If you are a salon owner who spends more time working in your business than on it you may find the business growth is slow, or alternatively has reached a ceiling point that you are finding difficult to burst through.
Getting out from behind the chair, i.e. decreasing the amount of clients you do, is easy if you do it right.

Step one: establish the minimum amount of income you currently need to bring into the salon yourself to keep it viable.

Step two: Do not take on any new clients. Go through your client list and highlight the most regular, big dollar clients you have and from now on take only these clients into your booking column, your VIP’s. Your column should be only as many hours as you need to do in order to reach your minimum income requirement.

Step three: See if there are any clients that you can palm off some of their appointment. e.g.. start giving colour to your apprentice, split the stylists up that your client experiences to get them used to the other members of your team. This is a good way to subtly pass over the clients who aren’t on your VIP list. Colour and finishing, or cutting if your specialty is colour, can all be done by different stylists with efficient use of the appointment system.

Step four: Book aside your other column hours for working on the business which entails activities such as marketing, team training, policy and procedures development, salon maintenance etc.

Step five: As you spend more time on training and marketing you will find that your average dollar spend increases and your team will be busier. If you feel you have the client numbers hire another team member. (note before hiring another member all stylists should be operating at 80% capacity most of the week.) Constantly adjust the amount of income you need to be earning to make the business viable.

Step six: Decrease your presence in the salon by working from home on your ‘management duties’ days. Put systems in place to ensure accountability for staff, a good policy and procedures manual will come with these.

Step Seven: Hire or promote a manager once the salon is no longer dependent on your income and can afford the extra wage. A good salon manager will make your salon money by converting more appointments, managing appointment flow, retail sales and stock management.

Good Luck!

There are many advantages to downloading information directly. The first is the cost. It’s much cheaper! Companies don’t have the expense of staff, offices and time taken to come out to the salon, so we are able to provide services for a fraction of the price. The documents are in your email in box within minutes of purchase. So you can start to work on your business straight away. These are the documents that business coaches use in your salons but now you can become your own business coach with these tested documents.

The most difficult thing when trying to improve your business is knowing where to start. You can avoid staring at a blank page wondering how to write a customer service system now, because it has all been done for you. All the modules in the shop come with an implementation guide to help make sure the team training is there to back up the paperwork. You are doing it yourself, but you are also saving a huge amount of money and taking ownership over the improvements in your business. That is very important.

The documents are largely adjustable so you can personalise them for your business without having to spend hours trying to re-invent the wheel and create the documents yourself. Salon Owners and managers are busy people so you have to ask – “How much is your time worth?”

On www.nexusrevolution.com.au there are heaps of useful documents, not just marketing tools but also systems and checklists that will help all aspects of your business so that you can tailor make an all round solution for your salon.

For example – Do you spend all your time marketing and never see results? The systems and tools on www.nexusrevolution.com.au are used and proven by salon owners around the world, developed over years of testing and improvements.

For a great price you can get over 100 different marketing letters or a professionalised secret shopper report and measuring system. It is all very simple stuff, based on good business principles and designed specifically for the hair and beauty industry. These quality systems have been implemented in salons the world over and have been perfected over the last 15 years.

Now at the click of a button you can implement a business health check with your clients and then produce a simple graph to tell you exactly where your clients think you need to improve. You don’t need to do anything except print out the surveys and type in the results! There is a great Service Pricing Guide that will tell you what you need to charge for services to make your business profitable. This is going to revolutionise the way salons do business because you can get so much more for your dollar now. You can get really useful tools for less than the price of a cut and colour! Need a business plan? Download it with the Revolution Guide to Salon Growth. There are so many helpful documents on here it should become the first place you check before undertaking any major document construction or systems implementation in your salon.

Now, you control what you buy and when you buy it. Complete with implementation guides and ‘how to tips’ the products available and the website itself are second to none in the industry and when consistently implemented there even guaranteed to make you money! If you are keen to try doing it yourself, keen to save money and keen to make more profit then the download revolution is what you are looking for.

Visit www.nexusrevolution.com.au today!

We recommend that if you have some gaps in your appointment book, book them out specifically for training and don’t allow any clients in their once you have done it. It is tempting to take the bookings if they come up, but never underestimate the investment power of a good team training, especially at this time of year. Stick to the training schedule and reap the benefits!

