The biggest summer booking mistake salons make

Summer is nearly here, just a few weeks away. You are either about to get absolutely manic or absolutely dead. Either way, are you ready? All on Build your salon. Let's not beat about the bush. Summer in the salon business is either a buzzing, money-making machine or it's crickets in a ghost town. And the thing is, you should probably already have a pretty good idea which way it's going to go. Here's something that I genuinely believe after 427 years in and around the salon industry. Every salon business has a rhythm. It has a season to it. It has a spring when it's great to sow seeds. It has a summer when things are coming to fruit. It has an autumn when we can reap our rewards and our harvest. It has a winter when things go quiet. Unfortunately, those seasons don't line up with the calendar seasons. So for some people, those busy and quiet times that follow roughly the same pattern each year fall in a different place to another business. So for example, in my own salon business, most of our customers were mums. And that meant as soon as they struggle with childcare, we struggled to get them through the salon door. So summer for us was a really quiet time. It meant that my mums were all at home with the kids or they were going on vacations. They didn't have time to make a trip into the salon. For other salon businesses, it's exactly the opposite. Summer is much busier for them. Perhaps they're in a holiday town, they've got some seasonality to their business, or they're offering services which lend themselves very much more to the summer months. So things like school holidays, the payday cycle, the weather, weddings, Christmas, all of that will feed into the pattern of seasons that you have in your business. But those seasons, apart from that bit around COVID, those seasons are fairly predictable. And most salon business owners tend to respond to that rhythm in one of two ways. The first way is to go with it. So you look at your numbers from last year, you've got a rough idea what's coming, and you prepare accordingly. That means that we need to get organised. It means we need to plan forward and we need to make decisions before we are forced to. It means that if it's going to be a quiet time, we probably need to squirrel away some money now to get us through the leaner summer months. It means that we need to get our staffing plans in place so that we are encouraging our teams to take more vacations during the quiet times. Or perhaps it's the opposite. It's going to be absolutely frantic. It's going to be really manic. We're going to be rushed off our feet. Well, that means we need to make sure that our team isn't going to burn out. It means that we adjust our marketing calendars accordingly and so on. The second way is to rage against it. To treat the quiet weeks as a bit of a personal failure, to throw money at marketing to fight the tide because you can't afford the quiet weeks that you know are coming. And it's going to be exhausting trying to manufacture busyness in a period that was never going to be a strong period. And I've done this. It doesn't work particularly well. It's expensive, it's demoralising. It takes an enormous amount of energy that you could have spent preparing for the season that was actually coming. Summer is coming. You already know roughly what it's going to look like for your salon. The question is, which way are you going to jump? I'm Phil Jackson, your queen of salons, coming all over the airwaves with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How is business for you? How is Q2 panning out for you and what are you looking forward to in your salon business for the summer? So first of all, let's talk about a manic summer. How do we survive and hopefully thrive during a manic summer? Let's start with the so-called good problem. You're about to be slammed. The bookings are pouring in, the phone's ringing, your schedule's rammed. It feels like a win and it is, but only if you're ready for it because being busy doesn't automatically mean profitable, especially if the quality of your service starts to nosedive. If your team hits a wall and they're absolutely exhausted, if your clients start feeling like they're on a conveyor belt, we need to take a breath. First thing to look at is your service menu. Stop fighting the current, start riding it. Summer clients have specific worries around their skin, around their hair, around their hair growth in places they don't necessarily want to. They're getting ready for holidays, they're getting ready for events. So let's build around those problems. It's perfectly okay to have a seasonal menu. It's perfectly okay to discontinue certain services if they're getting in the way of being profitable. So we want to start thinking about the conversations that are going on in a client's mind. We want to think about moisturising. We want to think about conditioning, we want to think about UV damage. We want to think about being holiday or event ready. These things make booking easy for the client. Nudge up your average bill, and there's no bad thing about that without adding huge amounts of time to the appointment. So we're not just setting services, we're actually creating solutions for a client's immediate problem. The other thing that happens when we're rammed is capacity becomes a problem. Overbooking is a very quick way to burn out your team and piss off clients. So look at your booking system now. Let's put some sensible rules in place. Staggering shifts, if you have a team. Maybe asking our part-timers if they can do a few more hours, maybe offering overtime to your existing team members. Build in a few appointment gaps, a little bit of white space here and there is no bad thing. And talk to your clients. Make sure they understand that you're hitting busy season. Ask for their patience. Ask them to get organised and book their appointments ahead. That makes it easier for you to plan your staffing across the summer. The goal is to handle