Mastering Your Niche: How Specialization Can Skyrocket Your Salon Business

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, my beautiful friends. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Welcome to the Build Your Salon podcast, and welcome to May, one of my favorite months, because I love the spring. We have a wonderful thing here in the UK, at least, where we have about 48 to 50 weeks of cold and wet, and then two weeks of incredibly stupidly hot that everybody complains about. But in between, every now and again, we get the odd wonderful day in spring, and I love the vibrant colors, those acid greens. I love the fact that I've been walking down to my office this morning, so I record these podcasts at five in the morning. And I love the fact that I'm walking in daylight now, sort of tripping over curb stones and making myself look awful. You've got to be careful, you see, at my age, my dears, that you don't trip over and have a fall. How was April for you? Interesting month for lots of my one-to-one coaching clients, in that it was a bit patchy. We didn't seem to quite be able to shake off the winter and get into the spring, and my theory has always been that people are only really interested in looking good when they can show themselves off a little bit. So it's a struggle to get hair and beauty services as a priority in someone's mind in the winter when everyone's hibernating. It's a lot easier when people are starting to be a bit more social. So here in the UK, at least, it seems to have been a bit of a patchy, uneven story throughout April. But I did encourage lots of my one-to-one clients to make sure they were banking as much as possible in April, because I had a feeling that this month, May, was going to be a bit funny, a bit odd. And that's because we always have, in May, two bank holidays here in the UK. One at the beginning and one at the end. And bank holidays throw everybody out, because the schools are closed and people tend to go away or they tend to go and visit families. So it can be a bit funny, it can be a bit odd in the beauty therapy and hairdressing space. But of course, this year we have an extra bank holiday for His Majesty the King. He's not getting crowned on the Monday, but we get the Monday off work too. I'm assuming that they think everyone is going to be celebrating with such vigour across the coronation weekend that we're all going to have massive hangovers and won't make it to work on Monday. Anyway, we have three bank holidays, which peeves me a little, I have to say.

I think it's a bit odd and a bit disruptive. And I'd rather they'd tagged on an extra day and given us a bank holiday Tuesday, perhaps to one of the long weekends that we already had. Anyway, I don't get to make those choices, I don't get to make those decisions. But what it has meant, because a bank holiday is normally a time when you'd scrape the rest off the barbecue and drag the neighbours round to get drunk in the garden, people do seem to be a little bit more social. And all of a sudden, we are getting a little flurry of bookings in lots and lots of the businesses that I coach. So that's really good news. I thought it was going to go one way or the other. I thought that May was either going to be a tricky month or it was going to be a bit of a triumph. And I think there's going to be some big ticks in boxes as far as targets and goal setting are concerned. So I hope May is treating you well. I hope the spring is your favourite season too, because, oh my goodness, I can feel the energy pulsing through me, setting me up for success. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about today. Today, we are talking about specialisation, niching down, or if you're American, niching down. I love the word niche. I think it sounds terribly suave and sophisticated. But, of course, that means that we don't get to use the lovely little rhyme that there are riches in the niches, which is what the Americans say. So either way, whether you have a niche or a niche, I'm here to convince you that you should be specialising and niching down in your hair or beauty business. And lots of salon owners throw some resistance each time I ask them to specialise. And that's because they think that by asking them to specialise, I'm asking them to turn away existing or potential customers. And I'm not. So I'm not saying that you should be cutting huge chunks away from your price card and only offering certain services, though you could if you want to. And as we go through this episode, you'll see that there are certain business benefits to reducing the number of services that you offer. But what I am talking about is having one area of expertise. So by all means, offer a broad range of hair services or a broad range of beauty therapy services, but have one area where you are the expert in your region. One area where you can really dominate because it does have a number of benefits, firstly to your mindset, but secondly to the bottom line of your business, too. So how does it work? How does specialising actually increase? You'd think that by reducing the amount of things that we're doing, we'd be decreasing the potential for the business.

But actually, the potential upside can be huge. And that works, first of all, by increasing your expertise. So if you specialise in a particular area of our wonderful, beautiful hair and beauty industry, it does allow you to become an expert in that area. By carrying out more of a particular service or dealing with more of a particular problem, you build trust, you build credibility, you increase your knowledge with your clients, and they start to see you as an authority in your field. So, for example, my salon was a hair salon, and I was interfering in that hair salon for about 20 years. And we offered a wide range of hair services, as you would expect. A few extra ones, too. We used to do hair extensions, which not everyone did. I used to love doing hair extensions. Oh, my goodness. The only thing I struggled with was holding conversation with a client for three or four hours at a time. I found that a bit of a drain. But I used to enjoy doing my hair extensions, because it's not very often you get to see a massive difference in length and texture and colour all in one go. I used to love it. Anyway, the other thing that I used to really focus on, and I was a particular expert at, was colour correction. And I used to salivate, it used to get my juices flowing, darlings, if you'd really ballsed your hair up at home. If it had gone green, or you'd really cocked it up, or another salon had let you down and done a horrible job on your hair. And I used to love it when they came in with a hat on. You always knew you had a juicy one if they came in wearing a hat. And I would spend, you know, hours and hours fixing it and getting it to a colour that you were, if not thrilled with, at least you could live with, while we moved you on your journey to a desired result. So much so that I became much more confident. And colour correction is one of those things that hairdressers either love or hate. And a lot of people are very, very nervous about it. So by doing it again and again, I increased my knowledge, built trust, built credibility, and became a bit of an authority, if not in the industry, certainly in our area. So it enabled me to increase my expertise. And also, while we're building our expertise, we're also increasing the understanding of what an ideal customer needs. Because you're specialising in a particular niche or niche, you better understand that ideal customer.

