How do you measure up?

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, dear listener, Phil Jackson from Build Your Salon here, your Queen of Salons, coming in your ears with more ancient wisdom from the wise one. I love what you're wearing today, by the way. It really brings out the colour of your eyes. So today, I know you hate figures. I know you don't like doing math. I know that you don't want to be doing this sort of thing. You just want to do a great job with your clients, but we're going to get to grips with the figures. This is your job, darling. If you think you're an operator in your business, if you think you're serving your salon business best, by keeping yourself busy, carrying out more and more services, you are seriously undermining your future success. You've got to get comfortable with these figures. So today, what I've got for you is a small collection of figures, so that we're not getting completely overwhelmed by monitoring and measuring 250 different things. So a simple set. I've put together a little cheat sheet, actually, a little handout, one of my famous pamphlets. And if you head over to buildyoursalon.com forward slash podcast, then you'll be able to opt in and download the little cheat sheet that I've put that accompanies this recording. So there's going to be some calculations that you might have to do, but it's all very clear on the cheat sheet. And I promise you, this is really, really simple stuff when we get to grips with it. And I know you get scared, so you end up working harder and harder. But if you set yourself a goal right now of in the next three months getting comfortable retrieving and monitoring these figures, you have taken a huge step forward in your business. You can do this. We can do this together. And ultimately, it's about taking responsibility. Oh, my days, I can't bear it when I hear salon owners moaning about something in their business and not doing something about it. You are responsible for everything in your business. In fact, you're responsible for everything in your life. Scary, I know, but empowering too. So don't just moan about it. Let's dive a bit deeper, figure out what's not working in the business and get a bit of a plan of action. And that's ultimately what we're trying to get to with these figures. It's not just about measuring for measures sake. It's about measuring so that we can put a plan in place to see some improvement. So what are these magical measures of which you speak, Phil? Well, before we jump in, actually, I want to have a quick word about salon software,

because you're going to make life an awful lot easier for yourself if you have salon software that will give you some of these measures simply and easily. If you can retrieve these figures without breaking into a sweat, you're much more likely to monitor them on a regular basis. If you've got to go delving through different reports and you're finding it confusing and complicated, well, you're probably going to not do it in the long term unless you can delegate it to somebody else. So I would have a really close look at the software that you're using. Now, I know that changing software companies is a ball ache. It really is an absolute pain. And there's also some very rich data which gets lost each time you move. So it's not something you want to be doing just glibly. I would also want to just temper your enthusiasm a little for a new software system by pointing out that there is no such thing as a perfect salon software system. There just isn't. They've all got strong points. They've all got things that they, to be honest with you, don't do as well as some of the others. I would say that the salon software that you pay for tends to be better on the reporting side, but not always. I would say that sometimes the software that your team loves is not necessarily the one that you love as the salon owner. Sometimes the software that your customers love isn't the one that you love as a salon owner. So it's a balancing act. It's about prioritizing, figuring out what is important in your business. But I'm telling you right here, right now, that this reporting side of things should be in your top. I would put it as the most important thing for salon software, but I will allow it to be in the top three. If your software isn't doing this right, then get rid. You've got to change. You've got to move on to something that's supporting the growth of your business. Problem is, what happens over the years is the salon software gets more and more complicated. So basically what happens, I think, and this is only a suspicion, I would not swear to this. But I think what happens is somebody creates some salon software. And for a while, it's really good at some of the basic stuff. You know, it's probably come in with a slightly different flavor. It's taken on one of the one of the failings in a different salon software system. They said, you know what?

That salon software should be doing this, too. I'm going to build one that does that. And for a while, it just ticks some basic boxes. And usually it gets a bit of a following, a bit of a tribe and some people who are refreshed by this new approach to salon software. Then what happens is the software company starts trying to sell it and they start selling it to bigger and bigger companies. And what they really want, these big companies, is to make one sale and shift an awful lot of products. So what they really want, alongside us as individual salon owners, what they really want is a nice juicy chain. You know, if they can land a contract where they've got, say, 250 salons and they're all going to be using their software, that's a big win for a salon software company. So they start having these meetings and then normally a company that size will have its own way of doing things. So they say, OK, we like the look of your salon software, but we're going to need these reports. We're going to need it to measure this in this way. We're going to need a piece of paper that's got these five figures on the same piece of paper. So the salon software company says, OK, we'll build it. We'll build it in. If you promise us we're going to put this software into 250 locations, it will be crazy for us not to bend over a little and take it like a pro. We're going to we're going to build these reports in as bespoke reports just for you. Don't you feel special? Here's the line on which you sign. Problem is, once they've been through that process with a few companies, what they've ended up with is something very convoluted and very complicated. And we end up with so many reports and so many measures and so many bits of paper flying around that for us poor, poor salon owners, it's overwhelming, to be honest with you. So what do we do rather than trying to get to grips with these reports? We ignore them and we get ourselves a little bit busier, carry out a bit more service. And as long as there's money in the bank, we're OK. Well, not anymore. I have peeled the scales from your eyes. Now, my darlings, we are ripping off the bandaid, taking a deep dive into what your business looks like. So what exactly is it that I want you to be measuring? They say if you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself for life. But let me tell you, darlings, I've been in the situation during my career where sometimes you just want someone to give you the bloody fish. And that's what my new program for 2023 eight weeks bums on seats is all about.

