, the new and passionate employee is bored and will leave our career forever.If you invest in people, people will invest in you, and that means
Why Being A Salon Owner Is A Rollercoaster Ride
If you own a salon it has probably already happened to you, if it hasn’t it probably will, the question is, “Can you come back from it?” Owning a salon can be many things, fun, exciting, challenging, rewarding, frustrating and a great education in life and business. It will be full of amazing ‘highs’, and inevitably there will be some ‘lows’. Stuff happens! From acts of nature beyond your control like floods and fires to human frailties like divorce, business partnerships breaking down, illness, bereavement and challenges with your team. Then, for whatever the reason, there will be ‘the occasional staff walk out’. Can you come back from it? Rare is the business whose growth is only forward without the occasional step backwards. Most businesses can handle the downside and manage to ‘roll with the punches‘ and come back bigger and better with lessons learnt and steps in place to prevent it happening again, or at least lessen the impact when it does. It can wear you down… It’s not always easy to bounce back, especially if it’s a big thing that has really hit you hard. Let’s not pretend otherwise, ‘IT CAN WEAR YOU DOWN!’ It’s draining emotionally and financially and has an impact in every area of your life from your own health and relationships to your personal financial security. Where is the lesson? When ‘stuff happens’ you’re entitled to experience a range of emotions, after all, you are only human. The important thing is that you don’t let that negative state of mind last because it will destroy you and your business in the process, that’s where the real damage is done when you go into a downward spiral of negativity, resentment, anger and bitterness resulting in a state of defeat and hopelessness. It’s not over, till it’s over… Inevitably there will be things that you have no control over, like the economy, acts of terror, the weather, rent increases or staff deciding to leave and open up down the street… The important thing is to focus on the things that you do have control over! 1. What can you do?… There will always be stuff that goes wrong, and if all you do is focus on what is wrong, you will feel depressed, bitter and powerless. I’m not saying ignore it, and it will go away, it won’t! But you can look at what you can do and what you do have control over. As soon as you start looking for a solution, you are at least in a positive mindset and heading in the right direction. 2. What can you learn from it? You have two choices, for example; ‘Staff have left and opened up around the corner’. It hurts emotionally and financially. So either you become obsessed with the injustice of it all and remain bitter, vengeful and angry, or you ask yourself, “What am I meant to learn from this to prevent [or at least lessen the damage] when it happens again?” There is always a lesson, and in my experience, if you don’t learn the lesson, the same thing will keep on happening until you do. 3. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Put your ego aside and ask yourself, “How have your actions or inactions contributed to the problem?” Staying with the example of staff leaving to open up against you: Do you know why they have left? What was it that they didn’t like about the way you ran the business, you personally or the lack of opportunity and is there something for you to learn from that? Do you really know your team, their goals and aspirations, do you give them regular appraisals? Have you created REAL opportunities for people to grow within the business? Do you have suitable security measures in place to prevent the intellectual property of the business being compromised, i.e. clients contact details? Do you have proper employment contracts in place with credible non-compete clauses? Out of these questions come answers and depending on the answers will determine what your next proactive and positive steps are. 4. Anticipation If you own a salon, recognise that people will leave you, it’s just a matter of when, how many, who, why and what damage will they do to your business in the process. Accept that having some staff turnover can be a healthy thing for the constant rejuvenation of the business. Acknowledge that if you are a salon owner, there was a time where you were that person ‘leaving’ and that you are not the only one with the ambition to be an owner. Finally, in future is there a way that you could create opportunities to expand with your team, are their opportunities for partnerships, franchising or some other arrangement that is a win for both parties? Can you come back from it …again? Being a salon owner isn’t for the faint-hearted, people will let you down, you will at times feel disillusioned, frustrated and lonely, but business is also a great education about who you are, what you really want in life and as the old adage goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Don’t feel that you have to do it alone, there are many great authors, consultants, presenters and other salon owners that share in your challenges and have ideas and possible solutions they are happy to share. If you enjoyed this free resource, come and join us in my salon lifestyle Facebook group by clicking on the link below… JOIN HERE Top 10 things you should be doing… 1. Start by getting some clarity about what you want in life and what you want from your career. 2. You need to develop a commercial reality about your chosen occupation. What are the key skills to master? What results matter? What are the indicators of good performance? 3. You need to understand and master selling. Why it’s important, how you do it, and how to bring about a change in your current
Where you spend your time is where you make your money
