22. Take back CONTROL in your salon business

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. Hello and welcome, and today I want you to take back some of the control in your business. There's been a real buzzword around business for quite a few years now, and that buzzword has been outsourcing. And I think we may have gone a little bit too far in our industry, and I think that we're starting to lose the upper hand a little bit. I'm not suggesting that you should be doing absolutely everything in your business all day and every day. Of course there are times when you need to outsource, and there are some times when I wouldn't even consider setting foot in an area of my business. For example, bookkeeping, accounting, payroll, things like that, it just makes sense to leave that to the professionals, especially if you can get an integrated service that does all three for you. But there are elements of our businesses that I think we're handing over way too readily, and I think there are things that we need to start taking back into the fold a little bit. First up are websites. Now, I'm not suggesting, though you may want to, I'm not suggesting though that you go out and learn how to build an entire website yourself. What I am suggesting though is that you have enough knowledge and enough understanding to be able to update your website yourself. So that if you want to run a short term offer on your homepage, or if you want to tweak the pricing on your price list, or if you realise there's a digit missing on your telephone number, or if you want to change the links to head in a different direction for your social media, then you should be able to do that yourself. If you're outsourcing it, you'll be paying by the hour for a job that will probably take minutes. Now, it may take you a little bit longer, and it's certainly going to take you longer if you've got to do the learning upfront. But once you have that knowledge, and my message to you throughout this whole video, once you have that knowledge, you can then make an informed decision over whether it's something you need to carry on doing yourself, or whether it's something that you can hand over to someone else. Next up, social media. Lots and lots of salons now handing their social media accounts over to someone else, so that they can tweet for them continually, so they can do their Facebook post updates, and so on. And I think it may be a mistake. I'm sorry to all you social media professionals out there, but the really authentic social media that I see out there that's really getting good results comes from the salons. It comes from the stylists or the salon owner. The stuff that I see done by the professionals just doesn't quite ring true.

It just feels a little bit phony, or it's not responsive enough to what's going on during the day in the salon. So take your social media back. Learn to master it. Learn to schedule. There's some amazing tools out there that will help you with social media scheduling. It doesn't have to take a vast amount of time. I do all of my social media scheduling in about an hour and a half, maybe an hour and three quarters. And bear in mind that's for my salon and for Build Your Salon as well. It's all done on a Monday morning, and then it's all scheduled for the whole week as well. I really think it's worth taking back in-house if you've outsourced that already. And again, you can make an informed decision later on. It may well be there are certain platforms that you just struggle with. I know lots of salons really struggle with Twitter, for example. But get the training, get the understanding first, and then make that informed decision. And finally, I want to talk about design. Now, this is a biggie because you are spending a lot of money, if you're a salon worth your salt anyway, you're spending a lot of money on design. And I'm talking about posters, price cards, point of sale materials. It's not something that I suggest you take on in its entirety. Make it a little bit like the website, if you like. So here's where I run it in my salon. Every year, every August, we have a pricing review ready for our prices to increase in September. And part of that pricing review is sending the new prices off to my graphic designer to design the new price cards for us to use for the next 12 months. As part of that brief, he will also review our logo and see if it needs changing. He'll review our tagline and see if that needs changing. And he will set me up some templates. So he'll give me a template for a flyer that I can use for the next 12 months. He'll give me three templates for posters that I can use. And he'll also give me the templates that I need for our social media banners and logos as well. So all of that is part of one brief. And I do outsource that and I pay for that. And then you need to learn how to design a flyer yourself using those templates. And I'll be really honest with you, the first flyers that I did took me probably a day and a half to create. Now I could knock one up in about 45 minutes, something like that. So what it means is that by keeping the costs down, by not paying for design during the year, I can generate a flyer. I can get 500 flyers printed for about 50 quid, including delivery, something like that.

So I can be much more responsive in my marketing. It also means that the return on investment doesn't have to be so vast before it starts to break even and then start paying me a profit. So if I was paying a graphic designer and then paying to get the flyers done, those flyers would have to generate an awful lot of income before it's actually worth my while. By using the templates that I've already paid for, and I use them again and again and again during the year, so I'm getting lots of bites from that cherry. But by using those templates, keeping the time and the cost down, I may only have to generate one or two extra new clients to make that exercise worthwhile. So get the templates set up, find yourself a piece of design software that you're comfortable with. Honestly, you are going to have to put your hand in your pocket for this. I've tried a lot of packages and I don't find the free ones particularly user friendly. So you might have to fork out, but usually it's a one off or an annual subscription. And get the hang of your design so that you can be much more responsive. You can run promotions on a much more frequent basis with a much shorter lead time as well. I hope that's been useful to you. If it has, don't forget to subscribe. I would hate you to miss out on the content I'm putting out every week. If you're already subscribed, I will see you again next Monday. 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.