Boost Your Beauty Business: Networking Tips and Strategies

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 friends. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. A very warm welcome to the Build Your Salon podcast with me, Phil Jackson, your Queen of Salons. And a very warm welcome to our listeners in Melbourne. I've looked at the stats for the last week and 25 people in Melbourne listen to the Build Your Salon podcast. So humbling to think of people the other side of the world listening and enjoying my little skit each week. And I like to think of all 25 of you all sat in a room crowded around the wireless listening to the podcast all at the same time with a margarita in hand. And I hope that is an accurate image. Also a big shout out to my one listener in Jamaica. I'm not quite sure what the salon scene is like in Jamaica, but I hope you're enjoying our content too. So look at me, one foot in Jamaica, the other one in Melbourne, Australia, and the rest of you hovering somewhere in between. So how are things going for you? We're now 18th of April, marching through into a decent spring, I hope. And I have to say, I'm just feeling a lot more relaxed about everything. I don't know if it's because we're off the back of a couple of weeks off school, so I haven't had to do the school run each morning or whether it's these longer days. But I've definitely noticed the increase in my energy and mood, and it's made me wonder why I don't just migrate for six months of the year and get out of the bloody UK for winter. I'm just getting too old for this rubbish now. But I hope business is treating you well. Mixed bag as far as my tribe's concerned. Some people enjoying much better month so far in April than they were in February and March. March not too bad for people. February really tricky for quite a lot of salons. A couple of people still struggling, still not getting quite back there. And I would say, if we've got good existing clients who used to be very frequent, and then either through COVID or through this cost of living crisis have eased off on frequency, yes, of course we should be re-engaging them, and yes, of course we should be trying to get them back to that old pattern of spend. But also bear in mind, the longer they're in a new pattern, where they're spending less or visiting less frequently, the longer they're in that new pattern, the harder it's going to be to get them back to the old pattern,

or even the less likely it's going to be that they'll ever get back to how they were before. So it might just be time to shift a little bit of the energy that you're putting into your existing clients, might be time to shift that into attracting some new clients. So does that bring me neatly onto this week's topic? No, not really. It'd be a lovely little segue if it did, wouldn't it? This week, I'm talking about networking. I'm talking about building relationships that can help your business thrive. And I've had a mixed relationship with networking over the years. I used to bloody hate it. Not industry networking, don't get me wrong. Put me in a room with you lot, and let's open a bottle of cava, enjoy some bubbles and a good gossip. Oh my days, yes, I could do that forever. But I'm talking about more local business networking, small business networking, that thing that we all feel that we ought to be doing at some stage, I'm sure. And maybe you enjoy it. If you do, please let me know. I'd love to hear from someone who actually does this regularly and gets good benefits from it, because it would make a brilliant case study. But I do think it's important to build our tribe. So if we go back to the episode on team, I said that outside our team is a slightly softer, squishier, a bit more irregular view of team. And that is the tribe that we're building up. So it's having coaches, mentors, that kind of thing, in quite a structured way. And then there's also this kind of looser network of people. And I think it's really useful to be in touch with people who don't necessarily operate in the same industry as us, but they're kind of in the same boat. And they're either in the same boat because they're in the same local area, which means they're facing the same local economy as us, or they're in businesses of a similar size. So it's small business networking, not necessarily other salons or estheticians, but people that are operating about the same level as us. But it's useful to find those little commonalities. And I always harp back to the story of when I was networking and came up with salon memberships. And that was purely from a networking event. That was me sitting next to a gym owner. And we literally lifted and stole that model of membership and income and put that into salons. And all these years later, here I am, of course, helping you guys do the same. So there are benefits to networking for us salon owners. I think where people go wrong is they see it only as an opportunity to get business. And that is part of it. There is an opportunity there for you to be getting business leads or referrals, but that's going to dry up pretty quickly. And the reason it dries up is that there don't tend to be an awful lot of people in these rooms that form your target market that represent your ideal

