Salon Retail when you're starting at ZERO

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 friend. Did you lose some weight? You've been working out, you're looking good. Your Uncle Phil back here again with ancient wisdom from the Queen of Salons. How on earth are you? So good to be coming back in your ears again just a week after my last episode rather than the two years it took me from the one before. And today we're talking about salon retail, which is something I get lots of questions about and lots of complaints from salon owners. They're very frustrated, bless you, are you frustrated my darling, that they just don't get enough retail or their team isn't retailing. So today I want to talk about why we need to be retailing at all, and I bet it's not for the reason that you think. And also I want to give you a few little hints. I've got three tips for if you're starting from zero, how is it that we can get things moving, get some product moving through your salon doors, and hopefully add in a little bit of camp comedy for you and some motivation too. So I want to assume that your retail performance isn't where it needs to be, otherwise you wouldn't be listening darling, would you? And actually I'm quite surprised as I'm signing people up for one-to-one coaching, even very successful salon businesses. I'm surprised at how many people struggle with salon retail. We jump in and realise that their performance is pretty appalling sometimes, and even selling one product in a day is quite the event, I can tell you. So if we're starting from that place, then you're in the right place. If you're above that, of course, then congratulations, you're doing a superb job, and sit back and enjoy the ride. But I want to frame the conversation firstly in a slightly different way and ask why it is that we actually bother retailing at all. And very often it's because that's what everybody else is doing. It's what's the accepted wisdom. And I hate accepted wisdom, particularly in our industry. I think it's a rotten way to run a business. I think it's uninspiring. And my estimate, and it is only my estimate, my dear, is that 70% of salons either break even or worse.

So we've got 70% of salons out there either making no money or losing money, month in and month out. So doing something just because everyone else is doing it is actually kind of counterintuitive. In fact, pop it, it might even be the case that you'd be better off looking at what every other salon is doing and then doing exactly the opposite. You might actually increase your chances of success. So just because everyone else is retailing doesn't give me enough reason to do it. It's going to be making a meaningful contribution to your business strategy. So first of all, do we need to be retailing at all? And I think there is a case to be made for a strategy that does not include retail in our salons. And I always get some resistance. I always get some kickback when I say this kind of thing. I think that a lot of people start to feel that they're not doing a proper job. They're not doing a complete job if they're not offering salon retail. And I think that's a load of old toss, to be honest with you. And I think there's an argument to be made that if you're tying up thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stock and you can't get your team to retail, then why not look at actually whether it's worthwhile as part of your business at all? I think you can do a complete job without retailing. I think you can do a complete job by giving people a referral link and pointing them in the direction of Amazon. And in fact, I think you're probably doing a better job doing that way than recommending a product that you haven't got in stock or not being able to recommend exactly the right product because, you know, you haven't got any on the shelf right now. But I do think you should be retailing for a very different reason. And the reason is that it's one of the only things we have in our salon businesses where we're not swapping time for money. Let me explain. By definition, most of what we do is carrying out service in exchange for money. So we're swapping our time during the day, our column space for money, and that limits the potential of the business. And if ever you want to rile me up, my dear, if ever you want to get me kind of cross, start putting limits on my business. I hate it. And I think that that artificial limit is something that we can break through when we look at salon retail. Incidentally, I think we should be looking at other ways to not be swapping time for money as well. And it's why salon memberships have been a big feature of my business strategy for so long. But also, I think you should be looking at some kind of education, something where we can sell one thing to many people at once. And that's what retail is. It's a one to many because we could be selling to 40 clients in a day or we could be selling to one client in a day.

And as far as retail is concerned, it doesn't extend our day. It doesn't increase our fixed costs. And I find that kind of exciting to be looking for those opportunities where we can change that money equation. Trying to swap time for money is a bit like trying to sleep your way through His Majesty's forces one soldier at a time. It's going to take you forever. But if we can start tackling larger numbers of soldiers at once, we can increase our effectiveness and work our way through the ranks a lot quicker. So where do we even begin retailing properly if we're starting at zero? My Salon Owners Retreat is a unique event where you get to create the agenda. This isn't a retreat of boring presentations in conference rooms without windows. The entire program is a mix of group coaching, mastermind sessions and one to one coaching with me, your favorite salon coach. There's also time built in for implementation. Yes, you're going to leave the retreat having actually got some important work done on your business with our support. Our spring 2023 retreat is now sold out, but you can be the first to hear about the next Salon Owners Retreat and get the very best early bird pricing by heading to buildyoursalon.com and joining our wait list. I can't wait to see you on Salon Owners Retreat. Don't forget your speedos. Well, I think the best place to start if you're struggling with retail is re-examining the relationship you have with your salon suppliers. And it's a relationship like any other. If you're going to have a successful relationship, it needs some work and that supplier relationship is no different. And I think it starts with who we decide to jump into bed with. I think it starts with that selection process. If you imagine all of the suppliers lined up, who are you going to swipe left for? And who is the lucky person you're going to swipe right as far as retail is concerned? We're looking for that chemistry. We're looking for that awesome fit. And there are a couple of things that will be a giveaway. And the first is to look at who the supplier's ideal end user is. And we're looking for some kind of synergy, some kind of similarity between your ideal customer and their ideal end user. And there is so much choice out there.

