Salon Loyalty That Works (Phil Ingram)

Loyalty schemes in salons have a bit of a reputation and not all of it is undeserved. There's the cheap bit of card that gets lost in the bottom of a handbag, the free service that costs you more than it brings in, and the nagging worry that you're just training people to pay a bit less. So I wanted a proper conversation about what loyalty actually means. Today I'm interviewing someone who has made loyalty their business. Phil Ingram is the founder of Mead, a loyalty platform that helps businesses ditch the printed stamp card and get their logo on their customers' phones without being tied to an expensive booking system. Let's get him on the show, shall we? Phil, welcome to the Build Your Salon podcast. Hi Phil, great to be here. We have one Phil to another. We have Queen of Memberships, Queen of Salons meets King of Loyalty. This is going to be great. So to start with, let's get an introduction for people who haven't come across you, haven't come across what you're doing. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey? Okay, so hi everyone. My name is Phil. I'm the founder of a company called Mead, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a second. Although I actually am doing this podcast from my home in Hong Kong, originally from the UK, moved to Hong Kong in my mid 20s. I'm not going to say how long ago that was, but it was the 90s and it was still a British possession then. Slight sojourn for two and a half years in New York for the dotcom boom. And then the dot bust where I came back to Hong Kong. I've been here ever since. COVID changed directions in COVID. I used to be in the travel industry and then obviously COVID came along and funnily enough, there wasn't a travel industry anymore. So I spent a little bit of time in Web3, which we won't talk about, but eventually kept asking myself every time I walk into a shop, why do I have to keep joining these damn things? And set out to work out, is it possible that a consumer need not spend 15 minutes trying to join the loyalty program, do all the work, and then remember all those passwords, all those barely used apps that are used twice a year. Is there a better way to do it? And at the risk of a shameless plug, that's what I think we've achieved with Mead. So obviously, Mead is a platform specifically for indie retailers, and that covers many sectors, including the salon, health and beauty from nails to hair to tanning to tattoos. We have them all. And yeah, I think the most fun thing about Mead is working with independent retailers. I have conversations with operators all over the world today. I've talked to people as far away as Colombia, the UK and the Philippines. And so, yeah, that's what I'm here, hopefully to help some insight with what we've learned talking with people in, I think, about 90 countries so far. Wow. And I love interview. I mean, I love talking to people who are specifically from the salon industry. But when someone's got a little bit of cross industry experience, I think that's really interesting to me. And to have someone who's got international experience and looking at other industries as well when it comes to loyalty, I think this is going to be a good one. So I guess, first of all, I want to talk a little bit about that kind of why loyalty is so important these days and why building and deepening that relationship is important to businesses. And it sounds like quite a glib kind of low level question. But actually, I think it touches on a few very fundamental bits of economics, apart from anything. So what's your take? Why is loyalty so important? Well, I think if we sum it up, I call this the loyalty equation and your customer lifetime value, the amount of money you'll make from a customer. It should be hopefully not good if it's not a multiple of what it costs you to acquire that customer. And all loyalty is, is a way of getting a little bit more customer lifetime value for that given cost of acquisition. So that is both glib and profound at the same time, because everybody knows and this is not industry specific. Everybody knows acquiring the customer is when you put all the front and hidden costs of everything you do together is an expensive process. Keeping the customer can be a challenge there. There's, you know, both internal reasons, external reasons, competition. We'll touch on some of those, I'm sure. But at the end of the day, if you can earn a little bit more money from the customers that you have, and I think you'll probably want to talk about this because loyalty isn't just about giving discounts. It's about creating, offering greater value. But at the end of the day, that's all it is. It is simplest thing. How do I earn a little bit more money for the customer? I put X amount of effort into earning. And then from there, you can sort of go down the rabbit hole. Some things are industry specific. Some things are not. You know, obviously some industries you can't increase volume, for example. So now this is a silly thing for me to say as I don't have any, but hair grows at a certain rate. It's not very, for a hairdresser, getting someone to come in 15 times a year instead of 12 times a year is not really. See, obviously there are some specific things, but restaurants, for example, if you can get someone to eat there 13 times a year instead of 12, that's a nice injection at the top right there on gross profit. So I think it's really important. You put a lot of effort into acquiring customers and that