I Spent £300 on a Billboard (Big Mistake)

I wasted 300 quid on a billboard once it actually cost me 3000 pounds. Not because the billboard was that expensive, but because of a piece of maths I wasn't doing at the time. And once I've shown it to you, you will never be able to unsee it. All on Build Your Salon. Hello. Hello, hello. My salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons coming all over the internet with another dose of My Wise Owl wisdom. How on earth are you achingly? Well, I hope as we storm into June, I do like it when the first episode of the month lands on the first of the month, but we have a Monday Friday rhythm. So frankly darling, we take our chances. But this month everything is gonna work out wonderfully. And we are at the start of something this month as we're heading into June. That means we're nearly at the end of Q2, nearly halfway through the year. So every Monday I'm doing an episode on what I'm calling the 10 Minute Money Fix. There are five fixes. We've got five Mondays in the month. Each one is a little bit of maths or a little reframe. Don't get scared. I know you don't like maths darlings or a little reframe that puts money back into your pocket. It's all about becoming a more profitable business. So I'm not asking you to overhaul your entire business. I'm not asking you to do any huge sweeping changes, just little money fixes. And this one is designed to change the way that you look at every pound that leaves your bank account. Here's the bit that you don't get told when you are studying to become a hairdresser or a beauty therapist, and that is that the cost of an expense is not what it says on your invoice. The real cost of an expense is what your business had to do to earn, to pay for it. Let me explain. If your salon runs at a 10% profit margin and for lots of salons and beauty rooms and aesthetic clinics, that's about right. It's on the low side, but let's deal with reality rather than pipe dreams. That means for every hundred pounds of revenue coming in, 10 pounds of that is profit. The other 90 pounds goes on your rent, your wages, your products, your software, your stock, your tax, all of those wonderful things that we all resent paying month after month. So when you spend 300 pounds on something, that 300 pounds has to come from somewhere and there's only one place it can come from, and that is your profit, which means your business had to generate 3000 pounds in revenue just to cover it. That's a 300 pound expense, 10% profit margin. So we multiply by 10, 3000 pounds in sales that the business has to do just to pay for that one thing. Just sit with that for a second because lots of you beautiful salon business owners look at a 200 pound invoice and think, well, that's 200 quid. Or you invest in some training, which promises to pay for itself. You pay 500 pounds out for training, generate 500 pounds on a new service and think it's been paid for, or a new product line gets brought in, it's gonna pay for itself in no time. It's just not true. And let me tell you why I know this. It's because a few years ago somebody called me up about advertising on digital billboards that were going up all around the town. They were gonna put them in the shopping centre in the post office so that people would look at them in the queue in some of the shop windows, bright and shiny, thousands of shoppers going past them every day. Apparently all for the princely sum of 300 quid a month, I was sold on the Dream Brand Awareness, your name in lights, people seeing me everywhere. So I said, yes, of course. I said, yes. It felt like proper marketing. And at 300 quid, it didn't feel untenable, it didn't feel unaffordable. It felt like I was being finally a grownup business owner for whatever that means. And I would occasionally pass these screens and see our advert popping up there and get a little buzz to see my salon's name out and about across the town. 300 quid, no brainer except a few weeks in I started to monitor whether we were actually getting clients from these screens. And I didn't just have to ask, I didn't just say, how did you hear about us? What I'd done is set up trackable marketing. So the way back in the 18 hundreds, darling, when Uncle Phil started his salon, everybody used to call up for appointments and I had something called tracking numbers. So they were telephone numbers that all rooted through to reception, but they were all unique. So I knew that if somebody had seen a particular telephone number in an advert and called up, I knew they were calling up because they'd seen that advert. It made the marketing trackable. So I had one for all the flyers that we did. I had one anytime we put an advert in the paper and I had one on these digital billboards and nobody came as a result of those adverts. Nobody used that particular tracking number. They said that they'd researched us. They said they'd been recommended by a friend. They said they'd walk past the salon like the look of the place. Nobody mentioned these boards. And the longer that went on, the more I realised that that feeling of being in serious business was actually me being seriously, seriously stupid. Then I did the maths because 300 pounds at a 10% profit margin, 3000 pounds in revenue, the salon had to do every single month just to cover that one piece of marketing, 3000 pounds and not a single new appointment that I could trace back to it. And that's when it landed for me. It wasn't a 300 pound mistake, it was a 3000 pound hole in my profits. Now of course, this isn't about digital billboards or marketing or deliciously tempting sales reps. This is about every single thing that you are spending your money on. That 200 pound a month software subscription, 2000 pounds worth of work, 350 quid on a training course, that's three and a half grand, 600 pounds worth of products you overorder because the rep gave you an amazing deal. 6,000 pounds of work. Every single pound needs to be multiplied. And this is why I see salon owners working flat out now. I don't like the idea that you are scrimping and saving and cutting costs to save every single penny. I think it's a miserable place to be in business when we're cutting corners and cutting costs again and again and again. But when you start understanding how much work you actually have to do to cover those costs, it's absolutely worth taking your bank statement out every now and again and figuring out where you are leaking money. It's not always because you are undercharging. Well, actually, you are often undercharging, but that's another episode. It's because you're leaking money on these things that quietly cost 10 times what the invoice says. And that's if you're on a 10% profit margin, which is pretty good these days. It's unfortunately way too low for most businesses. But if you're on a 5% profit margin, we're not multiplying by 10 anymore, we're multiplying by 20. So the fix isn't to stop spending. You've gotta spend money to run a business, but the fix is to look at every expense through this lens before you say yes. Is this thing gonna bring back 10 times what it costs? Because that's the bar that's been set by your profit margin. Now, of course, if we can improve your profit margin, brilliant, we get to relax a little bit about these costs, but until then, my darlings, everything gets multiplied by 10. So here's what I want you to do today. Genuinely today, I only want you to take a few minutes. I want you to open last month's bank statement or bring it up on your phone, pick five expenses, multiply each one by 10, and then ask yourself honestly, hand on heart, was it worth it? Some of them will be rent wages, your business coach, obviously, but I'll bet you'll find at least one, probably more where the answer is no. And that's the one I want you to look at cancelling this week. That's the fix. That's the whole thing in less than 10 minutes, and that's the whole point of these money fixes. Each of them take less than 10 minutes. There are five of the money fixes available, and this one is the first. The other four are all a bit like this, a tiny bit of maths, but mainly a reframe that quietly helps you keep money in your business. If you want the full walkthrough, the real cost calculator and all five fixes, then you need to head over to 10 minute money fix.com. I'm gonna put that link in the episode description as well. And the whole thing costs you nine quid, okay? That's all I'm asking for, pays for itself before lunch because there's no point in me asking you to keep more profit in your business and charging a huge amount for it. So it's 10 minute money fix.com, the link's in the show notes. And what I've done is put those fixes in as PDFs that you can download. They're also available as video episodes, or if you wanna take me for a walk with the dog or listen to me in the car, I've made them available as audio as well. So I've made it as accessible as properly as possible. My Darlings Friday's episode, we're gonna change things up a little bit. I'm talking about what you do when you get a one star review and want to burn your salon down and hit somebody. We've all been there. That's just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet. And until then, take care.