Salon Team Meetings 101

Hello, team meetings are vital for the long-term success of your business. Get them right, you've got a team that's bought into your vision, on board with what you're trying to do, motivated to help you achieve your salon goals. Get them wrong, and you're doing serious harm to the potential future of your salon. Hello, Phil Jackson here from Build Your Salon, bringing you the tools you need to master to build the salon business you deserve. And I'm recording this today at the very end of November. And November for a salon coach is like December for a salon owner or a salon manager. It's our big month. Two reasons for that. Firstly, people are starting to think about next year and how they want to improve their business and how they want next year to be different to this one. So they're looking around for information and for coaches. And secondly, nobody wants to speak to me in December. I get very neglected and forgotten in December, darlings. So it's my last chance to get people on the phone and convince them that I'm the person to help take their business forward for the next 12 months. So November's a really busy one for me. I'm speaking to people from all around the world and I'm spending a lot of time on the road as well. And that's because part of my onboarding process is to get under the skin of your business. I want to see how it ticks, how it works, what's working in your business and also where I can add value and help you improve over the next 12 months as well. And one of the things that I've noticed this month is that you are not meeting with your teams frequently enough generally. And also some of the content that you're sharing, some of the team meetings that you're holding, I think might actually be doing more harm than good. So firstly, how often are you meeting with your team? Well, I think as a bare minimum, you should be looking at meeting your entire team once a month. That's what I do in my salon. If you have a team which is younger or a team which needs lots of coaching and training and improvement, you might want to increase the frequency of your full team meetings. I have some salons on my books that meet with their team every week. I also have some salons, actually two salons, who meet with their team every day in December to communicate the team's sales target for the day. So in periods of intense change, you might want to increase the frequency as well. Where you're asking for a little bit more over and above what you normally do from your team.

Absolutely. It's time to increase the frequency and have that full team meeting and that contact with them. As far as the length of your meeting is concerned, well, if you're meeting with them once a month, I reckon you should be booking out about an hour. I book out an hour, but I try and aim for the meeting to be finished in 45 minutes. Two reasons for that. The first reason is that the only place I can have a full team meeting is actually in the salon. And I don't like it when I'm holding a team meeting or trying to wrap up a team meeting if a couple of early comers, a couple of early clients are opening the door and they're not being greeted properly at reception. I find it distracting and I think it disrupts the end of my meeting. So I like to have everything wrapped up in 45 minutes. Also, it gives us a chance to grab a cup of tea and freshen up before the first clients arrive. So we're greeting them properly and facing the day with a renewed vigor. I like my team meetings at the beginning of the day when everybody's fresh. I can't make them work during the day because we're a hair salon. So we've got colours processing and people running over and things like that. So I can never manage to make room in the day for a team meeting during the day. And I think that your team are too keen to go home at the end of the day. So I don't like end of day team meetings. You might need to do a bit of trial and error. You might need to try a few things out with your team and see which yields you the best results. I always start my meetings on time, even if nobody's ready. You need to communicate the importance of these meetings to your entire team. And if you're willing to accommodate latecomers, if you're not going to start it on time, the message they're getting is that actually the meeting isn't that important to you. And I think that puts you on a back foot from the very start. So what are we actually going to talk about in these meetings? Well, I think the main bulk of your meeting should be training. And what are we going to be training them on? Well, I'm not talking about technical training, though actually you could include some technical training if you wanted to. But I do think it's a really valid place to be sharing product knowledge and product training. So anything new that's coming into the salon, I would absolutely use your team meeting to launch it and share some product knowledge with the team. Also, if you've got products which aren't shifting on the retail basis, then I would also look at some product knowledge to just try and reignite the spark and get those slow moving items moving from the shelves a bit quicker.

Also, it's your time to promote. Also, it's your time to educate on any promotions that you've got going on in the salon. So do not send an SMS to your customers. Do not send an email campaign. Do not place an advert or share anything on Facebook unless your entire team knows the ins and outs of that promotion. Because it's really embarrassing if a customer has seen the advert and a member of the team that they're speaking to doesn't know what they're talking about. So I always share the marketing activity that we've got coming up over the next month with my team before any customers might see it. What do we leave out of the meeting? Well, we can leave out any negativity. This is not the place to give your salon team a roasting. And I have to say I got this horribly wrong for about the first four years in my salon. I thought having a team meeting meant sitting everybody in a room and screaming and shouting and stamping my feet because I wasn't happy with the results that they were giving me. It was a really demotivating, really negative space. And actually my team ended up dreading our team meetings and we had people calling in sick those mornings and things like that. Was it my fault? Absolutely. I got it horribly, horribly wrong. But I had worked for someone who was a bit of a tyrant. She didn't have very many team meetings. And when she did have a team meeting, she used to tear and scream and shout and stamp her feet because we weren't getting good results. So I thought that's what managers had to do. I hadn't worked in any other salons before or after. So I thought that was what managers were meant to do for their team. It took me a long time to realize actually I was doing a lot of harm. So don't give your team a roasting in your team meetings. Absolutely. If there are things that they need to be pulled up on, then you can do that. But I would do it in a way that you're training them on the system or the process that you have in place for the salon. It's not time to single anyone out for poor performance. Share positive things in the salon. So share wherever anyone's had any kind of success, positive reviews that you've got from customers. Absolutely. I would share those in a team meeting. Anyone who's gone over and above what they normally do or what is expected of them, celebrate that in your team meeting as well. I will not let anybody sabotage my meeting. And if you've had very negative meetings or very few meetings in the past or if your team is feeling very demotivated, you might struggle with this. They will come to the team meeting and use it as an excuse to vent. They will share their negativity with everybody else and you can't let that happen. If you think you're at risk from this, what I would do is put a notice in your staff room or your kitchen a week before the meeting asking for anything that anybody wants to speak about.

So they're not allowed to talk about it in the meeting unless it's made it onto the agenda. That way, if there is something negative and you don't want it as part of your team meeting, you can take that person to one side and say, look, this is really important. I definitely think it needs dealing with, but I don't think the team meeting is the right place to do it. Let's have a meeting in my office now or let's get the people concerned together over lunch. So you're communicating that it's an important thing. It needs dealing with straight away, but you're not letting that negative energy bring the energy of your entire meeting down. I hope that's been useful to you. If it has, don't forget to subscribe because I do a broadcast like this every single week and I would hate you to miss out on the content that I'm sharing. If you've already subscribed, I will see you next week. If you need more help with managing your team, check out the link that I've put below in the description. There's a link to a course that I run called a team performance upgrade. If you're looking at appraisals or developing your team in a meaningful way over the next 12 months, check out the link. I expect I've put a special offer on the course there for you as well until next week. Take care.