includes everything. The product that you have, the experience your customers have, your branding, the marketing, how you outreach, how you find people, maybe, you know, getting recommendations from current customers who refer other people in. But once they're in the door, then you have to think, how do I make sure I keep them? And I don't think you can rely on the service in the moment in that half hour, one hour, two hours, whatever it is. I don't think you can just rely on that alone. I think there has to be a deeper layer. You could partly call it belonging or membership or community depends on, you know, how you come at this. And also the feeling that you're valued as a customer rather than you just take the money and get the whatever. And that, you know, that value maybe comes back in some ways. You know, it's like these guys really look after me and they appreciate and, you know, say, yeah, I'm going to buy the extra products off the shelf, you know, all those extra margin things. Maybe I'll buy those because, you know, these I belong here. This is this is my place, you know, in the coffee shop business, for example, they talk about the third place work home. And you could make that argument about the salon industry, too. It has elements of the third place to it, you know. So I think that's it. It's about you've got a customer. You do all the things well because loyalty without a good product is pointless. But then what else can you do? What can you know about your customer? How can you adapt to what you learn about your customer? How can you just get that a little bit more? Maybe whether it be turning a predictable frequency of visits into things like upsells, higher quality add ons, whatever. It's just what can I do? And so loyalty really is how if you break even with acquisition, loyalty is how you make a profit. Because you're able to push higher margins for the customer you already pay to acquire. Sorry, I tried to combine several ideas into one there. OK, we're going to unpack some stuff. So I think basically the fundamental point I want to come back to in just a second is that there's a difference between a reward that's building that relationship and just a discount that's eroding profit margins. But before that, I kind of want to put my tuppence worth in as far as what's going on in our industry specifically. And basically what we've got is a situation where and like you've said, it's not because salons are doing a shitty job that you wouldn't be in business because people talk. People don't come back. There's plenty of other alternative places where people can get hair and beauty and aesthetic services from. So it's not because you're doing a bad job. The problem that we have, particularly here in the UK, is there are too many salons and I'm going to do an episode on this later in the month. There's too many salons for everyone to be busy in the way that we are used to. There's no way to run every single salon 85 to 90 percent utilization anymore. It's just not physically possible. Supply has grown much, much quicker than demand. So what that means is when we're marketing, we've got to be pretty fierce because the only place you're going to get customers from is other salons. Nobody's sat at home going, oh, I've got hairy legs. I wish there was a solution to my hairy legs. That doesn't happen. They're already going somewhere else. They've already got a relationship somewhere else. So we've got to work really hard in our marketing to get them in the business. That's one side of it. The other side is we've got to make sure that we're retaining the customers we've got. We've got to make sure that they're coming back. And we've already said doing a good job isn't enough. And you highlighted some really lovely points there. And I love that sense of affiliation, that sense of membership, ownership. That experience is something that we're trying to build really hard into lots of salons so that the right ones survive. I want the ones that are investing in training and have high standards and do a great job to survive, not the ones who just happen to be better at Instagram. So when it comes to getting people to come back, what's the how much can a loyalty scheme really move that? Loyalty is loyalty is a tool. So like all tools, it depends on how you use it and how skilled you become with it. You know, it can't do it for you. I always like in the it's a crass analogy, but I always use the analogy of buying a shovel. Great. You've got a fantastic shovel. But until you pick it up and use it, you're not going to get a hold in the ground. And the same with loyalty. You have a tool. You have the ability to connect with people. We can talk about the different ways you can do that, even if you're using a printed stamp card, you know, putting your logo into their physical wallet. You know, the combination of one, just a simple fact that that you have that belonging. Obviously, with digital loyalty, we can do really cool stuff. We can get your logo, anybody's logo right next to their credit cards in their Apple, Google wallet. We can do things such as, for example, with phones know where they are. And you we can do it and me does this that if you get within a couple of hundred meters of a place where you're a member, the pass pops onto the lock screen. So you can't avoid. So, you know, it's like, oh, you know, and maybe even that might shake someone to go. I haven't made my appointment for next month yet. Although there's a separate subject about