Leaky Bucket Alert: Your Salon Has a Retention Problem

If your whole marketing plan is basically get more clients and post on socials, I hate to break it to you darling, but you're doing it the hard way. And if you think amazing service alone will keep people loyal, well, newsflash, your competitors are giving out great service too. So in this week's episode, I'm breaking down why retention is the real growth strategy, and how you're probably not doing it well. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your ears again with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Here we are right at the end of July, poised on the edge of August. My goodness, this quarter is flying away. How's it been for you? I've heard a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest with you. Lots of my salons actually take into account that July can be a tricky month. So they've accordingly set their strategy and targets. But some people hoping for a slightly better month and it hasn't quite materialized. So how's it been for you? Reach out and let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to hear about how business is panning out in 2025 for you. So what are we talking about today? Well, today, I want you to shift some of your marketing efforts. I think lots and lots of people are out there posting like crazy on social media, not doing very much else, though, to be honest with you, darling. And I've talked to you before about having a stilted marketing plan. And I hope you enjoyed the spanking I gave you on that. But it's not enough to keep focusing on getting new clients through the door. And in fact, if you've got consistently high numbers of new clients coming through the door, well, that's not always a good thing. Why would that be then, Uncle Phil? Well, if you've got high numbers of new clients, by definition, you might well have a retention problem because new clients can only go into slots that you've got available. So if you've got lots and lots of new clients month after month after month, well, you can't be keeping your old clients very happy. Otherwise, you wouldn't have room for new clients now, would you? So retention has become the problem. And I promise you, retention deserves to be your new obsession. Retention. It's much cheaper to get a new client, to get an existing client to come back, rather, to retain an existing client is much cheaper than acquiring new ones. In fact, acquiring a new client can take five to seven times the investment than keeping an old one happy.

Retention, therefore, isn't just emotional. It's actually economic as well. It's more profitable to keep people happy than it is to keep searching for new clients. I used to work in the 1800s when I was young. I used to work as a holiday rep for a holiday company in Turkey. And basically, we figured out that we had to do something about customer retention. In fact, the company as a whole did some calculations and figured out that if they didn't do something about retention, they were going to burn through the entire population of the UK in about 12 years. Well, on a smaller level, that's what's happening to you, too. If you're not keeping clients happy, there's only so many clients out there. There's only so many in the population of your town or your city. So ultimately, we've got to keep people happy. Also, loyal clients spend more. They refer more and they cause less stress. In fact, I'm a very guilty party as far as this is concerned in my hairdressing business. I actually don't like new clients very much. I find it very a little bit of anxiety pops up each time I see a new client in my hairdressing column. I'd much rather just be dealing with my regular customers and making sure that they're still happy. I don't like the hassle of trying to train a new client to be a good customer. It takes far too long. So your existing clients, they trust your prices. They don't bring the drama and they're shouting your name from the rooftop. So, of course, we've got to keep people in the business. And there's no point in pouring money into marketing if you can't keep the clients you already have. What you've got there is the age-old leaky bucket problem. So growth without retention is that leaky bucket. We've got to make sure we're plugging as many holes as possible. Keeping people in the business is more profitable that way. It means we're doing a better job of keeping those customers happy. So why do people leave us? Well, some of them, there's nothing we can do. Some of them, it's just natural that we burn through a few clients. There are some clients who genuinely can't afford to come to you anymore because they've had a change in their circumstance. Or some of your clients do move away.

Or some of them do drop down dead. These things are happening. But the bulk of them, I promise you're not losing for those valid reasons. The bulk of them are stopping coming to you because we are getting something wrong. Now, occasionally, it's because we've really ballsed something up. It's because we've done a terrible job of a haircut or a beauty service. And the customer has decided they don't want to come back. And that's perfectly valid. That decision-making process is perfectly valid. But I promise it's also happening a lot less than you think. Most of your customers are leaving you for two reasons. One of them is because they are bored. It's because you're not bringing new ideas. You're not moving their service forward. You're not moving the conversation forward. And particularly, we see this in hair. If you're not offering new ideas and your customer thinks they might fancy something different, you lose that customer because they don't think you can come up with anything different. So it's your job as part of your consultation process. And in fact, this was one of the promises that we made to our customer. In the consultation process, we would bring them an idea for next time. But it's your job to keep moving that conversation forward, to keep making suggestions, to keep trying to move them onto new services, to keep things interesting, to keep them exciting, to adapt as your customer needs change over time. The other thing that will kill your retention is inconsistency. If you're offering the same service but different vibes, clients don't complain. They just don't come back. You're breaking trust each time you offer an inconsistent standard of service. So it's really important that even if you're a solopreneur, you pull apart your client journey, map it out in quite some detail, and make sure you're hitting the same notes every time at each stage of the customer journey. Also, your shot over the bows, the warning shot, is if you're not getting referrals from your clients. So sometimes you don't get referrals from clients, not because they think you're awful, but they can't trust you to be brilliant every single time. So pull apart that customer journey. Make sure you're offering a consistent experience again and again and again, making sure we're keeping clients delighted at every stage of the game. And part of that process needs to be follow up and rebooking. Hope is not a strategy. Rebooking should never be assumed. Rebooking should be something that we work for. Don't try and make it optional. Don't try and let people leave it until they get home and they check their calendar.

