Ask me Anything - February Q and A with Phil Jackson

How on earth are you? How is the world treating you this February? How can your Uncle Phil help you on your way to salon success? Let's find out in my monthly Q&A. Hello, hello, hello my salon friends. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, looking good and feeling gorgeous. How's February? How did we get on through January? Interesting month, I thought. Lots of my guys really struggled at the beginning of the month, and then towards the end had a real lift, and we had some brilliant strong results in that last week of January. February looks to be fairly steady. I have to say, I was not sorry to leave January behind myself, and February's panning out pretty well for me. But what about you? Why not reach out and let me know? Phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon friends. And today's episode is our monthly Q&A episode. This does rely on you sending some questions over. Use that email address. I would love to hear from you. Or reach out on Instagram at philjacksoncoach. Which you could even leave me a little voice note. And perhaps if you did, I would play it on the podcast. And look at you getting international fame. So let's see what's happened in my mailbag this month. Let's see how I can help you best. And our first question comes from Valerie in Edinburgh. Beautiful part of the world. A city that I've been lucky enough to visit a few times. And I love it when I get to visit these places with work. When you get paid to go somewhere as beautiful as Edinburgh, you know you're doing okay. And Valerie says, I'm thinking of changing my opening hours. The salon isn't very busy and there is lots of white space. Okay, Valerie, thank you for the question. Great question. Lots and lots we could unpack there around the white space. And I'm assuming that you're ticking all the boxes as far as your marketing is concerned. And you feel that actually there's no other way you can fill that white space. Because that, of course, would be my preference is for us to just get busy in the opening hours that we've got. But as far as changing your opening hours is concerned, do bear in mind that as small business owners, we have very few advantages over the big guys. Those bigger companies have got bigger budgets than us, more marketing, they've got more experts working for them. They seem to have the most attraction as far as new recruits is concerned. All of these benefits that these big chains and huge companies have. But we have won over them.

And that's our ability to make changes in our business and make changes really quickly. I'm lucky enough, I've done consultancy work with big companies, software companies. And let me tell you, to get a decision from one of those companies is gruelling. Everything seems to have to go through layer after layer of meetings. And if you get to a certain budget level, it has to get signed off by somebody else. And it goes on and on and on. Whereas in our businesses, we get to make changes like that. And honestly, big businesses envy us our flexibility. So you could change your opening hours. And to be honest with you, the world is not going to spin out of orbit. If you get this wrong, let's put this into some context. And hopefully your clients are coming to you for reasons other than your opening hours. Hopefully they're coming because they love the transformation that you're delivering or the experience or they just love you. In which case they will follow you into whatever hours that you decide. Now, if you get it wrong, of course, we get the opportunity to change again and again and again. And now I'm not saying that we should be changing our opening hours every week. But certainly you can have a little tweak and a change, you know, two or three times a year, I think, without any big deal. I don't think that's going to make a massive difference to a massive negative difference to your business. And if it means that you're getting a bit more out of work life balance, if it means that you're ticking a few more boxes for your customers, then I'm all for it, darling. And I think you should go ahead. What I will say, though, is that we need to look at the opening hours that our ideal customer is after. And I see lots and lots of salons following each other as far as opening hours are concerned. And I think that's a real mistake. In fact, the story that I was told, which brought this home for me, I will share with you now. It's not my story. And it was about a guy who was running a salon that was next to a gym. And he opened his salon very, very early in the morning. I'm talking about five in the morning. And he was busy and he was doing really well. Another salon in the same town wanted to do equally well. So they opened their doors at 5 a.m. It didn't make sense for them because they weren't next door to the gym. Do you see? So we look at your ideal customer and then look at the hours that might resonate with them. If you're looking for damage limitation, if you want a little get out of jail free card, which means that you can change your opening hours and then change them back without egg on your face, my darling,

