Why Every Salon Owner Needs a Mentor
The day you decided to go alone and open your own salon, you took the biggest gamble of your life. Depending on where you are on your salon journey, you might not know it yet, you might still be in the early stages, but what you have done is engage yourself to one of the most dangerous and fraught journeys that only 15% survive past 10 years.
I have seen marriages fail, people lose their houses, some being sent to another country and people having so much debt it will take them a lifetime to recover.
So why are we so keen to take this journey?
For me it was a way out. I was young, I had a family and I needed to earn enough money to move from an almost-condemned flat. For you, it might be because you’re good at what you do, think you might make some money and be free to work less hours and spend time with your family. Whatever your reason is, I wish you success.
I have been a salon owner for most of my life and a salon coach for 5 years and there’s not much I haven’t seen or tested to make a salon owner successful.
I was recently asked “What makes some salon owners RICH and some salon owners struggle?”
The answer is simple…..Knowledge.
The more you know, the more you earn.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. You could know everything and implement none of it. So the secret to success is knowledge + implementation. Simple right?
One of the biggest mistakes I made as a salon owner was trying to do everything myself and learning by my mistakes. This cost me years.
There are only two ways to get knowledge
1. To self educate :
Watch a video, read a book, go to a seminar or any other form of education that you learn and then trial in your salon. Some may work and some will fail. You get to try first hand and tweak as you go. This is the cheapest option and if you are young and have plenty of time, then this might be the option for you.
I was recently gifted by a dear friend a curry cooking class via a Zoom call (strange I know, but with lockdowns it seems the norm now!), people said to me afterwards “ Why would you pay for that? You can Youtube how to cook curry for free?”
Beforehand I would have thought the same, but let me tell you the difference between a free video telling me what to do and a mentor advising me as I cooked…
With the video, I would have watched it and then copied step-by-step. To be honest, I thought I would be doing just that in my Zoom class. It’s not until you work with an expert that you see the difference. The live Zoom call started and so far it was no different to watching a video, except it was live. As the cooking started the mentor looked into everyone’s curry pot, he checked on our onions, some were not cooking enough other peoples were cooking too fast. He advised us what to do and what would happen if things went wrong. He checked our spices and got us to imagine the smell as they were being toasted. He checked the colour and guided us as we went along.
This simple curry dish I was cooking needed at least 15 adjustments to stop it spoiling.
The result was an amazing curry, but that’s not the end of the story. This week I cooked another curry from scratch and I knew the pitfalls and made adjustments along the way again.
I was able to replicate what I had learned and implemented from my cooking mentor.
The difference between the two is not that one was free and one cost money.
The real difference is that if I had gone down the free route, I would never have known the mistakes and I would have always kept making them, never really mastering the art of a good curry. I would never understand where I was going wrong. As they say, ‘You don’t know what you don’t know, until you know it!’As a bonus, my newly learned skill can be replicated time and time again, adjusting with any cooking implements. I know what to do to keep the curry flavours on track.
2. Learn from someone that has been there before you:
If you can learn from someone that was successful and paid the price with their time, you will be shown the pitfalls, the dangers and the fastest way to make success happen. Most salon owners waste years trying to fix a problem that they have and do not realise that they are fixing the wrong problems! The right salon expert knows what to fix first and this will save you those trial and error years.
If you don’t have lots of time and want to jump the success queue, getting advice from someone who has been there, tested what works and teaches it, is a smart move.
There is a cost to having a successful salon
You will pay, either with money or your time.
Being good at doing hair, nails or beauty is what got you thinking you could run a salon. That’s what 90% of salon owners think and I was one of them. I believed that I would be successful just because people liked me doing their hair.
That was mine and other salon owners’ downfalls, I didn’t think about staffing, bills, marketing, client experience or any of the important things that need to be done by someone.
Let’s talk about where you need to master more skills needed to grow a successful salon.
Mastering your finances
The main reason salons struggle to pay all their bills on time is because the margins in a salon are so tight there isn’t much room for error. Read that again and let it sink in.
The wages, stock spend, rent and other bills take up to 70% of the salons takings then add VAT or GST depending on what your country charges for added tax and your takings have almost disappeared. There is a balance you need to master and that is get your staff to take 3x what you pay them. Many salon owners struggle with this as they have no systems to make it happen.
The 3 ways to make it happen and build systems that get staff to always hit 3x wage.
You need to be able to attract fresh people into your world.Real quality clients that come to you because you are the one that is an expert in your field. See, even your clients need help to look good. We see that as a good thing. Your client wants to spend more to look and feel better, because they can’t do it on their own.
Once you’ve attracted those good clients, you will need to have a system to convert those clients into loyal fans that want to return again and again. Believe it or not, you are in the business of getting people to return to your salon. Stop leaking clients and money once and for all.
Then you need to make sure you offer the best clients experience ever so that they love coming to you, the better the experience, the more the clients will pay. If you want the good high-paying clients, (well who doesn’t?) then you need to be offering something a little bit special.
These 3 things will take time to implement in your salon.
You will need to conjure up the system, formalise it, teach it to your team, watch the results and tweak again and again until you find the right formula that works and all whilst working the salon floor!
These systems took me over 15 years to master.
Today you have the chance to save 15 years and hire a mentor. A business coach that has tried and tested the systems so they work. What you are paying for is their 15 years of trial and error.
And that is why I believe that every salon owner needs a mentor, unless you have years to waste.
If you truly want a successful salon and you are willing to put the work in, you will be successful I promise. It may take a while but you WILL get there. If you want to get there quicker you WILL need help off someone that has done all this before.
Having a mentor at anything in life will help you get there faster.
When I go to buy a car, I always take a friend who knows about cars or a mechanic to see if what I’m buying is good.
It’s good to have an expert to stack the odds in your favour.
Just to close I want to tell you that last year I did a survey of salon owners that had a coach and the ones that didn’t.
It’s as clear as black and white.
The ones with a good mentor made lots and lots more money that ones that don’t.
You can check it out here – Owning-A-Salon-Is-Good-For-Your-Wealth
The ones that don’t have a mentor are 5-10 years into their business and are still not making any money.
If you can afford a coach, then get one.
BTW did you know that we aim to not be an extra cost to salon owners? We prefer to see it more as an investment in yourself and your salon.
Our guarantee to all salon owners is that if after 12 months of coaching you have not increased your takings by what you have paid us, we’ll coach you free of charge until you do.
Are you curious if we can help YOU grow your salon?
Looking to see if we can help you grow your salon and whether we are a good fit with you?
Watch this webinar on how we help salon owners before we chat to you.
We want you to see how we work, to see if you are aligned with our ethos.
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Richard