making sure people make appointments as they walk out the door. Something I've talked with a lot of operators about, you know, using rewards as a journey. Even Mead, which focuses on a digital stamp card, what I call low resolution points. But, you know, creating a journey. It's not about, you know, get your nails done ten times that nine times the tenth time is on us. It's about, you know, it's about upsells, services, specials, you know, products. You can do discounts on product, anything outside or nails. Obviously, it's a little different to hair because you might have them done more often. People have their nails done for a particular event, for example. And so you can put a little bit of frequency jump in there. But really, yes, I think, first of all, make them a member of something. Not, you know, you can say a member of my loyalty program or join my loyalty program. But I always think you should give these things a good name. Something relates to your brand, but not necessarily the same. Be part of this club. Have the ability to push, you know, push with passes. You can do push notifications so you can reach out and touch. You know, emails get opened. Ten percent of emails get opened and two percent get replied to. But 40 percent of push notifications get tapped on. So, you know, much more effective. So I think it's just about extending that reach. You want to find ways in which you can touch the clients when they're not in the shop. As well as, giving value, you know, that coming back again and again. I think actually not getting discounts actually helps sell it. It's getting more value because a lot of these places will sell product or they have additional services or things that you'll be able to do soon. Or Mead is to refer is to create collectives and refer business between yourselves. I think just trying to add value at the end of the day, it's one of the things that affects whether a customer will come back into a shop is do they perceive value? You know, and so I think you just want to add value and you don't have to discount to do that. But if it's a frequency thing like coffee or sometimes nails, then a lot of nail salons on Mead actually do that, you know, do it nine times, ten times the next times on us. But they're trying to get for frequency, particularly people who might go to lots of events with things like hair or even tanning, which we have a lot of on Mead. Those tend to be fairly frequent. So they often focus on things like product or upsells or additional this or add package add ons or whatever. So there's lots of different ways. But the end of the day, first of all, make someone a member and to offer value for being loyal. But also make them feel valued. Let's let's unpack that a little bit more specifically then. So you've highlighted a couple of different points as far as use cases are concerned. So let's imagine we're running a hair salon because that's the world that I came from. And my beauty listeners are very, very clever. They can translate into their own industry. So what you're suggesting then is that we don't necessarily have people collecting stamps for our core services. So the number of haircuts they're having or colour services they're having. Instead, they'd be collecting stamps for purchasing retail products or taking add ons to those services. Is that what you're saying? Yes. OK. So, I mean, obviously, there's many. Obviously, hair is, as you can see, I'm one of the world's leading experts in this particular subject. I do know the rate at which my goatee grows. So I know it grows at a very fixed rate. So I assume there's an analogy there somewhere. But, yeah, I mean, obviously, that would be that's economically down and damaging. I think, you know, hair is something that has my wife has done. And it's as periodical as the phases of the moon. It is, you know, when she goes. So there's no value in trying to say, hey, if you come 10 times, I'll give you 11 times free. All you've done is cut your revenue by 10 percent. That has no point. But obviously, and I want to assume, you know, maybe I mean, if you if you have product, if you have additional services, for example, you know, not every maybe maybe you can throw in additional services like coloring or extra things. Or maybe I have I know of one and they cohabit with a nail artist and they've basically done a sort of cross thing and use the nail artist as a sort of extra thing to give a giveaway as a gift. And they've priced that in. They work the account for that behind the scenes to say, hey, you know, come 10 times and you get a free get your nails done free for an event or something. So it's how do you add what you don't want to do is take away. If you're selling frequency, then the freebie is a good thing. But if you're trying, if you're if you're selling consistency, then it has to be how do I add value? And one assumes most places have more than that core revenue stream. And obviously hair is a sophisticated set of services. The menus can be quite extensive. So how do I utilize allegedly how do I utilize that? You know, the menu, how do I push? I've got things that or maybe it is something I'm doing new. I bought a new product, a new salon product into thing. How do I use my loyalty to push that and have people experience it? Or am I working with other businesses providing a border? Can we cross sell each other in rewards? So we're helping promote bring new customers to each other. I think I'm trying to while you've been talking, I'm sort of