Visit our free salon business forum on facebook for great interactive salon business chats!

See you there!

News! We have started a salon business forum where salon owners can ask questions of salon consulating expert Iain Horne and chat to each other about the ins and outs of salon business. We are hoping to make this a real nexus for getting answers about the salon industry so please come along and join. It is a facebook page and totally free. No catches. We just want to start a chat forum where you can get real answers. Iain will be logging on once a week to answer any questions on there so if you have any issues you wouldn’t mind asking a bit of expert advice on this may be what you were looking for. The link is here.

See you on the forum!

Meg

We are about to put on a casual stylist to boost up our earnings in the popular hours on late nights and saturdays as these are the times where we constantly book out. Putting on another full time or part time stylist would defeat the purpose as we only need them at those busy times.

The website is doing great now we have the adwords campaign going, my bounce rate is only 2% which is a great improvement, and we have taken quite a few hair extension clients since getting organised enough to offer them! John Kasapi, our co-owner and guru stylist is a Great Lengths Hair Extension trainer for Brisbane so we have a very unique selling point there as our guy trains all the other great lengths salons how to do it right. We have been flogging this in the flyers and the website and it is gradually building momentum so that has also been a bonus.

Salon marketing! The thing we love to hate, think I’ll go in a shopping centre next time!

Cheers

M (salon owner)

So we are embracing the discount this month to see whether it pulls in any clients. The letter drop worked well and so we exapnding on that and dropping 5000 professionally printed flyers in the area with a generous discount for first time clients and information on our new hair extension services. We’ll see what happens!

My free website project is going well. Although I am now paying for google ads at a small budget of $5 per day. This is working a treat for the hair extensions and with a bit of tweaking of keywords and alot of linking up with other sites I have managed to increase the traffic on the site  per day by 950%! We are now get hundreds of hits per day and our leads from the website have gone up to at least one solid enquiry per day. Happy with that but will keep working on it as it would be good to be geting online bookings as a standard each day…what shall I aim for, 5 bookings per day…done!

Let us know of any ideas you have

All the best

Meg, salon Owner

Knowing how to effectively manage staff comes down to your ability to comminicate professionally in a way that keeps everyone on side whilst still getting the message across. Regular meetings and structured forums where team and management can feel safe to express their concerns and requests is a vital element in salon management.

Also having set ways in which you deal with breaches and behaviour codes is important as it provides team members with a clear guide as to what you expect and written consequences so there can be no excuses for misunderstandings.

If you are finding yourself at the whim of your team, or are constantly putting out team fires, then The One Stop Salon Business Shop has just the product you need and this month it is just $79.95! That’s $20 savings, and lets face it, that’s sorting our your team management for the price of a haircut. You have to agree it’s worth it.

The Team Management Pack not only gives you detailed info on hiring the right team members but also includes interview sheets with all the questions you need to ask. It covers how to structure your staff communication, how to hold professional quarterly staff reviews and how to manage warnings and firing procedures professionally in order to avoid getting yourself in hot water.

This module has long been one of our favourites and is a step by step guide to managing your team effectively, including induction and training ideas. It comes with all the forms you need to implement the changes. This module links in closely with our Position Descriptions module. Just order and download today!

For more great team building tips check out our article on the 12 C’s of Team Building in our free information corner on the website www.salonbusiness.com.au

We trialled 4 different offers within the 500 flyers so we will also be looking to see which one got the most returns. This is a good way to streamline your marketing, test a few different things and then next time do more of the one that works! The offers were:

Book in for a colour and get a style cut and blow dry for free

$50 off any cut and colour combo

30% off your next cut and colour

Free product treatment pack worth over $100 (wholesale value about $30) with any cut and colour service

Will let you know which one works best. Our head stylist is away for a week after breaking his little finger, which always happens as soon as you put out a marketing campaign. Not neccissarily the finger but something always breaks, dissapears, goes down or leaves, right at the crucial moment of a marketing campaign, what is with that!!!??

If you want any ideas for offers in marketing campaigns have a look at our Essential Salon Marketing Letters and Salon Special Occasion Marketing Letters on the website. Packed full of inspiration for marketing ideas.

