Salon owners: Your questions answered

How are things with you? How's business? What is standing in the way of your incredible success? Let's find out in my November Q&A. Hello my salon friend and welcome, Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, here with a bit of wise old owl wisdom coming in your eyes and ears over on YouTube and all the major podcast channels. Why not flick around and choose the channel that suits you best? Here we are with my November Q&A, and it's been rather lovely, getting lots of questions coming in now. And as always, you don't have to give your name if you don't want to, and we'll take anonymous questions too. And we've got three corking questions for this one. I'm getting a bit backed up though, so please don't contact me with anything desperately urgent. I think we've got enough questions for December and the next gaps in my schedule will be January now, but I'm loving the Q&A sessions. I have to say it saves me an awful lot of time researching and scripting. I know it's a shock to you that I do research and script my episodes. I don't just make this shit up as I go along, you know. Anyway, shall we jump in and see what's going on with you? So the first question is an anonymous question. How do I compete with other businesses? Sorry, how do I compete when other businesses are charging so little for their services? There are mobile beauty therapists charging less than half what I do, and I don't know how they make a profit. Well, interesting. I think there's a few things that I can add to the mix here. And the main crux of it, my darling, is that I don't really want you to worry about what your competitors are doing at all. You don't know what their financial goals are. You don't know what their business goals are. You don't know who their clients are. You certainly don't know what the cost structure is. And I'm assuming you've got a salon if they're a mobile beauty therapist that are causing you aggro. Their cost structure is going to be completely different. Their profit margins are going to be completely different. Heck, you don't even know if they want to make a profit. There is a legitimate excuse sometimes to make a loss in a business, sometimes for tax reasons. Or it could even be that they're a front for a drugs cartel. You've got no idea what's going on in that business. So don't drive yourself mad trying to figure out how they're making a profit, whether they're making a profit. I think ultimately, though, this turns into a question on what you want to compete on. And we all need to be competitive in the marketplace, but we do get to choose what we're competing on.

Are you going to compete on the level of service that you offer? Are you going to offer a bigger range of services? Is it going to be a kind of all-in-one shop where people can get all sorts of things done? Or is it that you're going to compete on the level of education for your team? They're extremely well qualified. Is it the ambience that you're creating? And then last, at the very bottom of the list for me, as far as competition is concerned, is when we're competing on price. And competing on price is a miserable place to be. In fact, I think, make a note, somebody, I think we'll do a whole episode on competing on price. It's just gloomy having to scratch around to save a few quid on this and a few quid on that. And can we go for a cheaper brand of coffee? Don't you deserve the best for your clients? Don't your clients deserve the best products? Don't they deserve the best experience? Don't your team deserve the best in terms of training and development? All of that costs money. And there's too many salon businesses out there who are trying to build a Bentley and charge for a Ford Fiesta. You just can't do it. It's not a tenable long-term business strategy. We've got to charge properly for what we do. But then if we're competing on something other than price, I'm not saying price is irrelevant, but people aren't coming to you for your prices. Let me explain. Unless you're the cheapest in town, they're not coming to you for your prices. They're coming to you for something else. They like you or they like the salon or they like the service that they get or the results that you give them. And that's great. We emphasize that in our marketing. And stop worrying. There's always going to be somebody who will do a job cheaper. Remember, we saw this in my town for years. Cheapest haircut you could get in town was £10. Someone came along, opened a salon, no exaggeration, in the same shopping center where they were offering haircuts for £9.99. For one penny, people would switch allegiance. People that shop on price are not the customers you want to be chasing. They're really not. I had this discussion with an ex-team member of mine. She left us because one of the reasons that she wanted to leave was she wanted to set up her own business. I've been grandfather to lots of businesses over the years now. And she wanted to service what she called salt-of-the-earth clients. Normal people. We're an expensive salon in a very affluent town. And she wanted the salt-of-the-earth clients. I said, good for you, darling. But just bear in mind, salt-of-the-earth clients haven't got any money. And you're going to have to work a lot harder to hit your profit margins. So find something else to compete on, something that can set you apart from the competition. Don't worry about mobile therapists that are undercutting you down the road. If your clients are that easily swayed, you don't want them on your books anyway. I hope that's helped a little. Next question, or another anonymous one, bear with. This time we're asking about cancellations and no-shows.

