The Profit Vampire Hiding On Your Salon Menu

There's a service on your menu right now that's quietly costing you money. Every time a client books it, you lose. Most salon analysts have no idea which one it is. I'm gonna tell you how to find it and what to do about it All. Build your salon. Hello, hello, hello. My salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your Queen of salons coming all over the internet with another dose of my Wise Owl wisdom. How on earth are you achingly well, I hope as we storm towards June, my gosh, where's the year going, darlings? Is it just me getting old or is this year zooming by? Though I could do with perhaps a little bit more sunshine. What are we talking about today? Today we're on fix number two of my Money Fix series. So last Monday we talked about the 300 pound expense that was really costing me 3000 pounds. Today we're gonna go in a slightly different direction. We're gonna talk about the services on your menu, which are quietly eating into your profits. And I'm calling them profit to vampires because frankly, I'm a camp hold nonsense kind of guy and that's my show I can do as I damn well please. But that's what they are. They sit on your menu looking innocent and they get booked all the time. And every single booking costs you money that you didn't know you were losing. It's not just a service that loses money on the invoice. The price looks fine on paper. You've done the sums, you've done the calculations. So clients book it happily, your team don't complain about it. Everything looks normal, but the problem is what's underneath because once you factor in the costs and time that a service takes, the products that it uses and the cost of the slot it occupies, the maths comes out in the red and you start losing money on the booking and you can't see it because the invoice looks like it's in the black. And there are a lot of salon and owners kidding themselves with some of these services that they lead to higher price services in the end. And I don't think that happens as much as you think either. I think there are an awful lot of people who keep things on their menu because they say, I know I don't make a lot of money on nails, for example, but that's fine because they go on to have facials. Do the sums, do the figures, have a little look through the reports. It happens a lot less than you think. Not saying that you can't make nails profitable, but for a lot of salons, those lower price services are hard to turn into money spinners. And most business owners have at least one of these profit vampires. Some of you have got several, and until you do this sense check, until you do the sums, you can't genuinely tell, which is which. Let me tell you about one that I had: a classic children's haircuts. We had them on the price menu for years priced low because that's what you do with children's haircuts. And you tell yourself that you're filling the quiet slots and it brought the parents in and it looked like a clever bit of business. It wasn't because here's what was actually happening. A kid's cut was booked in for 30 minutes, half the price of an adult cut the actual appointment though actually took nearer to 45 minutes. By the time you've sat the kid down, persuaded them that this is not gonna kill them. Stop them screaming and done the haircut around the wriggling awful child in front of you, cleaned the hair off literally every single service and got them paid up. They're in the same chair using the same electricity, the same scissors as everybody else for half the money. And that's not even the worst bit. That is what it did to the diary because that four o'clock slot on a Thursday was prime real estate and one that I could have sold for a 200 quid colour and it was locked up by a 20 quid kitty cut and that kid wasn't paying the bills. The expensive colour slots were and the parent had the kid in tow. So they weren't even in getting something done at the same time. So I ran the money properly. The profit per hour on a kid's cut was less than 18 pounds. Profit per hour on an adult, easily double that sometimes an awful lot more. Here's where it gets interesting though. I didn't just put the prices up. I know, shock horror, me driving kids out of the salon, what an arsehole, but I did something even better. I reframed the salon experience. What we did was start leaning into the salon being a quieter space, a retreat from the chaos, time for you. The things that salon owners forget is that for an awful lot of our clients, an appointment isn't just a haircut or just a facial. It's the one hour of the week when no one asks them anything, when nobody needs them. When no one's pulling at their leg, they don't just come for the cut, they're coming for the peace and quiet as well. And even if it's not your screaming three-year-old in the next chair, someone else's screaming three-year-old kills all of that completely. So we made the decision. Kids went up to adult prices, full prices, no concession, and that only available at specific times normally on a Saturday when the busiest slots are around when the salon was already noisy anyway. And we couldn't have that feeling of peace outside. These windows just not available. Some parents had a problem with it. Some parents left. Of course they did. But that was kind of the point because they weren't bringing in an awful lot of profit with those slots anyway. The ones who stayed, the kids who carried on coming rather paid full price, they tended to be the ones that had difficult hair, very curly hair, some that had Afro-textured hair, and they were really the ones that were taking an awful lot of time anyway. So it was fair that they were paying full price and we could now give them a full size slot instead of a kitty cut slot. Either way, the salon was the winner. But of course, it's not just about the kids. The principal works for every service on your menu. It's about those services, those little tiny services, those express services that don't take an express amount of time, that quick brow shape that actually ties up a beauty room for a disproportionate amount of time. By the time you've consulted and maybe mapped things out and threaded and tinted, it's just not enough to be charging 20, 25 quid when you could be using that room for something much higher in value. They're not bad services, but they're badly priced or badly positioned. And until you've done the maths, until you've traced the client journey, you just don't know. When you find a profit vampire, what do we do? I've got three options for you. The first is we reprice, and that's the most direct. So the service stays on the menu, but the price goes up to reflect what it actually costs you to deliver. Some clients are gonna leave and that's fine because the ones who stay are gonna cover what that client was bringing you anyway, in terms of profit. Second, you can reframe, and that's what we did with the Kids Cuts. The service still exists, but it's repositioned, has different availability, different terms, different times, different framing. You stop it. Eating into your premium slots or retire is the boldest, and that's where we're just brave. We take it off the menu. Some services don't belong in your business. They attract the wrong clients, they tie up the wrong slots, and they distract you from the work. That actually makes a big difference to your profit margin. You don't have to pick the same option for each vampire. Some will get re-priced, some get reframed, some get retired entirely. The point is, you stop pretending that the problem isn't there anymore. So pick three services from your menu today and just work out what it actually brings in terms of profit, but also the impact that it has on the rest of your business. If the sums don't add up or if things just have a little bit too much of a negative to them, you've found a vampire. And then it's time to ask yourself, are you gonna reprice? Are you gonna reframe or are you gonna retire? You don't have to do anything dramatic today. You just have to sit with that little bit of knowledge. This is fix number two of five. If you want the full walkthrough, the profit checker, the maths laid out for the services on your menu, plus the other four fixes that are designed to help keep more profit in your salon business. Head over to 10minutemoneyfix.com. Spend nine quid about an hour of your time and I'm gonna put that link in your show notes as well. I'll be back on Friday with another episode on a slightly different tack. I'm not gonna do these money fixes every single episode, every other episode throughout the month so we can change up the flavour a little bit if this is really not your vibe. So just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again. In the meantime, reach out and let me know what you think. What are the profit vampires in your salon business? Has this episode helped you at all? Also, reach out if you'd like to discuss this with me in interview on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I'm now looking at recording my July interviews. I would love to see you, meet you, greet you, bring you into the Build Your Salon podcast world. Until next time, take care.