SALON PROFESSIONALS! My September Q and A

What's going on in your salon business? What's happening in our beautiful industry this month? Let's find out in my September Q&A. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon. Hello, hello, hello my salon lovelies. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, here with a bit of Wise Old Owl Wisdom. I've got my Wise Old Owl Glasses on today as well. So apologies if we've got reflections pinging all over the place like a laser disco show because, frankly, I'm struggling a bit with my contact lenses. I can get them in. Perhaps you could write in. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. Give me a few hints and tips. I'm alright getting the contact lenses in. I can't get the buggers back out. Anyway, it's Q&A time, which has turned into my favourite bit of the month, I have to say, as far as content creation is concerned. In fact, if you threw enough questions at me, I just do these every week. I love it. Love hearing what's going on. So let's jump straight in. As you know, some of our listeners decide that they would rather stay anonymous with their question, which is absolutely fine. So I'm going to start with the ones that have given me their names, and I've clustered a couple together as well. All will become clear. So first question comes from Matthew in Taunton. Oh, you might know my sister. My sister lives in Taunton, Matthew. I don't know what sort of salon you've got, though. You haven't said. And a nice broad question from Matthew. What marketing ideas do you have? Now, I could and probably would fill multiple podcast episodes talking about marketing ideas. It's a bit vague. Don't know anything about your business. And frankly, if you think I can sort out your entire year's worth of marketing in a two-minute response, then we are sadly mistaken, Matthew. So I'm going to do what I think will be useful, which is to give you my September marketing ideas. And I know we're in the second week of September already, but these are the ones that I've been pushing out with my guys. Firstly, we're looking at recommend a friend, and I bang on about recommend a friend all the time. Make zero apologies for it, Matthew. It is the single most important marketing campaign I think you can get out there if you need new clients. Second, lost client marketing. Now, lost client marketing, we might do an episode, actually. Make a note, somebody, that we're going to do an episode on lost client marketing because I don't think anyone's doing it properly. We're not doing it consistently.

And I don't just mean sending somebody a quick text message automatically five weeks after they've been in for a visit and not rebooked. I'm talking about an email campaign that goes out, three-part email campaign, goes out to your lost clients, tempting them back in to the salon because if they've made that purchase decision with you once, it should be relatively easy to convince them to come back in, certainly compared to finding new clients. And then the third one for September, and this is a promotion that we've done for the last three years in simple salon marketing, and it's our recovery promotion. So depending on the kind of salon that you've got depends on what flavour it is, but we do hair in recovery or skin in recovery. And basically, the messaging is about undoing all the damage that you did to yourself over the summer months. So if you've got clients that have been on holiday and the sun and the salt water and the chlorine in the pool, all of those things have an effect on our skin or effect on our hair. So the messaging in that September promotion is all around moisturising and repair, and it works really, really nicely. So we just put a bundle together. Normally, it's service plus retail at a price that makes sense. Nice, clear messaging, beautiful graphics. Get it out there and get it done. Let me know how you get on with those ideas, Matthew, or perhaps tell me a bit more about your business. We can be a bit more specific with our help. Next up, I've clustered these two together, actually. I've got a question from Karen in the Republic of Ireland. Hello, Karen, beautiful bit of the world. And she's asking about social media. She said, you've said to do less, which sounds grand. Grand. Love that. Because I seem to be spending a lot of time making posts. How much should I be posting? And I've clustered that with an anonymous question around social media. How do I come up with ideas on what to post? I put those two together. OK, ideally and realistically are not always the same thing with what we can manage as small business owners. So ideally we'd all be posting multiple times a day on multiple different platforms and turning into this massive behemoth of a machine that creates all this social media content. But that's overwhelming. And I don't think it's entirely necessary. And also, I think it takes us away from actually what's important with the work that we're supposed to be doing. So what I have realized, what I've come to realize as someone who has consistently not posted and consistently posted a bit and then consistently posted three times a day, it's the consistency that matters.

And it's what you can consistently manage. So it might be that you would love to post multiple times a day, but we actually realistically where you are right now, you might only be able to post, say, three or four times a week. And that's fine. So we go with the kind of what the minimum viable product is in that sort of way. So if you can only manage three or four times a week, that's fine. But be consistent three or four times a week. And I think actually probably four times a week as a minimum would be fine. Actually, you could go a little bit less than that, but I think you're in danger of disappearing. And if I was looking to create content for four times a week, what I like to do is batch my content together. So let's say you jump into my Instagram and you'll see there are different kinds of posts. There are reels. There are reels where I'm talking to camera. There are snippets from these podcast episodes that are quote images. And there are just silly little images to silly little static posts. So I've got five different sorts of content. So what I would do is sit down at the beginning of the month. And let's say we're talking about the reels that I create. I will have a day where I create all the reels for the month. And you could be doing that, too. So if you decide, let's say we're going to be posting four times a week. What I would do is say once a week, I'm going to be talking about a product. Once a week, I'm going to have some kind of client story or a testimonial or a before and after. Once a week, I'm going to have a behind the scenes one or where I'm talking about my team or a personality post. And once a week, I'm going to be answering a client question or maybe looking at some kind of case study. So we've got those four different sorts of content and then we can cluster that together. So at the beginning of the month, we're going to spend, say, half a day creating all of our content. And I'm going to spend an hour putting my client stories and testimonials together. So it becomes much more efficient. And then we can schedule that stuff. And, you know, I'm a big fan of social media schedulers. Sorry, I'm running over. We need to get this wrapped up. OK, the other thing I want to point out for both of you is if social media is becoming overwhelming for you, firstly, look at delegating. But if you can't delegate, start reusing some of your content, because if you've got a couple of thousand people following you on Instagram, have a look at the reach of your posts. You'll be lucky, really lucky if you've hit more than, say, 50 or 60 of those people.