Why working ‘on’ your business will give you more in return than working ‘in’ your business. For every salon owner, there will come a time when your salon has outgrown you being the main earner. If not now, then it will come… so be ready. This is the time when you need to step away from doing and learn how to manage people instead of managing your clients. Every hour you spend working in your business is an hour lost driving your business to where it is meant to be. Someone at some stage has to DRIVE your salon. DRIVE clients in the door DRIVE your staff to better things DRIVE your profit This isn’t a story of ‘you must give up what you love (doing clients) to work on your business’, but, it’s a story of a pay-off. If you work out how many hours you want to work a week, you must have an idea of how that time is going to be best spent. For some salon owners, it’s fully behind the chair and then an afterthought of working on the business. So how do you start to step away? What I did was delegate some work to others and cross off an hour each week, then that hour became two, then three and so on.Delegating some of your workload is a great way to offload some of the pressure · Staff training· Stock control· Stock ordering· Cleaning· Emails· Client complaints· Computer work· Marketing· Paperwork What can you delegate to your staff? This doesn’t have to be complicated and doing simple things more often will grow your salon faster than trying too hard. Just by sitting down, taking some time out from all the doing and looking ahead to where you want to be will be the simplest thing you can do. Looking towards the end of the year. Do you know what your expected turnover is going to be? Do you know how much profit will be left? Do you have targets in place to encourage your team to keep focused? After all, you are in business to make money. TIP OF THE WEEK Now for the so simple thing that most salon owners don’t do. You need to monitor your staff and let them know how close they are to their target; this needs to be done on a daily basis. The staff need to know how close they are to hitting their target. It always amazes me when a staff member realises they can actually hit their target; they go for it in a big way. But when they think they can’t make it they won’t even try. Repetition So all you have to do is be repetitive and help them along. Show them what they are doing works. As an owner, it’s your job to encourage and show them how to hit their targets. If your stylist asks 100 clients to buy shampoo they may get a 10% hit rate, that’s 10 shampoos, but if they ask 10 clients, it’s only 1 shampoo sold. They need to be repetitive with their work also. Show them how to do it, role-play scenarios with them. If you can get 1 stylist to follow you, they will all follow you. This is just one example of how to earn more money in the salon. Simple but very effective Richard McCabe ‘The Lifestyle Salon Coach’www.lifestylesaloncoach.com When you’re ready here are ways I can help you… 1. WORK DIRECTLY WITH ME AND MY TEAM If you own a hair or beauty salon and you’re fed up with having no cash leftover then check out our group coaching programs. If you’re a new salon owner or have less than 2 employees then this just for you CHECK IT OUT HERE If you’re established and have 3 or more employees, this is perfect for you CHECK IT OUT HERE 2. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE A FREE COPY OF MY BEST SELLER SALON BUSINESS BOOK? Just send me an email with the subject line BOOK, and I’ll get that to you. rmccabe3@me.com
Why Salon Culture Is So Important It Will Actually Save Your Salon.
Why salon culture is so important it will actually save your salon. Think of the biggest and fastest growing companies in the world today, Uber – Apple – Google – AmazonWhat do they have in common?Staff who all share their passion to grow. Get the right systems in place and the right people working for you and your salon will thrive. Just concentrating on getting superstar staff and how much money they make you, well, your salon will always end up barely surviving, over time it catches up with the best of us. You cannot buy people who don’t want to be bought! People that can be bought only work for money. So how do you install LOVE into your staff if they are mercenaries? Imagine your team all money orientated chasing down targets to get their bonus, selling retail and up-selling the clients on almost every visit. Superstars in their own right. THIS IS WHAT MOST SALON OWNERS DREAM OF……………. Motivated staff who seem to be getting results and making money. But I see it differently… I see greedy money hungry staff, who try to book as many clients in their column as possible, squeezing and rushing clients. Up-selling services with the focus on making more money NOT client focused at all. I see the client walking out with retail products that they don’t really need. How long before the client wakes up and realises they are being used? How long before these staff get caught out? Not long….. Clients will soon see through them and tell you with their feet, they will not be coming back. It will be a while before you realise clients are dropping off. New clients will come and think your staff are wonderful, attentive and professional, as they sell more retail and up-sell services. One day the new clients will stop coming, the word is out and gaps WILL appear. The bonuses that drove your greedy staff will dry up as they will find it harder and harder to hit their target. What do you think these mercenaries will do now?They will leave you, as they look for their next victim.Because………………. Do you feel they have any LOVE for your salon? Do you think they care about other staff members? Do you think they care about you? If you are looking for your staff to LOVE your salon then they must believe in your salon culture. And that all starts with you. Most staff want to belong to something bigger than money, them and even you. I call it the Kim Kardashian moment. Your staff need to feel that what they do is making a difference to your salon’s success. Their success. Your success. And by you building systems to help them achieve this you are actually building a culture in your salon. Some call it a salon standardSome call it cultureSome call it belonging What it really is, is a common goal for all staff to aim for and live up to. They need to feel that their actions on a daily basis ACTUALLY make the salon better. This has NOTHING to do with money and EVERYTHING to do with money. The money is just a milestone that makes things ‘happen.’ It’s the ‘happen’ that will build the salon culture If you spend your time working on this it will pay you back 10 fold Where do you start? Well, you need to know your salon’s goals for the year? Share them with the team, let them know what’s expected of them and help them achieve it. This is so powerful it has the power to grow your salon so strong, it will not need you 🙂 RichWhen you’re ready here are ways I can help you… 1. WORK DIRECTLY WITH ME AND MY TEAM If you own a hair or beauty salon and you’re fed up with having no cash leftover then check out our group coaching programs. -If you’re a new salon owner or have less than 2 employees then this just for you CHECK IT OUT HERE -If you’re established and have 3 or more employees this is perfect for you CHECK IT OUT HERE 2. JOIN MY FACEBOOK GROUPYou’ll find like-minded salon owners all eager to learn and grow their businesses. It’s a safe place where you can ask all of your business questions JOIN HERE
Are Your Employees Only Looking After Themselves
Are your employees only looking after themselves? You know the ones, the ones that have a big clientele, their rebooks are through the roof and sell more retail than anyone else in the salon.If you think I’ve gone crazy or you think that this is a mistake then you need to listen on…….. Your first impression of this statement is Richard are you MAD!!!!!!!!!!!!This is the perfect employee…Because most salon owners seem to have the same problem, their staff seem to have a problem with client retention being poor, retail sales not being good enough and low rebooks. These owners would chop off their arm to have staff who are that passionate?Are they passionate???? Let’s come back to that statement……..Most salon owners complain that the staff are not passionate, but what they really mean is they are not rebooking or selling retail. And a lot of salon owners find it really hard to get their staff to hit set targets because they don’t want to upset them. So, I understand WHY salon owners want that ‘GOLDEN EGG’ stylist or therapist. It’s a short cut to more money and a busy salon.But, as you know or will soon find out there are NO short cuts to a successful salon. But, what clients and you really need is consistency….As the salon owner who can get average staff to perform like superstars will always be more successful.You see owning a salon is a marathon, not a sprint……..If you master the client satisfaction mastery, if you get this right, your retail, your rebooks and your client retention will go through the roof naturally. Clients like predictability and they like to feel comfortable and most clients do like to buy, they just don’t like being sold to.A salon that can replicate a great service time and time again will always thrive. With client retention averagely sitting at 74% many salons lose over 26% of their current clients due to inconsistent staff, unpassionate staff, de-motivated staff.It’s about replicating a fantastic experience time and time again.Besides……………………………………….. Think about this for one second.You want…………. Passionate Busy Motivated Money-Driven Great Rebooker High Selling Retail Big $$$ Takings WHO ARE YOU DESCRIBING ??????? That’s why this is so dangerous for your salon!!!!!So what’s the answer? We know you are in a ‘repeat business’ business. So if you can ATTRACT clients to your salon and keep them, get them to LOVE what you do and they do not leave, your salon will soon be full of high paying clients.So all you need to do is make sure EVERY staff member prefers the same perfect routine every single day, every single week. This is where you are called to build a system for your salon where you will teach them HOW you want things done, when you want them done and by whom.This is all about YOU taking back control of your salon.This is THE most important thing you should be working on in your salon. If you’ve been in business long enough you’re going to know one thing. If you don’t know this yet, it may be brewing as we speak. Superstars don’t stay around for long, they have other agendas. They came to you with lots of clients because they took them from their old salon and when they leave your salon they’re going to take a bunch of your clients too. You’re going to feel the drop hugely. They’ll leave with your clients. They may even open a salon down the road, they may even take some of your staff members with them. So if you get this salon standard system right, you don’t need a salon full of superstars to make lots of money. You’re much better off with a salon full of average performing workers that are following a superstar system and that way the system always stays with the salon, YOUR salon. Not only that but the average performing staff member loves working for you. Why, because it’s the only place they can hit their commissions, their rebooks are up and their retail is through the roof. They feel as if they belong to something bigger than themselves. If you are interested in learning how to turn your staff into superstar earners with a system then check this out.https://isaloncoaching.lpages.co/lifestyle-salon-plan/ Then you can decide if you want to take the next step. Richard
Why I think marketing will NOT get you more clients and what is the new game changer!