pinging off little specific examples. And I think something that is very underused in hair salons in particular is conditioning treatments. Conditioning treatments cost pence to apply. Usually you'd be charging between 20 and 40, sometimes more per application. So the profit margin on condition treatments is massive, but it's an optional add on. It's not something that people would necessarily think of every time. But if they were collecting a stamp each time they had the add on service, there's plenty of extra profit margin to do something really quite tasty after they've had five or 10 of those. Or the other thing I'm thinking of is retail. And we have a big problem across hair and beauty where people are coming in the first time a product is recommended to them. And then they're not going back to the salon for a repeat purchase because it's just easier to get it online. Even if it's, you know, a little bit more the fact that it's delivered and all the rest of it. But if we had, you know, if people were collecting stamps in the salon for the retail products that they're buying, then they'd have an incentive to have that slight bit of resistance, a slight bit of friction, if you like, to buying the salon product rather than getting it online. So I think there's a couple of concrete examples there that I personally would be looking at straight away. That ticks every box, a reward that is financially very, very sensible, but has tremendous value to the customer. Yeah, that's a better example than I had. So yes, perfect. The next thing I want to touch on you and you touched on it very briefly, they're talking about kind of cross pollination between operators and salons now have become quite complicated spaces. That traditional employment model that I grew up in where you were an apprentice and then you were an employed stylist and one day you might be assistant manager is not the majority of the industry anymore. We've got salon spaces now where lots of people are renting out rooms to beauty therapists and aesthetic practitioners. Lots of hair salons now are renting chairs to people, sometimes mixed in with an employed model. Sometimes that's their entire model now is to rent chairs. So where does loyalty start or particularly the type of loyalty that we're describing? Where does that fit in that quite complicated picture? Normally, the starting point for how loyalty ties in with a business would be to say that loyalty sits side by side with where the P&L, the profit and loss of the business actually sits, because that's what it directly hits. Loyalty enables you having already accommodated many of the costs. Basically, it becomes a gross profit addition on the bottom line. There are more complex structures now, as you say, where what used to be employees are now basically operators on their own and they're renting space in a sort of larger collective. It depends on the, it is perfectly possible that a space could operate a loyalty program and all the independent operators come in under that. A tool like Mead use locations to actually break up, you know, who bought someone into the collective, etc. From the collective owners, whoever actually owns that top level, that has the benefit of tying the consumer into the, into the top brand, rather than the individual. So it has pluses and minuses for individual operators, you know, but an individual operator could operate their own program too, if they wish. So I think you can see both options. We have many, I have many independent nail artists. I have them in the UK. I have them in the US and my personal favorite is Angie, Angie's nails in Mozambique. And she's a solo nail artist. She uses Mead. She's lovely. Um, but you know, and it's just a really simple tool that the customers feel rewarded. It's really, really cool. My nail art. I got it. I got a digital stamp card for my nail artist. Well, that's unusual. Um, so I think you can look at this multiple ways. A business, a business that rents out rooms could establish a global loyalty program that operates across all those chairs. And that would be of great value to the customers who may use more than one service in that space. Because obviously hair, beauty, aesthetics covers a wide variety of stuff. There's enough to keep several businesses going there. Um, and it would then depend on how they structured it into the agreement they had with, with the operator. Um, you know, um, because, you know, it has the benefit if, for example, the individual actually I may ask for someone, an individual operator who's operating, who's renting a room. What's the proper term for them? I've just realized I don't know the answer to that question. Well, it's really complicated. We call them room renters. So are the room renters or chair renters. Sometimes they're space renters, but usually it's room renters. Um, okay. Thank you. I come out learning something new. That always makes me happy. So the, you know, I think if you build into the agreement, if someone's away, people do have lives, they go on holiday, et cetera. Then, then obviously someone's able to, you know, you can refer to other people and they're able to keep the loyalty intact. So it depends on the agreement that the room renters have with the space owners, um, and or operators. Um, so you can have either way. People could have their own stamp card because it takes five minutes to set one up. Or you could have a global program and each of the room renters effectively is their own location. So, you know, when