Ask me anything! October salon owners Q and A

What's going on in your business? What's happening in your salon world? Let's find out in our October Q&A. 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. Hello, hello, hello my salon friend. How on earth are you achingly well? I hope I'm super excited because this has turned into my favourite episode of every month. My Q&A session when you send in your queries for my expertise and my bit of wisdom from the wise old owl. Also I'm very excited because this episode is scheduled to go out on my birthday so many happy returns to me. And we have a whole month of celebration in my house because I am a complete diva and make no apologies at all. Of course, I'm not doing this live because I shall probably be shit-faced in a gutter somewhere crying about the state of my life. Anyway, let's find out what's going on with you. By the way, I do a Q&A like this every single month. It'd be awesome if you could send in your questions. I have to scratch around and have to chuck it out on socials the day that I'm recording and find out what's going on with people. So please feel free. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to hear how I can help you. So let's jump in with our first question from Laura who says that she's very highly utilised, so very busy, but most of the utilisation is coming from new clients. So firstly, a big thumbs up to Laura for measuring utilisation. As you know, it's one of my favourite measures of how successful a business is. And also well done for recognising that you've got lots of new clients coming in. But it does suggest that you might have a little bit of a problem with retention. It means that your new client retention is low because ideally we want a few new clients coming through and every salon needs new clients because some move away, some lose their job and can't afford your services anymore, some drop down dead, whatever. And they need replacing to keep our utilisation up. But most of it should be made, most of your day should be made up with a core of regular clients. So sometimes we find that there's a disconnect between what the client expects and what they actually receive. So sometimes it's a marketing issue. You're portraying a certain way of being, a certain vision of what that experience might look like. And then that's not the reality when they come into the salon. And sometimes what's interesting is it doesn't have to be a worse experience when they come into the salon.

Sometimes it can be a similar standard or even a better experience, but it wasn't what they were expecting. And that's disconcerting for a new client. So how do we find out? Well, ring them up, ask them. I would honestly bring this in and we did in my salon. We brought this in where we said to our new clients, by the way, just so you know, it's our policy to call up all new clients a few days after your visit to make sure that you enjoyed your visit and find out what you thought. And ask them. And very often you will get just the answers that they think you want to hear. But every now and again, you get a little nugget of information, a little something that you can take action on in your business. The other thing I would do is make sure you're doing lots of lost client marketing and maybe think about if you've done lost client marketing and they haven't responded, maybe chuck a check a survey out to your lost clients to find out why they weren't coming back. They've got no skin in the game. They don't care whether they're offending you or not because they've decided they're not coming back. Now, it's difficult to incentivize lost clients to give you that kind of feedback because we can't really give them a voucher for a service if they decided they're not coming back to you. But why not give them a voucher for Amazon? Say, you know, we're going to do a lost client survey and one lucky winner is going to get a 50 quid Amazon voucher. You might get a few responses then. So I hope that's helped a little bit, Laura. Let me know how you get on. I'm going to march through these questions because we've actually got a few this month and I don't want to spend too long on one and leave people hanging. So the second question came from Jay and Jay says, I'm not making a profit and it's leaving me really demotivated. How can I become profitable? Wow. Big question, Jay. The first thing we need to figure out is why you're not profitable. And really, without that bit of information, I can't help you too much further today. But essentially, there's only really two ways that you can be unprofitable. One is there's not enough money coming in or the other is there's too much money coming out. So there's only really two sides to that equation. So if there's not enough money coming in, that can be down to pricing or it could be utilization. So either there's not enough people coming through the door. So then that becomes a marketing exercise or there's enough people coming through the door. You're busy, but there's not enough money coming in to cover your expenses. So that becomes a pricing exercise. That means that we're not pricing our services properly or we've got plenty of people coming in.

We're charging pretty much what the market will allow us to, but we're still not making a profit because there's too much money going out the door, which means that we've got to look at wage control, cost control on all those miserable, depressing things. So perhaps you'd like to reach back out to me, Jay, and let me know where that lands. Or maybe just that bit of clarity is all we need to figure out exactly where the problem is. But profitability on its own, yes, it's an indicator that things might not be right in the business, but we can't really take action until we know why we're not profitable. So go away, do a bit more homework and get back in touch, please, darling. Next up, I have a question from Emma, and this is one that I get again and again and again and again. My team won't retail. What can I do? OK, so we can tie them to the door and hit them with a wet mop until they do what they say. Not at all, darling. But there are a few things that I would say that we need to make sure are in place. The first is, are you retailing? Because if you're not, guess what? The team aren't going to follow. And I've had this situation a couple of times in one-to-ones where I've been into the salon, they're like, oh, my team won't retail, my team won't retail. I say, OK, you show me what you're doing retail-wise. If you're doing loads and they're doing none, that's one thing. But if you're not doing anything either, not really setting a brilliant example, are we? And that goes the same if you're delegating to supervisors or managers. They need to be setting the pace too. They need to be retailing too. Then, of course, we get into a coaching section, which is when we make sure that they've got the product knowledge that they need. They've got the skills on those conversations in the consultation. They know how to sell. Once we've been through all those things, really, it's about setting a minimum acceptable standard. And a minimum acceptable standard might only be one product a day or even one product a week to start with. But if they're not hitting that, then that conversation shifts them up. Retail is either important enough that you're willing to start going down the capability or disciplinary route with somebody or it's not. If it's not, scrap it. Don't have it as a target at all. If you're going to take it seriously, you need to be willing to sack somebody because they're not retailing or they're only retailing below a minimum acceptable standard. So it's either that serious for you or it's not. And I think that actually that comes down to a recruitment problem in our industry. I think it's if we knew we could replace people who weren't performing properly, we wouldn't tolerate poor performance. So I hope that's helped a little bit, Emma. Next up.

