by Greg Milner | Jan 5, 2010 | The Right Mindset
Yesterday we took a call from a distressed Member, a salon who’s been with us for several months.
“I ran two ads in a local magazine, and got zero response.”
Among the dozens of calls and emails we get every week, from salon owners expressing delight and wonder at the results they’re achieving as a result of doing ‘my’ kind of marketing, there’s always one or two who complain they’re not getting the same results. And when I analyse it, it almost always comes down the same thing.
Expecting sensational results from only one piece of activity.
The Inner Circle members who do incredibly well – and there is ample evidence of them throughout this website – are without exception those who live by the creed of Massive Action. Those who fail to emulate those results are, without exception, those who regard marketing their business as something of an ‘experiment’ – as if it’s something that a scientist would do in a lab, they test the water one toe at a time. They do one ‘thing’ – one ad, or one small mailbox flyer, or a single one-page letter to their clients, or a sample run of text messages to a tiny proportion of their database, and somehow expect a stampede of customers.
Such expectation is always a mystery to me. You want BIG results? Do BIG things – and not consecutively, all at once.
This salon business owner is hardly alone. Most salon businesses make the mistake of linear (or consecutive) marketing; doing one ad, flyer or letter, waiting a month to see what happens, and then doing another thing, waiting another month, and seeing what happens with that.
Worse, the mindset of the ‘linear’ marketers is such that not only do they do things one at a time, they also do ’em too small – typical of the timid.
Inner Circle member Cherie Hardman (middle) and staff at Femme Fatale in Jannali, NSW with their Ultraceuticals A-List salon award for 2009
Evidence this, just emailed today, from Inner Circle member Cherie Hardman of Femme Fatale Beauty & Skincare, in Jannali, NSW:
“We have now had the pleasure of being a member over 2 Christmas periods and although our increased profits were more spectacular in Christmas 2008, they were more spread out over the months leading up to Christmas this year (due to the special offers you told us to do in Nov). The big one for me is I have cut back to 3 days a week in the salon, and will take up to 6 months PAID maternity leave this year which would never have been possible before joining WSM. We have definitely noticed that when we ‘market big’ we receive big. We also mix things up a bit such as we not only have our normal packages with the add on’s but we also created an additional festive overhaul similar to one of the templates in your Toolkit.”
Marketing your salon business cannot be timid. Recently another member complained that she’d ‘tried our kind of marketing and IT doesn’t work’…. she claimed that a particular campaign that had been incontrovertibly proven to generate thousands of extra dollars for a huge number of our Members had completely failed for her. When pressed, she admitted she’d sent it out to ‘about 25 of her clients’.
Twenty five??? That’s ALL? Yep, 25. No wonder it didn’t work, she didn’t give it a chance. The science of marketing is about numbers. And any statistician will tell you that 25 is far too tiny a sample to provide results of any reliability at all.
But the biggest mistake is doing ONE thing, waiting for a result, and then doing the next thing, and so on. The trouble with this strategy should be obvious – by the time you figure out whether the first shot has worked or not, you’ve lost another week, a month, three months, during which time you’ve avoided doing ten other things that could have been tested alongside each other.
Thirty years ago, when Lee Iacocca took over an ailing Chrysler and set about giving the moribund company a kick in the butt, he had at one stage no fewer than 37 different strategies, plans, campaigns and re-organizations underway. It upset a lot of people (inevitably, those resistant to change) but it saved the company.
To those who complain “I can’t handle too many things at once, it’s too chaotic/my staff won’t like it/it’s messy/it’s too much going on”, I say this:
Success is not neat. It IS chaotic. If at the end of your day you’ve done everything you needed to do, your desk is tidy, not a pen or stray bit of paper to offend the eye, and nothing ‘left over’ for tomorrow…. that‘s when you need to worry. That’s when the business is in trouble.
The Space Shuttle goes straight up because it has to. But your salon business needs to zig-zig upwards…
Neither is success linear, a straight line from zero to hero. ALL businesses zig-zag to success, like a mountaineer criss-crossing the face of the mountain, attaining a foot-hold here, a hand-hold over there, then another foothold a little to the right and up a bit.