And we can start tailoring those services to exactly what they need. So by focusing on one small area of your price card or one small area of your clientele, it allows us to create a very unique experience for those clients. Helps us to differentiate from others in the market. And this is something we keep coming back to on the Build Your Salon podcast, is that we do need to stand out in a very, very crowded marketplace. The truth is, in most markets, in most regions, there are too many hair and beauty businesses. There's just too many of us around. Which means some of us need to fail, unfortunately. And I've never been here to save an industry. But I am here to make sure that the right salons and the right beauty therapists do well. I want to make sure the right estheticians do well. Because I think there was a time, maybe if we head back to pre-lockdown days, when actually the salons that were failing weren't the ones that didn't clean the windows and didn't increase the training knowledge of their teams and didn't invest in their ongoing education. They were good salons that were going by the wayside. And that's where I've seen my particular expertise come in. And I want to help you do well if you're a good salon. And let's have the ones that have got the poor standards and the dirty windows and don't invest in their training. Let them fail along the way. And my estimate here in the UK... Oh, God, I've gone off on a tangent, darlings. I'll get back on track in a second. Bear with. My estimate in the UK is there's about 20% too many hair and beauty businesses. So by standing out in a marketplace, we're increasing our chances of success. We're making sure that we're one of the ones that succeed in a very crowded marketplace. Because focusing on that specific niche, it helps build a stronger brand. It helps build a stronger brand identity. And strong brand identity, of course, builds a loyal customer base, creates a sense of prestige and exclusivity even around our brand. And also, it helps us attract team members too. Because there will be team members out there who love nothing more than perimenipals or skin to deal with. Or love nothing more than alopecia to try and help a customer with. So building that strong brand, getting known for it in a crowded marketplace, having that sense of prestige increases loyalty, increases our chances of attracting team members too. Are you ready for some predictable in your salon business?

How would you feel if you knew you could look ahead and rely on a certain level of income month after month? Would that stability help you become the confident, inspirational salon owner you were always meant to be? Or maybe you're looking for a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace by offering something truly unique. Salon memberships are what I know best and what I know more about than anyone else. It's my honour and pleasure to bring you my Salon Memberships Master Plan. Step-by-step training to help you get Salon Memberships into your business without overwhelm, without guesswork and without any missing steps. Head over to queenofmemberships.com for all of the details and a very special deal for my podcast listeners too. You'll love the simplicity of Salon Memberships and your clients, maybe even your competitors' clients, will love them too. That website again is queenofmemberships.com. I can't wait to help you on your way to salon business success. So far I've been emphasising the need to specialise in quite a woolly way. I've talked about increasing your expertise and understanding your ideal customer and building a strong brand. And they're quite woolly reasons and quite difficult to measure. So how about putting some more money in your till? How about getting a few people to spend a bit more money with your particular business? Let's talk about the business reasons for specialising. And the first is we've talked about building that strong brand. What we're doing is creating a competitive advantage. So how does that work? Well, by focusing on a particular client need or a particular service or a specific area, not only are we differentiating, but we're becoming the go-to destination for clients. Now that brings a couple of benefits to it. Firstly, we start to get referrals even from your competitors. And this happened to me because I was the king or queen of colour correction. I used to occasionally get customers sent from my competitors. If it was a colour correction that they didn't want to touch, if it was too scary for them, they used to send them to me. And of course, that gave me not only a little boost in my takings in the short term, because colour correction is a lovely service for a high spend, let me tell you. But also it gave me the opportunity to try and impress that customer and see actually whether I'd built enough trust in that colour correction service for them to come back to my salon rather than going back to where they came from. So those referrals sometimes occasionally turned into ongoing customers too.

