Thirteen years ago this month, I started coaching and supplying marketing resources to the salon industry. I guess I must have spoken to literally thousands of salon & spa owners all over the world in that time.
Many things have changed. When I started Worldwide Salon Marketing in February 2004, smart phones hadn’t been invented. Apple had only recently launched the first iPod. Facebook was only launched the same month. Google wasn’t even a listed company, let alone the giant it is today. Instagram was still 6 years away from birth.
Most salons & spas didn’t even have a website back then. Many were still using paper and ink to book appointments.
The phone, mailbox flyers, and newspapers were their primary marketing media, along with word of mouth.
Much has changed, and changed rapidly. And it won’t ever stop. But one thing has never changed, and I’m guessing it never will.
It is this: 90% of people who start, or buy their own salon or spa business should never have gone into business in the first place. It sounds brutal, and it is; but in my 13 years of providing all sorts of marketing & business support for salons & spas, it’s been clear from the very start.
Very, very few people in the hair & beauty industry go into business with a clear idea of what they want to achieve. Almost none has read a business book, studied a business course, subscribed to any kind of business or marketing publication, or taken the trouble to seek out specialist help or advice.
It’s a sad fact that most come from a purely technical background – they’re merely good at what they do – and suffer under the delusion that simply being good at what you do is sufficient foundation on which to build a business.
And yet – silly me – I’ve spent the past 13 years attempting, and often failing, to turn many of these hair stylists and beauty therapists into entrepreneurs and business owners. In many cases though, spectacular success.
When Amy Farley came to me ten years ago, she was a struggling massage therapist, breaking her back for 60 hours a week. Today, she’s a successful entrepreneur and marketer with thriving days spas on both coasts of Australia. When Tracey Orr bought our first Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit in 2004, she was operating as a nail technician in a single room at the back of a hair salon. Tracey went on to build Launceston’s biggest and most successful salon.
There are many more such cases. The successful ones possess some common attributes.
· They were relentless about educating themselves on what works.
· They took advice, and hired professionals to do the jobs they were either unqualified to do themselves, or didn’t want to do.
· They ALL took massive action.
· They recognised the difference between working ON the business, and working IN it. And did everything in their power to do the former.
· They understood that their JOB, as owner, was to market the business, bring in the customers, and pay others to do the technical work.
· They started their business with the end in mind.
These are the people I call the ‘ten percenters.’ The ten percent of salon & spa owners – hell, it’s probably less, but I’m generous – who I really should have concentrated on helping further their success, rather than attempting to drag some of the other 90% to the water trough and forcing them to drink.
(Yeah, I know, it’s strange. I’m constantly nagging our Member salons to forget about trying to get recalcitrant, lazy, unproductive staff to do their jobs properly, and instead concentrate their efforts on their winners.)
The vast majority of owners in the hair & beauty business conduct their lives in a constant state of quiet desperation. Too afraid to make the changes necessary for improvement, they struggle from year to same-same year, hoping that perhaps by some miracle, things will get better.
Without changing anything. It’s a common definition of insanity.
For reasons that will become obvious, we’re in no way identifying the victim in this report. I’ll call her Jenny. It’s a false name, but everything else you read here about her salon business happened exactly as described, in the latter half of 2016.
Jenny’s otherwise-successful beauty business has been brought to its knees – in real danger of going under – through theft, deception and outright lies by a ‘star’ staff member.
This employee was hired because of her reputation as a ‘gun’ saleswoman. And she was. Her retail sales and re-booking rates were through the roof. Products were flying off the shelves. New clients were coming through the door in rapidly-increasing numbers. It all looked good, on paper.
But Jenny was mystified. Where was the money?
To her absolute horror, Jenny discovered the awful truth. It was ALL a sham. The so-called star employee was ripping her off blind. Taking cash from clients and putting it straight into her purse. Stealing products.. Secretly contacting Jenny’s clients and offering them cheaper services from her home. Then came the last straw. The employee suddenly left after several months of covert larceny, walking out of the salon with Jenny’s entire database under her arm.