Rebooking needs to be something that we're really, really tight on every single time. It means you're more likely to keep clients in the business. It means they're more likely to get the slots that they want in your calendar. But it also means that we start to see if there's a problem with retention and rebooking a lot sooner in the journey. Running a small business is hard enough. You shouldn't need a tech degree just to keep up. AI DIY is your monthly shortcut to earning more, working less, and finally feeling in control with the power of AI on your side. Each month, you'll get fresh tutorials on marketing, money, and mindset. Plus, step-by-step prompts and support that makes this feel easy. No jargon. No overwhelm. Just smart tools that fit your business and your life. Join AI DIY now at philjackson.coach. Look clever. Sound brilliant. Work less. So I've convinced you that retention needs to be a priority in your business. How do we go about making sure that we're boosting retention like an absolute pro? Well, I've already talked to you about building out that client journey, mapping out every touchpoint with your client from the online process to the pre-booking process to the welcome, the consultation, the service, the follow-up, the aftercare. Map it out in detail. Build out your signature journey and make sure that at each stage of the game, you can repeat that journey consistently. Also, look for areas where you're not doing very well at the moment. And I know that's a bitter pill to swallow. Nobody wants to pull apart their client journey and realise they're failing at certain stages, but it's much better that you notice before your client starts to. Surprise and delight still works. So little gestures bring big loyalty. Add those extras. Make sure we're still offering a consistent standard of service, but those thoughtful extras can feel really personal and elevate the client experience. And particularly if you're looking for retention to turn into referrals, those little touches are absolute gold. Next, train your team to rebook with confidence. Teach them that it's not being pushy. It's professional.

Give them the scripts that they need if you need to. Give them the training. Most of all, give them the targets and measure how many customers they're rebooking across their day. If those numbers start to slide, I promise you that's going to turn into a medium to longer term retention problem. It's much better that we nip it in the bud and notice if there's a problem with rebooking. And that's all about measuring retention. Now, I will admit that a lot of salon software systems do retention figures really, really, really badly. I'm a geek. I'm a nerd. And retention reports leave me absolutely baffled, darlings. So if you don't understand it, go back to your salon software system. Make them explain that retention report to you. If there isn't a retention report, measure rebooking instead, because frankly, rebooking equals retention in the longer term anyway. If you've got high rebooking, chances are your retention is going to be pretty high too. If your rebooking started to fall or your visit frequency has started to expand, you're probably starting to churn clients. And ultimately, of course, what gets measured gets better. This is all about noticing when clients don't come back. It's about noticing, my darling, when people are starting to fall off the radar. And yes, we can use technology to help us stay in touch. So automate those reminders. Automate the marketing. Automate those birthday messages. Keep it personal feeling. Don't let it get too robotic. But it's a really useful thing to automate a lot of these touch points because it means we get to stay in touch without being too spammy. But ultimately, we want a system, a process, some technology to kick in as soon as we've noticed, or better still, as soon as technology has noticed that somebody might be falling off the radar. And then my final tip on customer retention. If you've got a customer retention problem, then we're going to start looking at something like salon memberships. And salon memberships are my favourites as far as a customer retention model are concerned. We end up with people that last a lot longer. It means we're offering our customers something different that they can't get down the road. And membership customers tend to be the very best as far as loyalty and long-term spend is concerned. More on memberships coming up through August. I've decided that August is going to be our memberships focus. We've got two or three episodes coming up in the Build Your Salon podcast. If you've got questions about memberships, reach out and let me know now. I can try and build the answers into my episodes across the next two or three episodes. So Phil at buildyoursalon.com. Also reach out if you would like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast.

I would love to be sharing your journey with my Build Your Salon podcast audience. And I'm sure they would love to get inspiration on what you're doing well. So just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. And until then, my darlings, 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.