It’s why the Space Shuttle needs the energy required to power a small South American country for an entire year just to escape gravity – if NASA could climb a mountain to get into space, it would, but there aren’t any convenient hand-holds on the way. It has to do it all at once, straight up.
But your salon business ain’t a rocket ship. You need a LOT of hands and feet, all working together – at the same time – to climb the mountain. If you’re only using one foot, or one hand, at a time, you’re never going to climb over the creek at the bottom, let alone zig-zag up the hill.
by Greg Milner | Jan 18, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Beating the Competition, The Right Mindset
Marketing Plan For Hair Salon Business: Are you an entrepreneur, or just a business owner?
Salon entrepreneurs & Inner Circle members Jane Dowling and Niki Koutrakis: “Xmas was a huge success! Our best ever! Gift voucher sales were up 50% on last year, and overall we were up 30% for December. That’s with the same amount of staff as well! Jane and I are so pleased as January has been off to a busy start also! And the (Advance Notice Marketing Triggers) you send out by email to Members are great…so easy to follow.”
Even those salon and spa owners whose business is recording bigger and bigger sales in spite of the recession (and there are plenty of our Inner Circle members reporting extraordinary results, see the photo and caption at left, and elsewhere on this site) it would be foolish to point at such results and say the recession does not exist per se.
While there may be green shoots of optimism, by and large the picture is a grim one across thousands of industries.
At home, my 28-year-old second son is glum. Just over a month ago he was riding high on the back of the China-driven resources boom, making over $100,000 a year as a fly-in, fly-out driller, about to buy his first property. Then the crash hit, Chinese orders for iron ore started drying up, his employer’s share price tanked 95%.
Within weeks his world has crashed, about to lose his job, no chance of buying that house. He’s no orphan.
But funny things happen when things get tough.
To me, it’s a time of terrific opportunity for (some of) those in the beauty business.
Lean close, dear reader: for here is a dose of reality that 95% of your competition doesn’t get, won’t understand, will to their detriment ignore.
The typical reaction – certainly among Hair Salon businesses – to a downturn is to close the shutters, to actually stop doing the only thing that brings money in the door – a marketing plan for a Hair Salon Business! For you, the savvy salon or spa owner, this is simply a brilliant opportunity.
Because most of your competition actually remove themselves from the market place, decrease rather than increase their visibility. They stop spending money on advertising. And that creates a sudden vacuum.
Less noise in the market place means your message can be heard easier. Fewer salons & spas spending on advertising means your ads, flyers, direct mail can cut through the clutter.
But it takes a certain entrepreneurial mindset to actually get this, a certain determination to not simply understand it, but put it into action. I wonder how many salon & spa owners reading this really regard themselves as entrepreneurial. Not many, I hazard to guess.
The relative few who do are those who tend to be attracted to the My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program. They understand that being in the salon or spa business is not about cutting hair, or applying glop to a client’s face.
They tend to be risk-takers, because if you’re totally averse to risk, you shouldn’t be in business anyhow.
Stubborn, delusionally optimistic, creative, fearless, flexible and focussed are some of the ways psychologists and business people describe the personality of the entrepreneur.
According to former Apple executive Guy Kawasaki, “you need to be in denial or in ignorance about the huge challenges you face.”
And Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter, says he often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that’s not panning out. “You end up lying there saying, I’m not stopping. It would be an act of shallow cowardice. Or you decide to quit and you say – This is one of those ideas that just isn’t going to work.”
Of the entrepreneur mindset, Kamen says “It’s not that they’re brilliant or well-educated. They work all the time. They don’t let failure demoralize or destroy them. They pick themselves up and keep going and eventually, every once in a while, one of your ideas actually breaks through and works, and it makes all that stuff seem worthwhile.”
(source: http://us.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/01/12/entrepreneur.psychology/index.html)
Here’s an example of Entrepreneurship at Work in the Salon Business (AND a special bonus for Inner Circle members)
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| IC member Tegan Messineo and partner Ben – spectacular results from some entrepreneurial ‘sales thinking’ and marketing ACTION up for her country town salon. |
Tegan Messineo of Body Firming and Beauty in Bunbury, Western Australia, joined WSM and received her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit in October 2008. Tegan obviously believes in ACTION. She writes this week how she used the Toolkit principles, resources in the Members Only ‘Sealed Section’ website and some ‘sales thinking’ strategies to craft a radio ad.
