Inspiration for your salon. Look outside the industry for great ideas.

We all need ideas and inspiration in our salon businesses from time to time. I'm here today to try and convince you not to look at other salons for those ideas, but instead to look outside our industry. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your eyes and ears again with another dose of wise old owl wisdom. How on earth are we? October the 17th, this episode is scheduled to be coming out. How is October treating you? So across my one-to-one clients and my group coaching clients, it's been an interesting picture, hasn't it, the last couple of months? What I found is that August was a much better month than lots of salons would normally expect. Does that sound reasonable to you? And then September was actually a bit quieter, actually not quite as impressive as it could have been. And lots of people struggling to hit targets or just scraping a pass rather than making triumphant, huge amounts of profit. And then October, fingers crossed, so far looking pretty good, I have to say, and I've been absolutely thrilled to bits with some of the targets that people are setting for Q4 this year. Some absolutely huge targets out there, broken down into bite-sized chunks and actually feeling very achievable, given what I'm hearing so far. So what's the story with you? Why not reach out and let me know? Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear what's going on in your business. Also, incidentally, thank you so much for lots of your birthday wishes last week. I know it's difficult to believe that I'm aging at all, isn't it? But it was lovely to get a couple of greetings on my birthday. I was very spoilt. We had a lovely day at a spa. Did I buy any retail products? No, I didn't. But that's a conversation for another time. You naughty, naughty spa owners just not retailing at all. It's ridiculous. And then back to business with a bang after that. And I'm coping all right with autumn so far. Autumn is my least favourite season traditionally. Very messy, very muddy, and I don't like the gloomier evenings, but I'm determined this year to make the most of every season. And I don't know if it's because we've had an unseasonably bit of warm weather here in the UK, which has kind of got me through, or whether that mindset shift is what it's all about. Anyway, what are we talking about today? I want us to start looking outside the salon industry for inspiration. I went to a trade show this weekend. I was at Excel in London, Salon International, and Olympia Beauty. And I think the danger of trade shows is that we all end up trying to do the same things. Everything feels very samey when we go into our salons.

And I've often said that, actually, if I delete your branding, if I delete your salon name and your logo from your price card and your website, I could swap in another salon in a heartbeat. And most people would be none the wiser. And that's because we all look to the same places for inspiration. So I want us to look outside the industry. And I've got a couple of quick examples. The first is my salon guarantee. And I think we're going to do a whole episode on the salon guarantee, because I do get lots of questions when I mention it. But we have a five point promise in the salon, five part service promise in the salon. And I stole that idea or largely big chunks of it anyway from TGI Fridays. Remember TGI Fridays, where we all used to think we were having fun when actually we were just paying a huge amount of money for overpriced food very generally. Anyway, I was in TGI Fridays and at the bottom of the menu, they said, if we don't offer you a dessert, you get one for free. And I thought that was a genius bit of marketing. So what did I do? Came back to the salon. We did the same thing with conditioning treatments and we did the same thing with retail products. So there is a promise in my salon that if we don't tell you about everything we're using on your hair, you get to take all the products home for nothing. And you could be doing the very same thing as well. Changed our retail fortunes overnight, I can tell you. Anyway, stealing ideas from outside the industry. And last week, just before my birthday, I was off seeing one of my favourite customers over in Belfast, which has fast become one of my favourite cities, I have to say. What a lovely place. A little bit shabby, which I quite like in a city. You don't want anything too polished, do you? I always have lots of fun in Belfast. And of course, to get there, I had to, I didn't have to, I could have gone on a boat, but I flew. I flew from Heathrow to Belfast, short flight, British Airways, business class, because I'm worth it and why not? So I thought, what if we examine that transaction and figure out if there's anything that we could steal for the salon industry from there instead? And the first thing I wanted to point out is a bit of a mindset shift, I think, particularly in beauty, around doing what's best for the customer. And I think a lot of times we get swayed by what the customer actually wants, sometimes away from doing what they actually need or what we feel we ought to be doing. I think we're too easily influenced. And I thought that was something that we could take from the airline industry because I didn't go and knock on the door heading into the little cockpit and talk to the pilots.