client. So I don't think that should be the primary goal. And I think that's where people go wrong with business networking. They think it's going to get the salon busy in the short term. And it just doesn't work like that. Yes, you will get access to some potential customers or clients. But I think it's more about who are their customers? Who are their clients? Do you have something in common? Are you targeting the same people in a slightly different way and with a different offer? Are there opportunities to collaborate? Can we partner up with some of these businesses? And we're building relationships, of course, with other professionals, either outside our industry or in our industry. There's a lot of advice. There's a lot of support out there. There are a lot of resources that we can access through these networking events. And I think that's really valuable too. So it may be that people are going to pitch at you at these events. Let's face facts. It just happens however much we don't want it to. And they're the people that are getting it wrong. They're turning up at a networking event. They're trying to pitch to 25 people in an hour and a half. And then they leave and you never see them in that event again. And that's not, I don't think anyway, that's not the most effective way. And it can feel a bit icky. But very often, there are people who we can tap up for a little bit of advice. For example, let's say you've got a website and it's not performing particularly well. And there's usually a web developer in one of these networking events. Let's face it, it might be that you're either going to use their services or not. But we could tap them up and say, actually, is SEO worth the investment? And just have a conversation around that. So that kind of slightly softer, looser advice and support. And a lot of these people at networking events, let's face it, will be actually kind of relieved that you've introduced a topic that they know something about. Because I promise you, however uncomfortable you get at these networking events, there are people that are going to feel a lot more anxious and a bit more shy. It does increase the visibility and exposure for our business. And that was one of the benefits for us. You know, my salon has been in Newbury now. Well, I keep calling it my salon. It's not mine, actually. I just interfere in it every now and again. So I feel like I can call it mine, but it's not mine anymore. And we've been there for over 20 years. But there are people to this day who say, oh, I've never heard of you. And we're on the main road that runs from the railway station into town. They must have walked past us, you know, a dozen times in the last year or so. So many people, oh, I didn't know you were there. So it does increase a bit of visibility. And I think it increases visibility in a very positive way. It sets you apart as a slightly more serious business owner. Because we do rage in this industry, unfairly, I might add. But we do have to rage

against this perception that somehow a salon business is not quite as serious as a business of an equivalent size in a different industry. That it's that sometimes we get these people's hang-ups imposed on us that actually we're not serious business owners. And I think being seen at networking events actually does something to show them that actually we are serious and we are to be taken seriously and that we do have proper ambitions for our small businesses. It helps you keep up to date with what's going on. There's always a good bit of gossip going around some of these networking events, I'm sure. And there's that lovely potential to increase our confidence and motivation because we've been connecting with people. So that bit of anxiety, those few nerves that you had going into that networking event at the beginning, well, you know, we've overcome that and we've stretched out of that comfort zone slightly. And I think that it boosts your confidence, boosts your motivation. And we're good at talking to strangers, let's face it. We're probably more comfortable in that environment than most other people. And I think there's a lot to be gained. So where do we start? How do we know whether it's worth going networking at all? Well, the first thing you need to figure out is what it is that you want out of it. What are your goals? What do you want to achieve by networking? Is it that you're looking to meet potential customers or potential collaborators, people that you can partner up with? Or are you looking for industry experts? Do you want to learn from other business owners? Or are you actually looking for a new web designer or someone who can give you some legal advice on a regular basis? Because knowing your goals will help you identify the best events to go for. So if you're looking to rub alongside industry experts and people that are in our beautiful salon industry, well, to be honest with you, one of those breakfast clubs where they take one person from each industry and won't allow anybody else in, it's not going to work for you. So it will start to help you form your shortlist of which events and opportunities you want to turn up to. Are you ready for some predictable in your salon business? How would you feel if you knew you could look ahead and rely on a certain level of income month after month? Would that stability help you become the confident, inspirational salon owner you were always meant to be? Or maybe you're looking for a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace by offering something truly unique. Salon memberships are what I know best and what I know more about than anyone else. It's my honour and pleasure to bring you my salon memberships master plan. Step-by-step