It ran on the local radio station only THREE TIMES before she had to take it off air because it was too successful.
Members: Get Tegan’s radio ad and salon flyer NOW by logging into the Member’s Only ‘Sealed Section’ and navigating to ‘Getting New Clients – Beauty’
On its first outing, the ad ran twice on Day One and generated TEN bookings. On Day Two the ad ran ONCE and generated another 9 bookings, at which point Tegan pulled the ad because they were already up to the self-imposed limit of 19 prospects for the free trial treatment.
At the time of this posting, the salon had had 5 of those 19 in for their free treatment, and signed up FOUR of them for a full course of anti-cellulite treatment at $1500 a time, paid up front. I’ll do the sums for you:
That’s $6,000 in up-front sales, in TWO DAYS, with another 14 prospects yet to see. But at that 80% conversion rate, Tegan can expect total sales of around $22,000 – all from a radio ad that cost a measly $170 to produce and schedule for a full week.
But there was a lot of more detailed ‘sales thinking’ that went into this, I’ll let Tegan explain:
“Now even though we need to give a client 1 hour of our time and we don’t know if they are really here to buy or if they are just tire kickers, we decided that when they call up and book in we will up sell them an extra $20 and they can include Virtual Mesotherapy and Ultrasound to their appointment. Now if this client doesn’t end up purchasing anything she still has to pay her $20 so that then covers our time and product.
“Also because its a free appointment people sometimes think that they don’t need to show up. That then makes it worse for us as we have set aside this 1 hour time slot. So if they don’t want to upgrade to the Meso and ultrasound we then still get them to pay a $20 deposit which they will get back when they show up for their appointment. If they fail to show up they forfeit their deposit.
“In the appointment we have a structure that we use.
- We do the consultation
- Analyse their body shape
- Grade their cellulite
- Measure them
- Do the treatment
- Re-measure them
- Discuss treatment packages
- Close the sale
- Get the Happy Form filled out
“We have included a lot into the packages that we are selling but..in reality it doesn’t cost us much at all. Absolutely everything is factored into the price and then our mark-up is added on. With the toning tables we are using it as something to basically bulk up the package. And we have already had ladies say that they don’t want this or that in their package but because its a package they still have to pay for it.
The cost to run the radio add for this week has been $170.
Thanks for the great Ideas!!! Its sooo nice to see when all your hard work pays off!
Tegan Messineo
Body Firming and Beauty”
by Greg Milner | May 22, 2008 | Ask the Experts, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, The Right Mindset
Salon Marketing Plan Strategy: Has the Gorilla Got You in its Grip?
Is it little wonder that so many in the hair and beauty business find themselves in more trouble than a blind, one-legged dog?
Every week, our fax machine pours forth with a stream of ‘HELP’ letters, from hair stylists and estheticians who’ve suddenly found themselves owning a salon, with not a clue about a marketing plan for their salon or how to generate business.
Like this one:
“Dear Greg, My name is (name withheld), I’ve just purchased a cute little hair salon in (location witheld) on the Gold Coast – it settles in two weeks. “The lady I purchased it from has let the salon run down, she has only been taking about $2,500 a week. I’m so worried that there will be no clients in chairs when I open my doors on June 2nd. I have very little money to play with so I was just going to do a discounted mail drop and hope for the best.
“I have just watched your DVD and I don’t know what the hell to do – I feel sick now, knowing that my mail drop won’t work. I think I have bitten off more than I can chew. I’m keeping the apprentice on but I don’t know how I will pay her if I don’t get bums on seats.
“Please, please, please can you help me so I don’t fail before I start.” |
Without wishing to sound like a broken record (I do) I’ll keep nagging until I’m blue in the face. Fancy fit-outs, expensive equipment, swish furniture, state-of-the-art software systems, up-market products, pretty pictures on the walls, flat screen TVs…. NONE of that stuff matters a damn unless you know how to get customers.
