The Spirit to Grow Your Salon Business!
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order”
Alfred North Whitehead
The spirit to grow your salon business may well be strong and thriving. But look at any successful business and you will find the person at the top who will quickly agree that the daily grind of business is largely thousands of tiny, arduous, yet ever so important details. How many of these little details are ever seen by the customer, or often other members of the team? Seldom do they ever see the light of day. Well it simply is not that thrilling, special or often, fun. What we are really talking about here is hard work. In fact let’s call it grunt work and in most cases, no grunt work means no growth. No growth means no hope.
Let me give you an example of what type of work we are talking about. In a highly successful salon operation we worked with the owner of the salon to set monthly standards of operational review. This review for the team members has consequences and rewards but most of all it has the laborious task of looking at the details of the business, intently, and often. Each month the manager of the salon has to prepare labour reports, inventory reports, sales reports, and services reports. What does that mean to the manager? Well each day the manager has to be “aware” of what is happening in the business by looking at each one of these facets of the salon. Looking at a sales summary from the computer to looking at guest evaluations on the service levels to being aware of what products are out of stock or overstocked. Are the appointments being booked efficiently and are the therapists helping out when they are not performing as service? Sounds boring. It probably is, but how else can she be properly prepared and know her business since not only does she need to prepare the report but know what the reports are saying. This orderly approach is a fundamental to know your business and be proactive.
What does this mean to the salon team? Well after the manager has prepared the reports she meets with her supervisors to discuss the results. How and why did they get those results this month? Where did they win, where were the challenges. How did they do compared to last month and last year? What needs to happen to keep up the wins and what needs to happen to change the challenges to wins? Yes, there is more.
The manager and the supervisors then attend a monthly, scheduled, meeting with the owner. There they review the reports talk about the wins, and the challenges. Collectively they decide the strategy to continue to make positive change. Who has to do what, and what needs to happen. Of course this also includes a review of the notes from last months meeting to see how they made out accomplishing the goals they agreed to. Still, yet more.
Well, the people who perform many, if not most, of those countless laborious details, the team, have to be brought in to the loop. So after the meeting with the owner the manager has a scheduled meeting with all members of the team. Here the manager shares how the spa performed, where were the wins, where were the challenges. What needs to happen this month to continue to change and grow? The meeting would never be complete unless the manager also receives some input from the team on what they think needs to happen to continue the growth. The loop is now complete and ready to start again.
Is this glamorous work? Not really. Would you prefer this work or schmoozing with Celine Dion who just walked into the salon? Not much of a choice. Is this work necessary? Absolutely. You can’t possibly expect the business to run right, or grow, if you don’t take care of the business you have today while keeping an eye on tomorrow. This does not mean spending all the time in the office looking at paperwork. It simply means focusing part of your energy on keeping the order of things within the business.
Develop your systems, services and philosophies and constantly review them and improve them. Then start all over again. Constantly communicate and document as much as you can. Write it down, put it on paper, and share it with your team. These are key elements to keeping the order of things. Every team member in the salon needs to know that the salon is committed to being organized, detailed and consistent in the approach to business. It breeds the professionalism and top of mind awareness for paying attention to the details that you desperately want in your team. It is this kind of dogged persistence that must be at the core of your culture to progress and that will keep you ahead of the game, and that new salon down the street. That being said it is not the drive for consistency that can change, it must always remain high, rather the “how” consistency will be achieved.
Change to your salon is what oxygen is to the body. Vital. For survival it must be constant and endless. The real test becomes how to maintain order while embracing the change at the same time. If your salon wants to be around for the long haul you will need to find a balance between these two conflicting yet perfectly integrated ideals.
In the wake of the head spinning change of the life today there may not be a need to even consider Alfred’s ideal of preserving the concept of change.
Just think of the changes we have seen in the last twenty years around the world. New planets and worlds discovered, old countries split while some take new names and how many cells phones are out there now? Although the spa industry in North America is not driving, nor enduring, these types of dramatic changes it has rapidly evolved to have a major presence in the lives of millions on this continent.
After all isn’t the salon business booming with all kinds of new and wonderful spa product popping up everywhere? As this salon evolution has taken place so too has the sophistication of every little part of the business. More suppliers, better computer systems, more and more complex and involved products using every possible plant, mineral and chemical on the planet. New and specialized treatments. Each and every process or activity in the salon continues to be analyzed for a better way to do it. This has produced new, proven and reliable methods of operation that has given some tried and true methods to the spa industry.
Let’s take a well known company to draw a parallel, McDonald’s restaurants. Here is a now global company that found a successful way to do things and have been able to repeat the process billions and billions of times. Wouldn’t you just love to have the same consistency of product and performance that McDonalds has? For the purposes of this example we will not debate the quality of their products but rather focus on the manner with which they do business. No matter where you go in the world, Toronto to Tokyo, McDonald’s customers know that the burger and fries will look, feel, and taste the same. They are a virtual machine. Each and every time a customer walks into their store they know what to expect and they get it every time. At the core their customers trust McDonald’s to deliver what they promise because they have earned that trust time and time again. As the world of restaurants, food and customer expectations have evolved and changed McDonald’s has remained unmistakably consistent. They have preserved order amid change through the art of process and systems.
Yet there is another side to the story. You may or may not be a McDonald’s customer but it is likely you have heard about new menu items constantly finding their way onto the McDonald’s menu. From once the standard Big Mac and French fries, to now with numerous salads and deli sandwiches, where freshness and quality standards are concepts they stand behind. Go to their website and use their Nutrition Calculator. Who would have ever thought of McDonald’s promoting a nutrition calendar 10 years ago? Once again, you may not choose to be a McDonald’s customer but you can certainly appreciate the amazing amount of change that has taken place amongst all of that order. Based on their history these methods certainly appear to be a recipe for success and thus the concept of preserving change amid order has served them well.
They have done this through careful and thoughtful experimentation. They have listened to their customers and they have tried new things. Have they all worked? No. Have they learned from the process? Without a doubt. This does not mean go out today and try something wildly different. It simply means insure the culture of change remains a part of your salon. When is the last time you created a new treatment? When is the last time you sent staff out to be trained or retrained? When is the last time some new paint or carpet arrived in the salon? What is new, special or different today? Most importantly, what are you doing about it in this moment?
It may look a lot safer, and sometimes prudent, to not break barriers or create new ways to do things, but the fact is the opposite is true. If you don’t risk anything you will inevitably find yourself falling behind those that do. You can be the creator of change, or allow change to lead you. Try something new, learn from the wins, and learn from the challenges.
In the end the spirit to grow lives in all successful salons the trick is to find the balance between order and change. Maintain flexibility and consistency. You may not ever find it, or perfect it, but there is there is much learning and joy to be found in the challenge of the attempt.
Do you need help to grow your salon business? Contact us here.