Keeping Your Salon In The Game

It is a paradox, CoronaVirus, bad or good for sure. While you can look at it as a crisis and these being dangerous times. We have also been given the gift of time to work ON our businesses. For sure, We must keep ourselves safe and healthy and keep others safe first. We can also take a lot of positive lessons and actions and definitely use this as an opportunity to learn from. Before we onboard any salon owner into our program we have a one-hour discovery call. We ask powerful questions and create a profitability assessment, a fear assessment and a lifestyle assessment.

While this concept brings us some clarity we really go deep on the discovery process once we start our program. But initially, there are almost always 3 main fears that come out of every discovery session:

1. Fear of not enough money
2. Fear of failure
3. Fear of not being good enough

But there is one other fear that often gets overlooked… Fear of being complacent.

While the first three fears are common, we all fear the same things for sure in business and in life. But if you analyze those fears, they are really just a word, Fear. And with all these fears, fear of being successful, fear of not having enough, fear of not being good enough or doing enough… I see the same fears are surfacing with our clients now in these crucial times. So I want to share my biggest observation with you.

The Solution Lies in the Fear of Being Complacent

It is natural to fear in times like this. You all know why as you are reading about it everywhere. You are listening to every podcast there is, every thought leader, every posted news therapy… everywhere. In fact, every time you open something, fear comes and winks at you. You can smell it. Even when the animals hunt they smell fear. And what do we do? Do we freeze or fight? Our nature is to react to a symptom. But what if I told you that it doesn’t have to be like that. That you can totally “choose” instead of reacting to fear by fleeing, freezing or fighting. You can choose to THRIVE! The fear of it all could be resolved by educating ourselves and studying the outcomes before they happen. And create an intentional plan to get the true outcomes we want.

You see the brain is a goal-achieving machine; it doesn’t know the difference between real or imagined. It will act based on thought and emotion. So take advantage of it and create a positive and intentional reaction. By reacting to the fear of what might happen, we create solutions to something that might not even happen at all. But if you are thinking of the end results that you want to have, you will have intentional results that are going to bring you the outcome you really want. I hope that makes sense!

The Long Game:
The long game is what we need to do now to improve our company over time and to make our company “Thrive” consistently. To help sustain our company and our life. There are many things we focus on with our clients when working on the long game.
Here are some powerful things you can do right away that can really impact your business:

1. Staff Recruiting & Retention: you’ll want to create your perfect avatar staff member. This is a great time to think about what kind of employee works best with you, the salon culture and your values. Think about what qualities work for your leading style. Take the three attributes and behaviors that work best with you, that inspires you, and then create the perfect avatar and job description.
2. Create a career road map for your staff and detail how they can thrive in your company.
3. Write a plan on how you will develop them over the next year.
4. Be intentional and ask yourself what are 6 key outcomes you would like to see in your company to improve. Maybe it is things like client retention or your client’s experience, or brand awareness, etc.
5. Design your upcoming staff meetings for 6 months in advance. Preplan each staff meeting topic. Design your meetings to be aligned with your goals and produce the results for these specific outcomes from the previous task.
6. Know your retention numbers. What is your retention for new clients and regular clients?
7. Set goals for the next 6 months. Include a financial growth goal. Use a small % growth for your revenue increase. For example, 2% growth per month on accumulation basis.

All these things will create a habit of focusing on high impact actions and that will make the biggest impact in the long game. Think about what you will do each month to create an experience that will elevate client and staff retention. Focus on working by intention. Measure and analyze the results with your team every other day. You can use group chats or huddles to recognize good efforts and results. And don’t forget to celebrate your wins weekly.

The Short Game:
The short game is focusing on “now” money. These are things we can do that will create immediate revenue and impact. It’s less about the overall strategy and more about creating buzz and income that keeps things going. So that you have cash flowing while you work towards the long term goals.

Here are some powerful things that we have implemented with our Salon Cadence community with very high success and minimal effort. All these things will build collective engagement with your staff and your community of clients and local potential new clients.

1. Have a cocktail party once a week. You can do this virtually online. It’s the perfect opportunity to invite your clients to Instagram Live or Zoom or a Google Hangout party. Create a theme and have fun with it. Share a good book, a good hair practice, answer any question and have one of your staff members deliver a unique demo.
2. How can you monetize? For sure you can offer a membership opportunity for $10 or $20 a month. You could also charge a higher one-time fee for your virtual salon/spa club. Look, if you signed 100 clients for the weekly virtual club party, that’s an instant $1000 per month that you can use right away towards your expenses, saving or other goals. This is your opportunity to speak of great products that your clients can buy right now online.  It’s not a big-time investment but gives so much hope so all win-win-win.

   HERE’S A GREAT RESOURCE: To build stable, predictable & recurring cash flow into your business. Implement a membership plan for salons that is 100% integrated with Phorest Software and Stripe Payment Systems. One of the best ways to build client loyalty! Check out Salon Socials Membership Software.

3. You can offer a virtual consultation as part of the membership or charge for private time.
4. Buy 3 get one free. You can sell gift cards, but intentionally, to your client and to make sure they rebook and schedule their services with your salon. Clients to want to help you very much so give them choices on how they can be there for you. For example, If you buy 3 colors we will give you one free, buy three haircuts you get one free.
5. MAKE NO MISTAKE: when you get money for pre-sale services or gift cards make sure to open an account and deposit all that money into that account. You don’t want to spend the money before you get back to work. This is not cash to spend now, so make sure you have a good way of managing the cash flow behind it.

This last point is so important. Think of how you will use this money once you provide the first service. What will you do with this money? Pay employees and pay your expenses. This is like receiving a loan with no interest. So make sure you set the money aside for your employee compensation and expenses associated with your direct services. Be intentional about it.

I hope these things are helpful. Our clients are all focused on these things right now and more. They are working by design and continuing to build their businesses in these difficult times. The best advice I can give doesn’t just react and rush to make quick money. Keep the long game in mind and be intentional with everything you do. Remember fear can get you into freeze, flight or fight mode… I say “Choose Thrive”.