What to Do When Your Salon Goes Quiet in Summer

The salon's gone quiet, the diary's full of white space, and your instinct is to panic and throw another offer out. Don't! A quiet summer is an opportunity, it's planning season, and here are five things you can do with it. All on Build Your Salon Hello, hello, hello my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? It's achingly well, I hope. How's business? How's it looking? Nearly at the middle of the month. Are we starting to enjoy July a bit, or are we panicking, looking at lots and lots of white space? The white space thing, my goodness. Yeah, it's designed to induce panic, I am sure. But I honestly think there's some opportunity there as well. And I get that the temptation is to start knocking money off and you run a desperate 20% off everything sale and throw lots of offers into local Facebook groups and you join every other salon in your area racing to the bottom. My darlings, your Uncle Phil is here to tell you that there is a better way. For some salons, I appreciate this is not a problem. For some of you, you're all rushing around waxing genitals all over the place. And for some, it's actually a very, very busy time. But for others, a summer dip is normal. And that's why we need to plan for these things. And it was the same in my salon. As soon as the kids start to break up, families are going away. Mum's struggling with childcare routines. But it's a predictable rhythm. In my salon, in the industry, it's not a sign that things are a problem or your business is failing. And I did a whole episode a couple of weeks back on making peace with the rhythm in your business rather than fighting against it. So today is going to be kind of the practical follow up on that. Not just talking about accepting the quiet, but what you can actually do with the time that you have. And I've got five strategies for you today. I haven't got all the answers, though, my darling. I'd love you to reach out and let me know what you're thinking. Also, I'm asking a favour before we dive in. I'm going to ask a favour if you are on Spotify listening or watching my podcast. It's a video podcast you can watch on Spotify now, in case you didn't know. But if you're on Spotify, please, can you press the follow button? Because I keep getting emails from Spotify saying that for the number of listens that we get and the number of people streaming the episodes every month, I have a very low number of followers, apparently.

So I want you to follow if you've got a couple of minutes. It would also be amazing, of course, if you leave me a review. That's the very best way of getting the word out there, out into the world so that more people can tap into your Uncle Phil's wisdom. But if all you've got time for is just to press follow, that would absolutely make my day. I don't know how to check how many followers I've got, but if it stops them sending me bloody emails, then I'm there for it. Anyway, five strategies. What are we going to do with the quiet times? Well, number one, get the team to take their annual leave. And I know it feels a bit counterintuitive asking your team to go away when there's not much money coming in. But what we don't want is lots and lots of white space around the place. And we don't need the salon open from dusk till dawn stressing about people standing around twiddling their thumbs and checking their phones. You trying to find stuff for them to do. It's a horrible way of running a business. So we're going to do the opposite. And actually, when you think about it, the most logical time for the team to take their annual leave is when the salon's quieter, because that's going to help protect your cash flow a little bit. So you're not paying for empty hours when the demand isn't there. They've got to take that leave somewhere. Wouldn't it be better that they take it when the salon's actually quieter rather than when it's busy? Of course. And it also means that they're topping up their energy ready for the busier times that are coming. So when we get that back to school rush or the Christmas madness starts to hit, you want your team fresh, not worn out from a long, flat summer twiddling their thumbs. So have a look at your holiday policy. Check your contracts. Check with HR if you need to, because you might be able to insist that your team take at least some of their annual leave. And what we used to say in my salon is that if you haven't booked your holiday by May, I'm going to be booking the rest for you. So if you've got a few days drifting around that haven't been taken, I'm going to say to my team, it's time for you to spend those over the summer months. And in many contracts, that is perfectly acceptable, though you may have to give the team a little bit of notice. So let's make summer the encouraged window for those longer breaks and then protect the team and protect their time in, say, October, November, December, when business tends to be a bit better. And we can frame that as a perk. We know we've got better weather and I'm going to give you the time to spend with your family so that you come back recharged. So we're not just managing the rota. What we're doing is lining up your team's energy with your revenue strategy.