Why I think marketing will NOT get you more clients and what is the new game changer! Most salon owners need more clients and will decide to do a little bit of marketing to get some more clients in their salon, after all they just want bums on seats. It goes a bit like this, ‘we are quiet at the moment, let’s do a Facebook ad or post in a magazine or in the local paper’. I even saw a salon yesterday doing yellow pages, radio and newspaper, wow what a lot of money being spent! And now with the introduction of social media, you the salon owner, think this is a great medium to get clients because you now have a budget of zero. You spend nothing and expect results, 9 out of 10 salon owners get what they put in zero response. Most old ways of marketing are dying; yellow pages, adverts in the local paper and radio and most people have moved on to the new and in trend social media, it was great for a while when it was new, but today every salon I know is posting something and your little message is getting lost, so you get little or no return, you start to fall out of love with this new medium of marketing as well. Twenty years ago we had fewer salons and more clients with expendable income. They had less choice of where to go and more time to investigate if this was the salon for them. Consumers had less choice of where to squander their income, we didn’t have iPhones, computers, flat screen TV’s and worldwide holidays to fight with. Now our biggest competitor is NOT the salon down the road it’s everything that entices the money away from your salon into another store, like the new iPhone 6, flat screen TV’s, etc. Years ago we had innovation with hair, the bob, the page boy, even Vidal Sassoon came up with a new haircutting technique. Everyone wanted it and it drove the masses into salons. I remember not so long ago when Jennifer Aniston had the very first LOB. That’s all I did every day for weeks and weeks, it drove in the masses and the salons that could do the best LOB were the busiest. But after a while, all salons were mastering this and the effect got watered down, and the status quo was resumed. Today’s market is balayage and the salons that were the first to say they were the masters were the busiest until all the other salons became aware and copied, and the rush will have slowed down again. So the first salons had an audience of thousands wanting this new technique the stars were wearing, and then all the other salons start posting and advertising and your message gets lost, and your audience is halved or even smaller still. It doesn’t matter if you are the best as the new client has not got time to review all the salons now that are offering this service, they don’t have the time so they may just stop looking before yours. So I say marketing will NOT get you more clients. Marketing will get you noticed.So what will get you more clients?What is the game changer? I believe very strongly that the business you have needs to be built around your values and what you stand for. Who we are and why we do it. This has to be the number one key to unlocking more clients in your salon.Your business goals need to reflect your values, they need to be focused on what type of lifestyle you would like, and I’m not talking about the size of your yacht, I’m talking about, who do you want to do life with, which staff and clients do you want to share your life with. What type of life are you building? Start with you and what burns inside and build from there, the people who you want to hear this story are waiting to listen from people just like you. Build the salon around your values and beliefs and you will start to spread the word. Not a fad like before, this cannot be copied if it is true to you. Other salons may try to offer specials to attract your clients away from you, but if they like coming to your salon because of your values and beliefs it’s hard to prise away a true believer. I believe in this so much that I am rewriting all the work that I use to coach my clients. This is the game changer and my clients will benefit from this. I have been doing this for the last year and it gets clients fast. It gets your story out to the clients you want. It also keeps you focused and in the game for longer. So here is to the new game changer.Game on Richard McCabe ‘The Lifestyle Salon Coach’www.lifestylesaloncoach.com When you’re ready here are ways I can help you… 1. WORK DIRECTLY WITH ME AND MY TEAM If you own a hair or beauty salon and you’re fed up with having no cash leftover then check out our group coaching programs. If you’re a new salon owner or have less than 2 employees then this just for you CHECK IT OUT HERE If you’re established and have 3 or more employees this is perfect for you CHECK IT OUT HERE 2. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE A FREE COPY OF MY BEST SELLING SALON BUSINESS BOOK? Just send an email to rmccabe3@me.com with the subject line ‘BOOK’ and I’ll make sure someone gets that to you