Get MORE from your salon software

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 would like to help you get a little bit more bang for your buck as far as your salon software is concerned. Welcome. I don't have a strong political message. I have my own personal viewpoints. But one of my beliefs is that as entrepreneurs and salon entrepreneurs, our job is not necessarily to use our voice and our platform to change the world. I think an entrepreneur's job is to turn the conditions that we're living in into something that can grow and prosper and generate profit. So I don't preach. I don't have a strong political message to get out there. I don't tell you what cards to deal. I help you with the cards that we've been dealt. Now, whatever your political beliefs, whether you believe that Brexit is going to be a great thing for the country or a terrible thing for the country, whether or not you believe that Donald Trump is going to be the end of the world or whether his counterpart over in Moscow is going to do the job for us, all of these things I will leave to your own personal beliefs. But I don't know many people at the moment who don't believe that we are in for a slightly choppy time. Whatever happens with those circumstances, we're going to be in for a choppy time financially and economically. So how do we help our businesses survive when things are tough? Well, one of the measures that's often touted is to start looking at cutting costs. Big business does this all the time. A lot of big businesses will have a budget in place for staff redundancy and a continual program of squeezing budgets and making sure that no money is spent unnecessarily. That can be very valid. I do think a cost cutting exercise every now and again is very good use of your time. Don't spend too long on cost cutting, though. I do think that if your time is worth, say, £100 an hour and you spend four hours trying to save £20 on your energy bill, that's probably not the best use of your time. So by all means, keep an eye on your costs, but don't spend too long trying to squeeze them if savings aren't immediately apparent. The other way we can help our businesses survive and thrive is to get more out of the money that we're spending.

As well as making these videos and building online training programs, I'm a salon coach and a mentor, so I'm in a very privileged place. I get to go inside people's businesses, sometimes into their salons, and see what makes them tick. And one of the things that struck me is that we're not making the most of salon software systems. Now, I'm not affiliated with any particular software brand. We use Forrest salon software in my hair salon at the moment. It's not something that I sell. I certainly don't get paid for recommending Forrest to anybody. And in fact, by seeing other people's salons and other systems in place, I'm starting to believe that actually most of them can do a pretty brilliant job for you if you use them properly. There aren't many that can't handle some kind of marketing campaign, for example. There aren't many that can't produce reports to help you with your staff management. And there aren't many that can't generate data telling you what your most profitable services are. That said, and this is my message for you today, they all rely on the fact that you have to put the information in there in the first place. And that's what's bothering me at the moment. I've got experience with one salon, and this is a very extreme example, but one salon who literally had salon software on a PC on reception alongside a paper appointment book. And the only thing that the salon system was being used for was to log sales as a till. They didn't even put the client details in there. All of the client details were in the paper book. And this was just a glorified till with a PC screen. What an entire waste of money. It was ridiculous. OK, it meant that they could monitor progress as far as takings were concerned. It also meant they could work out their staff commissions relatively easily. But nothing else that this system could do was being utilized even to one percent. I've also seen salon systems that are very good at using the appointment side of things. So they like the fact that their systems can send out text messages and automated emails to help reduce the number of no shows. But they're not doing anything with that information around their clients after that.

So they're not engaging with their clients regularly through email or SMS. They're not exporting that data into their email sending software. They're not using that data to manage that relationship in between client visits. And there's an awful lot of very valuable information tied up in that salon software system. You should be pulling reports from your system at least every week that help you manage your team's performance. They should be working to targets. And I've put lots of videos out there on targeting. So I'm not going to cover that now. But I've put lots of work into those. So please refer to them. So we should be setting targets and monitoring our team's progress towards those targets every single week. We should be pulling out how they did last week. We should be pulling out what they've got booked in this week and coaching our teams to make sure they're hitting the targets that we need them to for our businesses to survive and thrive. So my message is not to spend more on your salon software. I'm sure you're probably spending enough already. I've got no particular drum to bang as far as which software you should be going out and investing in for your salon. But what I'm saying is if the system is there on reception, use it to its maximum. Make sure you're taking every opportunity for training to make sure you know that software inside out and you can get to the information that you need to run your business. I hope that's motivated you and giving you a little kick up the bum as far as your salon software is concerned. If it's been helpful, don't forget to subscribe because I do a broadcast like this every single week. If you've already subscribed, I will see you again next week. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.