20. How to raise your salon standards - GUARANTEED!

Hi everyone, this is the weekly Build Your Salon podcast with me, Phil Jackson. I'm here with the tools you need to generate the profits you deserve so that you can lead a fuller life. Welcome, how the devil are you? I hope I find you in the rudest of health. If you haven't joined me before, please hit subscribe now. You don't want to miss out on content in the future, and I guarantee if you're not here, we will talk about you behind your back next week. This week, I want to guarantee that this is going to be the best episode for your business ever. Actually, I'm not, but I think you should be guaranteeing because this week we're talking about salon service guarantees. Now, not many salons use any kind of promise or guarantee in their marketing, so it's a really good opportunity for you to stand out against your competitors. What you're doing by putting your money where your mouth is, by guaranteeing a standard of service, you're immediately firing off loads of questions in the minds of your potential customers because they'll look at your marketing and say things like, my salon doesn't promise this, my hair dresser doesn't promise me that result, my beauty therapist won't promise me those results. So immediately, you're starting them questioning whether they're in the right place, and that's an opportunity for you. Salon service guarantees are one of the most important marketing statements that you can possibly make. They are marketing gold, and once you come up with one, I want you to use it everywhere. I have mine on the back of my business card, it's on the price card, and it's going to hit our website very soon as well. As always, I like my lists, so there are three golden rules for you when you are coming up with your salon service guarantee. The first is that your guarantee must be achingly simple to understand. The whole process of claiming against a guarantee needs to be simple, but people need to know immediately what it is that you're promising them. If you're burying your guarantee in pages and pages and pages of text on your website, people are going to think that's a rotten guarantee, and that you're probably trying to wriggle out of ever trying to deliver on it. Secondly, it has to be relevant to your customer. There is no point in guaranteeing part of the service that the customer isn't actually that interested in. So for example, if you have a guarantee in your salon where you promise that you're going to answer the phone within three rings,

well, that's fine unless you're in a salon like mine. In my salon, 70% of our customers either rebook on the day or book online. So making any kind of promise around phone calls isn't that relevant to my customers. How do you find out what's relevant to your customers? Of course, you ask them. So if you suspect that something could be important, then that's where you drill down and have a chat with the people that are sat in front of you. Also go back to your customer avatars. If you haven't worked on your customer avatar, you need to go back to episode 18, please. And have a little look there. There's some homework there, which will help you really clarify your target market in your mind. But finally, don't do any guesswork at all with your guarantees. Have a look at your complaints. Have a look at the things that people aren't happy with. If you can bring a guarantee in that faces off some of the objections that people have had to your service over the years, that is pure marketing gold. The third is that your guarantee must be absolutely genuine. So if you guarantee something and then you fail to deliver, you've got to refund or you've got to let them have that service for nothing that day. Whatever it is you promise, you have to deliver on it. And what's worse, you have to do it with a smile on your face and be grateful. Firstly, be grateful because they're still talking to you. But secondly, be grateful because they're showing you where your salon systems are failing. And that's really important if you're going to improve in the future. That kind of feedback doesn't come cheap, but it's really, really valuable to how you can improve and increase the standards for your staff and your salon going forward. The acid test for a guarantee, you should be slightly uncomfortable when you make that promise. If you're not sweating a little bit, then you probably haven't gone far enough. So today I'm talking to you as Phil from Build Your Salon, but also I'm talking to you as Phil, the most unpopular salon manager in the world right now, because I've just come out of a staff meeting where we've been talking about, guess what? Our new salon guarantee. And I'm asking for quite a lot from my team, as I always do. So what I want to do now is share with you the guarantee that I'm making to my customers, not in a kind of, I don't want to be showing off.