training to help you get salon memberships into your business without overwhelm, without guesswork and without any missing steps. Head over to queenofmemberships.com for all of the details and a very special deal for my podcast listeners too. You'll love the simplicity of salon memberships and your clients, maybe even your competitors' clients, will love them too. That website again is queenofmemberships.com. I can't wait to help you on your way to salon business success. So where do we find these events? Well, I'm talking about in-person events primarily, but of course there's an awful lot that happens on social media, an awful lot of online events now. So everything that I'm talking about will transfer to an online space, but I think that in-person events tend to build warmer relationships much more quickly. So I'm going to emphasise the importance of networking and I'm going to encourage you to actually stand in a room and press a bit of flesh and meet some of these people in person. So we need to research relevant events. We need to find what's going on either locally or nationally. You know, don't be afraid to travel. If you're in the wrong room and there's nothing else locally for you, don't give up. Perhaps you do need to drive a few more miles to find an event that's going to work really well. But very often they're set up by local trade associations or local business groups. And a lot of times they're asking for memberships too, but very often you can go along to one or two of these events as a guest. Then sometimes you just pay a few quid or buy your breakfast. So you can test it out. It's pretty rare that anyone asks you to sign up having never set foot in the room before. And a good event will have an attendee list, either something that's sent out ahead or something that you can have a look at when you arrive so you can see who's in the room. And if there's people that you are keen to meet, don't be afraid to ask the organiser and say, actually, I noticed so-and-so's here from such and such a company. Any chance of an introduction? Or can you point them out to me? The people that organise these events want it to be a massive success for everyone concerned. So usually they're very happy to make those introductions for you. Some networking events are more social, more of a mixer. And we get lots of those around the conference season, don't we? Where there's something a bit more social in the evening. So it's not necessarily a kind of

staged network event in that we're expected to work the room in a particular way. But it's a bit more of a kind of glass of wine and a chin wag. But be careful with those that you don't just gravitate towards people you already know. Drink the bottle of calva and then head off to your hotel room, darling. I completely understand the temptation. Sometimes they are breakfast-based. Sometimes they're more of a kind of short, sharp hit. So sometimes there's lunchtime networking events where they're kind of 45 minutes or an hour. So figure out which format is going to be most useful for you. Test a number of these events and figure out whether you prefer a smaller event where you get longer with particular people or a bigger event with more opportunities. And also be prepared. Now I know that it's pretty old-fashioned these days to take business cards with you. But it really is the most effective way to leave somebody with something they can take action on. I take a pen with me and I make notes on people's business cards. So after I've finished a conversation, you'll see me scurry off to the loo or into a corner and just make two or three bullet points about the conversation. Because after you've met 20 or 30 people in a short amount of time, it is really easy to forget actually who you've spoken to. Practice talking about your business in a convincing way. A lot of people will call it an elevator pitch or something similar. But you don't really need that. You just need to be able to describe what you do and also who your ideal client is very quickly. So don't just say that you've got a salon in the local area. I would say we've got a salon in the local area. We specialize in XYZ for XYZ market. So we specialize in laser hair removal, particularly for ladies who are going through the menopause. And that firstly opens up a couple of opportunities for someone else to have some conversation with you. But secondly, it kind of helps people scratch their heads a little bit and say, oh, actually, I've got access to that market because we run, I don't know, health events for ladies of a certain age. So perhaps that's something that we can collaborate on. So I think having a bit more than just the fact you've got a local salon business prepared, ready to go and ready to talk about will actually make that networking a little easier. If you're not amazing at communication and building relationships, well, firstly, I'd be surprised. I think it's something we do particularly well. But there is something about a salon owner taken out of their salon that seems to erode lots of those skills and confidence. So it might be useful to perhaps look at developing those skills. And there's usually training programs that you can do online or even just throw it into YouTube and figure out what help and advice that you can get