someone joined the master program through which renter and you know where they earned their stamps in the program. You know, where they redeemed their rewards in the program. But you would have to have some form of accounting on the back end where rewards are earned to benefit of one person's pocket and redeemed to the detriment of another's. So, um, these are things Mead eventually wants to look into doing because we're trying to build networks of businesses like the bookshop next to the coffee shop. It's just the same as the beautician next to the hairstylist. Um, and, uh, so, yeah, we're looking at tackling that problem in the future, but for now, yes, I mean, you could do it. Someone could set up a program right now, set up each, either each room or each room renter as a location. So, you know, who brought people in, et cetera. Um, or you could allow room renters to basically run their own. Well, you can't really stop them. It's their right to run their own program and live and die by their own efforts. You could do both. I think there's, uh, yeah, I'm gonna pad that out with a little bit of industry specific. So I think the. Basically what we would need to establish really very carefully is first of all, this needs to be optional. You can't impose it on a chair renter or a room renter. It'd be something they either opt into or opt out of. Um, now something we spoke about before we came on air, which I think is actually a really strong benefit of the way we're looking at this though, is it's completely agnostic from, um, from salon software. So you could have chair renters or room renters. One of them operating. Namely one of them operating Freshe and the salon uses Forest because this sits away from salon booking software. They could still enjoy the benefits of a shared loyalty program for the salon. Um, which I think is a really, really strong selling points. Now the bit that you've alluded to, and I'm going to really double down on that is we need to be really careful about how redemption happens because what we don't want is a situation where Betty's client has accumulated nine stamps with Betty. But actually the 10th stamp comes from Joe who's working over here and Joe ends up on the redemption end of it because that's not fair. So you're going to have to think about how a loyalty program is redeemed and who's going to get what out of that. Um, just to make sure that we've got all the T's crossed and the eyes dotted. Um, but I think there's some mileage in that. And I think the other thing that we've hinted at, and I'm going to bring straight into the room. Now is we've got the opportunity to build brand loyalty to the salon. Um, and that's really important. So do you want to, do you want to talk a little bit to that? Yeah, it's something, uh, it's something I know you've talked about in previous podcasts and it's something we discovered, uh, along the way. Um, is that, um, quite often with very personally delivered services, um, like this, uh, that sometimes people become very loyal to the person and not necessarily to, to the business. I go, I don't go to this shop. I go to see Becky. Um, and one of the dangers for owner operators is that when staff go, customers can go. Um, one of the things about using Mead, if you, you know, uh, someone who operates their own salon has staff, et cetera, is the if you hear any noise, my dog just walks into the room. Um, if, if, um, if the loyalty is to the salon, the logo is at the salon. If on Mead, do you create a loyalty card, a stamp card. When anyone joins the first place that ends up is next is your logo underneath their Visa and MasterCards in their Apple or Google wallet. And it remains as such. And so, um, whether Becky sees them or David or Joanna, um, the business is the one getting, giving the stamps. The business is the one generating redemption, redeemables and the business is one getting the redemption. And I think that gives a re it gives a, or if it's not Mead's first purpose, but it turns out that actually there's a particular problem in this industry. Um, with that and Mead, um, I wouldn't say it solves it, but it certainly helps move the goalposts a little bit in the favour of the salon, the at the actual P&L owner. Um, uh, who knows their ability to continue is what enables them to pay the salaries down the line for everybody. So yes, that, that is one thing, you know, we want to do. We want to one, kill the printed stamp card because it's time they went, it's 2026. And two, we want to give anybody, even an Indian nail artist in Mozambique, the ability to spend five minutes. And the next thing you know, their customers are carrying her logo next to their credit cards in their phone. I think that's a really cool thing to be able to do. And from there, you can build so much of names right in front of you. You see it every time you pay for something, you see it pop up on your screen every time you get on the same high street as this. I think that's a really powerful tool. And these are not tools that even the booking systems, which get very expensive. Once you start adding all the add ons to them. Um, they don't really offer that. They're basically glorified CRMs. What you don't want your customer's name in your database. You want your brand in their phone. And that's what Mead trying to do. And I think one of the things as a consequence of doing that is it does actually help tackle the problem you talk about of maintaining loyalty with the brand rather than maintaining loyalty