And we've gone from Emma to Gemma. Emma to Gemma. That pleases me enormously. Happy birthday, me. Are memberships for me? I run a busy beauty salon. OK. Yes. It's the short answer to that, Gemma. As you know, I'm queen of memberships. I haven't been beaten many times over the years, but there is a proviso. Really, there's two things that you need. The first is you've got to make sure that you're running profitable pricing. If you try and build a membership on shaky pricing or unprofitable pricing, the membership will put a magnifying glass over those cracks and turn into enormous problems for you. So if your pricing is stable, big tick in a box. Number one. Second thing is we've got to make sure we know who our clients are. The only other time I've been beaten is I was brought in to try and consult with the salon and they were a blow dry bar in central London. Didn't know who their clients were. Didn't even take names as people came through the door. You can't build a membership around a disloyal clientele or a clientele that you don't know. So if you've got a loyal clientele and your pricing is OK, go for it. Let me know how you get on. Let me know what you build your membership on. I've been midwife at the birth of hundreds of memberships around the world by now. I would love to see what you've come up with. Next, I've got a question from someone who's chosen to be anonymous, which is fine. You're more than more than welcome to let me know that you don't want to be named. I'm struggling to recruit. I've tried social media. In fact, I've tried everything. Wow. That's a big statement, isn't it? Saying that you've tried everything. Have you tried everything? I wonder. I think I did at one stage. I used to find the pattern in my salon was that we wouldn't lose any team members for a while. And then a group of people would leave all at once. And in fact, once I had a mass exodus and lost over half my team. Now, bear in mind, at my peak, I was running a team of about 21. So to lose half my team was a big deal. And yes, we did try everything. That was standing in the street, handing out flyers, putting flyers underneath people's windscreens, all the online stuff, all the social stuff, emailing my clients. We made our first ever recruitment video. We did everything I could think of. Even getting in contact with people who'd resigned years ago who I'm working with again. And going to all the colleges and doing the talks and making those industry. I mean, everything I could think of. Are you doing everything, Anonymous? If not, then don't say you are, dear.

Don't you try and pull the wool over your Uncle Phil's eyes. The second thing I would point out is that social media is not going to work for you. Unless you can encourage your clients to get that message off your page. Because you've built your profile. You've built your Facebook page around clients and putting content out that they expect to see. So you're going to need their help. So if you're going to put recruitment messages on social media, make sure you're saying to your clients, please share this message so that we can find our next superstar. And encourage them to do it. Even incentivize them to do it. We offered our clients a golden handshake bonus. So if we took on a team member, we didn't actually get a team member from it. I'll be honest with you. But we did get some interviews. We said to our clients, we'll pay you £100 if we take on a team member that's been introduced by you. Because in these days of social media, they're keeping in touch with people who used to do their hair or their beauty treatments years ago. They haven't lost touch with these people. So let's utilize that. And we tried recruitment agencies, all sorts of things. So there's a lot we can be doing. The other thing I would say, though, is that recruitment marketing in our industry is generally bloody terrible. We are hiring. Couldn't give a shit. Such a dull headline. So boring to see in someone's social media feed. You wouldn't do that to, you know, you wouldn't say to a client, we are waxing. They're not bloody interested. Let's sell them on the motivation to apply. Let's sell them on the transformation that you're going to deliver. Where is it a better place? What could they be sick of in that? You know, we had a very successful recruitment campaign, which I've wheeled out a few times for clients as well, with a no bitchiness guarantee. Are you sick of the bitchiness in the salon that you're working at the moment? It won't happen here. That's an incentive. That's different. That stands out in a very crowded marketplace. So it's not that there aren't recruits out there. It's that your recruitment marketing has become dull and uninteresting and uninspiring. Let's use the creativity that we've got bags of in our industry and push that into our recruitment marketing as well. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant in the end. And our final question for October comes from Sophie. Sophie says, I want to go to 100% online bookings and stop the phone calls as lots of people are phoning, leaving no message. Then when I phone back, they don't answer and it's wasting my time. OK, a few things that I've tried over the years. We have had for a long time a remote reception service. We don't need it anymore, actually, but we did for a few years and it's not the cheapest option.

But you certainly get a lot more messages when it's a person answering the phone than you do when it's just an answer phone. I would say that the first three months are the worst. But if you've got a good service, then you should be able to get back to them and polish and improve and refine. And actually, towards the end, we have them even having access to our booking system so they could take care of moving appointments and canceling appointments for us, which was awesome. So I would certainly look into something like that if you want. It depends a lot on your clientele. I'll be really honest with you. If your avatar is someone who's happy and comfortable with online booking and that's what they want, they want that convenience. And you haven't got a problem at all. And you probably could go down the answer phone route. But if they need that bit of personal interaction, then either you've got to shift avatar. So you've got to change target market or we're going to have to accommodate that one way or another. The other thing I found really useful when we have answer phones set up. The one thing I would say is I do know Sophie mainly works on her own. So she's a solopreneur. So it's a bit different than when you've got a salon team. But the other thing that we did with our answer phone message was made it clear when we would be checking messages. So we would say, you know, it would say leave a message. We check these messages at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. So people weren't sat by the phone waiting for you to call back immediately. And then if your number popped up at 1 p.m., they knew that that's what they were calling for. The other thing you could look at is maybe texting people. If it's a missed number and it's a mobile number, why not just text them the booking link and see whether that would mop up a few stragglers for you as well. So a few ideas on pushing your clients towards online bookings. And my goodness, once it's done, what a game changer it is in a lot of salons. So I hope that's been useful to all of you. If you've got questions for next month, feel at buildyoursalon.com. Otherwise, just seven short days till 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.