The Power of High Ticket Pricing in Your Salon

Are you happy to be part of an industry that's historically and continues to be underpaid? Personally, I'm not okay with that, and I'm pretty sure you didn't start your salon business with the idea of being the cheapest and hardest working in town. Stay with me as I convince you why and how to be charging high ticket prices. Hello, hello, hello, my salon lovelies. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. My goodness, isn't this year flying ahead with us? Here we are towards the end of February. Personally, I am ready for spring. I feel like I've been cold for about three months now, and I'm tired and I need some sunshine on my face. I need some spring in my step, and I'm ready for some busier salons too. How's business? How are things treating you? Interesting picture in February for my guys. Very varied. We had a stronger than anticipated January. February's a bit patchier. Still lots of people moving appointments around, so my first piece of advice is tighten up those cancellation policies. Make sure we're getting those booking fees or deposits in place. Make sure everything is squeaky clean and clear for when your clients are booking. Let's stop letting them dick us about, shall we, darlings? And what are we talking about today? Well, we're returning to my favourite topic of money. And this is off the back of some coaching conversations that I've been having over the winter, particularly around people struggling to get enough clients in to pay themselves more, to make more profit and to make their salons a more profitable business. And I think there are a few people that over the winter have come to me as if I'm some kind of Gandalf character, my loves, as if I've got some endless pocket of clientele that you can tap into that you weren't aware of their existence, that suddenly I can conjure a busy salon out of thin air. And of course, that's not true. Your uncle Phil has worldly limitations, the same as anybody else, much as I would love to turn you all into the spicy success that you need to be. Because sometimes there just aren't the clients there. And the first step, of course, is to take some responsibility because you're responsible for everything that's in your business or everything that's not in your business as well. Everything is there because you put it there or because you allow it to continue to be there. That includes lousy clients and lousy team members, by the way, my loves. But if we are facing a reality where there's just not enough clients in our locality, in our local area, well, sometimes that's a bitter pill to swallow because you have to take responsibility for that.

Because at the end of the day, my darling, you chose to put a bloody salon business there in the first place, didn't you? And if there are no more clients to be found, but we still want to be making more profits, well, there's only one place that can come from. After we've done our rounds of cost cutting and efficiency, after we've reduced the spend on superfluous items and cut back the fat as much as we dare without impacting that client experience, of course, there's only one place left to go and that's charging more for what we do. So the first thing we need to do, of course, is to disconnect what we do from what it costs us. And that's my first piece of advice for you on pricing and high ticket pricing. So we have to get away from this model of looking at what every single service costs us down to my God, I hate it so much, so much. When we look at pricing exercises, and every coach out there has a pricing program, I'm not unique in that. Mine's called Get Paid Properly, I'll tell you about that a bit later. But every coach out there has a pricing program and so many of them are looking at cost-based pricing. So many of them want you to go down to the last milliliter of product, down to the last cotton wool bud to figure out how much a service costs you to carry out. And I'm telling you now, that is a miserable, boring place for you to be. It means there's not enough profit built in for you to waste an extra milliliter of product. It means that we're cutting things so fine and so tight that there actually are very, very, very small manoeuvres available to us as business owners. And let me tell you, if you're employing team members, you might be measuring your product down to the last milliliter. I guarantee you, they are not. They're using more cotton pads than you warrant, my dears. So let's get away from that cost-plus-based pricing. And that buys us some freedom, but of course, with that freedom also comes a responsibility. We need to have a system for our price setting. We need to understand the mechanisms of high-ticket pricing. And why would we want to, apart from the profit margin excuse, why do we want to charge these high-ticket prices anyway? Well, I alluded to lots of people moving their appointments around and cancelling last minute in my introduction section.

That starts to dry up a little bit when we get into high-ticket prices. There's a very old adage in the coaching world, which we can apply to the salon space as well. And that adage is that the more they pay, the more they pay attention. What does that mean? Well, it means that people who invest financially in the services that they're buying also invest emotionally and take those services much more seriously than people who are paying budget prices. The more they pay for an appointment, the more likely it is that that appointment is going to be positioned as important in your customer's mind. So charging high-ticket prices actually gets you a better quality of customer. And every time we increase those prices, we may well be pricing some people out of the market. We may be pricing some of your regulars, some of your old-timers out of the equation. But guess what, my dear? Every time we increase our prices, we also tap in to a new potential market. Because as much as there are people out there who will not pay £100 for a facial, there are some people out there, some very high-quality customers, who don't believe you can get a high-quality facial for less than £100. So every time we price some people out, we price some people in as well. And they tend to be better behaved. They tend to take the upsells, take our recommendations, and take retail products as well. Why do they do that, do we wonder? Why do they behave themselves better? Well, it's because we also expect to pay more for an expert. There's a price perception exercise going on. And I know it's unfair. I know it shouldn't be this way. But the reality is, and let's face it, my darlings, I'm coaching you on reality, not just the ideal. But the reality is that if I have two people side-by-side in a marketplace, one of them's charging £50 for a service and one's charging £150 for a service, who do you think I'm going to see as the expert? Who do I believe is going to do a better job, get me better results, deliver that transformation more effectively? Of course, it's the higher price. So that price perception exercise we can use to our advantage because it positions us as an expert in the marketplace too. But why is it important that people take upsells? Why is it important that they take the products that they recommend? Well, of course, it's not just so that we can make more money. Though ultimately, my dear, don't forget, business is there to make money. That is your purpose. And in fact, in some places, if you're a director of a company, you have a legal obligation to maximise profits for your shareholders, by the way.