with the individual in the salon. I think to just illustrate and clarify, then what we're saying is that this is a tool which can help a little bit in those situations where a team member leaves and somebody feels that they have some brand loyalty. You've got at least a bigger chance of keeping them in the business so they can build a relationship with someone else. It's not going to save you if you're doing a shitty job. Um, and that's been my argument with it as I think people have been sold loyalty programs in the past in the customer is going to stay slavishly loyal no matter what. And I don't think if you do a terrible job with someone's facial, they're not going to come back whether they've got nine out of 10 stamps or not. It's just not going to save a customer who's had a terrible experience with you. You have to find a different avenue to retain the customer in the business. But if we built some brand loyalty, there is at least a slightly bigger chance of you being able to retain someone in the business and give them an opportunity to build another relationship. And what I particularly like about the way that you put Mead together is these big expensive salon software system and salon software companies. You are on my radar, my darlings. I am coming for you this year because it's got ridiculously expensive and overly complicated. And I know why it's because they've tried to please that solo operator in Mozambique and also someone who's got 15 salons over here through, you know, just economics. They've ended up trying to please so many different people that they're just annoying everybody now. But some of these salon software companies will build an app for you, which a customer installs on their phone. People don't want that, do they? No, we know for a fact through our research that possibly that I put it this way. It's come to the time now when you walk into a shop, not your favorite airline, your hotel, but any sort of high street shop, not just salons. And they gleefully tell you, hey, we've got a loyalty program. Some reason it feels like you've just been told your flight's been cancelled at check in. It's like, do I have to? And that's where it's gone wrong. You know, to circle back to the point you just made. I'll put it maybe a little bluntly. There's that old phrase, you can't put lipstick on a pig. And, you know, loyalty is like alcohol. It just magnifies whatever's actually there under the surface. If you're in a bad mood, the alcohol just makes it worse. If you're in a fantastic mood, the alcohol makes it awesome. And loyalty is like that with your service. Whatever you do, there's no point. There's nothing to be there's nothing to be loyal to you. You can't one time. Two times zero is still zero. I think the other thing I'm going to throw into the mix and because we're shooting down salon software systems. Of course, there's no reason a salon software system should even exist alongside Mead, is there? Because if I'm thinking more and they're not necessarily listening to my podcast because they're not really my tribe. But, for example, a walk in barbershop, a lot of times they don't even take a name, let alone an email address that there's no salon booking system as such. There's just a till where they take payment or maybe a card machine. But we could be starting to build some brand loyalty and actually have these stamps accumulating even if they had no salon software system, couldn't we? Well, yes, you don't need one. I mean, with Mead, as long as you've got a phone, you can manage your program and you can stand people. So it's ridiculously quick and all your customers are walking in with that and they tap that pass, which has come forward in the lock screen because the address is the Apple and Google do this. You tap it. There's a QR code. You scan it. You stamp them. It's over in four seconds. So, no, you don't need to be connected. I think, obviously, any major network of things, booking software, POS systems are the same. They try and add the bolt ons because they're trying to lock you into their system. Fine. I mean, at the end of the day, if the system's working for you, we're not trying to say don't use it. But one of the things I've discovered is that sometimes there is reason to change. You may change your booking system. You change needs. You may change your POS and booking systems and payments, payment methods and POS. These are touch moments. Touch and you leave. You know, you pay done and leave. There's no law. There's no connection in that. It's a physical transaction, a booking system. You make the booking and it's done. Loyalty is about that constant ether of connection between you and your customers. I'm a great believer. And this is what I'm trying to do. Then instead of loyalty attaching the payments or bookings, they should attach to loyalty because loyalty is where the permanent connection between with the customer lives. So that's that's that's what we say to people. We built Mead not to integrate so that you could didn't need help. You could do it yourself in about five minutes. I mean, if you if you can type an email, then you can set up Mead. And it doesn't connect to anything because it shouldn't connect to anything. It just means that you it's not for big hotels. It's for indie operators or independently owned salons, restaurants, coffee shops, whatever just works off the shelf. You can have your first members in with in five minutes. And by not integrating with things, you actually just think make