Are You Running Your Salon to Be Popular, or Profitable?

Nobody wants to be unpopular. Everybody wants their days filled with people who want to be around them, both staff and customers. The problem is that that generosity, that being popular, that can feel warm and generous in year one, but by year five, it's costing you control of your business and your profits too. 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. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. How's life treating you? Business good? Storming towards the end of the year? My favourite marketing quarter. What have you got lined up? Are you going to do Black Friday? I think you should. Honestly, it can just be the tonic that you need to get some decent money in at the end of the year and get us off to a flying start in 2027. What we're talking about today, we're talking about being popular. We're talking about popularity versus profit, because sometimes they can be opposite ends of the same scale. Of course, I'm not saying that you have to be unpopular to be profitable, but sometimes we have to do the unpopular thing. And I can see how we got there. At the end of the day, my darling, way back when, when you first started building a column in your business, you did it through being popular. You did it through being a people pleaser, through making sure that you were liked, through building those relationships. Though sometimes quite intimate, personal relationships with our customers. The problem is, as you get older, and as you move on in your career, and as you become a business owner, rather than someone who's just responsible for their column, well, it's a slightly different skill set. And particularly, when you're managing team members as well, people pleasing is not always the best strategy, and it can be an extremely expensive strategy too. And we end up doing things like avoiding conflict, not having those difficult conversations, or maybe even letting some of those precious standards slide just to keep the peace. Never wanting to be that boss who stamped their feet and swore like Gordon Ramsay. All of those things feel reasonable in the moment, but over time, they start to compound, and it starts to cost you money, and it starts to sometimes cost you your sanity as well. As far as team members are concerned, well, if you're a people pleaser, I find that managers tend to be the ones that avoid holding anybody accountable. They're not great at delegation, because they don't want to have to chase people up or bollock them for not doing a great job. And it means that sometimes those teams learn that the standards that are put in place are optional. And I find that people pleasing managers tend to be the ones that struggle to get people behind promotions, struggle to get their team to upsell, struggle to get their team to do anything over and above the bare minimum. I had this in my own salon, not with me. I actually went on a bit of a journey. Shall I share my journey? Do you want that? OK, we'll take a moment. When I first started my hair salon way back in 1903, I honestly was a bit of a dragon. I know it's hard to believe your soft old Uncle Phil, poor puffy old Uncle Phil. Could he possibly be a dragon to work for? I was a monster. And we didn't have a team meeting until somebody was crying, basically. That was when I knew a team meeting was over and I'd scream and shout and stamp my feet and slam a lot of doors. And I was like Gordon Ramsay, swearing at people, shouting people out for not doing a good job. Where did I get that from? Because it's not honestly who I am. I got it from working in a salon who had a boss rather who thought it was their job to scream and shout and swear a lot. And we only had a couple of team meetings and everybody cried in the team meetings. I thought that was how you ran a salon. I'd never come across any other. I'd only worked in one salon, so I'd never seen anything else. I thought that was the norm. And then I realised over time that actually it's a very high pressure, demotivating place to be. It works for a while, but over time people get tired. They don't want to hear you screaming and shouting at them. And also the recruitment market got tougher. I had to look at why people were leaving. And the reason ultimately was me. By contrast, I employed an assistant manager. I employed an assistant manager who was exactly the opposite, who was such a people pleaser. And I didn't find out until after he'd left the business. But actually, he was actively undermining a lot of the stuff that I put in place if he felt it was going to make him unpopular. So when I was delegating stuff like we really need to increase this standard or we need to increase the sales of this item or we need more upsells from these team members in the translation through to the salon floor. He was filtering all of that stuff out and undermining the stuff that I was trying to put in place because he didn't want to annoy people. He didn't want to piss people off. Part of that was my fault because he got a bonus every Christmas on the number of people that was on the payroll. He didn't want people to leave because he had a financial incentive for them not to. Interesting way of rewarding your managers, by the way. But it also meant he wasn't going to take a stand on anything. So we had these two opposite ends of this spectrum, me being the screaming, shouting Gordon Ramsay figure, him being soft as shite and not doing his job at all. And somewhere in the middle was probably where we all should have been over time. He left anyway. I got slightly more effective as a manager and softened my stance a little bit. And we got a lot closer. I wouldn't say I was anywhere near perfect as a manager, but I did a pretty good job. Now, as far as clients go, well, if we keep with that people pleasing thing, clients start to push boundaries. We start to accept their lateness so they learn that it's OK to be 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes late for an appointment. They cancel an appointment last minute once or twice. We say it's OK. Don't worry about it. So they learn that last minute cancellations are part of your culture and that's OK. Maybe we've even got some clients. I don't see this terribly often, but I have seen it where clients feel that your pricing is flexible, that they can haggle over what you charge for different services and they get away with it because they've always got away with it. If you're increasing your prices, but Betty, who's been coming for years, her price hasn't gone up. Well, guess what? Betty's going to feel that she doesn't need to pay your prices that are on the price card. Well, you've trained her that way and you've done it because saying no feels like you're risking the client relationship. What happens over time, though, is the business becomes less profitable, becomes more stressful to manage because the most demanding clients are the ones that are running the salon. They're deciding the way that the salon is actually functioning. So it is a genuine trade off. Sometimes we have to sacrifice a little bit of popularity in order to remain long term viable and profitable to get those boundaries in place, because there will be moments where being liked and being profitable pull in opposite directions and it's uncomfortable. It's not a clean win win. And you need to be OK with that, too. I think part of that is understanding what your boundaries are, understanding where the line is that you won't cross. And I think the ultimate message for you today is that you need clarity. Clarity is the answer to all of this. I'll give you an example about clarity. And actually, it's one that I hadn't recognized for quite a long time. I'm pretty good at marketing, as you would expect from someone who coaches other people on salon marketing. Did a good job. I was getting lots and lots of people in as a response to some of my marketing. But our client retention after first visit was really, really poor. Why was that? Well, it was around clarity. It's because what I was communicating in the marketing, however appealing that was, was not what clients experienced when they came through the door. They were feeling let down or uncomfortable. There was a tension there. Sometimes it's not even that you're not doing the job that you promised. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes you're doing way more than they were expecting. And that's uncomfortable for clients, too. As soon as my marketing became more honest and more cohesive and more in line with what we were actually delivering, that client retention started to increase, even if we were getting a few less new clients. Clarity, clarity, clarity. Clients need to understand what your boundaries are. They need to understand your expectations of the relationship, your expectations of them. They need clarity on what they can expect from you in return. And the same runs for your team members as well. It's all about knowing yourself because your business starts with you. Your business starts with you is the name of a cheat sheet that I've put together for you. No charge for it. Head over to queenofsalons.com. Find the button that says links. Your business starts with you. Drop your email address in and I will ping that straight over to you. It's a few exercises to get you thinking about what's important to you, what your values are, and that will help inform some of those boundaries that we've been talking about today. So what do you think? What have I missed? Anything you want to add to the argument? Anything you want to throw in there? Have I got stuff wrong? Please reach out and let me know. My email address is scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. Also reach out if you'd like to be a guest on a future episode of the podcast. I'd love to be interviewing you about your journey through our magnificent industry. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until next time, take care.