then why not call them your winter opening hours? And that gives you the opportunity then as we get into the spring to review, make another change. And it doesn't look, you know, so you're backing down on something that you have belief in. Honestly, the seasonal opening hours thing, I think, is going to have to happen for our industry. So I'm really pleased that you asked this question, Valerie. And I think that, honestly, it's going to come from the way that the climate's going. It's going to come from the way that our utilities are going. So, for example, if you condense your opening hours over the summer, over the winter rather, when the weather's cold, we're not heating big drafty buildings for as many hours. It reduces our energy consumption. And similarly in the summer, every summer we struggle here in the UK because we don't get consistently hot weather. So a lot of salons don't have aircon or don't deal with the heat particularly well. I think, honestly, we're going to start looking at earlier opening hours before the midday sun hits us. I think more people opening, you know, at kind of 7, 8 in the morning rather than 9 and 10, trying to get the bulk of their trade through the door. And then perhaps we're even heading for a Spanish style siesta. And I would be all for that. I love a nap in the afternoon. So I hope that helps, Valerie. Please let me know how you get on. And this is the only thing. I do get lots of beautiful questions and then I don't get the follow up. You don't tell me what happens next. So please reach out and let me know what you decided. Next question came from Tina. Tina, I'm going to put a pin in your question. You asked a question about commissions. I started sketching out my notes for it. It's going to be a whole episode. So in a couple of weeks time, I will release an entire episode. I didn't want you to think that I was ignoring you. Next question comes from Dania Moncrief, who is writing in all the way from Jamaica. I love that. The fact that we have the opportunity to connect over these thousands of miles. And honestly, I'm never I'm never unimpressed by it. I'm always blown away by what technology can do for us. And Dania's question is, how much emphasis do you place on salon decor when budgeting? I must say I feel guilty to spend on what seems trivial on the expense report. Well, firstly, a massive. Well, firstly, thank you so much for writing in. Dania also says some lovely things about the podcast, too. So thank you for that. Secondly, great question. And thirdly, well done for budgeting and looking at your expense report, because there are a lot of salons out there who don't.

So you're already one step ahead of I would. I'm going to guess about 80 percent of salons don't look at their expenses and don't set budgets. So well done for that, Dania, if nothing else. Now, when it comes to salon decor, I'm guessing you mean on an ongoing basis. OK, because I wasn't quite sure whether you meant how much you would spend on salon decor if you were reopening or refurbing or whether it's the kind of ongoing salon decor when we're looking at, you know, fresh flowers on reception and things like that. So I guess because you're budgeting, we're looking at the ongoing thing. If we were looking when we're first opening the salon, honestly, my first salon and actually my most profitable because the unit was tiny that we were in. So the rent was very low. The first salon was absolutely opened on a shoestring. I did the wiring. I had a friend who worked in shop fitting. He used to draw me diagrams and then I would go away and do the wiring. We were allowed to switch anything on. And then he would come over, do the inspection and sign off my work each week. We called in every favor with plumbers and decorators and plasterers and all sorts of things. All of the furniture was sourced secondhand or it came from Ikea. And it was the only way we could get the business open. So it was absolutely on a shoestring. But I was very lucky because at the time we opened, there were lots of what I call the cream and chrome salons. And you know what I mean. You know, everything's painted cream, all the fixtures are chrome and there's not much personality. I don't think people want that from us anymore. I think what they want is a reflection of you and a reflection that you understand what your customers want. So I think we're allowed to put a bit more personality in. And I think that means that we can get away with a bit more, to be honest with you. And I think it's looking when you're buying items for the salon, it's looking at how much difference they actually make to the customer experience, because we have to draw a line somewhere. What you need to bear in mind is that customers have infinite demand in the face of finite supply. You've only got so much money, they will take everything they can from you. So they would love it if you had antique rugs and they would love it if they got unlimited champagne on every visit. They would love it if you could take four hours over a hair or beauty appointment that would take anyone else 45 minutes. But we can't do that commercially. So we need to make a call on how much impact each thing is going to have. So I'm going to use the example, a very glib example of a reception desk.