around building relationship skills and building communication skills and get much better at listening. And I want you to kind of slip into consultation mode. But I think it's a very useful little switch, actually. And I envisage a physical switch in my head where I switch into listening mode. And the key for me is to listen with the view of obtaining information rather than listening with the view of figuring out what I'm going to say next. Because I think it really shifts the emphasis. And I think I think that's what we do in consultation mode, actually. So put yourself in consultation mode for the hour or hour and a half. There's lots of books and articles about communication and relationship building. Some of the old ones are still very useful. How to win friends and influence people. I would recommend Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm not a big fan of that as a reader. I find it a bit dry. But there's plenty of information about this sort of stuff. Crucial Conversations. Kerry Patterson. Also one that springs to mind if you are building your Amazon wishlist. I would ask for feedback on networking events that some of your customers have been to. If you've got business owners that come to you and you're bound to have a few, ask where they go. Where do they hang out? How do they build their networks? And what value do they get from different opportunities? My Salon Owners Retreat is a unique event where you get to create the agenda. This isn't a retreat of boring presentations in conference rooms without windows. The entire programme is a mix of group coaching, mastermind sessions and one-to-one coaching with me, your favourite salon coach. There's also time built in for implementation. Yes, you're going to leave the retreat having actually got some important work done on your business with our support. Our spring 2023 retreat is now sold out but you can be the first to hear about the next Salon Owners Retreat and get the very best early bird pricing by heading to buildyoursalon.com and joining our waitlist. I can't wait to see you on Salon Owners Retreat. Don't forget your speedos. And then of course the Salon Owners best friend and worst enemy actually is social media. And social media I don't really think of as networking in

the truest sense or at least not on the platforms that we use most. So most of us gravitate towards platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. I'm not sure they're brilliant for networking as such and actually I would caveat that there are some useful networking groups on Facebook but I wouldn't really see Instagram as networking. But social media can be really powerful for reinforcing those relationships. Once you've got your stack of business cards why not head back and start adding people as friends on Facebook or start following them on Facebook or Instagram. And of course the exception to that would be LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is built and pitched as a networking platform. So I would certainly be adding those contacts as LinkedIn contacts. And even though LinkedIn I think has lost its teeth a little bit as far as networking is concerned is still considered to be the sort of more professional social media option. Though I do think it's kind of degenerated into a bit of a Facebook light. And some of the feeds I see could equally be Facebook feeds. You can see they've just copied and pasted the content over. But I think my biggest tip for building these networking relationships is to realise this is a long-term process. Your networking is not going to be a one-hit wonder. You can't go to one event and expect that to suddenly build your professional relationships. It's something that happens over time. It's something that's in fact a lot of people won't network with you at these events until they've seen you there more than once. They've got so used to people turning up pitching once and never being seen again that they've got a bit tired of that now. And they aren't really particularly interested in nurturing relationships with people they don't think are going to be around for a long time. So it does become more valuable and useful over a period of time. You've got to give back to your network. I think the worst networkers are the ones that are only there for their own purposes. Be prepared when you're in that listening mode to find ways where you might be able to help other business owners too. Now don't let people start taking advantage and the temptation is that we're a very giving industry and so you don't want to suddenly start saying oh well I can promote your business to my customers and blah blah blah and not get anything back. Let's make sure it's a two-way street. But if there are opportunities where you can add value to somebody that you're networking with

