I Walked Away For 6 Months. My Salon Survived.

What would happen to your salon business if you had to take six months off? I found out the hard way Build your salon. I am gonna talk today about my journey or a bit of my journey in salon ownership. Way back in 2011, the salon business had been open for 10 years and they've been 10 pretty good years, to be honest with you. We weren't setting the industry ablaze or winning hairdresser of the year or anything fantastic like that. But generally we were profitable. We drove nice cars, we had nice holidays. We were a growing business with a growing team. But 2011 was the year that we adopted my eldest son, who is now a fairly well-rounded individual. He's in his late teens and thinking about moving home. So he got through the worst of it all. And at the time though, he was two and a half years old and he'd been through a lot. He'd been moved around an awful lot too. So even though he'd had very good foster care and foster carers alongside salon owners, by the way, are my favourite people in the whole wide world. He'd had very good foster care, but he'd actually lived in more houses when he was two and a half years old than I'd lived in when I was in my late thirties. And it meant that he was very unsettled. Now I'm a big planner. It may not surprise you, but I love the excuse to go out and buy a new notebook and a new pen and start planning out a project. And in fact, that's what I do in my salon coaching business is I help people plan and help them execute on those plans. And I thought you could plan parenting. And those of you that have got children are already laughing at my naivety, my darlings, because I had no idea at all. Anyway, I had planned to take six weeks off work to help my little dude come and settle in, and then he would go off to nursery, I'd go back to work, albeit for part-time and for six weeks, my customers were okay. They were very excited. I really like it about our business that after a while, your customers, they're not friends, but there's something more than just customers and they start to buy into your life goals, not just your business goals. And my customers were really excited that we were starting a family and thought it was a great thing that we were doing. So I'd arranged for six weeks. They would go and either they'd go on pauses basically. So I'd be really busy before I went off on paternity leave or I'd be really busy when I got back. Or they would go and see other team members. We had a team by then and most of them were fine. They had no problem at all. But it became very clear very quickly that six weeks was not gonna be anywhere near enough time for my little dude to settle down. In fact, social services recommended that I take six months off to help him settle in, which I did. And I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. But the problem was I was one of the biggest money earners in my salon business. I was the salon owner, I was the salon manager. I took care of all the staff and the training and the development and the performance management and all of those good things too. And I had put nothing in place. And those clients that were okay with me taking six weeks off were not quite as good with me taking six months off. So we started, first of all, to lose money. Then we started to lose team members because I wasn't there managing their performance, making sure everybody was happy. And we got into this cycle of losing money month after month. But piled on top of that was this unpredictability, this spiky takings graph that we had in the business. We had huge fluctuations in our takings. So the patterns seemed to be that we would run up a huge overdraft one month and then pay a bit of it off the next month, and then we'd run up another overdraft and then we pay some off. So it made it really hard for me to understand when it was okay to invest in the team, to invest in training, to invest in products and services even to invest in a refurb because our salons work very, very hard. So we had a couple of things heading towards us that made for a perfect storm. And this came to a head. I was about 10 weeks into my paternity leave and I took a phone call at home from my accountant. And I don't know how long you've had your business for, but trust me, when an accountant calls you at home, it ain't good news. It's not gonna be because they suddenly found a pot of money that you've overpaid to HMRC. And I can remember standing in the kitchen taking this call and my little dude who actually even now is addicted to mini cheddars pestering me for a snack. It was that time of the day. And I can remember looking down at this amazing blessing of a being this little man that I was trying to protect from all the chaos in his life. While my accountant told me that we had three months left before we would have to bankrupt the business. That was three months to make the team redundant, three months to sell off whatever fixtures and fittings we could, three months to try and find someone else to take over the lease on the building. But the problem was I was on paternity leave. It's not like I could go and get an income from anywhere else. The salon was our sole source of income. 'Cause my husband still works in the salon to this day. I couldn't go and get another job somewhere else because I couldn't work. So I remember sitting on the floor and just cradling this gorgeous little man. And it's the first time my little man ever saw me cry because I was letting him down. Instead of protecting him from all of that chaos, all of that turmoil, I was opening him up to more uncertainty, more chaos, and I didn't have any options. So I basically pulled myself together, opened up the laptop and started really tearing the business to pieces. For the first time, I looked at every supplier agreement, every invoice we've been paying, all of our staff contracts, everything came under scrutiny because the frustrating thing was at least half the time, we were busy, we should have been making money. And I tore the business to shreds looking for clues as to what was going wrong. And a big part of that recovery was salon memberships. Because I needed the stability, I needed the predictability so that I could start to plan. So we weren't facing these huge peaks and troughs in our salon takings, but they were built from desperation. And the frustrating thing is we had no one to copy. I was the first to do anything like this. Over time. I'd love to say that in that three months we'd managed to turn the whole ship around, but we hadn't. We've managed to get us back to break even in three months though. And that was enough time for us to try and get a little bit more leeway outta the bank and try and get some things in place. And it took about 12 months for us to get to the stage where we were solidly profitable again. But this time we were profitable on a business that I didn't have to work in every day. So salon memberships did a huge favour to me. In