By the way, pilots are getting very young these days, aren't they? But I didn't go and knock on the door and say, by the way, I don't think we should be flying the plane this way and can we turn left a little bit because the view will be better. We put ourselves in the hands of the experts. We hand ourselves over, we hand our welfare over to these other people, these people that we trust to make the best decisions on our behalf. And I think we could do with a bit of that in the salon industry too. Get a bit more prescriptive, get a bit more sassy if you need to, but do what the customers actually need rather than what they keep asking for if you know that it's not quite right for them. The other thing, in fact, the rest of this episode, I really want to talk about the way that airlines charge for what they do. So everybody was on the same plane. We were all heading in the same direction. We all have the ultimate same outcome we were going to get from London to Belfast in the same amount of time. It didn't matter whether you were traveling in economy or in business class. We all got there at the same time on the same plane. So the outcome was the same. But what was different depending on what you paid was the experience along the way. And I think that's OK. It doesn't mean there aren't standards. It doesn't mean there aren't procedures and processes. And my goodness, the airline industry runs on systems and processes. But it was OK that we had a different experience. So, for example, I had a few glasses of champagne on the way home because I didn't leave my car at the airport this time and I was celebrating my upcoming birthday. People in economy, unless they paid for extra refreshments, didn't get served anything beyond a small bottle of water. And that's OK. Nobody questioned that. Nobody said, well, that's not fair that he's getting that because I paid a different amount. And I think we could be doing much more, not so much on the hair side. I know you're good at tiered pricing. But on beauty, we could definitely be looking at tiered pricing because ultimately the result we're getting for the customers is the same. It's OK for the experience or your level of experience to be different. And then that gets me onto pricing because I'm sure in that plane full of I don't know how many people sit on a plane these days, 250, 300. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure there were lots of people that are paid a different price to sit next to each other.

I'm pretty sure that I had paid a different amount to the person sat next to me who paid a different amount to the person sat behind us, even though we were getting the same experience in the same class on the plane. And that's because the pricing altered with demand. And I think we could be doing that, too. Now, I know that there isn't a salon software out there that can deal with fluctuations in price like you would see with an airline. But in my own salon, for example, for a very long time, we ran a discount on rebooking. So if you rebooked on the day, you paid a certain price. If you rebook later, you paid a little bit more. Think about hotels. They do this an awful lot as well, don't they? Supply and demand fluctuates and changes the price that we pay. And I think we could be doing that in our salons, too, charging a premium for the most popular slots during the week, pushing people towards their quieter, those quieter Wednesday afternoon slots when we might struggle a little bit to get people through the door. And I think it's OK that people pay a different amount as long as they understand why they're paying a different amount. The other thing, of course, that changes with airline pricing, and we could be doing this, too, is the flexibility. So you can pay a certain amount on most airlines. You can pay a certain amount for a flight, for a seat on a flight, and you paid it. It's done. It's dusted. If you cancel, tough tits. You've lost your money. And you know that you could be paying more for that ticket for added flexibility. So you can pay a bit more and then alter the time or the date of the flight if you need to. And we could be doing that with our businesses, too, couldn't we? We could have a kind of pay up front, non-negotiable. The hotels do this as well. Hilton does this. You have like a saver rate and then a flexible rate. And then the highest rate allows you to cancel right up to the day of your stay. We could be doing that in our businesses, too, couldn't we? We could be having different cancellation policies depending on how much you paid for that service. And then those customers that need that extra flexibility are paying a little bit more. And that premium, of course, is subsidizing the fact that you might have a few late cancellations or no-shows along the way. So people are paying more for that flexibility. Now, the other thing that I don't think is anybody expected to get on that plane and pay when they got there. Nobody expected to pay on the way out. And I think this is a huge one that we should be taking into the salon industry, too.

We've got to start charging people 100% up front. Now, whether you charge it all in one go, whether you charge 50% when they book and another 50% a few days before the appointment, however you want to do it. But by the time we set foot on that airplane, everybody had paid in full for their service. And I know that one of the arguments we have against this is that people aren't going to take upsold services, upsold products. Do you think the upselling stopped when I got onto that plane? Of course it didn't. They were selling refreshments to the people back in economy. We could have given even a charity donation. They were selling Wi-Fi access. All sorts of things that could be add-ons. And people were still quite happily parting with more cash. So let's get all the money up front for our services in the salon industry, too. The one thing that I do want to differentiate, though, and I still think that we should be steering away from, is this loyalty points thing. So the airlines do this an awful lot to try and keep you loyal to a certain brand, to a certain airline. All things being equal, you fly with that one because you've got more points stacking up or they've upgraded you to bronze or silver status. We don't want to go down that path. We don't need to in the salon industry. So be careful what you're choosing from these businesses. But keep your eyes open when you're enjoying an experience or even when you're not enjoying an experience. See how we can apply that to our own business and bring that in as well. Little business lessons all around us, all day, every day. Hope that's been useful to you. If it has, reach out. Let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com Also reach out with your questions because each month one of these episodes is given over to Q&A. Just seven short days until 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. All on, build your salon. All on, build your salon.