And only because one of my one to one clients is currently looking at reception desk. So a big shout out to Vivi, by the way. Vivi Chan, who knows more about laser hair removal than anyone I've ever met. Anyway, so she's looking at reception desk. And you could spend, you know, three, four, five thousand dollars on a reception desk if you really wanted to. Equally, you could probably get a reception desk for two or three hundred dollars. What you need and everything in between. What you need to figure out is, is that three thousand dollar reception desk going to have a lasting 10x impact on the reception experience for your customer? And I'm going to guess it probably doesn't. So somewhere in the middle will be a number that says, OK, it's a smart enough reception desk that our customers will like it. But we're not spending so much. We're not wasting extra money beyond that. And actually, it also comes back a little bit to Valerie's question is what your customers want and what they would appreciate. And we can test these things and we can tweak these things along the way. So, for example, on an ongoing basis, we used to have fresh flowers on reception. We used to have a beautiful arrangement of flowers on reception. And it was one of those things that when I was looking at my expense report, I thought, actually, this is costing us a lot of money, particularly in the summer when the flowers didn't last very long. So we looked at having an artificial flower arrangement and the customers didn't like that at all. We used to get lots of people taking photos of our flower arrangement when they were fresh flowers. As soon as they were artificial, no one took photos anymore. So I knew that our customers weren't really resonating with that. Then I got kind of creative. Instead of having an arrangement on reception. So we were a hair salon. So we have styling sections. We just had a single stem vase. And my favorite flowers are gerberas. They always cheer me up. So we had one single orange gerbera on every section. And suddenly people were taking photos of their coffee next to the gerbera. So I knew that we'd hit something then. But, of course, it cost me a lot less buying single stems than it did for a whole arrangement for reception. So we can tweak and change these things and see what resonates with our customers. What I would say, though, is our salons work really hard. So whatever you're budgeting, make sure there's enough left for you to freshen up the paintwork. Because as careful as we can be and as delicate as we are, you know, our customers are hoiking their handbags around or scuffing the skirting boards or brushing up against paintwork.

And that kind of thing, I think, is much more important. I would prefer to see a very simple salon that's beautifully, immaculately clean and nicely presented and fresh paintwork all the time than I would something very, very fussy that looks a bit tired. The other thing you can do, of course, is go down the path that my husband has in my old salon. So, for example, when we come to the reception desk, actually, he didn't spend $5,000 on a reception desk. He didn't spend $300 on a reception desk. They spent about $150. And he bought one of those antique bars that has a record player built into it from the 1950s. I think it cost him about £150 and we use that for a reception desk. So there's lots and lots of ways that you can approach these things. But have a think about what your customer is going to appreciate first. Thank you for your question, Dania. Final question. Sharon says, how long do you give a new beautician time to how long do you give a new beautician to get busy? OK. Unhelpfully, Sharon, my answer is going to be it depends. So, again, thank you for the question. Thank you for measuring the productivity of your team members. Thank you for thinking about targets and performance. But it depends and it depends on one thing. And that's in my mind is whether they are what we call a new column or a replacement team member. So if they're replacing somebody, there should be some clients drifting around the salon already that you can place with your new team member. So in my mind, I'm not going to give them as much time to build a clientele. If it's a brand new column because you're doing well and you're expanding and they're starting pretty much from zero, then you might want to give them a little bit more leeway. For a replacement team member, and this is just what I used to do in my salon, they would have 12 weeks. Now, 12 weeks might not sound like an awful long time to you, but I'm pretty good at marketing. I can get that person pretty busy. As long as they're retaining and rebooking the customers that I'm giving them, they can build a clientele pretty fast with me. So 12 weeks was my cutoff, but I would extend that if it was a brand new column. But even then, I'm only talking about 16 to 18 weeks. It doesn't need to be six months to get busy. If they haven't got to grips with it by three or four months, they're probably not ticking those boxes as far as rebooking and retention are concerned. So I hope that's been useful to you, Sharon. If anyone has any more questions, please reach out. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I can't do these episodes if I don't hear from you. And actually, these are my favorite episodes to do. So do me a favor. While you're in the giving mood and doing me a favor, why not leave this podcast a review?

I would love to get some more five stars on the podcast. We've got some beautiful feedback from around the world, and I'd love to see your name amongst the crowd. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty and more successful tips for business owners. All on build your salon. All on build your salon.