things a lot simpler. So no matter what happens with your booking system, it happens to POS. The same logo is sitting next to your customers credit cards on their phones and until the end of time or until they change phones and forget to add the passes back. But these things happen. We have ways of dealing with that. So, yeah, I don't believe in locking people in. I'm building an open system. I don't even make people pay until they get 50 members. I don't care whether it takes a day or it takes three months because once you get 50 members, they're using it and upgrading to the pro tier is a no brainer because some naive reason I'm trying. I think it's okay to be the good guy. I think a lot of industries, particularly salons, all the SaaS software as a service things they get, they all seem to be finding ways of pulling a little extra money here, a little extra money there. So I went the opposite way. I just made something that it has a price. The price doesn't change. The only unit of prices locations. If you're a bigger business of the four locations, you pay more than some with one location. Apart from that same product and it doesn't require you to connect anything. But later, I would like to add, you know, things like payments in there or POS. But I do it on the terms that they plug into the loyalty, not the loyalty plugs into the thingy touching leaf. Yeah, that's exactly how I'm tackling memberships. And my own salon software will be out sometime, hopefully by the end of the year. The money comes because of the relationship. The relationship doesn't become because of the money. Yeah. But I think if you've got something at the core of a bigger offering, I think that it's like a stick of rock. It goes all the way through. So whatever I touch will always have memberships done beautifully. Oh, I'm using the stick of rock analogy. I'm so stealing that. Of course, it only really works in the UK. It does. It does. But that's fine. Brilliant. That's fine. OK, I'm going to ask just a couple of questions to wrap up this episode. The first and the most obvious, of course, is if people are interested in your journey, if they want to keep in touch with you and particularly if they want more about Mead, what is the best way for them to keep in touch? OK, well, you can find our website at meadloyalty.com. You can find Mead on Instagram, which is where we find the most common ground at meadloyalty, M-E-D for David. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for my name. I'm the guy in the orange T-shirt and his profile picture. And yeah, I love hearing from people. I love talking to operators I do all over the world. Do not feel shy at all. If you have any questions and you don't need permission if you go to the website and click that sign up for free. Won't ask you for a credit card. Nothing. Please try it out. And then if you have any questions, you can tag us on meadloyalty on Instagram or me personally at the Phil Ingram on Instagram. And I devote at least an hour, half a day to respond to all the social media inquiries. So I usually respond to everything within a day. Wonderful. Wonderful. And I'm also thrilled to welcome Mead Loyalty as a brand new sponsor of the Build Your Salon podcast. So the link again is meadloyalty.com. I'm going to put all of those links in the show notes for this episode, too. And Phil has very kindly also offered. So he's already said you can have up to 50 members signed up on Mead Loyalty without spending a single penny. If you do decide to go pro, there's a discount available to you with a discount code BUILD25. And I'm going to put that in the show notes for you as well. And you can get 25% off your fees for life. So just to wrap up, we always ask our guests the same three questions at the end of a Build Your Salon podcast episode. And I've given you a bit of prior warning because I've noticed. Oh, you gave it away. Yeah. I did. I was going to impress everybody. No, I used to drop these on people and it felt terribly unfair. And I've had, yeah, I've now noticed that actually I don't want to bring anxiety to people. I want them to enjoy their visits at the Build Your Salon podcast. So the first question, as always, is what's the best piece of advice that you've ever been given? Strictly in the sort of entrepreneur category, which I think is most appropriate here. There's never the right time to start your business. So just start it. I am. Yeah, there's a lot of things, actually. I think there's never the right time. So you might as well just get on with it. The other one that springs to mind while you're talking actually is price increases. There's never a popular time to put your prices up. So just crack on with it. Let's get on with it. The market speaks. And then you've had a very, very varied journey to where you're at the moment. If you were going to leave a piece of advice behind for someone following in your footsteps, what would that piece of advice be? When I read that question in the advanced warning that you've now told everybody that I got, the very first thing that I thought of, and actually, I think this is a really good piece of advice. Again, it's in the entrepreneurial vein. The most important knowledge you can have is about your customers. Learn everything you can about your customers, both at the micro level and at the macro level. You can never know too much. You can never understand too much about what they need, what they like, what motivates them, why they do things. I think at the end of