How do I handle last-minute cancellations and no-shows? Okay. I think that actually it's less about the last-minute cancellations and no-shows. I think it's more about your booking process and your reminder process. We need to look at the things that we can control. You can't control people not turning up. You can't control people cancelling at the last minute. But we can make it easier for them to move their appointments earlier in that transaction. We can make sure that they're getting plenty of reminders. That's in our control as well. The other thing you've got in your control is that you can charge for an appointment ahead. And I think, was it last week's episode where we were talking about the analogies with airlines? Nobody jumps on board an aeroplane and expects to pay when they get to the destination. Everyone has paid for their tickets up front in full before they set foot on the tarmac. And I think it should be the same in our business too. I think we would have much less in the way of last-minute cancellations and last-minute no-shows if people had some skin in the game, if they paid. Because by paying, we're positioning that appointment as much more important in their minds. And I think that charging people up front needs to be the way that this industry develops. Yes, you might well have some problems with existing clients switching over to your new way of doing things. I promise it's going to be worth that short-term pain. Yes, you might have problems, particularly this time of year, where people are booking more than one appointment ahead. But just because we're charging 100% up front doesn't mean we need to charge it all in one go. You could charge a booking fee or save 50% at the time of booking and then charge the rest a week or 10 days before the appointment or even 48 hours when we cut off with your cancellation policy too. So I think charging up front would be a really good, useful exercise for all of us. And the other thing we need to look at is your reminders. Are you sending text message reminders? Are you sending email reminders? And bear in mind, most people aren't going to think about that appointment if they're not organised, a bit like me, they're not going to think about that appointment until they receive the text message. So if you're only sending a text message 24 hours before, well, you can't be surprised when you get lots of cancellations 24 hours before. So look at when we're sending confirmations and reminders. Keep in touch with people on the run-up to their appointment. Keep confirming the time and the date and make sure they're free. So a few things that I think we could be working on there. I hope that's served you well. And final question is from Paul Shakeshaft.

And he says, what salon software do you use and recommend? OK, Paul, here we jump into some very muddy waters. It gets very political when we start talking about salon software. It's, yeah, there's different, it's like different rival clans as far as software is concerned. And when we talk to salon owners about it, of course, everybody wants confirmation that they've made the right spending decision. So they get very vigilant about it. It's a bit like when you join Slimming World, you become a bit of an ambassador, don't you? And try and persuade that everyone should be doing Slimming World as well. It's a bit like that with salon software. And I'm very pleased to say that I don't run a salon myself anymore. So I'm not affiliated with anything. I'm not interested particularly in one company doing better than the other. That said, I have recommended lots of people to lots of different salon software companies. My big thing with salon software is that you shop on features, not on price. Find out exactly what's important in your business. One of those things that better be reporting, by the way. Otherwise, we're going to have a big row. And shop on the ones that tick the most boxes for you. There is no perfect salon software out there. I promise you that. They all have shortfalls. They all have failings. Whether that's in terms of the reporting being inconsistent, my biggest bugbear. Whether it's because they don't have a particularly useful, let's say, a user interface for online booking, which would be a big no-no for me. I really, really want that. Some have branded apps. Some don't. Some manage multiple locations really easily. Some don't. Some integrates with different software, which you may want to use for marketing. Some keep it all in-house. So figure out what's important to you and then shop around. And the big three that I'm pushing people towards at the moment are Timely. I've been very lucky to have a good relationship with Timely for quite a long time now. I think price-wise, they're extremely competitive, depending on the size of your business. I think most of the stuff they do is really good. I think that the only thing I don't like with Timely is they don't have a lot of in-house marketing stuff. They integrate with MailChimp and expect that most of your email marketing, for example, will be done external to the software. I don't particularly like that. I find it a bit clunky.

And the more spanners you throw into the works, the more complicated things get. My second recommendation is Forrest. I've been a Forrest user. And I've been a timely user as well, by the way. I've been a Forrest user and had very good experiences with their software. However, the reporting on Forrest historically was not the best. That said, I do know that there's a new update to Forrest. And I've had a look at the reports. And it looks like, dare I say it, it looks like we may even have a retention report, which makes sense. Shock horror industry. Hold on to your hats. That would be a game changer, wouldn't it? So you could look at Forrest as well. And the third one is Salon IQ. Now, Salon IQ, I've never used, but I have sent lots of customers in their direction. And they've been very well looked after. People seem to sign up with Salon IQ and then stick with them for a very long time. I think it's a very solid choice. It's a bit kind of a bit British Airways. It's a bit solid, tried, tested. And it's been around for a very long time. They've got a brilliant team behind Salon IQ as well. So they're kind of my big three. Other ones pop up and disappear. I don't like free Salon software because there's an old adage. I didn't come up with it, but I think it's genius. But if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Somebody's paying somewhere along the line. And if you're not paying for it, it's actually you've become the product and someone's paying for you, if you like. They're paying for your data or access to your customers. So I don't like the marketplace softwares where they're marketing on your behalf and they kind of own your database. I'm not interested in that at all. But I do think we need a slight mindset shift as far as Salon software is concerned. Software will let you down occasionally. Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes things are offline in the same way as sometimes your card processing doesn't go through properly. And we need to be OK with that. Most of the time, software is great. Most of the time, it's saving us time, saving us effort, saving us money. Have a slightly lighter touch, a bit less bought in to the performance of your Salon software and just appreciate that sometimes things happen. So that's been useful to you, Paul. Please let me know what you decided in the end. Any more questions? Please ping them over, phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing about how well you're doing and I'd love to answer your questions. If not in the December Q&A, then I promise to get to them first thing next year in January. Until we speak again in just seven short days. Take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners.

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