Anyway, it's not just about making more money. It's about getting better results for our customers. And ultimately, if you want the best for your customers, if you want to be able to use the best products, if you want to be able to invest in the best coaching, the best training, you want to deliver the best client experience. Well, ultimately, that costs. You can't build a Bentley and charge for a Ford Fiesta. It's just not tenable in the long term to keep investing in your skills, keep making sure you've got the best products on the shelf, keep making sure that your team is highly motivated and not charge for that. But of course, we can't just go out there charging high ticket prices. That's got to be backed up by the customer experience as well. So let's jump into my tips on how we can charge high ticket prices just after this quick message. Let me guess. Your appointment book is full, but your bank account isn't. How long are you going to let that go on for? Isn't it time that you got paid properly? My Get Paid Properly program isn't just another course. It's your roadmap to boosting your profits, increasing your takings, finally getting rewarded for the hard work that you do. With nine straightforward modules, my foolproof pricing spreadsheet, and I'm even throwing in a one-to-one coaching call to answer any questions that you have about the training or anything or anything else that's getting in the way of your incredible success. Head to getpaidproperly.com forward slash podcast, and you can save a hundred pounds on your sign up and get that bonus coaching call with me. The program is backed by my signature 90-day no-quibble guarantee. Take the training, take the coaching call, and if you don't feel you know enough to confidently set your prices profitably for the future, I will coach you myself until you do. Head to getpaidproperly.com forward slash podcast, lock in that saving, and finally take strides in the direction of getting rewarded for your hard work. So how do we go about charging more?

I hope I convinced you of the need to start charging higher prices. And trust me, you're not just doing this for the good of yourself. You're not just doing it for the good of your business. My darlings, you are doing it for the good of the industry. We all need to be charging a lot more. We all need to have a lot more confidence in charging for the transformation. And that's tip number one, is to stop charging for the product that you're using, stop charging for the time that something takes, and start charging for the transformation that you're delivering. Time does not equal money, and it should not equal money. At the end of the day, and I love this analogy. It wasn't, it's not my analogy at all. It was taught to me a long, long time ago. But at the end of the day, let's say you have a vicious toothache, and you go to a dental expert. You go to your dentist and say, I've got this terrible toothache. I need you to help me fix it. Do you think we want that to take a very long time, my loves? Or would we actually pay a premium for a dentist who can get rid of that toothache in two minutes flat, rather than 45 minutes? Of course, we want the transformation as quickly and effectively as possible. So let's start disconnecting the time that a service takes from the results that we're delivering, and start charging for the transformation. And that has to come through in your marketing as well. Stop talking about each element of a service. Stop talking about things in a step-by-step way. Start talking about the transformation that you're going to deliver to your clients, how their life, how their position, how their skin, how their hair, is going to be better at the end of the visit. That frees you up to be charging an awful lot more. Secondly, let's start making it a little bit less easy for people to shop on price. So what do I mean by that? I mean start creating signature treatments. And I know that your manufacturers want you to slavishly follow the protocols that they teach you. They want it to be with their name on your price card, not your name. And trust me, they also want you to be using a probably quite sizable amount of product during that protocol as well. Because ultimately our manufacturers are self-serving. They want to sell more products to us. Let's not kid ourselves that they're on anyone's side but their own. But you've got enough knowledge, you've got enough understanding, you've got enough expertise to be combining those products, combining those protocols. Of course, we need to be using things in a safe way. But you know how to put those treatments and services together to deliver amazing results for your customers in a way that only you can deliver.

Something that's signature to you, something that's bespoke. Because if it's bespoke and signature, you can't shop on price anymore. I'm not going to see that service described in that way, delivered in that way on anyone else's price card in your town, in your region, heck, even in the country or the world. Suddenly we're selling something unique and that frees up an awful lot as far as pricing collateral is concerned. And the final element is my call to arms not just to make your services unique. Don't just make the process unique to you. Let's start making the experience unique as well. Let's start spicing up that customer experience with unique touch points that nobody else does quite the way that you do. Let's start getting our personality back into our salons and clinics again. Because trust me, over the last 15, 20 years, that personality has been erased layer after layer after layer. So much so that very often I can take your branding away from your website and it could be anybody's website. I can take your branding away from the outside of your salon, step inside, and I could be in any business. Let's get your personality back in there. Let's get that experience completely unique. Because if people aren't shopping on price anymore, if people aren't shopping just on those step-by-step processes, they're shopping on the transformation. The other thing they're shopping on is the way that you make them feel. And that is your customer experience. Let's get a bit of your magic back in there, shall we? So there we have it, my call to arms on charging higher ticket prices. What have I missed? What are you doing that means you can elevate your prices amongst your competitors? What are you doing to make sure your business is the most profitable it can possibly be? Reach out and let me know. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends. You've been very quiet this year and I shan't stand for it, my darlings. I really shan't. Also reach out if you would like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. You might be a supplier or manufacturer or expert in your field with something that you would like to share with my audience. By all means, reach out. Or maybe you are a salon owner or a business owner who just wants to share their journey. I promise you it's not about having the biggest, most impressive business in the world. Anybody can be inspiring to my audience. We will find the little nuggets of wisdom that you have to share. So reach out phil at buildyoursalon.com scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again with another dose of my Wiser Hour wisdom.

Next week I'm going to have a little tool, a little device, which is going to help you find the very best clients out there. And until then, take care.