Tip number two, let's have a look at training. When it's quiet, what is your team actually doing? If they're sat in the staff room twiddling their tits and scrolling their phones, my darling, then I'm afraid it's time to toughen up just a little. Your team's skill is the most valuable thing that you have and a slow spell is a very good time to invest in it. But don't get don't get into a sweat because I said invest. It doesn't need to be expensive. Sometimes your suppliers have very low cost workshops or sometimes free workshops on their new products, their new lines, their new techniques. But if you do want to invest in the team, also have a look at the independent academies. A lot of academies run summer deals because your quiet time is also their quiet time. You can very often get 50% off or buy one space, get one free. It's not beyond the realms for you to pick up the phone to an academy and say, look, I'm thinking about investing. What deal can you do me over the summer? There's often a deal to be done. Also, we can look at online education for the simple stuff, maybe some in-person workshops for the more difficult stuff. And don't forget those soft skills as well. It's not all about cutting, coloring, facials and hair removal. Sometimes it's things around consultation skills, rebooking, handling difficult clients, talking about retail without sounding like an asshole. But by the busy time, the team hasn't got any space. So let's do it now. And then by the time we get to the busy time, they're a bit sharper. They're ready to hit the ground running and they can exercise those new skills as we get into a busier time. So they can practice their newfound skills on a busier column. Next up, rather, I'm talking about marketing. Marketing done in a panic is always bad marketing. It's that needy, desperate, discount-soaked marketing. And it's the stuff that actually holds our industry back. Good marketing gets planned with a clear head. And that's a luxury that you don't have when you're busy. So use this quiet time to start mapping out your autumn, mapping out your winter. You could easily get your marketing for the rest of this year. Maybe even make a start on Q1 of 27, goddammit, by the end of this summer. So those key dates are the same every year.

We can plan our promotions and start batching our content, writing some emails so that they're scheduled and working for you when you're nice and busy in the run-up to the end of the year. It links to what I talked about in Monday's episode about targets. This is why we plan by the quarter, not by the month, so that you can judge where to spend your marketing energy. There's only so much marketing that you can do. There's only so much marketing bandwidth that you have access to. So by planning in these quiet times, we're not going to get frightened. We're going to get a bit more assertive. We're going to start steering the business in terms of those busy and quiet months. Next, I want you to look at your opening hours. An empty salon with the lights on and the aircon running and a full team standing around is expensive, and you don't have to run your business that way. There is nothing that says you have to fill the same number of calendar hours all year round just because that's what you've always done. Of course, you're going to have to check your team's contracts, but have a look at last summer's data. Don't guess, and I want to spot the days and times that are difficult to fill. If over the summer holidays, Tuesday mornings are a graveyard, why are we open? Why not rejig the rotor? Have a summer opening hours announcement and start to rearrange those hours a little bit. And I think we should be doing this anyway, particularly as we seem to be getting used to having these heat waves here in the UK. Why aren't we changing our opening hours? Why aren't we opening earlier in the morning? Why are we not opening later instead or filling the hours at the quiet times or at least the cooler times in the salon? So we're not paying to air condition a whole building in the hottest bit of the day. Honestly, look at the continental way of doing things. Look at how the Spanish have their siesta. So perhaps we can break those shifts up as well. Breaking things up a little bit is having our summer hours policy. So we've got some flexibility. Now, we haven't got to chisel anything in stone, which says that it's always going to be that way. We call it our summer hours policy. Then it's not a sign of a struggle. It makes it look like it's a sensible decision that your clients can respect. And then point number five, when it comes to marketing quiet slots today, and I think this is the one that matters the most. If you're staring at empty slots, the urge is that you discount it and fill the column with just about anything you can get your hands on. So what we end up doing is discounting cheap little services just to get somebody in to see them during the day.

And we end up starting to promote a 15 quid brow shape. And you're going to need to do a lot of those in a single day if you're going to fill it and make a dent in your profits for the day. So I want you to put that marketing effort. You know, we just talked about there's only a certain amount of marketing energy that you have. I want you to put that marketing effort behind bigger hits, bigger packages, bigger bundles. Because if one person books one of those, it might fill up half a day of a team member's time. And you can build those summer specific bundles around what clients actually want this time of year. Those pre-holiday packages with color and a deep conditioning treatment or a gloss for hair salons. Those getaway ready bundles where we get a mani and pedi and a spray tan and a lash tint all tidy in one sitting. Or a complete skin reset with a facial. Maybe we can't do peels this time of year depending on the weather. But a course of treatments booked together. So we're not necessarily knocking huge amounts of money off. But that big high value appointment is going to fill a much bigger gap than hunting for lots and lots and lots of little clients. If there's less clients around, don't put promos together that rely on you finding 50 people to take an offer. So there's my five strategies. But what have I missed? Why not reach out and let me know what summer is looking like in your salon business this year? Phil at buildyoursalon.com. We're scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Anyway, I'd love to hear what you're doing to keep yourself sane and cool during the summer months. And let me know what your Q3 and Q4 planning is looking like. I'd love to know more about what you're trying to do in your business to move it forward. And is your cash flow worrying you? If it is, well that's exactly what getting your numbers straight is all about. My 10 minute money fix is my £9 walkthrough that walks you through where your money is going and helps you keep more of it in your business. You don't need a finance degree, just 10 minutes. There are five fixes, all of them take less than 10 minutes each and the link is in the description below, 10minutemoneyfix.com. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the airwaves again with another dose of your Uncle Phil's wisdom.

And until then, take care.