Now, I didn't try and emphasise that with the customers. I didn't try and poach these customers because I wanted those referrals to keep on coming, of course. But several times I had different salons in the area sending me colour corrections in. The other thing I think it does is it increases your potential pond. I think people will travel further to visit a specialist. And if we think of this in health terms, are you going to go to the local surgeon who does a little bit of everything if there's something wrong, let's say, with your heart? Or are you going to travel a bit further and go and see the person who does that particular heart operation four times every day and does nothing else and is a massive specialist in the field? Would you not drive a few more miles to make sure you are seeing the absolute expert in that area? I think you would. And I think your hair salon and beauty salon clients will too. Because the wonderful thing with our business, it's not like Costa Coffee or Starbucks where we're asking people to come in several times during the week. Usually we're only asking people to come in once a month or once every six weeks or even once every two months. So they will make the extra effort. Once you've got the car out, you might as well drive a bit further to go and see the absolute expert. So we've become the go-to destination for a certain clientele. And that means even if we feel that we've tapped out our local market, we can start to broaden the reach of the business. We can start to market to a slightly bigger area. And I had this with a particular customer of mine who jumped on the phone with me and was a little bit desperate. And she was an esthetician, an aesthetics nurse, in fact. And she carried out most injectables. But specifically, she was trying to build her business for Botox. Now, you will have your personal opinions about Botox. I have my personal opinion about Botox in that I would bathe in a damn bath of the stuff every morning if I was allowed to. I love it. I love that numb feeling. I can never get enough. But the... I know some people disagree. Whatever. Once you get to my age, dear, let's check in with you again and see if your opinions have shifted. But she was trying to set up a Botox business in an area where there were lots of people carrying out Botox services.

And the one thing I've kind of grown at is that most people who are carrying out Botox charge the same. They charge per area and they pretty much charge about the same. Certainly locally to us, they do anyway. So if you're a new customer trying to decide who's going to carry out your Botox service, which can be a nerve-wracking experience, let me tell you. If you're a customer in that situation, how on earth do you tell one practitioner away from another one? How do you tell one esthetician apart from another? It's really, really tough because you're all charging the same to all intents and purposes. It looks like you all do the same job. Now, there are a couple of things that we can do here. The first is we can stand apart because we're the expert. Because we've niched down, we can charge more. And there is a price perception that kicks in here. So if, for example, I see five people carrying out Botox services, all of them charging £200, but one of them charging £300, what do you think my perception of that higher price service is going to be? Am I going to think that you're going to do a better job or a worse job? So there's something we can do by niching down and honing in on our expertise. There is something we can do around increasing our prices. But the other thing we can do is niche down even further. So what I encourage this customer to do is to become the go-to destination for a particular type of problem, for a particular type of client. So she offered most injectables. She wanted to build a Botox business. That's fine. But we built a package where she was the go-to for smokers' lines, for those little fine lines that appear around your lips after you've been dragging on a Benson and Hedges for years and years and years. Actually, lots of people get smokers' lines anyway. So she became the go-to. And that meant she could market a lot further than her local area for her Botox services because people would travel that bit further to have that specific need catered to. No one else was marketing to people that had smokers' lines. Everyone else was looking at anti-wrinkle injections. I also think there's an argument to be made for increasing our profit margins because by specialising in a specific area, we become more efficient by doing more of those services. We get a little bit quicker applying those colours or we get a bit more effective in delivering those services. And that helps to reduce our costs. So even if we're charging the same as everybody else for those services, we do start to increase profits. And I think there's also – this is where the argument for reducing your price card comes in. Now, I know that by listening to this podcast, you are the kind of hairdresser or beauty therapist or esthetician.

You're the kind of person who invests in themselves. They want to do better. They want to see their business grow. That means you're keeping up with CPD, with continual professional development, and you're investing in your own training too. I'll put money on it, in fact. The problem is if you've got a very broad price card with lots and lots of services, that training bill becomes really high every year. Whereas if you've reduced your price card down, we get to keep up with the training. We get to invest maybe even more in particular services, but reducing the cost of training overall. And all of these things are pushing forward to increase profits. Increased profits means that either you get paid better, or it means that we can invest more in marketing those services and growing even further. And finally, specialising in that specific area does help us increase referrals from your satisfied clients. Most clients do not use their power of word of mouth around your business to attract new clients to you by saying, Oh, you should go to this beauty therapist. She's really lovely. They just don't. What they will refer you for, though, is you getting a particular result on a specific need that that customer has. Oh, go to her. She's amazing with thread veins, for example. And that attracting new clients, of course, is the best way to grow your business over time. So I hope that's been useful to you. I hope it's given you a bit of confidence to niche down, specialise a bit more. I hope I've given you the business reasons to dominate a particular part of your price card. And I hope it's also given you the confidence to maybe scrap a couple of those less profitable services. I'm not telling you what to do. And if you're taking advice from a free podcast and acting on it without thinking it through or consulting with anyone else, then you're daft, darling. But I will tell you what's happening in a number of my salons and a couple of my one-to-one clients have over the years got rid of nail services, for example. Gasp! How dare they get rid of nail services? Problem is, unless you are specialising in nails, it's really hard to compete. Very tight profit margins. Very hard to increase your prices to a level which matches the profitability of other services. So by getting rid of them, it's allowed those salon business owners to specifically dominate a different part of their price card.

So they're edging up to, for example, those higher-end facial services or laser hair removal. So by getting rid of those nail services, it's given the business a bit of breathing space but also allowed us to increase profitability as well. So I'm not asking you necessarily to be that brave, though you may want to. And if you have any success with any of my ideas, of course, please reach out. Let me know. And if there's a topic that you'd like me to cover in a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast, then please email me phil at buildyoursalon.com. I love hearing from my salon business friends. And until we speak again in just seven short days when I'm coming in your ears, 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.