It's the marketing training that you need to fill up some of the white space in your appointment book and turn you into the salon owner you were always meant to be. Get more bums on seats in early 2023. Head over to buildyoursalon.com and join the wait list to be the first to hear and get my special early bird pricing. So what do we need to be measuring? What are we going to be asking our salon software to regurgitate for us in order to improve our business? Well, the first thing I want you to look at is utilisation. And that's a measure out of the hours that were available, how many hours were actually taken up with paying clients. And you're going to want to measure this on a weekly basis, a monthly basis. But also, I would break it down into team members, too, and figure out how busy each individual team member was and build that into your performance management. And if you need some help with performance management, reach out phil at buildyoursalon.com. Let me know. I would love to hear from you about any ideas you have for free future broadcasts. So utilisation is something that actually a lot of coaches don't bother with, which I think is a bit of a shame. I think it paints a really good picture of what's going on in the salon. Now, obviously, we're going to be measuring takings. And that's my next two measures, actually, is retail takings and service takings. But the thing is, if all you look at is takings, it doesn't always include what's going on as far as marketing and promotions concerned in your salon. Let me explain. Phil, for goodness sake, speak clearly. Precision is what we need in our language, darlings. Let's say I stand outside your salon and I hand out vouchers for a free facial or a $1 facial. Let's put it that way. And people can come in with this voucher, pay $1, have a deluxe facial. Wonderful, wonderful experience with you. And then wend their way through life feeling a bit more confident. If I handed out hundreds of those vouchers and all we looked at was takings, well, it could look like my team wasn't being terribly productive at all. When, in fact, they've been booked up all day every day with these $1 facials. So utilisation, I think, paints a fuller picture of what's going on in the salon. And then once we've measured our takings in terms of retail, in terms of service, then we're going to look at average bill. So how much, on average, is each transaction worth to the salon? Now, the one thing I would say, if you're going to start setting some targets for some of these numbers,

do bear in mind changes that are happening inside the business. So lots of people will have an average bill target, and I worked with one salon, bless them, set themselves an average bill target and then got very triumphant and very smug because they'd started to achieve it consistently week in and week out. What they'd failed to appreciate, though, as part of our coaching process was that we'd implemented a price increase. So, of course, everything had gone up by about 5%. So no wonder we were starting to achieve that average bill target all the time when actually that should have moved up alongside our prices. Then I want to start looking at a report which most salon software does really, really badly. And you get to choose one here. You get to make a choice. You can either measure rebooking. So how many people are actually rebooking as they leave the salon or very quickly after. Or you can look at retention. So how many customers in this time period have been retained? How many are we keeping hold of in the medium term? Now, the bit that lots of salon software companies do really badly is retention. Now, I'm a nerd. I am one of those very rare things which is a gay nerd. And I'm a geek. I love software. I love technology. I love automation. And I don't understand most salon software retention reports. I find them incredibly convoluted and very difficult to follow. So my preference is that we measure rebooking. And I think, in the end, they tell us the same thing. I think if you've got a high percentage of rebooking, then your retention is going to be pretty high as well. If you've got very, very low retention, chances are that people aren't going to be rebooking either. So I think, in the end, they tell the same story. Now, the other reason I prefer rebooking is we can make a difference very quickly. Let me explain. Let's say that we've identified that your customers are not rebooking as they leave. And we decide to increase focus in a couple of team meetings. We set some targets for our guys. And we ask them to really make sure they're asking people to rebook and suggesting when they should be making their next booking for. If all we're measuring is retention, it can take us weeks, maybe months, before we realise whether we are making an impact with that training and that extra focus or not.

Whereas rebooking, I can tell the next day whether my guys have made a bit more of an effort with rebooking. So we can have an impact much more quickly on rebooking. And I think that success loves speed. And I think that the stuff that we can act on really quickly serves us a lot better. So have a look at retention reports in your salon software system. Have a look at rebooking reports in your salon software system. Most of them will do one or the other well. Very rarely do we see them both being excellent reports in the same bit of software. Choose the one that you can access the figures easiest, because that means you'll actually do it and you'll keep up with it. But if you've got a choice, I would plump for rebooking every time. And then the final of these basic measures is frequency of visits. How often are we seeing our customers? Sometimes we don't need any new customers in the business at all. We just need to get them back in a little bit more often. So sometimes we can transform a business just by increasing that frequency of visit. Just one extra visit per customer can change the fortunes of a failing salon, I promise. Now, there are, of course, lots of other bits of paper that could be flying around the business. And they're there for a reason. There are lots of reasons for all of those reports to exist inside your salon software. But they're when we dig a bit deeper. So if, for example, we realize there's a problem with our average bill, we can dig deeper. We can go into more reports. We can find out more data from our salon software system to figure out why that might be. So all of the rest of the stuff is there as a backup. But these simple measures will give you a really good idea of what's going on in your business in lots of different areas. So head over to buildyoursalon.com forward slash podcast. And you can download the cheat sheets that I've put together to help you get to grips with these figures. And it explains how if you don't have salon software or your salon software is missing an element of it. I will show you how to manually calculate some of these figures, too. And then, of course, the next stage is to look at the picture that these numbers are painting. So let's say we have a growing average bill but falling retention. What does that tell us about the business? The customers that we've got are spending more but we're losing customers. Perhaps we're being a bit too pushy. Perhaps we've trained our teams to be selling and they're too aggressive with it. The customers don't like it. Or what if we've got, say, low utilisation and big gaps between visits?

Well, that can start to inform our marketing decisions for the coming year. Perhaps we need to encourage people back into the salon a little bit more frequently. Or maybe we've been focusing too much on those high-end services with low frequency of visit. And, of course, all of this helps with your team performance management, too. Well, there'll be a similar set of measures that we would be talking to our team members one-to-one about. And if you want an episode on that, reach out phil at buildyoursalon.com. So, I hope that's helped. If it has at all, then, of course, I would love it if you could jump in and give me a five-star review for this episode. You know that it will absolutely make my week and it will take you just a couple of seconds. Don't forget about that cheat sheet. Buildyoursalon.com forward slash podcast. Just seven short days. Don't miss me too hard, darlings. Until we are together again. 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.