There are so many brands trying to differentiate themselves, trying to emphasize different values. Perhaps they're particularly eco-friendly or particularly glamorous and used by celebrities. And what we're looking for is that ideal fit, something that clicks between your business and theirs. I want you to also bear in mind the life cycle of that brand. We need to look at the age of who it is that we're swiping right for and the products that they're selling. And I want to see that there's some kind of innovation, some kind of freshness to that brand. Because over time, brands do get a bit stale and a bit funky. And products do get a bit stale and lack in innovation. And if you start to see brands and products that are running out of steam, it's probably being milked as a cash cow. Lots of these brands these days are owned by big multinational companies and conglomerates. And some of the brands in their portfolio will get less effort and less innovation. And they're just milking the cash out of the brand before it either dies or is completely refreshed and reinvented. So have a look at where you think your chosen retailer, your swipe right, is in that life cycle. And before we start buying in, figure out what your expectation is going to be. And expectation is kind of the next stage of making this a successful relationship. It's a bit like laying all your cards on the table after you've been dating for a little while. And saying this is what I expect from you in this relationship and this is what you can expect from me. Is this going to be a monogamous relationship or are you going to be polyamorous? Are you going to be stocking multiple brands in your salon? Are they able to sleep around with other salon owners? Are you going to see those products for sale in other salons on your street, in your town, in your region? Or are you going to keep them all to yourselves? Also, at the beginning of the relationship, define exactly what's going to be in it for you as far as the extras are concerned. Is there going to be a certain amount of in-salon training? And I love in-salon training. I think it's vital for the long-term success of your retail endeavours. And I think that just having a different voice coming into the salon can make such a difference to your team members. So I like in-salon training. Or perhaps they're one of the bigger brands and they've got an academy that they can use and that you have access to rather. And that's always worked really well for my team. They love external training. They love jumping on the train and zipping up to London and spending the day getting pumped and motivated and bringing fresh ideas back into the salon.

Is that going to be part of the offer? And also, I would look at what kind of marketing support there is. Are you going to be getting point-of-sale materials? Is that something you have to pay for? Or is it free? And what kind of brand awareness do they have going on? Your customer is going to have heard of this brand before they come into the salon and see you using it. On the marketing note, one of the biggest things that pisses me off about suppliers, and there are many, trust me, but one of the things that annoys me the most is that we get no notice around the promotions that they're running. So I'm encouraging you as a solid business owner, as a decent salon owner, to start putting some thought into your year. And ideally, I want you doing that in November or December. I don't want you waiting until the last minute. I want you to figure out what your goals are for the coming year and then put together a loose promotional calendar that's going to deliver on those goals. And then along comes your supplier and drops a last-minute promotion on you. And it just annoys me because they know way ahead of that what their sales cycle is going to look like. They know when they're going to be putting promotions together. And I think with a bit more notice, we might be able to build more of their promotions into our promotional activity a lot more successfully. So we need as much notice as possible. And I would honestly have that upfront conversation as quickly as you can. When am I going to hear about the promotions? How far ahead? And sometimes your rep needs some training. You need to train them as they leave their sales meeting and they're the first to hear about their upcoming promotions. You need to train them to jump on a call with you and tell you what on earth they have coming up in the future. Then while we're examining expectations, what can they expect from you? Are they expecting a certain level of spend each year, for example? Or are they expecting that you will carry their entire range at all times? How many reps visits are you going to be getting? And that's something that I am very keen on delegating as well. And the arrangement that I have with the reps that supply my business are that I would meet them perhaps once a year or at the very most once a quarter. And then those in-between visits aren't going to be taking up my valuable time. There will be something that's delegated either to my assistant manager or to our front of house manager or even to a senior beauty therapist or senior stylist if need be. And what I do in that annual meeting is I set the parameters around decision making.

