by Greg Milner | Jul 29, 2009 | The Smell of Success
Info Salon Marketing Superstars – Inner Circle member of the week: Dr Usha Venkataraman
There are good reasons we created the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™ and the Inner Circle marketing and mentoring program for beauty and hair salons, rather than for lawyers, or…doctors, for example.
Lawyers and doctors – as anybody who’s ever dealt with them will confirm – already know everything. Just ask them. So I was never going to beat my head against a brick wall trying to teach a doctor or a lawyer about marketing.
Dr Usha Venkataraman of Aesthetic Image & Laser Centre in Melbourne – sales more than doubled in two weeks after joining the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program in June 2009.
But occasionally one of them slips under our guard and finds their way into the Inner Circle program, like Dr Usha Venkataraman and her colleague Soraya Pricop did at a Road to Riches seminar in Melbourne just over a month ago.
Click here to see the salon’s location
Luckily for these two, they weren’t like most doctors. For years their combined medical/cosmetic clinic had struggled, despite them ‘trying everything’.
So Dr Usha joined the Inner Circle group and took her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit home that day. And unlike many, they took action right away.
Soraya takes up the story:
“In the two weeks leading up to the seminar, my side of the practice (cosmetic) took just $2,500. After the seminar, I read through everything in the kit, listened to the tutorial CDs, took notes during my first coaching call… basically just followed the system.
“In my next 6 days at work, spread over two weeks, my takings jumped to $7,500! Dr Usha had a similar dramatic increase in takings. In a typical 5 hour session (before joining the program) she would take $2,000, maybe $3,000 at the most. But we just did some figures…in a recent 5 hour session, her side of the practice took…$8,000…!”
“It is quite amazing that we had struggled along barely making money for years, and suddenly, just a little bit of education and the right tools, and it’s made a remarkable difference…”
Note to all Doctors: yes, your business is different, yes you’re all very clever and yes, obviously you already know everything. It’d be just too awful to spend all those years in expensive medical school and not know everything.
by Greg Milner | Apr 20, 2009 | Getting Salon Clients Quickly
Tanning Salon Marketing: A Salon Owner’s Story – One Decision CAN Make All the Difference
Lisa Gray of Beauty Naturally in Sandgate, Qld, shares the strategies that saved her business from extinction – and put money in her purse for the first time in years.
(Play the interview recording below and listen in as Lisa describes how her business has taken off.)
By the beginning of 2008, Lisa Gray was at the end of her tether. Years of running herself ragged had left her with little energy, even less money, and the ‘ideas cupboard’ was bare.
Lisa says you ‘could have fired a cannon’ through her little beauty salon on the northern fringes of Brisbane. But as is so often the case, the teacher appears when the student is ready, and Lisa was ready.
In the next 12 months, her sales rose from $170,000 to $230,000, including a 25% increase in product sales. Her return bookings rate rose from a meagre 40% to 68%. She took on between 9 and 15 new clients every month. But the biggest change is her new attitude to her business.
“I get excited about actually having a business,” says Lisa. “I’m not so stressed, and when you’re not so stressed you’re more creative, you’re more at ease with yourself, you enjoy what you do. I actually look forward to staff trainings and staff meetings!”
“It’s exciting, it’s not a drain, and I don’t feel negative, I feel very very positive.”
Here’s just a partial list of the ACTION Lisa took to turn her business around:
1)Distributes a flyer offering a Toolkit-inspired $99 special offer to 500 local homes every month. “This has been brilliant, we get a regular flow of new clients from this.”
2)Sends out the series of New Client Letters in the Toolkit to each new client every week. “They work very well…largely responsible for our higher re-booking rate.”
3)Has implemented the Queen of Referrals program in the kit. “Our clients are loving this…”
4)Sends out a monthly newsletter. Not every quarter or every couple of months, every month, using the Newsletter Templates in the kit. “I get a fantastic response from these newsletters…”
5)Started running a regular, small, lead-generating ad in the local newspaper. “A great response…”
6) Hired a full-time receptionist. “Amazing what a difference that’s made to sales…”
And that’s just the start. As Lisa says, “All this and I haven’t even scratched the surface of the whole Inner Circle program and the Toolkit!”
by Greg Milner | Mar 4, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Salon Goalsetting
Marketing Plan For A Beauty Salon: How do YOU Compare with This Salon Owner??