So the chances of them seeing that content again the following month are really, really slim. Plus, you'll have picked up a few new followers during the month anyway. The other thing we can look at is reusing content in a different format. So if you put something out as a reel last time, why not turn it into, say, a carousel post for next month? And then the month after that, you could turn it into a quote post. And the month after that, you could be talking to camera. So we can stick to our lane. We can be talking about the same things again and again and again, reaching different people and with different different content types, different formats for our content. So it becomes much less overwhelming. So essentially, if you look at my stuff, you know, I'm talking about the same things again and again and again and again. I'm talking about team, money, marketing and memberships. That's all I talk about. Very, very rare that I'll leave that lane at all. So it's just that rinse and repeat. So I hope that's been helpful, Karen and Anonymous. Another anonymous one. Dear Phil, I feel like I'm carrying the salon on my own. My team is not that busy and they don't seem bothered. I feel like I will be better off working on my own. Oh, precious angel. I don't need to feel like that, darling. But I must admit there have been times in my career when I've been a bit like that, too. Like, is it worth having a team at all? And I think this question essentially comes down to responsibility. We need your team to be taking responsibility for their own performance. And that's a performance management question. And I've definitely done episodes in the past on performance management. So do a little search. Jump over to buildyoursalonpodcast.com and have a little search and see if you can find an episode on performance management. Because sometimes our teams don't step up because they don't know what's expected. We assume that they know they need to be busier. When actually we need to spell out exactly what success looks like. The other part of it is that you've got to take responsibility for this as well, I'm afraid, Anonymous. Because ultimately everything that exists in your business, in fact, darlings, let's get a little bit meta about it all. Everything that exists in your life is there either because you put it there or because you allow it to continue to be there. Oh, gosh, that was a bit cerebral for this time of the day, wasn't it, Puppets? But the point is, in your business, yeah, okay, maybe they're not performing at a high level. You gave them the job. You're the one who does the appraisals every year. You're the one who sits down and does the performance management meetings. So you've got to take responsibility for this, too. So I'll be going back, revisiting targets. And we need, as an industry, to be a lot tougher.

If people aren't performing where we need them to be, then get rid of them. Move them on. Find somewhere that they can thrive and replace them with someone who is going to thrive in your situation, too. Oh, that was a bit of a rant. Apologies. I don't like ranting on Q&As. Final question. Another anonymous one. I've had my salon for 11 years and always been busy. Well done. Snaps for getting to 11 years, especially over the last three or four years. We have a small team and they've been with us for a long time and have loyal customers. Very nice. At the end of the month, there is barely anything. Oh, it gets gloomy. There's barely anything left in the bank and things are getting worse. Where is my money going? Okay. Well, well done, first of all. 11 years old. Small, loyal team and loyal customers. You're getting some really good stuff right. Where's my money going? I don't know, mate. Let's try and figure this out, shall we? So a business only has really two parts to it. We've got the money that comes in, the money that goes out. And if there's no money left at the end of the month, we've either got to get more money coming in or less money coming out. It's not rocket science, is it? I don't know how busy you are, but as far as the money coming in side of it goes, if your utilization is high, the only way you can get more money in really is to look at your pricing. And I would suggest if you've always been busy, then there's probably a little bit more elasticity in the pricing. We can probably get those prices up a bit to try and stem this flow of money out of the business. The other bit is really getting to grips with the figures. And I'm going to shamelessly pitch my program in just a second. But you need to understand what your break-even point is. We need to know how much money your business needs to be taking just to keep everyone paid, just to keep the lights on. After that, then I don't want you to obsess about break-even anymore. If you obsess about break-even, that becomes the thing that we celebrate. It's like, yay, we broke even this week. Great. We made no profit this week. That's not something that we want to be encouraging. We want to be making really decent profits. So I'm going to pitch my program, which is Get Paid Properly. It takes us through break-even, takes us through how much money needs to come into the business. It also breaks down your costs, where the money is actually being spent in the business, which is the other side of that equation. Head over to getpaidproperly.com. Have a little look. Any questions, then ping them over. So that was a bit of a breakneck speed Q&A, but I'm loving it because we're actually getting plenty of questions in now.

Head over to buildyoursalon.com or buildyoursalonpodcast.com for previous recordings. Head over and send me your questions, phil at buildyoursalon.com for next month's Q&A. And until we speak again in just seven short days, take care. See what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty and more successful tips for business owners. All on, build your salon.