So my assistant manager is authorized to spend up to a certain amount without coming to me and checking that that's OK. And there are some things that he's not allowed to do. So he can't discontinue any products without a conversation with me first. And he can't bring any new products into the salon. But it saves an awful lot of my time. And I'm also a big fan these days of having as many of those meetings as possible online rather than taking up time and space inside the salon. So an annual meeting, ideally online, where we set out my strategy for the year. I get as much information about their strategy as possible and then clear parameters and delegate those meetings to someone else. So now, how about some tips? How about my three top tips on how to actually get some product moving in your salon if you're starting at zero? They say if you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself for life. But let me tell you, darlings, I've been in the situation during my career where sometimes you just want someone to give you the bloody fish. And that's what my new program for 2023 eight weeks bums on seats is all about. It's the marketing training that you need to fill up some of the white space in your appointment book and turn you into the salon owner you were always meant to be. Get more bums on seats in early 2023. Head over to buildyoursalon.com and join the wait list to be the first to hear and get my special early bird pricing. So how do we get some products actually being sold and going out through the door? Well, firstly, I want to talk about your team. If you have an expectation that your team is going to be retailing, we need to communicate that expectation early and frequently and take it seriously. That means, my dear, that you're going to have to go back to your job descriptions. And then a lot of those awkward conversations around performance don't need to happen because people will know before they've even applied for a position with you that there is an expectation that they will sell. I hear salon owners moaning and whinging about their teams that they won't sell this and they don't sell that. But they're not having these performance management conversations and you need to be crystal clear on what you expect people to do. It's like giving instructions in the bedroom, darling. The more specific you are, the more likely they are to find your magic spot. So I would emphasize a target, a retail target in your weekly or monthly performance management meetings. Incidentally, if performance management meetings are something that you're not really sure about, give me a shout.

Phil at buildyoursalon.com and we will dedicate a podcast episode to performance management meetings if you think that would be useful. Now, when we're setting our retail target, you've got some options. You can either set that target in monetary terms, in dollars or pounds, or we can set it in the number of retail products that someone is going to be selling for you. Or we can do something called care factor. And care factor is a measure of the number of customers who left with at least one product. And it's a feature of some of the bigger salon software systems. Now, honestly, none of those is perfect because you could have somebody who you set a monetary target for. You could have, let's say, a target of $2,000 and they've sold $2,000 worth to three customers and ignored the other 37 customers they saw that week. So that's not a great measure of how well somebody is doing their retailing job. Similarly, with units sold, you could have, for example, two beauty therapists who have both sold 10 units. The only difference is one of them sold 10 travel sizes at $12 each. The other sold 10 serums at $200 each. But on paper, they would look like they've done the same job. And, of course, they haven't. So I don't think any of those measures is perfect. So I would go back to your salon software, choose the one that you can measure easiest and go with that. And usually that's either the financial target or the number of units. Now, incidentally, if you're doing financial targets, add the tax back in because it's terribly demotivating. If you've got a team member and you've set them a target of, say, $500 and then they're mentally adding up how much they're selling during the week and they come into you breathless because they're so proud of their performance. They've managed to hit their $500, except you've then taken the sales tax off and they've done $400. It's a really demotivating space to be. So this is the only measure where I add the sales tax back in so that actually what goes through the till is what they're targeted on. And then for each team member, we're going to have a target, but you're also going to have a minimum acceptable standard. And this is where we start getting serious, because if we've come from that place of coaching, we've come from that place of challenging their mindset around retail. We've given them the tools. We've done role play with them. We've done some scripting with them. They've been mentored by someone who's a brilliant salesperson in the salon and they're still not hitting that minimum acceptable standard. That conversation needs to change. And either you're willing to take that strong action and have those difficult conversations or you're not.

And if you're not, don't bother setting the target at all. Oh, my dears, I'm being strong with you today, aren't I? Come over all butch and masterful. And what I'm looking for from my team members is what I call the McDonald's attitude. So it used to be in the days of human interaction that you went to the counter, ordered your Big Mac, and then the person on the counter was trained to ask whether you wanted fries with that. Would they upgrade you to a meal? Now, what didn't happen if you said no, what didn't happen was that the McDonald's worker with the three little stars on their badge would then beat themselves up and say, I'm never going to offer fries again. This is a completely pointless, demotivating thing to do. And I'm not a salesperson. I'm a customer service expert. That just didn't happen. They had a light attitude to it. They just move on to the next customer and get on with their day. And that's how we need to be about retail. So strong targets and then a disconnection to the personal stuff that we're lumping into the outcome. So here they come, my three ways that we can get better retail performance. The first of three strategies I have for shifting retail is that we start pricing some of this stuff in. If you've got a service that you're carrying out on a client and you know that the best result relies on brilliant aftercare, price it in. Stick it in a bag and give it to them. And we used to do this a lot with, for example, hair extensions. So if you've ever had hair extensions or you've ever carried out hair extension services, you will know that aftercare is vital. If they don't look after those extensions properly with decent aftercare and proper products, their hair is going to come back in in four weeks time looking like a manky used merkin. It'll be dreadful, matted, horrible, disgusting. So what I used to do when I did a full set of hair extensions was include all the aftercare they would need. And I'd give them a detangling brush and a shampoo and a conditioner. And then they're much more likely to use the right products because they're there in their bathrooms. And you can apply that to all kinds of hair and beauty services, certainly on the facial side. We're doing these prescriptive facials and then it's optional whether they keep the good work up when they get home. It makes no sense to me at all. While we're talking about bundles, we found that the biggest barrier to people buying professional retail is just they've never taken it before.