the rush without the experience going downhill. It's also to maximise the return. So we're making the most of this period. We don't just want the clients booking in for their regular services. We want to make the most out of every single appointment in a way that looks after your columns, looks after your profitability, and also looks after your team. We don't want a burnt-out team because they can't deliver the service that your reputation is built on. If service slips when you are busy, you're pissing off a lot of clients. If it slips when you're quiet, well that's one thing. If it slips when you're busy, a lot of clients are going to notice and your reputation starts to suffer. Make sure your team members are actually taking their breaks. I know it is tempting, especially when they're on commission, to start dropping their lunch breaks on a brutal Saturday. Tell them they're doing a great job. Little things matter enormously. Maybe get the lunches in during your busy times. Let's see what we can do to make life just a little bit simpler for our team members. The other opportunity, and this one gets missed constantly, is retail and gift cards. Don't call them vouchers anymore. Gift cards please, darlings. When the salon's buzzing and clients are happy, they're in the mood to buy. They're spending already. And that moment when someone's in the salon loving their experience is exactly when you ask about upcoming birthdays, special occasions. Gift cards bought in the summer get redeemed in the autumn, which smooths out your cash flow exactly at a time when you need it most. Or perhaps you are looking at the summer in exactly the opposite way. Perhaps your salon is like mine. Perhaps your salon is full of regulars that have gone on holiday or the kids are off school and there's too much white space in the diary. It's getting uncomfortable and you're starting to panic. Let's see if we can reframe that so that a quiet summer does not feel like a crisis. This is your opportunity to work on your business. Salon owners who come out of the summer stronger are the ones that use that downtime deliberately instead of panicking. So start first of all by knowing when the quiet bit is coming. Have a look at your booking software. Have a look at last year. Find those quietest weeks. The first thing that does is stop you panicking because you know when those gaps are coming and you can start to market into them or plan for them. So if you want to promote your way through it, we could do a targeted offer specifically for that very last week in July, or specifically for those quiet Tuesday afternoons, rather than a blanket summer discount. Get your marketing out early. We know that those clients that you've got coming in need time to plan. They need time to arrange their childcare. They need time to work around their holidays. By the time July comes, it's too late. They've already booked up their summer with plans as it is. Use those quiet weeks to come after clients who maybe came once and didn't come back. Lost client marketing is always a really strong one for the summer. We used to do our 'recommend a friend' in August because we had plenty of capacity. I knew that takings were going to be low. I wasn't worried about people coming in on discounted appointments. I just wanted to fill up some column space, or maybe there's a way that we can use your time better. Is your website a bit of an embarrassment? Is it time for you to start reviewing your prices ready for the autumn? Is your retail area a bit of a mess? Do we need to start looking into those white label products? Perhaps we can spend that time researching. The other thing I used to do was encourage my team to take their annual leave during the summer, 'cause I'd much rather they took it when we were quiet than when we were busy. And also, it was when we invested the most in our team training because what we found was there were a number of the academies up in London who used to offer summer promotions 'cause it was their quiet time as well. We used to get 'buy one, get one free' from some of the big academies so we could actually get more of our team upskilled when it was quiet. But whether you're going to be really busy or whether you're going to be really quiet, there are some things that you need to do right now. You need to look at last year's numbers right now, today, not so that we can start getting complacent. It's just so that we understand what's coming. Your booking software is crammed with data. Use it. If last summer was manic, you've got roughly eight weeks to get your capacity plan in place. Start looking at your team rota, your service menu, get your retail in order. If last summer was quiet, you've got eight weeks to build that pre-holiday marketing campaign to identify those lapsed clients. Figure out whether we're going to do a 'recommend a friend' and figure out what your training plan's going to look like and how we can effectively use your downtime to improve your business for the autumn. So either way, the plan is the same. Know what's coming. Start planning now. Don't react last minute. Summer is going to do what summer does. If you are looking for ways to keep hold of more of the money that's coming through your salon business, I would love to help you with my 10 Minute Money Fix. I've for just nine pounds. You get five 10-Minute Money Fixes to implement in your salon. Each of them takes less than 10 minutes. Each of them designed to keep more of your profits in the business rather than wasting money. And the link to that is in the description. It's 10minutemoneyfix.com. I'd love to be helping you keep hold of more of your hard-earned cash. What am I missing? What's summer going to look like for you? What plans have you got to get you through the next few months? Why not reach out and let me know? Phil@buildyoursalon.com is my email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the airwaves again with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. And until then, take care.