December Madness: The 3 Christmas Mistakes Every Salon Owner Makes

Mistake number three is acting like your Santa and giving all your profits away. You end up discounting when you should be maximizing. And this one makes me want to scream. I hate it when I see offers in December. And I've seen some absolute stormers. I've seen some buy one, get one, freeze on service. I've seen Christmas sales, pre-Christmas sales, 20% of everything. We should have got this out of our systems over Black Friday. It's not time to start giving your profits away. Those discounts are destroying your margins. They're devaluing your service and anchoring those services at a lower price point. You're training clients to expect deals when they should be expecting to be paying more. And you're attracting bargain hunters in December instead of making space for those loyal clients. More than that, if you're going to be increasing your price in January, and you're discounting in December, my gosh, that increase is going to feel like more. It's going to feel like such a price hike when people come in for that first appointment of the new year. A 20% discount means you need 25% more clients just to break even. You're working harder and earning less. That's not festive, my dear. That's just foolish. So what are we going to do instead? Well, let's start bundling and packaging stuff together. Put services together so if your hair, you could do a cut and color with treatment for X amount. Feels like a deal, but protects your margins, protects your profits. No reductions on gift vouchers. Again, this should have been out of the way during Black Friday. I don't want to see buy £50, get £10 free through December. Those gift vouchers are probably the only time of year, actually, that gift vouchers are genuine gifts for people. We're making life easier. That comes at a premium. We don't need to be offering extra nonsense when we're pushing gift vouchers out the door. Make sure we're adding value instead of reducing price. Upgrading to premium products for X amount. Upgrading people's services. Again, give people a bit of notice if they're going to be in the salon for longer. If you want to start offering something at a discount, then why not start looking at your January packages? Because January tends to be a time when there's a bit more availability drifting around. So we could perhaps have a gift with purchase. So buy a service in December, for example, and get a free mini treatment in January to fill that quiet month.

Adds a bit of exclusivity, but without reducing what people are going to be spending in December. The golden rule is we add value. We don't reduce price. And if clients ask for discounts, well, just say no, we don't discount our services, but we do have some lovely gift packages available, confident, calm and with no apology. One salon I worked with ditched. They were doing a December pre-Christmas sale each year with 20% off, which actually I think is pure stupidity. I really do. To reduce your profit margin. And actually 20% isn't going to be enough to make a huge difference to people's buying behavior anyway. I think it's crazy when we're going to be closed for a chunk of December and we really need to get as much money through the till as possible. I encourage them to replace it with a book three services and get an express treatment free. Same number of clients, £3,000 more profit than the previous year. I get there was a price increase in there as well over the 12 months, but even so, that's what strategy looks like. So what have I missed? What are you doing this December to make sure we're absolutely maximizing? Is December still your most profitable month? It always used to be historically. Maybe things have changed now. Maybe people aren't spending as much as they used to. What are you noticing this year? Reach out and let me know. Also reach out if you would like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I'm now booking guests for early in 2026. My email address, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear from you anyway. I love hearing from my salon owner friends. So there we have it. Those three silly mistakes that cost you money each Christmas. That's ignoring retail, bad scheduling and discounting when we should be upping the ante. You've still got time before peak season hits. Pick one and let me know how you get on. It's not complicated. I just want you to start thinking a bit more strategically. Just seven short days until I'm coming all over the airwaves again with another dose of my wise owl wisdom. And until then, take care.