Are you making these mistakes with your salon team targets?

Hello, Phil Jackson here from Build Your Salon, bringing you the tools you need to master to build the salon business you deserve, and today I want to help you avoid the three biggest mistakes I see in team performance management. Welcome. I'm a huge fan of performance management in salons. I don't think it's done nearly enough, and I certainly don't think it's done well enough in most instances. And in fact, when I start coaching a salon one to one, one of the first things we will go through is their performance management process. I truly believe that sitting down with your team members at least every month, ideally every week, and reporting back to them on their performance, setting them a meaningful target, and coaching them to achieve that target is the way to longer-term success. And I don't see it often enough, and people get very hassled and bothered by the entire performance management process. So today, I want to take you through the three big mistakes that I see in salons again, and again, and again. The first one is that there isn't a salon goal. Now, quite often I see this in good salons that have actually gone through some kind of goal-setting process, but what they haven't done is actually identified in monetary terms what they want the salon to achieve. It is not good enough, guys. It is not good enough. To sit down and say that this year, you just want to do more than last year. That's not defined enough. It's not clear enough. And more could just be an extra three or four pounds. What I want you to do is go way back to the beginning. Figure out exactly what it is that you want your salon to achieve for you. And then figure out how much profit you need to generate to support your dreams and your life goals. Once you've got that, you've got a turnover target, and that's what you need to be coaching your team to achieve. The second thing that I have a big problem with in salons is that they're not reporting back their team members' progress in a meaningful way. They're either confusing the team with too many targets, or they're just not meeting with them regularly enough. So you need to be sitting down with your team and figure out exactly what it is that you're going to measure in your salon. In my salon, we have four key measures. I don't really think you need more than four, so feel free to swap these out, but I don't think I'll make the list any longer.

So my key measures, very briefly, are firstly, turnover on service, secondly, turnover on retail products, thirdly, your retention rate, so how well you're looking after our customers and getting them back through the door with you, and fourthly, your utilisation or productivity, so how busy you are in your column. So have a look at the reports that you can generate from your software system. Make it easy for yourself to draw those figures out, because you're going to be doing it very regularly. And once you've got that information, sit down and coach your team to hit the numbers that you need to. It may not happen overnight. And also, please don't try and coach the team on four targets at once. If you've got somebody who's failing on all counts, so they're not hitting target on any of those measures, and you go in and try and coach them on all four, they're just going to freak out, think they've got no future with you, and you're going to lose that member of the team, or at least their motivation, very quickly. What I would do instead is get them to communicate with you about which target they want to work on first. Work on one, get some success, get something to celebrate, and then move on to the next target that needs attention. Thirdly, and most importantly, if you've set your team targets, and you've set your salon target, for goodness sake, make sure that they are tied together. And I see this again and again. Let's say a salon has a target, a profit target. They've set their turnover target for £250,000. They've got five team members, each turning over £40,000 each when they hit target. The targets don't add up to enough for the salon. So they've set a salon target and then completely disconnected these random targets, completely arbitrary for their team members. Make sure that if everyone hits target, you're hitting target too. Because if not, what you're going to end up with is a whole team of people that are performing well, or they think so, that you're rewarding and coaching in a meaningful way, and you're still not making the profits that you deserve. Yes, I know there's some homework to do here, guys, but the software system that you're paying for can make this really simple. Get on a training call, get some support, and figure out how to get those figures out of that machine. I hope that's been a massive kick up the bum for you, as far as performance management's concerned.

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