Setting Targets in 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 today I want to talk about something I get more questions about than anything else, and that is setting your staff targets. Welcome! As smart salon owners and managers, I'm sure you instinctively understand the importance of setting targets for your salon team members. It's important that we communicate exactly what is expected of everybody in the salon. And if you haven't already, I fully encourage you to take some time and set down on paper exactly what it is that you expect every member of your team to accomplish. And in my salon, yes, that even includes the lad who comes in on a Saturday morning for four hours and shampoos hair. He has a target as well. I see two big problems in the way that salon owners are setting targets. The first is that the individual targets don't add up to what the salon needs to achieve. So I'm talking here about, say, a salon owner who has actually taken the time to set down what they need their salon to achieve over 12 months. The problem is, once they've been through that goal setting process, the target seems to kind of disappear. And when they go through the appraisal process and the performance management process for the individual team members, if you add up all the targets that they're setting, they don't add up to what they want their salon to achieve. So even when your staff are doing well, even when they're hitting the targets that you set, you still don't make the profits and the turnover targets that you set for yourself. And that's a very frustrating place for a salon owner to be. So I fully encourage you to go through the goal setting process. And there are tons of my videos on goal setting. It's my favorite topic. So go through that process. Set your salon target. Speak to your accountant to make sure it's realistic and you know what's involved in hitting that target. And then break that down into the number of team members that you have. And yes, you might need to emphasize full time team members over part time or whatever. But just make sure that if they all hit target, that that means you hit your target as well.

The second problem and slightly more involved problem that I see with goal setting and target setting for your teams is that you're only setting one target. Very often that's a turnover target. And very often that's the point at which an employed member of staff will go into commission. So sometimes it's, say, three times their wage. So they earn three times their wage and then they're starting to make commission. That's one target, but it's not enough on its own. Because, OK, you've got a consequence, a positive consequence for hitting that target, but you haven't got any negative consequence if their performance falls below a certain standard. So what I suggest is that for every target, you have two measures. One is what brilliant looks like, what excellent looks like, when you're going to start getting commission, when we're going to start patting you on the back and praising you. So all of those positive consequences kick in. The other needs to be a lower target. And I think you need to say this is the minimum acceptable standard in my salon. Let's take retail for an example, a nice contentious one. Lots of stylists and beauty therapists hate retailing. But let's say that we have a target for a team member and they're going to sell 20 products a week. And if they hit 20 products a week, there's going to be some kind of incentive or some motivation that kicks in. It could be a financial commission. It could be that they get rewarded by a certain amount of training each year, or it might even just be something as small as a special mention in a team meeting. But I think you also need to set that lower standard for retail as well. So let's say you agree as a team or in a team meeting or you decide as a salon owner that the very bare minimum each member of the team should be doing is two products a day, which is not an awful lot. So what happens if somebody's performance falls below those 10 products a week? There has to be a negative consequence that kicks in. So we've got the positive consequence that kicks in if they hit the higher target. But what happens if their performance falls below a certain level? Sometimes it's just a case of you as an owner or manager coaching that member of the team to increase their performance to the minimum acceptable standard. Sometimes it might, unfortunately, be something a little more severe. So we have a utilisation target in my salon.

We like everyone to be operating ideally at 70% to 80% plus. We also have a lower target of 60%. And if your performance falls below that 60% for three weeks running, we reserve the right to cut your hours. Now that feels very severe and it's not an automatic consequence. It's something that we would consider over a number of meetings. But the idea is that we don't really want to pay you to sit around the salon not earning money for just over half of the amount of time that you're there. So we've got that top level, what excellent looks like, and actually if they hit 80% consistently, that's when we look at promoting and raising their basic. And if it falls below 60%, there's a string of meetings and a negative consequence tied to it. So go through your salon, figure out your performance standards. Don't just have one or two per position. I strongly suggest you have at least three or four. Figure out what excellent looks like and how you're going to reward with those positive consequences. But also figure out the minimum acceptable standard for each measure in your salon as well. 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 hit subscribe, I will see you again next week. Take care.