When is it time to recruit?

Hello. If you have a salon team already, I know you'll have asked yourself this question at some stage. When is the right time to start recruiting your next member of the team? So today, I've got a few tips to help you make that decision just a little bit easier. Welcome. My name is Phil Jackson. I'm the founder of Build Your Salon, and I've made it my life's work to help you with the skills you need to master to build the salon business you deserve. And today, I want to help you decide when is the right time to grow your salon team? When is the right time to be recruiting? First of all, this has to go back to your goal setting. If you haven't got clear goals around what you want your salon to be achieving this year and over the next five years, that is the very first place to start. I can't cover all of that in this video. I've done plenty of videos and work on goal setting. Please have a look through the channel and see what you can find there. Assuming you've got your goals, though, that has to dictate the size of the team that you need. So if you have a certain level of turnover you want to achieve or a certain level of turnover you want to achieve with you moving back from the salon floor, this will tell you how many members of staff you're going to need. And once you know your average bill and your frequency of visits, we can start to break that turnover target down into the number of people you physically need on the premises earning money for you. So that gives us a kind of overall target of where we want to be. Obviously those goals are going to be influenced by what it is that you want. So if you want to start stepping back from the salon floor carrying out less services yourself, you're going to need to replace yourself with a member of staff or two. If you also want to get to the stage where you're opening up a second location, slightly overstaffed in your first location, it's probably a very good place to be. So you're upskilling your team and eventually you might be able to move some bodies over. So your goals have to come first on this. If you're stuck and you don't know how many members of the team you need to achieve your financial goals, take a look in the description box. I've linked in there to a worksheet that I have and an accompanying video, absolutely free. And you can figure out how many members of the team you need to hit your financial goals.

Secondly, when people ask me when is the good time to recruit, I always say right now. We have a process in my salon, a continual process of recruitment. So even though we don't have big recruitment campaigns where we're pushing lots of ads out to try and get new members of the team, I always have my ears open. We always make sure that a certain number of our social media posts highlight the fact that the salon is a lovely place to work and we invest lots in our staff and our training and look how well everybody gets on and some social stuff. So we're kind of doing that background noise on the recruitment scene all the time. I'm always happy to interview potential members of the team even if we have no obvious vacancy. I do not believe that if the right person came through the door with exactly the skills that you look for, exactly the right attitude for your salon and a clientele that they were bringing with them, I do not believe that you could not find room for them. So always keeping your ears open is a really good place to be. The other thing I continually do is collect names of people who might want to work for us one day. So for example, if we do do some recruitment advertising and we do a batch of interviews, there may be people who just aren't right for you right now. I always make a note of their name and number and sketch down a few details and I always ask them for permission to contact them in the future. So then if somebody leaves me unexpectedly, I have a little black book that I can immediately start dialing numbers and get somebody to replace them as soon as possible. If that person has already found another job somewhere else or they're happy in the salon they're at, I ask their permission again. Can I call you next time? And interestingly, nobody ever wants to be taken off the list, which I think can show you that even in a salon where somebody is happy, the level of loyalty is a lot lower than we might anticipate. Thirdly and finally, the right time to recruit is when you think you're going to have to worry about replacing somebody in your team. I call it succession planning. It's kind of what happens if. So when you've got somebody moving up the ladder, it's going to leave a gap in your price structure. Is everyone else going to move up or do we need to recruit in? So when you've done your appraisals in January and you've figured out where everyone's going to be by the end of the year, that should give you a really clear idea of the spaces that are going to need to be filled. Also, to be honest with you, the days of recruiting somebody at age 16 straight from school, taking them through college and then paying them all the way through to retirement are gone.

OK, if they were ever here, the days of people working for you for 10, 15, 20 years at a time. It's just not going to be that way anymore. Yes, of course, there are occasional exceptions. Yes, of course, there are people that will work for you forever. But generally, the amount of time you're going to keep someone on the payroll is much, much lower than it used to be. So you need to make an educated guess around the people that you're recruiting at the moment. How long do you think they might be in post for? Because that will give you an idea about when you need to start succession planning. In my salon, it's a sign of the times, I'm afraid. But we assume that most people will be with us between three and four years. So we take on a new member of the team. And if they're not going to pay back, if I've got to invest lots in their training and I'm not going to be able to claim that money back through increased profits, I'm afraid they're a no-go. I can't take them on. Yes, of course, we have team members who have been with us a lot longer. And I would love it if everybody stayed for 5, 10, 15 years. But we assume, we make the financial assumption that you're going to be with us between three and four years. That helps with my succession planning, helps me get my schedule together for when we're going to need to push that little bit harder on recruitment. I hope that's been useful to you. If it has, don't forget to subscribe. I do a broadcast like this every single week, always on a different topic. 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. Take care.