I don't want to be kind of making you feel bad about what you're doing or look at what we're doing. This is fantastic. But I want you to understand the thought process on how I've put our guarantee together. So our guarantee is called the Bravo Five Point Promise. So it's kind of got a nice little catchy title to it. It's immediately easy to understand. People know they're not going to be wading through pages and pages of terms and conditions. Just five simple points. Point number one is that we guarantee you will receive a full consultation before every service. Now, that may not feel like something that is terribly important in our customers' minds. If I asked my customers what they really love about us or what they've hated about salons in the past, I don't expect many of them will come up with the reason of consultation. But I know that it's the key to guaranteeing a really good visit is that consultation, that clarity, that staff member and the customer having the same vision is really powerful stuff. So I know that the consultation is key to the whole visit being successful. Point number two, well, this is a bit of an upsell and there's a story behind this one. So point number two is that if we don't offer you a luxury conditioning treatment at the basins in my salon, all of your services today are free. So why would I do that? Well, there's a couple of reasons. Firstly, conditioning treatments are really good money for salons. They don't take a lot of product. They don't take a lot of time. They're something the most junior member of staff can do. And the income that comes in is actually it can make quite a big difference to your bottom line. And the only reason we weren't selling lots of treatments in the past is because we were never asking about it. We were a salon that was doing maybe two conditioning treatments a month. And then we were only doing them when we were running horribly behind. So we gave them a treatment to keep them quiet. So I had a bit of a flash of inspiration. I was in TGI Fridays some years ago. It's not somewhere that I go terribly often. And at the bottom of the dessert menu, they made a promise to their customers. And the promise was that if the server didn't offer you dessert, you could have that dessert for nothing. And I kind of went away scratching my head and wondering why that was important. But actually what it's done in my salon, by taking away the choice over whether we offer a treatment or not, we've also taken away all of the embarrassment over offering that really simple upsell. Have a think about it in your salon. Have a think about the services that you could be offering, but it's got to be something you can offer to every single client.

If you can come up with something, make a promise around it. Take the choice away from your team and I guarantee you're going to see higher results. Point number three builds on point number two. So point number three is that if we don't tell you about every product we're using on you today, you get to take them all home for nothing. So again what I'm doing is I'm taking the choice away from my team around whether they talk about products or not. They have to, but also because I've made it really obvious. So this is going to be on a card which is in front of my customers. It will be stuck to the mirrors. So it will be in front of my customers. They're waiting for that conversation to happen. It's not something that my team has to be embarrassed about anymore, because actually the customer knows that they're going to get in trouble if they don't carry out that part of our three-point promise. Point number four is the first part that generated a bit of negativity with my team. And the promise I'm making my customers is that if you're not 100% happy with your hair today, you don't pay. Now immediately a couple of my team said that they thought customers might take the mickey with this and pretend they weren't happy in an effort to get out of paying. And do you know what? There might be one or two. But I promise you, the number of people that will claim against a guarantee, even when there's a good reason, is very low. The number of people that will claim against a guarantee when they have no good reason is even lower. The marketing capital that you're generating, the goodwill that you're generating, will far outweigh any cost associated with that part of the guarantee. And then point number five, and I'm only telling you this because I want you to understand the whole process behind guarantees. Point number five is that if you don't leave the salon on time, you don't pay. Now this was something that purely came from our customers. This was entirely customer-led. They said that one of the things that really annoyed them was when they were kept waiting in reception or when a stylist was running late and that had an impact on the customer's day. So this is the last point of the guarantee that we're going to implement in my salon. You don't have to do the whole thing at once. So we're going to put points one, two and three in place straight away. We can do those really easily. Point number four, we're going to have another staff meeting about and then implement.

Point number five might not come for a couple of months. We've got things that we need to alter in the systems and processes that support that salon promise. So when I talk about feeling slightly uncomfortable, my team immediately felt very uncomfortable. But think about the things that you could put in place that mean that you can guarantee that somebody leaves on time. So for example, we're going to have to get probably a bit stricter about people coming in late for appointments. So people can't come in 15 minutes late for an appointment and then claim against the guarantee if they don't leave on time. We're going to have to build something in place for that. We're also making it part of our uniform policy that all of my team will wear a watch. Because if you don't know what time it is, you don't know if you're running late either. So what I want you to understand is that it takes time to build a promise like this and it takes time to put the systems in place to support it. So that's the five point promise that I've put in place in my salon. What I want you to do today is come up with a list of things that you think would hold good marketing value for your clientele. And then start testing, start talking to your customers in a very informal way. And just say, have I got this right? Does this matter to you? Is it important? And if the feedback is good and it's making you sweat slightly, then go for it. Get that promise in place and then use it everywhere. I hope that's been useful to you. I will see you again next week. Hey everyone, it's Phil again. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, please subscribe and be sure to tell your friends. For more help and information on running your salon and your life, head over to buildyoursalon.com. I'll see you there.