And Jenny can’t prove a thing. It’s her salon business, but it’s as though it had been hijacked.
A highly-developed sense of PARANOIA might have avoided much of the heartache.
There are risks in business at every turn. Competition. Changes in the market. Credit restrictions. Innovation and new technology. (Kodak? Ruined by digital photography. Video stores? The victim of Netflix and iTunes. The taxi industry? Crippled by Uber. It’s a long list.)
But it’s a much harder pill to swallow when the enemy comes from within.
So what can you do to protect yourself?
Security cameras. They are cheap. And they can record everything. You can even view them from your tablet or phone remotely.
2. Database control. Any salon appointment software package worth its salt should be capable of producing logs showing who logged in, when they logged in, and what they did when they logged in. Your list of clients is THE most valuable asset you own. Protect it with every weapon you have at your disposal.
Inventory control. If you don’t rigorously reconcile – every day – product in with product out and money collected, then you’re allowing massive cracks to open up. Things will mysteriously fall through them, unnoticed.
3. Social media control. It’s all very well and lovely to have your clients interact with you via your social media channels. But who else has admin access to your Facebook and Instagram platforms? It’s all too easy to put trust in your staff to ‘run’ your social media for you. And it’s even easier for them to run amok inside those platforms, secretly contacting clients and ‘poaching’ them.
(Did you know that if somebody has NO admin rights to your FB business page, and you haven’t verified that page with Facebook, they can steal the page from you?)
4. Email & Website. Who has access to the business email account? It’s very easy, using email, to get access to your website logins, change the password, and suddenly, the website goes dark.
And they’re just the essentials. You can make a long list of your own.
Many owners in the ‘warm and fuzzy’ hair & beauty industry might find the above a little confronting, not wanting to appear to be Big Brother to their staff. But there is wisdom in that oft-quoted saying, “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
Many salon owners dream of ‘cashing out’ after too many years of hard work, building their business. Too few achieve that dream. Not many even get a sniff of interest.
When Marnie and Peter Doman sold their Perth beauty salon, they had a queue of eager buyers. Yet just a few years previously, they were broke, the salon was barely breaking even.
But by the time they put the business on the market, it was seriously profitable, with a buy price well into six figures. How did this happen? Put simply, the prospective owners were buying a system. Marnie and Peter weren’t selling a business, they were selling a well-oiled, highly-organised system for bringing clients through the door, fulfilling services, and sending clients out the door having extracted – ethically and legally – as much money as possible, every single time.
That system – or systems – were so successful that Marnie’s husband Peter Doman now works for Worldwide Salon Marketing, setting up the same kind of system for our Member salons and spas. Here’s how Peter describes the process they put in place.
Want that for your hair or beauty business? Complete the form here and Peter will be in touch to walk you through it…
“YES! I want to know how to set up my salon for sale!”
I’d be filthy rich if I had a dollar for every time a salon or spa owner has told me “My product suppliers provide all the marketing I need…”
The image you see here is the kind of marketing ‘advice’ some product suppliers are handing out to their retail partners. (I’ve blotted out the name of the product to save embarrassment.)
“Business growth is easy with (name of product):
Advertise your unique service
if the ad pays for itself, run it again”
Wow. Brilliant. So that’s all there is to it. Gosh, and here I was, misguidedly thinking for all these years that business growth was a whole lot more complicated than that. Silly me.
Sarcasm aside, the ‘advice’ above unhelpfully fails to address quite a few crucial questions, such as:
Who is the Target Market for my advertising?
What do I say in my ad that will appeal to that particular target market?
What offer should I make to them?
How do I get them to pick up the phone and order now, rather than next week, or next month?
How to I prove that what I’m selling them actually works?
To advertise anything effectively, you need great answers to those questions.
Fortunately, you don’t need to dream up all that stuff yourself. As a Member of our Salon Acceleratorprogram, you get instant access to more than 1,500 tested, proven, done-for-you salon & spa advertising templates.