Has your salon turned into a gorilla?
In an average, garden variety day, we interview at least half a dozen applicants for Inner Circle membership. And I kid you not, nearly half of those fall into the category above – having bought or in the process of buying themselves a job because ‘I always wanted to own my own business’, and only too late discovering that the business owns them, clasping them ever-tighter to its breast like a hairy, grumpy gorilla intent on squeezing the life out of its prey.
Far too many stylists and aestheticians fall victim to the romantic notion of ‘being my own boss’, without for a moment employing what I call ‘accurate thinking’ – e.g., “I need X clients per week/month, each spending an average of $Y, to pay the bills. Then I need another Z of those clients in order to give me a profit. How do I get the extra clients I need?”
There is ONLY one way of getting extra clients. And that’s simply a marketing plan. (And before you diss me for failing to mention ‘referrals’ – what are referrals if they’re not word-of-mouth marketing???)
Treat your business like a 10,000 pound gorilla. Your very FIRST priority is to feed it a never-ending smorgasbord of juicy, ripe customers. Every single day. Then shut the door while it eats, and go get some more.
And you can’t be out hunting for customers while you’re inside the beast, working on the tools, digesting the food your gorilla is swallowing.
by Greg Milner | May 8, 2008 | Ask the Experts, The Right Mindset
*Sigh*… another day, another stream of applications for a free 90-day Test Drive membership of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program, and… scattered here and there, the inevitable plea for help from a salon or spa owner who’s left it till they’re on the brink of bankruptcy before taking action.
Many begin their application along these lines:
“I’ve been getting your newsletters/watching you on the web/receiving your emails for two or three years now, and I thought I’d better do something otherwise I’ll have to close my doors in 6 weeks.”
Er…you mean it took three years to work out that you don’t get different results by doing the same thing over and over again??
In the first three days this week we accepted ten new Inner Circle members, three of them on the 30-day Test Drive. But many more didn’t make it. Some went ‘above and beyond’ in their efforts to join the elite group.
Like this one: typical, common, but no less heart-rending for all its ‘me too-ness’. It landed on my desk with the subject line that did not bode well from the start:
“I’m not going to be your favourite customer because…….”
In a two-page fax, this salon owner admits “I have been sitting on your DVD for months, moving it from one pile of paperwork to another, always ‘going to get to that later.” (Yes, I’d like to procrastinate, but I’ll get to it tomorrow….)
“I have no money to give you at the moment.” (No surprise there, given the subject line)
“I haven’t even seen the whole DVD!”
And then, the story: “I have taken my turnover from $37K to $180K in two and a half years, but owe more now than I ever have. Without sounding conceited my salon has the best reputation in town and is quite high end for this market – my growth will back this up – when other salons are closing down I am putting on more staff. The trouble is they cost more than I am making! I need to save my salon’s life and indeed my marraige because believe me, my husbane is over the whole ‘we need to put more money’ in scenario…. I am averaging 2 hours sleep a night with worry, and have nowhere to turn for the money I need to salvage this situation…”
It’s time for some of what I call ‘Accurate Thinking’. If you’re in the same situation as this salon owner, lean closer, dear reader.
There are only THREE ways to increase revenue.
That’s it, three. no more, no less. No matter whether you’re a huge multi-national, or a corner deli. Here they are:
1. Get more customers. 2. Increase what each customer spends with you. 3. Increase your prices.
Folks, it ain’t rocket science. Business is actually very simple. People make it complicated. Profit is nothing more than the difference between your revenue, and your costs. If your costs are high, either reduce them, increase your prices, or better, a combination of the two.
(However, do NOT reduce your marketing spend. Increase what you spend on marketing – it is the ONLY thing that brings customers in…. and that includes referrals, which is just word of mouth marketing.)
FREE DVD: we’re happy to send anyone who wants one, a free DVD on salon & spa marketing. But we’d prefer you actually watch it when you get it, not months later, like the salon owner above. Click here to get the FREE DVD.
Yesterday we took a call from a distressed Member, a salon who’s been with us for several months.