then by all means do it. And I think the most useful way that you can add value to someone's business is to put them in touch with someone who can help. So if you can't directly help somebody's business I bet you know somebody who could because we've already got amazing networks at our fingertips. Some of the ways that we can kind of jinx our chances as far as networking concerned I think come from our own hang-ups and that bit of shyness or anxiety that you might be feeling is something we've really got to deal with. But remember that that discomfort's only there because you're operating outside your comfort zone and this is a good thing. This is where the big success is. Also the big failures of course are outside our comfort zone. But do bear in mind that we keep saying well we need to stretch our comfort zone. We need to do stuff that we're not necessarily comfortable with. This is a good thing that you've got that little bit of anxiety. I have a kind of different persona for different situations and it's not that I've got a multiple personality thing going on but I do lean into different aspects of my personality. So I'm not being inauthentic but the person that you speak to at an industry networking event will be a bit different to the person that you would speak to one-to-one at a local networking event and that will be different to the person who stands behind a chair putting half a head of foil highlights in for you. So there's different aspects of our personality that we bring out and my networking personality is a bit more confident perhaps than I would normally be walking into a room full of strangers. So I do kind of psych myself up. I'm a big fan of rituals and triggers so I have a particular outfit type that I wear to networking events. It sounds like I'm kind of turning up as a complete phony but I promise I'm completely authentic. It's just a different aspect of the same personality and you may have seen me speak in public for example. So if you've ever seen me on stage or speaking to a bigger audience I usually have a brooch or a pin and that's part of my ritual. So that's part of my uniform. It's part of and just putting that pin on because I've been doing it for a long time it kind of switches something in my head and says okay we're in presentation mode now. And it's what I call putting on a full filzy. So I'm presenting I'm putting on a full filzy and that and part of that is putting that little brooch on at the beginning. I have a ritual for my salon team meetings. So for years I had a playlist of three songs. I used to go to my car listen to those three songs and well two of them were in the car and one of them was in my headphones on the way back to the salon and then I'm in presentation mode for my team straight away and no one was allowed to talk to me or touch me in between the two because it was part of just putting myself in

that very positive, very communicative, very confident frame of mind. And I think using those little rituals, those little prompts can really help when we're feeling those bits of shyness or anxiety. And of course the best way to overcome it is just go with a mate. But be prepared to abandon your mate pretty early on too. You don't want to turn up at an event and just talk to the person that you know. What's the point? And then finally we've got to measure the effectiveness of these networking events. How do we know it's working? How do we know we're getting something out of it? Well it goes back to that goal setting at the beginning and I think really you've got to figure out how you're going to measure whether an event is worth it or not. Is it the number of contacts that you're going to make over a number of times? Is it how we're increasing our address book? Or is it the number of leads? Is it the amount of business that we're actually generating? What would make a successful networking event for you? What would make a successful network for you to be paying into? So figure out what those goals are at the beginning and then revisit those goals. And also don't be afraid to prune the networking that you're doing too. It's very easy and I've caught myself doing this twice in my career. Where I'm going to a networking event I've been regularly going to for quite some time. I'm very comfortable. I get on really well with the people that organise it but actually as far as the ROI, as far as measuring the success of those networking events go, they're not actually contributing to my business anymore. I've got into a very comfortable space. So if you want to maintain those relationships on a purely social level that's fine but don't kid yourself that it's performing as a networking event for you anymore. And I've had to prune those away and replace them with alternative methods of networking. So I hope that's been useful to you. Get yourselves out there guys and gals and everyone who identifies as something in between. Please let me know how you're getting on. Let me know how networking feeds into your business. I want to do a bit of a blog post on this and your input will be terribly terribly handy. So reach out to let me know. Ping me an email. Find me on social media at philjacksoncoach. I would love to connect with you and increase my own network at the same time. If you've got 20 seconds spare, please think about leaving me a five-star review on your chosen

platform. It really does increase the reach of the podcast. If you've got a minute spare, why not think about sharing this episode with someone else? It will be a lovely way to pay into your network and give a little bit back and understand that networking is about paying it forward. Why not share this episode to someone who you think could benefit? If you've got two minutes free, head over to your emails and send me an email. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. Let me know what you enjoyed, what you didn't enjoy, ideas for future topics. I'm just talking at 5.30 in the morning in a room on my own. I'd love to hear what you could use my help and advice with. Just seven short days until Uncle Phil is coming in your ears again. 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.