The writing and graphic design has been done for you. All you have to do is download, edit to suit your salon, and send to print.
This might just be the most important few paragraphs you read this week, this month, or even this year.
It was sparked by a converstion with a brand new WSM member, who called shortly after the courier knocked on her door to hand over her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®
This salon owner was clearly overwhelmed by the task ahead of her. “There’s so much material in the Toolkit, I just can’t get my head around what to do first,” she wailed.
(My immediate thought, left unsaid, was ‘maybe we’re giving Members too much material’. But then, how do you eat an elephant? Same way you eat a hamburger, one bite at a time.)
So I told her to take a deep breath, and took her through the only THREE things she needs to concentrate on. “Once you GET this,” I said, “everything else becomes easy, logical, simple.”
When we take on a new Member salon into our flagship marketing & mentoring program, My Social Salon, we work on three main areas, and here they are:
1) MESSAGE
2) MARKET
3) MEDIA
First, under Message: what do you say to your past, present and future prospects, customers and clients that is magnetic… that cannot be ignored…that must be responded to. In other words, what is your
USP – Unique Selling Proposition
Most salon business people – and this applies even MORE to big, dumb companies who pay advertising agencies a fortune in shareholders money – make the mistake of believing that some cutesy slogan is their USP.
Eg., here are some slogans used by three of America’s biggest advertisers:
1. We’re with you.
2. That was easy
3. The stuff of life.
Do these bring instantly to mind the name of the company? Nope, vague, meaningless drivel, all three of ’em.
Here’s what’s instructive: these slogans could be used by almost any company on the planet, with about as little impact. As Dan Kennedy writes in a recent article “…if anybody and everybody can use your USP, it ain’t one…”
I’d be a rich man indeed if I had a buck for every time a salon owner told me “Our USP is ‘we give our clients great service’….”
Put your USP through this test: is it a GREAT answer to the question, ‘why should I do business with YOUR salon as against any of the others?’
If not, go back to the drawing board. Take some of the truly great USPs as a model, lay them down next to your USP, see how they compare.
Does yours do for your business what Tom Monaghan’s did for Dominos Pizza? “Fresh, Hot Pizza Delivered in 30 Minutes – Guaranteed”…?
Does it answer the question like Federal Express answered with “Absolutely, Positively Overnight.”
Let’s say you’ve crafted a great message with a terrific USP at its core, next problem: your MARKET.
Who do you deliver that great message to – and deliberately, who do you exclude from it – do you do that effectively, efficiently with little or no manual labour, are you smart about this or are you simply throwing mud against the wall?
When asked ‘Who’s your target market?’ most salon owners will say ‘Er, all of the adult female population within a 5 mile radius.’
Terrific. If you want to send a postcard once a year to all adult females within a 5 mile radius of your salon – hardly an intense, focussed campaign – what’s your budget have to be? Um, $50,000. How much have you got? ‘Uh…600 bucks.’
Problem. Somehow, preferably by science, you have to shrink your target market to a small, carefully-selected list of the best prospects so that your marketing efforts are concentrated for maximum effect with minimum expense. Jump up and down in a puddle, not the ocean.
And third, the MEDIA.
Having chosen your target market and crafted the perfect message to that target market, what MEDIA are you going to use to deliver that message to that market?
(If you haven’t twigged to this already, once you’ve figured out your perfect target market, and the message to send to it, the media tends to choose itself).
So there.
That’s it in simple terms. Message, Market, Media.
Get those things right, the rest almost automatically falls into place.
Thirteen years ago this month, I started coaching and supplying marketing resources to the salon industry. I guess I must have spoken to literally thousands of salon & spa owners all over the world in that time.
For reasons that will become obvious, we’re in no way identifying the victim in this report. I’ll call her Jenny. It’s a false name, but everything else you read here about her salon business happened exactly as described, in the latter half of 2016.
I’d be filthy rich if I had a dollar for every time a salon or spa owner has told me “My product suppliers provide all the marketing I need…”