Let me know how you go…

Meg, Salon Owner

We have just come back from a six week break, hence the lag in blogs, sorry about that! The salon survived! It did not fall apart and although we did do slightly less this may be attributed to January and February which are notoriously slower months in the hairdressing business.

Before we went away we ensured that all of the team were well trained in the salon systems. This is vital, and we also had a system in place where they could email us if they just couldn’t figure out what to do. So we did check our emails once a week while we were away, but I figure that is a small price to pay for having something turning over income while you kick back and relax!

So now that the salon is managed we are looking at the next step to take our salon business to the next level. The team are happy, retail is going strong, rebooking is at 80% thanks to our customer service system, the salon policy and procedures manuals are in and working, providing great customer service – what next?

Now we are ready to get more clients. Salon Marketing is the least favourite of my things with regards to salon ownership. We have been doing this for over 15 years and we still have marketing campaigns that miss the mark every now and again. We always have our regular permanent salon marketing in place such as letters to current clients, new clients, yellow pages and local newspaper advertsiing but sometimes to get a big jump in the revenue levels of your salon you need to bring on a big whack of new clients.

We have a website, which we are trialling. I am currently trialling weebly which is a free website building and hosting tool www.weebly.com and while there is not alot you can do to adjust the templates it is enough to get us a web presence without having to invest a large amount of money. It is simple enough for me to manage and I am currently getting about 35 hits a day on the site. My next task is to put google analytics into the site so I can track how people are using the site and how long they are staying etc. I have put our salon up on any sort of internet guide or business listing site I can find and put a contact form on there so people can email for appointments. There are programs now for online booking sheets but I am trying to do this for free at the moment so will keep that aside till later.

Because our salon is a bit of a local institution having been there for over 18 years, I think a letter box drop to the area with a simple price menu, well designed, to remind people that we are right there and to inform them of our high quality team members may work. We don’t often recommend mail box drops as they can be hit and miss but I feel like the area is one that may respond so I am going to give it a go!

Will let you know how it turns out.

Let us hear your salon journey, comment and join our salon owners blog!

I thought this time as a bit of a novelty I would keep a diary of our new venture as a way to keep everyone informed on little tricks we use, and also the trials and tribulations we all experience!

We have brought a hair salon in Brisbane on the northside in a place called Boondall. The salon is very creatively named Boondall hairdressing, which is what we are going to keep it as. Hairdressers are famous for their very creative business names but in truth it is often better to keep it simple. There are two main reasons we are keeping the name. The first is because the salon business has been there for over 18 years and many of the clientele have been coming for just about that long! So from a community presence perspective we are best keeping it. Secondly, Boondall hairdressing is actually a really great name! Particularly in the online sense. The name says everything you need it to for online searchers to recognise. It’s a hairdressing salon and it’s in Boondall. Perfect! Just what they are searching for! It has all the keywords of our primary target, which is people looking for a hair salon in boondall. Like I said, simple, but also important and very effective.

Take over day was on the 23rd of November and we were closed for that Monday and the following day. Monday was rip everything apart and re-organise day and Tuesday was team Training day.

Everything went smoothly on the Monday, we chucked out a lot of salon junk that hadn’t been used, freed up some storage space, cleaned up 18 years of dirt and hair, removed all of the posters that were looking ratty, installed a proper coffee machine, set up a xmas rebooking promotion, all the fun stuff.

Tuesday we trained the team on our customer service systems and did a bit of bonding, got to know each other. Got some suggestions from the team on how they would like to see improvements made, that sort of thing.

And… I am please to report that in our first week, trading one day shorter than usual, Boondall hairdressing had a record week! So we are optimistic! How did we do it? Retail recommending training, consistent customer service and rebooking of 115% yep! 115%! Our staff were demons with the rebooking, booking some people in 3 and 4 appointments ahead. We got 4 non-returning clients back from a newspaper advertisement and launched our website which attracted an average of 20 hits a day, which is not bad for a website that’s only been up a week and is targeting a very small area.

We have now sent out 1000 cross promotions to the members of the local gym nearby and have done a similar promotion with all of the local childcare centres offering packages valued at $200 for $99 for new clients (not valid on Saturdays), will let you know how they go. Marketing is always a bit of a numbers game, and there is some trial and error, the important thing is to remember branding, value added promotions and consistently hitting the same market to create brand presence.

See you next time, love to hear from others who are starting up businesses out there too.