the day, you only have a business if you have customers. You only have money in the bank if you have customers that are willing to part with that money. And I think the key to that is understanding your customers in the context that makes sense for the business you're doing. So that's what I would tell anyone walking behind me looking to do something is never give up, always devote time to. Obviously, if you're doing someone's hair, you're talking to them by default. So, but, you know, but there's talking to them and there's learning and there's learning from them and learning about them. And I think that's above all else, talk to your customers and learn. I am. We're in such an amazing position and there are industries I'm sure Phil himself would kill to have the amount of customer facing time that we get in the salon industry. It's we're so lucky and so blessed to be able to literally have someone that we can talk to actually in the chair paying to be there so that we can deepen our knowledge and understanding. So prioritize some of those conversations over and above talking about what you saw on TV last night. And then finally, I know you've got cross industry experience, but what is the best thing about working with the salon industry? This is I'm going to actually go a little personal on this one. I think I don't know whether I said this to you before we started or at the beginning, but I grew up as a kid. I was a single child of a single parent. My mother worked with a hand. She was a sole trader. And when I when I came up the idea with Mead and that's a whole podcast episode in itself, how we finally got to what we're trying to do with Mead. I made the decision both for business reasons that I wanted to focus on indie retail rather than enterprise or box retail one because there was more blue ocean there because killing the printed stamp card is a very worthwhile exploit. But also because I there's no joy in selling to enterprise, but there is joy in helping independents do something well and having that connection with them. And I'm very privileged now to have a stream of conversations on Instagram, particularly occasionally WhatsApp that I struggle to keep up with. But I do where I've learned so much and there's a lot of joy in and actually the very broad salon. And I'm going to say I've you know, from I've got my I started off with tanning salons, but now I have hair, I have nails. I've got some tattoo artists. I have some barbers, too. They're a bit more rough. But anyway, the it's just a joy. There's just a lot of I've developed really, really good relations with them that they love to chat. I think they get something out of the fact that the guy behind the company that they just found online by themselves. You know, they're talking to him. He listens and he actually does things occasionally on the platform. So I love that connection. So it's particularly stood out with. I mean, I talk to people across many, many industries, but, you know, obviously I'm not from that world at all. But it is particularly so that this, yeah, I'm repeating myself. It's fun. There are a lot of fun to deal with. I've developed some really good relationships and actually, you know, I have a bunch across the UK. My wife and I will be back in the UK later in the year and we're going to tour around. I've got one salon up in Hull that I've basically who's on their way to a thousand members. And I said, you get a thousand members. I'm walking through the door with a magnum of champagne. So, you know, it's just fun. You don't have fun like that conversations like that selling crap to enterprises. So that's what I really like working with the salon people, because I've been able to help many. I've had them tell me that this has helped that they love the product. They love the credit. The customers love the product, which which means the world to me. And yeah, sorry. It's actually something about which I have a slight there's an emotional quotient to my answer. So see, that's why I love the salon industry or have become have come to love because of my experience over the past couple of years. There's if you go back through previous guest episodes, that last question is always an emotional answer. There's always an emotional connection with salons. It's a very, very special industry, and I'm proud to be part of it myself. So this is where we say goodbye, Phil. Thank you so much for your time today. I'd love to get you back on the Build Your Salon podcast again. I think there's a lot more we could be talking about away from loyalty, but around your journey into how you set up Mead and why you set it up the way you have to. So perhaps we can speak again. I'd love to. I've had a great time. I hope I didn't waffle too much. Not at all. There's some real gold in there for people. So there we have it. My conversation with Phil Ingram, CEO of Mead Loyalty. What do you think? What have I missed? What's happening in your business? What are you doing to make sure your customers are coming back to you time and time again beyond just doing the wonderful job that we know you all do? If you'd like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast, my email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear some of your journey, some of your success stories, your journey into business ownership and what the salon industry means to you. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the Internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until then, take care.