Don't Let Staff Holidays Ruin Your Salon

That two-week holiday your top team member just booked has left a big black hole in your cash flow. But here's the thing. The holiday isn't really the problem. The way your salon makes money is the problem. Shall we fix that? Hello, hello, 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. Let's be honest about that feeling. When your busy team member puts that holiday request in, it's not that you're going to meet that with happiness, is it? And that's such a shame. We should be celebrating our team members having a wonderful, wonderful holiday. But instead we start doing the mental maths. We start looking at the lost revenue, at covering the clients, the fear that that one person's fortnight in the sun could sink your whole month while they're in their speedos drinking cocktails. You're sweating and losing sleep and you stare at the column wondering how on earth you're going to magic up the turnover that your salon business needs. And I get it. It feels stressful, but it's also completely unavoidable. What if the problem isn't your holiday rota at all? What if it's the way your business generates income? Well, today I'm going to give you some sensible holiday management stuff and then we're going to talk about the bigger fix, which is how to get paid even when your team is lying on a beach in the sun. So firstly, the standard advice, you've probably tried it and it's all worth doing. Firstly, you want any annual leave booked well in advance so that you can see the iceberg before the Titanic hits it. And you can cap how many people can be off at once. So what we had in my salon business was people were put into teams buckets, if you like. We had a senior team bucket of managers. We had a stylist team bucket and we had a support team bucket, which was apprentices and receptionists. And we wouldn't grant annual leave to more than one person from each bucket at the same time. So you could have a stylist and a receptionist off at the same time, but you couldn't have two stylists off at the same time. And we brought those things in which made a big difference, but it took a bit of manual processing. But there's some brilliant software out there to help you with that kind of thing.

And I really like using software for this because with some of the apps, when they put the request in, if they're trying to book the same dates as somebody in the same bucket, it's not you as the manager that has to say, no, I'm sorry, you can't have that leave. The app says, I'm sorry, we can't accept that request. And it seems to depersonalize it a little bit. And it also encourages your team members to get their leave request in earlier because they want to beat everybody else in the same bucket. And I really do think we need to start guarding who could be off at the same times and also guard certain times of year. So we could build it into the app that some times of year. So, for example, traditionally for us, it was the bit before the summer holidays and the first couple of weeks of September and Christmas. People couldn't have leave requested in those times at all. These days, have a look at your own business. You can't make those general assumptions about business anymore. There are lots of salons out there encouraging their team to take more leave in December because it's not the busy month that it used to be. In fact, they're busier in October and November and a lot busier in January. So, you know, the rhythm of your own business. And we've talked about seasons in the salon businesses before on the Build Your Salon podcast. So surely we've got to grips with that by now. And we need to get clever with clients as well. And this is about building loyalty in your business, building loyalty to your salon, not just building loyalty to one therapist or stylist or esthetician. Because then if we've let our clients know early when their regular is going to be away, that's all good. You know, it's a sign of a well run salon. But it doesn't fix the actual problem, does it? But if we've got salon loyalty, well, that means that we can move people around a lot more. And actually, maybe that person taking a week or two off isn't going to hit the income quite as hard because some of their customers are going to go to other therapists, other stylists, other estheticians. So we don't want to put a sticking plaster over a great big wound. We want to actually get to grips with how the business makes money. And the real issue is that we're relying on people coming through the door. We're relying on what I call bums on seats income because bums on seats income means you only make money when a client's in the chair or when a client's in the beauty room and someone is carrying out service on them.

As soon as the chair is empty, the income for that slot for that day for that column is zero. And that holiday then leaves a big gaping hole in the diary and it's income that's disappearing and you can't get it back. A training day costs you and a sick day costs you and a fortnight off costs you what feels like a small fortune because cash flow is tied to the physical presence of your people. And that's what needs fixing. The real issue isn't that people need a holiday. The real issue is that we are struggling to get income when people aren't available to carry out service. And so many people price their services assuming that nobody steps away. I see so many price cards when I talk to people about whether these services are profitable. They are if everyone's fully booked all day every day and no one takes any time off. And that's not on. That's not going to work. We need to price that into the equation as well. So we need to look at our pricing and make sure we're allowing for the fact that not everyone's going to be fully booked. We're allowing for the fact there are quieter times of the year and we're allowing for the fact that people are not going to be available to carry out those services all day, every day, 365 days of the year. So that needs pricing in as well. And then ultimately, I think the answer to this and you're not going to be surprised is having some sort of income whether your client is visiting or not. If you had a baseline of revenue that landed in your account regularly, regardless of who's on holiday or how quiet the diary looks. That recurring revenue, of course, in our world means one thing and we're talking about salon memberships. Don't switch off thinking that memberships won't work in your business because they will. It is the single most powerful way to break the direct link between time and income. If you've got 100 clients paying you 50 quid a month for salon memberships, that's five grand landing in your salon before you've sold a single extra service before you've carried out a single blow dry, sold a single bottle of moisturizer before anyone's even walked through the door.

And that could be covering your rent, your rates, your software, your fixed costs right away. Then when your top stylist or your top therapist goes on holiday, does that recurring income stop? No, it keeps coming. And what's more, it encourages your membership clients to go to the couple of weeks before or the couple of weeks after to make sure that those bits of the month are busy. So we're keeping the buffer either side of the holiday really busy as well. So we're not losing that visit. They're just moving it to earlier or later in the month. When you go on holiday as a solo owner, does the income stop? No, it keeps coming. This is your shock absorber. The hole in your revenue stops being such a gaping chasm and it doesn't take it all away, but it becomes a bit of a dip and it's cushioned by a number that isn't tied to the number of appointments in a particular day. Now, I'm not going to turn this into a memberships masterclass. We've got plenty of programs out there, but the principles are really simple. Build a membership based on what your clients already do. Then price it competitively and build a membership habit around it. Price it for profit. We don't want a membership that's losing you money because that's even worse. We've got to make sure it's a profitable membership. Keep it really simple so that your team can explain it in a sentence or two. So we're looking not just for holiday planning. We're looking for a new way of business, of doing business. Holiday planning protects the diary and then I want memberships to help you protect your income. Do the sensible rota stuff, but get that recurring baseline of income in place as well. If you would like to build a membership, that's exactly what my Salon Membership Made Easy program is for. Head over to queenofmemberships.com. I will put that link in the description below. It walks you through designing a membership that your clients love and that's properly profitable. No guesswork, no missing steps. Head over to queenofmemberships.com and that link is in the description. Also available is Salon Memberships Made Easy, the book, which is available on Kindle right now. So head over to Amazon, search for Phil Jackson or Salon Memberships Made Easy and you can pick up your copy and it touches on the main points of getting your Salon Membership in place in just a few hours. We're going to sort your income model and then the next holiday request could actually, we could be pleased for them instead rather than resentful. So what have I missed? What are you up to this summer? How is the summer treating you? Reach out and let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. My email address scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

Also a request, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please could you leave me a review? Spotify are beating you on reviews. So if you're an Apple person, if you're an Apple lover, you need to step up and fight your corner. The Spotify people are wiping the floor with you right now. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. Until then, take care.