fact, in many ways, they saved my business and gave me permission to be the father that I wanted to be. So if you're struggling, if you are wondering whether salon memberships can help you, if you are looking for a bit of certainty, a bit of predictability in your business, this episode is for you. Because what a membership actually does when we take away all the marketing language, a membership does one thing. It converts unpredictable income into not guaranteed, but almost guaranteed takings. So instead of waiting to see who's gonna book in this week and this month, you know that there's a portion of your income that you can rely on. It's gonna land in your account whether you are at full strength or whether you are dealing with life. It's the flaw that your business can build from that most salon businesses don't have. And I think that must be a really scary place to be, especially in this day and age. And I get that it's not something obvious. It does change the client relationship. Suddenly that member isn't a transient customer who can come and go, they've committed to you, they're invested. We're asking for a different model of loyalty and that takes some work. But an awful lot of salon memberships fail, not because the idea is bad. The idea is excellent, it's because the execution isn't there. They make memberships too complicated, too many tiers, too many options, too many T's and C's. Clients won't buy anything they don't understand. If you can't explain your membership in one sentence, it's too complicated. Particularly if you want team members selling memberships for you, or they price it wrong, it's discounted too heavily or they've made it too expensive, which actually makes no financial sense for your customers anymore. A sweet spot is the win-win. It's when it feels like a genuine win for your customers. They're getting genuine value without you resenting those customers coming in without you cannibalising your profits, or they just launch it and leave it without mentioning it to clients consistently without having a method in place that gets memberships in front of the right customers every single time. So what does a good membership look like? It's simple. One or two memberships, clearly tightly defined around one service or a group of services. The thing is, what a lot of people think is that by piling more services into a membership, they're making it more attractive and they're not. And I see this a lot in beauty salons where they're like, I wanna do a facial membership and as a bonus, we're gonna give customers some waxing services or we're gonna give them nails as a bonus because that will make it more attractive. The problem is you've got so many clients that are interested in waxing, so many clients that are interested in facials, but the crossover between the two is smaller. So every time you pile a new service in, you actually make your membership less attractive. Less people are interested or they're not very good at putting the perks in there, the bonuses. And if you don't get the bonuses right, you're gonna end up discounting and that's going to eat into your pricing. It's gonna eat into your profitability really quickly. Or they get the launch wrong. And a really good membership doesn't need a massive launch. It needs excitement at the beginning. But actually when we're going through my training, most of my customers have sold their memberships before they've even launched. They've already got people that are interested. They're clamouring to get those few memberships outta the door. But we've gotta get the launch right, because the problem with memberships is they are by definition always available. That means we need good reasons why your customers need to take a membership today rather than waiting for next month or the month after. Or the final mistake that I see people making, and the best way to think of a membership is that it's perfect for the perfect customer and they're launching memberships for the wrong people. In my mind, there's a continuum of customers. Number one, you've got those customers who aren't particularly loyal. They go to other salons in between. Perhaps they're going to other salons for different services or they're only coming in when you've got a discount or when you're putting later availability on Facebook. They're very transient, there's no loyalty there. And number 10, you've got your diehards. Those who crawl over hot coals to make sure they're not letting you down with their appointment. They're taking the upsells, they're taking the retail. The biggest mistake I see is people trying to create memberships for either the number ones or the number tens. To turn a number one into a loyal customer takes so much effort and so much discounting and your number tens are already profitable. We don't need to turn those into loyal, profitable customers. They already are. In my mind, your salon membership is for your number sevens and your number eights. It's those people we could just do with seeing a little bit more frequently. Those people who don't quite keep the maintenance up on those hair extensions or they're not quite finishing courses to get the best results out of their facials, they're the ones that set the New Year's resolution that they're gonna put themselves first. They're gonna make sure that the salon visit is a priority. And by this time of year, life's got in the way. The kids have got in the way. Good habits have started to go by the wayside. Anytime you feel like you could get a slightly better result, if you could just keep the visits a bit more frequent, perfect customer for your salon memberships. I built my first membership out of desperation. You don't need to, you can start to get memberships in placing your salon business priced properly, structured properly, launched properly in just half a day or so. All of my details are in my salon. Memberships made easy program. All of the details for that are on queen of memberships.com. Everything you need is there. Have you got salon memberships working in your salon business? I wanna be interviewing lots of people. I am your queen of salons, but I'm definitely your queen of memberships. I wanna be interviewing people here on the Build Your Salon podcast, sharing their story of salon memberships. This is our way outta the unpredictability, outta the chaos, and a way to stand out in a very crowded marketplace. And I'd love to be hearing from you. My email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now, Phil, at build your salon.com. If you're on one of the podcast platforms, please give us a five star review, makes all the difference in the world to the magical algorithms. If you are over on YouTube, please hit subscribe. We are tantalisingly close to our first thousand subscribers, and I would love to be adding you to the fold so that you hear about future episodes. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of your uncle feels wild while wise wisdom, and until then take care.