THE SALON MANAGERS GUIDE - a few snippets.
The Salon Managers Guide is an easy to use stylist friendly guide for increasing total salon revenue. Profitably!
Each salon must develop a clearly defined and well managed growth strategy. This uncomplicated manual contains such a strategy.
Your questions answered:
F A Q
1. How can we win more new clients, without a huge advertising spend ?
2. How can we stop losing our best clients ?
3. How can we compete without reducing our prices ?
4. How can we increase our prices without losing clients ?
5. How can we sell more retail products ?
6. How can I give my stylists more retail sales confidence ?
7. How can we increase our average client spend ?
8. How can we increase salon revenue with current staff levels ?
9. How can we become more profitable without increasing prices?
10. How can we increase the frequency of our client visits ?
11. How can we convert more of our clients to colour ?
12. How can we sell more treatments ?
13. How can we sell more services from our salon menu ?
14. How can I get staff working more closely as a team ?
15. How can I motivate my team to want to do better ?
16. Why do some lucky salons seem to have more clients ?
17. How can other salons charge higher prices than us ?
18. We don’t have a receptionist – how can we stop irritating our clients ?
19. Why do my staff seem unable to act on their own initiative ?
20. How do we overcome the Supermarket box colour challenge ?
21. How can I penalise the team members that don’t try, without upsetting the apple cart ?
22. How should we address annual salary increase issues and requests ?
SALON EVOLUTION
There is no escaping it, our industry is evolving. Clients are more sophisticated today than ever before and they, like our industry are evolving, their wants, needs and expectations are changing.
More low-grade and smaller salons are closing down. The shampoo & set salon has almost been evolved out of our industry as trends have changed with style savvy consumers.
Our older generation are living longer, have more disposable income and are much healthier and fitter. No longer the shampoo & set for the 55 years old, she wants a full head of colour, and we’re not talking blue rinse.
More likely today your male client will ask you for shape and texture and then buy styling products to maintain the pulling power you just created for him. “Something for the weekend sir” will be gravity the defying styling products he uses to transform his two tier style so that he can be professional & business like during the week and then mess it up when he is ready to play.
If you are blind to, or are ignoring the evolutionary changes in our industry you are heading for jolt, you will lose your best staff and you will lose your best clients.
As well as catering for the evolutionary leap in style trends and population change we need to evolve the way we perform our service, we have to stop greeting our clients as our friends, they are not, and they are our customers.
We can be friendly, we have to be polite and courteous, we have to have massive respect and integrity but we have to be ultra professional in order to grow our business and survive.
As the salon manager it is your responsibility to ensure that the salon is kept busy with a constant flow of clients. It’s a complicated task and the stylists working for you will never truly appreciate this and will rarely work to 100% efficiency unless you, the salon manager make it happen.
When a stylist has an empty slot you are paying for ZERO productivity. It doesn't have to be like this, my aim with this publication is to teach the salon managers how to move towards busier, and more profitable columns without a massive marketing spend.
Strategic planning is needed and the strategy is not complicated or difficult. The immediate goal of applying this strategy is to gain a freely given commitment from each of your stylists to take personal responsibility for filling their own column every hour of every day!
We don't even need to teach your stylists new skills, most qualified stylists possess the skills needed to be successful but rarely use them in the manner they should be used, some call this laziness, some call it complacency, whatever label you want to hang on it, I call it unacceptable! And from here on in so should you.
Improved efficiency = Improved profit.
FOUR GOAL MANAGEMENT
Success in your business is based upon your ability to manage the people and resources, manage with a heavy hand and you will lose your best staff, manage to weakly and you will lose your best clients!
There are FOUR goals to achieve for managing a busy and profitable Hair or Beauty salon. Of course there are more than four imperatives however the rest are all encapsulated in the goals below .
1. Client Satisfaction
2. Client Retention
3. Client Loyalty
4. Client Referrals
A satisfied client will visit the salon every 8 to 12 weeks, buy her hair care and styling products from Tesco, a box colour from Boots and occasionally mention the salon she uses to a few close friends.
A loyal client will visit the salon every 6 to 10 weeks, buy hair shampoo and finishing products from the salon, become a colour client again and tell everyone she knows about the brilliant salon she uses.
FOUR GOAL MANAGEMENT -CLIENT SERVICE
To be the busiest salon in town you have to be a little different, you have to become distinctive.
Salons need to figure out how to grow, sharpen their brand image, and at the same time improve their Return on Investments. (ROI)
So what are your investments in relation to client service and salon business growth?
- Each one of your employees is an investment (you must consider them to be assets)
- Your retail products are an investment
- Your back bar, colour and chemical products are an investment
- All capital expenditure of furniture, lighting, plumbing, etc are investments
You have to invest serious cash resources into all of the above in order to be able to offer a 1st class customer service, and you MUST have structured method of gaining a return on those investments.
You would not put your life savings into a bank account that offers 0% interest; you want a return on that investment in the same way that you must demand a return on your salary investment for each team member.
Your employees are your biggest “assets” you invest more cash into them than anything else in your business so this is where you expect the largest return in terms of team work, motivation, hard work, diligence and the provision of world class customer care.
SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
To sustain growth, salons must build relationships with the client, not just sell them products and services. When the client trusts a salon, they will be willing to purchase a wider variety of products and services. You are investing in creating that trust.
Market leaders in our industry will pull away from the crowd – in terms of innovative working practices that will cost effectively satisfy the needs of the client and satisfy the revenue needs of the salon owners. Those salons that don't respond likewise will have a hard time catching up.
“Market leaders” your market is your town! You have to plan to take the initiative because we are in a time of change now and if you do not lead from the front and focus on being that market leader then you will become the follower mopping up the straggling clients.
So how do you become distinctive, how do you become the market leaders? You must plan to have the very best customer service in town supplied by salon staff that has the know-how to wow your clients with style – they are business and revenue driven and they know how to service more clients and get a larger profit return from every client. How ..............>
>.... THE SALON CLIENT WORK FLOW ROUTINE
You’ve heard the saying, “if you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t you can’t”
The science behind the above phrase is “cause and effect” you really do reap what you sew!
The idea behind “routine” was developed by military strategists thousands of years ago and is still practiced by all the worlds armies today, including and in particular the British SAS and the American Navy Seals. Today the military call this route a “drill” it is something that is practiced for every eventuality, every situation and anything that may go wrong. It is this routine that makes the SAS the best in the world. All top self made entrepreneurs use the same process of formal, written routine.
If you want to be the best salon in your town and be the busiest and the most profitable then you have to take a leaf out of thousands of years of “positive proof” that a FORMAL WRITTEN routine will make your salon staff brilliant at what they do and enjoy doing what they do more.
You have to realise that when you first introduce such a formal routine to your creative people there is going to be a little friction and a little resistance so you have to introduce it to them gently and with respect.
The first step to achieving this is to be solid in your personal belief that “cause and effect” is a proven science. By this I mean; for example, if you decide that you need win a further 100 new clients in the second quarter you will have to have a plan to achieve this, you need to write down your plan, and then get on with achieving it regardless of any setbacks; you are going to achieve 100 new clients in the second quarter.
There is more....
Wow. You now have a plan that will really make a difference to your bank account if you pull it off!
I mean hey, that goal will keep everyone really busy what with all the other work they have to do right? The first mistake you made – en route to achievement of your plan was using the word IF. Ok I wrote it but you didn't question it. If cause and effect is going to work for you, you have to eliminate any negative barriers to your thought process because....
The Client Work-Flow Routine is not only going to help you win another 100 clients in the second quarter it is going to help you achieve the following;
SALON BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT PLAN
- Loose less clients (increased client retention)
- Sell 20% more salon retail
- Re book more clients before they leave the salon
- Encourage and achieve more frequent client visits
- Earn greater respect and loyalty from your new and existing clients
- Sell more services from your salon menu
- Sell more colour to none-colour clients
- Sell more treatments
- You will become a more confident, more proficient and more respected salon manager
All your staff to become willingly more professional and more business focused.
CAUSE AND EFFECT
Everything happens for a reason, there are no causeless effects, if you put no petrol in your car it is going to stop working quickly, if you put no oil in your engine it is going to stop working, it may take a little longer but it is going to stop working.
When you start working with your new Client Work-Flow Routine it will be like filling your empty tank with petrol, it will not work at once, you will need to turn the engine over several times to draw the petrol from the tank to the engine! It’s also going to need practice and determination to keep on keeping on at it. Success is not an accident; it only happens when you take control of your own destiny and get stuck in.
A point to remember is that when you have educated your staff and briefed them on your plans and the part/s that they will play in achieving your goals most of them will give up very quickly if you have not formalised and printed individual expectations and targets for your team. Don’t worry if that sounds complicated we will help you with that.
The average number of times that people TRY something new before they give up is LESS than 1. Most people give up before they even try something new for the first time, and like it or not you are going to have more quitters on your team than you will have go-getters.
Now at this stage I do not want you thinking that this sounds hard, or, it might not be achievable, because that is how losers think and readers of this guide are not a losers, they are winners.
It is not EASY to be the best at what your business does, but it is easier when you have the right attitude, skills and knowledge. That means having the balls to make a bold plan and to execute it! Our industry is full of average salons employing average staff, who earn average money, conducting the average service.
The revelation is that all of your staff has the ability to lift themselves above the average and to be top performers, we simply need to teach them how and then encourage and reward them to do it.
If your “cause” is for example; to win 100 new clients in the second quarter and achieve all of the other 10 points in your Salon Business Development Plan. (Or any 3 months period)
The “effect” is to enrich the lives of your salon staff and your clients, when you put every effort into your staff and for perfecting client service for your customers by working to the structured and written work-flow routine you will as a consequence, reap what you have sewed!
You dreamt that you could do it; you thought that you could do it, and then you did it! You have to have big dreams; you have to develop a vision of yourself in 4 months time at the head of the salon super team having already achieved your goals. Imagine it, feel it, dream it. Make it your reality; you truly do have the power within you.
The “nature of Success” is that “nature” does not care who succeeds or who fails. There are winners and losers in every facet of life and business. Be assured that natural selection exists in the business world just a surely as it exist in nature and as Charles Darwin said; “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one’s most responsive to change”.
“Many of life’s failures are men who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up”
Thomas Edison
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