History is a great teacher. In 1944, General Eisenhower assembled the greatest invasion force in history to storm the beaches at Normandy.
Eisenhower knew that anything less than MASSIVE, overwhelming force, and the Allied attempt to drive the Nazis out of Europe would fail.
It remains a source of mystery to me why so many business owners don’t get this lesson. Regularly, I get email from salon & spa owners who moan that ‘I sent one of your letters to 30 of my clients and only got one appointment…’
Or, ‘I ran one ad…on page 68, down in the bottom right hand corner…and I didn’t get any response…”
One letter? To just 30 people? Well, what do you expect? What else did you do?
It’s a well-known law that action and results are inextricably tied together. Yet it’s a never-ending source of bemusement to me that so many salon & spa owners have massive expectations from minimal action.
So it’s instructive to look below at what’s required to get BIG results. And it shows clearly that the 80/20 rule applies in all things… Clearly, only 20% of salon & spa owners are prepared to take this kind of action, but they make 80% of the money in the entire industry.
Inner Circle member Lisa Conway of Marinelli hair only joined the IC program and received her Toolkit in mid-2008. At the members-only closed-door networking session after this week’s Road to Riches salon marketing seminar, Lisa told me how, until she joined the program, she had spent years in fear, afraid to make changes in her business, afraid to confront lazy staff, afraid to take any action.
All that changed when she ‘saw the light’. In this email Lisa sent the day before the seminar, she reveals a partial list of the action she’s taken, the marketing she’s implemented, in just a few months…
“I got thinking about what I have introduced or changed in our salon since I joined the program and got the Toolkit last July….
1.Send out SMS to a data base at a moments notice with deals to make the phone ring.
2.Collect and use Email to send special offers
3.Advertise with huge success in the local paper.
4.Letter drop our area
5.Put flyers on car windscreens
6.Stand in the street outside our salon handing our brochures
7.Give away $50 vouchers in coffee shops to faces I don’t know.
8.Queen of referrals program
9. Raise the dead letters
10. Birthday $10 vouchers
11. Made a fabulous brochure using an offer and great testimonials
12. Thank you for choosing us letters and $10 vouchers
13. Introduced another retail line so we have two now
14. Went from never doing any treatments in salon to doing 30 a week
15. From not one package to consistently doing packages
16. Weekly staff group meetings
17. Weekly staff training in salon
18. Weekly staff one on one
19. Introduced a fabulous system that puts all staff behaviour into 4 simple groups (Attitude, team, skill and Neglect) easy for us both to track and understand.
20. Display the salon’s weekly takings in lunch room showing both great and not so great work.
21. Know my average dollar sale and watched it go up
22. Know how to find so much more out of my computer
23. I have used movie tickets, holidays and chocolate as staff incentives, not just money.
24. Have staff that gets to work on time and has had their breakfast.
25. Have a staff birthday club that we go out for breakfast.
26. A manager who can now manage staff issues with out me.
27. Cleared out the staff I had with bad attitudes
28. Made our 100% money back guarantee common knowledge
29. Ring all colour work one week later to check if client is happy
30. We regularly back the computer up more than once every day.
31. Dialled up and joined a conference call
32. Listen to disks sent every month that motivate me.
33. Raised my price across the board twice
34. My on the floor time is now 4 hours twice a week.
35.I asked one client to find somewhere else to have her hair done.
36. Renovated the salon completely from 6 stations to 10 and 2 basins to 3
37. Know what % my staff cost me, know what it costs to open the doors
38. Sent my staff to another salon to get their hair done for the experience
“I have enjoyed this journey very much, I would never have believed this much could be done in such a small space of time not to mention watching my profit go up and my anxiety level go down. I am looking forward to the next chapter………….. Lisa.”
So, no fewer than thirty eight specific changes, actions and outcomes… and the biggest outcome of all, a massive $60,000 increase in sales in the 5 months August-December 08 compared with 07.
How do YOU compare with this list?