So let's make that first purchase a no brainer. Let's bundle it into a promotion. Let's say we're doing a summer promotion. Why not include some SPF products as part of a facial? Not only are they going to be using decent products when they get home, we've got an opener for our next visit, too, because we can ask them how they got on with those products. Were they using them consistently? Did they like them? Were they too light, too heavy? Were they intense enough? Did they see results? Did they not like the fragrance? Then that retail conversation the second time around is tweaking, changing our retail recommendations to get the right product into that customer's hands. We also had a new client package. So you couldn't come into my salon just for a haircut. As a brand new customer, you had to have the new client package. And part of that package was a retail recommendation. So pricing to that first visit was a retail product because our estimate was that between 60 and 70% of people had never had professional retail before. So we give it to them, put it in their hands. And then that opened up that conversation on the second visit. My second tip is to have those retail conversations much earlier in the client visit. So let's break with convention a little and talk about my lovely husband. He's a brilliant hairdresser and also a really good retailer. His retail figures are very, very impressive. And the key to it was that he would make his product recommendations right at the start of the visit in the consultation. So we're a hair salon, but you're going to have to translate. And you're clever people. You can do this if you're in your beauty salon, too. And he would say something like, yes, we can work on putting this style on you. I think it would suit you. We're going to tweak it a little bit and maybe make it a bit more asymmetric. And we're going to add some bangs. But to make that style work, you're going to need these retail products. So that promise, that commitment was much, much earlier in the visit. It took away all of that awkwardness at the end of the visit around whether they were going to be taking products or not. So my second tip is to move your retail recommendations right to the beginning in the consultation rather than, oh, my dears, you beauty therapists working in spas, you're the worst for it. Get to the end of my facial, get to the end of my massage, and then give me a leaflet with four ticks on it and send me off to reception. Awful. Let's get it happening much, much earlier in the visit. And then the final way to get more retail flying, and this is my biggest tip, by the way, is to make it a promise. And this was part of my five-point promise, my five-point service promise in my salon.

Incidentally, if you think that will be a useful episode for the podcast, reach out and let me know, and I can take you through the five-point promise. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to hear any ideas that you have around future broadcasts. But if you think you'd find it useful, I'm happy to do a five-point promise episode. Anyway, to cut a long story, medium length, one of the points in the five-point promise was a retail promise. And we promised that we would tell you about every product we used on you today. And if not, you've got to take them all home for nothing. And yes, I know that's going to make some of you slightly uncomfortable. And I think it should. I think a service guarantee should be something that you have to strive for. It should make you slightly uncomfortable. But the key to this was that the promise was displayed everywhere in front of our customers. So my hair salon, we had little mirror clings, little stickers that were at the bottom of every styling section with our retail promise on it. And that did two things for us. Firstly, it took away any embarrassment because the customer and the stylist knew that that retail conversation was going to happen. That meant the stylist approached it with a lot more confidence. There was no kind of shame around it. There was no awkwardness about talking about retail. The second thing it did, it meant that I wasn't the person kicking my team up the butt all the time to sell more retail because the customers were doing that for me. They were the ones making sure that those retail conversations happened. Now, we did have to tweak that a little over time because we encountered a situation after a couple of months where my team were rattling through these products as quickly as they possibly could. So there was no consultation. There was no discussion there. They were just ticking a box. So we had to go back and say, no, there is a purpose to this. And the purpose is that we're doing a really good job during our consultations. So I hope that's been useful to you. You now got my three retail tips if you're starting at zero and a slightly different take, I think, on the relationship that we have with our salon suppliers. If it's been at all useful to you, then please give this podcast a five star rating. You know that that's the biggest thrill I'm going to get this week. And any future topics, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear from you. And if you've implemented anything that I've brought along today, then let me know. It gives me that lovely warm feeling that I'm helping our industry soar. Just seven short days until our next episode. Don't miss me too hard, darlings. I will speak to you soon. Take care. 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.