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 there. Don't. A quiet summer is not a crisis. It's planning season. And here are five things that you can do with it. All on build your salon. 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 achingly well, I hope. How's business? How's it looking nearly towards the middle of the month? Are we starting to enjoy July a little bit or are we panicking and looking at lots and lots of white space? The white space thing? It's designed to induce panic I'm sure, but I honestly think that there is some opportunity there as well. 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 the local Facebook groups. 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 it's not a problem. For some of you, you are all rushing around waxing genitals all over the place and summer is actually a very, very busy time for you. But for others the summer dip is normal and this is why we need to plan for these things and it was the same in my salon. As soon as the kids are off, families are going away. Mums struggling with childcare, routines are out the window, but it's a predictable rhythm in the industry and not a sign that 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 it. So today it is going to be kind of the practical follow up on that, not just talking about accepting the quiet, but what do you actually do with the time that you have. So I've got five strategies for you today. I haven't got all the answers though, my darling. I'd love it if you reach out and let me know what you are thinking. Also, I'm going to ask a favour before we dive in. If you are on Spotify listening to my podcast or watching my podcast 'cause it's a video podcast as well. If you're on Spotify, can you please press follow because I keep getting bloody emails from Spotify saying that for the number of listens that we have every month I have a low number of followers so I want you to follow if you've got a couple of minutes to leave me a review. Of course that's the very best way of getting the word out there into the world as well when we get to more people tapping into your Uncle Phil's wisdom. But if you've got time to just press follow, that would absolutely make my day. I don't know how to check how many followers I've got, but if it gets them off my case, darling, I'm there for it anyway. Five strategies. What do we do with the quiet times? Number one, get the team's annual leave taken. Now, and I know it feels a bit counterintuitive encouraging your team to take holidays when there's not much money coming in, but what we don't want is lots and lots of white space around the place open from dawn till dusk and stressing about people standing around twiddling their thumbs, you trying to find stuff for them to do. So what we're going to do is the opposite. It's actually, when you think about it, the most logical time for the team to be off because it protects your cash flow. You are not paying for 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 is actually quiet rather than it's busy? And it also saves their energy for the peaks that are coming. When we get that back to school rush and the Christmas madness hits, you want your team fresh, not worn out from a long, flat summer twiddling their thumbs. So have a look at your holiday policy, also check your contracts because you might be able to insist that your team take at least some of their leave. So what we used to say in my salon is if you haven't booked all your holiday by May, I'm going to book the rest for you. So if you've got the odd days drifting around that haven't been taken, I'm going to make you spend those over the summer months. And in many contracts that's perfectly acceptable, especially if you give your team a little bit of notice. So let's make summer the encouraged window for those longer breaks and protect the team and protect their time during November and December when business tends to be a little bit better, frame it as a perk. You've got good weather and you've got time to spend it with your family. Come back recharged. So we're not just managing the roster, what we're doing is lining up your team's energy with your revenue strategy. 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 thumbs and scrolling their phones, my darling, then I'm afraid it is time to toughen them up a little bit. 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. And it doesn't have to be expensive. Sometimes your suppliers have free or very low cost workshops on new lines, new techniques. But if you do want to invest in the team, have a look at the academies. A lot of the academies run summer deals because your quiet time is also their quiet time. And very often you can get 50% off or buy one, get one free. And it's not beyond the realms for you to pick up the phone to an academy and say, I'm thinking about investing. What deal can you do me? Very often there's a deal to be done. So look at online education for the simple stuff, perhaps some in-person workshops for the more difficult things. And don't forget those soft skills around consultation, around rebooking, around handling difficult clients, about talking about retail without sounding like an arsehole. But by the time they've got their skills in place, they don't feel new to them. So they can practice their newfound skills on a busy column. Next up, marketing done in panic is always bad marketing. That needy, desperate, discount soaked marketing is the stuff that's holding our business back. Good marketing gets planned with a clear head, which is a luxury you don't have in the busy times. So use this time to start mapping out your autumn, mapping out your winter. You could easily get your marketing for the rest of this year and in Q1 of 2027 goddammit by the end of this summer. So those key dates are the same every year. We can plan our promotions, we can start batching our content, writing the emails now so they're scheduled and working for you when you are flat out in the run-up to Christmas. 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 collateral. 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. What we're going to do is get a bit more assertive, start steering the business in terms of those busy months as well. Next up, have a look at your opening hours. An empty salon with all the lights on and a full team standing around is expensive and you don't have to run your business that way. There is nothing that says that you have to fill the same number of calendar hours all year round just because that's what you've always done. Have a look at last summer's data, not a guess. We're working on data which days and times were difficult to fill. If Tuesday mornings were a graveyard, why are you opening them? Why not rejig the roster? 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 now to these big hot heat waves in the UK here. Why aren't we changing our opening hours? Why are we not opening earlier? Why are we not opening later instead and fitting the hours that are quiet times generally or at least cooler times in the salon. So we're not paying to air-condition the whole building in the heat of the day. Well honestly look at the continental way of doing things. Look at the Spanish siesta, look at how we can do those split shifts. Breaking things up a little bit, we have our summer hours policy. So we've got flexibility. We haven't got to sign anything, chisel it in stone, which means it's always going to be that way. And by calling it your summer hours policy, it's not a sign of a struggle. You are making it look like a sensible decision that your clients can respect. And point number five, when it comes to marketing those slots today, and I think this is the one that matters the most, when you're staring at empty slots, the urge is to discount and fill the column with just about anything. So what we end up doing is discounting little services just to get somebody in to see them during the day. You are starting to promote a 15 quid brow shape. You're going to need a lot of them to fill a single day and you're never going to do it. So put your marketing effort behind the bigger hits, bigger packages, bundles that might fill up half a day of a team member's time. You can build those summer specific bundles around what clients actually want this time of year. Pre-holiday packages with colour and a deep conditioning treatment for hair salons. And for your aesthetics, we're getting set for summer, those getaway ready bundles, your gel mani and pedi with a spray tan, a brow, lash and tidy all in one sitting, or a complete skin reset with a facial. Maybe we can't do peels this time of the year. It depends on the weather. But a course of treatments booked together, we're not necessarily knocking huge amounts of money off, but that big high value appointment is going to fill a much bigger gap. You're not hunting for so many clients. If there are less clients around, don't put promos together that relies on you getting 50 of them to take an offer to start filling up some time. So that's my five strategies, but what have I missed? Why not reach out and let me know. fill@buildyoursalon.com. You know, I love hearing from my salon owner friends, anyone. I'd love to hear what you are doing to keep yourself sane during the summer months. And also let me know what your Q3 and Q4 planning is looking like. If a quiet spell has got cashflow worrying you. Well, that's exactly the moment to get your numbers straight. My 10-minute Money Fix is my nine-pound walkthrough that walks you through where your money's going and helps you keep more of it in your business. You don't need a finance degree, just 10 minutes. So there are five fixes, all of them take less than 10 minutes. The link is in the description below, just a few short days until I'm coming all over the airways again with another dose of your Uncle Phil's Wise Owl wisdom. And until then, take care.