When the industry you’re passionate about sees on average, seven out of ten businesses operate unprofitably, doing the right things the right way isn’t just a desire, but a prerequisite for survival. The same goes for when you’re faced with “Force Majeure” situations, or sudden, unexpected events that can’t be controlled or protected against.
Take Eufora International Business Team Chairman Ashley Toliver-Williams’ quite literal sink or swim situation in 2017. After Hurricane Harvey flooded the city of Houston, and damaged or destroyed nearly 135,000 homes, Ashley’s $1 million award-winning Fringe Salon & Color Bar saw their guest count drop 43%, nearly wiping the business off the map in the space of a second. Now worry not, this isn’t a sad story; rather one of resilience. If you ever find yourself in Houston, you should swing by the salon; it’s still there standing strong! The thing is, these situations force you to reevaluate your salon business management vision and priorities.
Salon Owner, Co-Founder of Fuse Republic & Eufora International Business Team Chairman
To which do you relate to more: knowing a lot of stuff? Or are you doing a lot of stuff? Are you using blueprints that keep you working hard but provide little results? Tackling social media, branding, values and motivation, the following speakers dove into some of what should make the top of your priority list as an owner, or manager.
Engineering employee behavior with Ashley Toliver-Williams, Jay Williams and Josh Hafetz
Before Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, Ashley Toliver-Williams was turning hairdressers into six-figure hairdressers. The only issue was that the very same employees she had seen grown, she would also see leave her business in favour of their very own ventures. Why couldn’t she retain her top performers and inspire the results she wanted to see in her salon?
With her back against the wall, she had no other choice than to dig into the issue. What she worked on was the culture and communication — understanding what would motivate her staff to create growth and results for both themselves and others, all the while guided by the salon’s big hairy audacious goal.
Concretely, her salon business management style shifted the conversation from results-focused metrics (what you as the owner, should have a grip on) to behavior focused metrics. For example, to stop talking about retail sales and instead talk about “care factor,” emphasising the idea of caring for guests long after their visit, through retail product recommendations.
It was interesting to have it as the Salon Owners Summit Roadshow’s first presentation of the day as both Jay Williams, Salon Industry, Author & Educator, and Josh Hafetz, President of Art of Business, then later tackled leadership related topics. In Jay’s highly interactive keynote, the focus was set on values, and how they can help protect company culture. “Values-based leadership requires the need to communicate your values at every opportunity possible. People are far more responsive to a conversation about values than behaviours. Talking about behaviours doesn’t shift employees’ thinking at all; therefore, it is difficult to get any emotional or psychological engagement from a business management point of view.”
25 year veteran of the Salon Industry, Author & Educator
Are you in the business of hair? Or in the business of people? Most importantly, do your workplace values reflect your answer?
Jay Williams puts it this way: “Leaders must lean on the value of the organisation to drive performance, especially in times of change. An organisation’s values should be the bedrock of why the company exists, how it makes decisions and its true purpose. They must be authentic and relatively specific, so they resonate with the team as guiding principles, the way that you work.”
Some workplace value examples include:
- Being accountable
- Making a difference
- Focusing on detail
- Delivering quality
- Being completely honest
- Meeting deadlines
- Helping others
- Being a great team member
- Keeping promises, etc.
That’s the thing about values-based leadership. It’s your world, and you can create your word. However, the critical part is to be able to define those values compellingly and articulately.
Salon business management tip: breaking the Habit Loop
If your people are still not following through on their professional responsibility, then perhaps, as Josh Hafetz explained, you either haven’t tapped into what motivates them intrinsically or they’re stuck in a habit loop.
“Think about something you might want to instil in your people. Let’s say pre-booking. One strategy is to say ‘you have to pre-book more’ and try to cheer your staff on. But for it to be effective in the long term, you have to turn pre-booking into a habit,” Josh explains. “One thing you could do is create a trigger; maybe five minutes before their shift starts the trigger is they look at their book, and they look at their client base, and they say 4, 5 or 6 weeks, based on each client. They now have a trigger that’s going to help create the habit of pre-booking through the day. And maybe at the end of the day, you go around to each of your stylists and give them a little Wawa card or something silly to recognize what a great job they did.”
Your people don’t have to have the same values as you. But they have to be willing to support your vision. They need to know what’s in it for them if they choose to support your values. And when a leader gets better, the people get better.
Social media and brand management with Olivia Smalley and Mikey Cannon
Despite coming from two opposite perspectives, both Celebrity Stylist and Social Media Influencer Olivia Smalley and Product Design Lead Mikey Cannon also stressed the importance of having a strategy that provides results — only this time, in a social media and brand/reputation context.
While Olivia tackled content creation and connecting with users on social media, asking attendees if they’d rather have 1000 views or 1000 likes, Mikey talked about ways salon owners could fully capitalise on their existing database and ideal clients by leveraging reviews, custom branded experiences and Instagram advertising.
Context, consistency and purposeful posting on social media
It can be quite easy to lose track of what can concretely help grow your salon or spa when it comes to social media. “But Instagram is not the devil,” claims Olivia. “What we don’t know is what we don’t know. That’s why I am here today: to make it seamless and easy.”
Purposeful posting is simple when you have the formula for it: entertain, educate and inspire (EEI). Starting with content, she explains: “As soon as somebody grabs their phone, the first thing they’re going to see is your pictures.”
From there, they do one of three things:
- Swipe away, not interested
- Follow up with your work
- Decide they want to sit your chair
Captions, she continues, create a context for your followers or people landing on your page. Where content is king, context is queen. Your pictures are essential, but so are your captions: “The caption is where people get to know you.” Imagine working out at the gym and only building arm strength. That’s what you’re doing if you’re posting content without context.
Olivia then dives into cross-promotion and consistency, adding another layer to working on the right things. When you start promoting other stylists on your page, people start interacting with other employees in the salon, and slowly but surely, this makes them feel at home when they spend time in your business.
So what about followers you may ask? As a focus point, it’s not something you should keep tabs on. Instead, “keep up with your online portfolio,” the social queen says. Bring your offline reputation online, and grow what your finishing skills; or in other words, how you angle the camera, how you get your clients to pose, the way the hair falls, the light you use. Keep your focus on educating your clients by showcasing both you and your work.
Using your client database to its full extent
In the same spirit, Phorest Product Design Lead Mikey Cannon discussed the future of salon marketing, putting great emphasis on users’ online experiences.
This included three key ideas:
- Online reputation
- Custom branded experiences using apps
- Targeted Instagram advertising
Each of these ideas feed into one another, and we can observe their relationship by looking into a person’s customer journey.
Product Design Lead
Before someone books into your salon, they are likely to look you up online. It turns out that 70% of people check out a business online after someone refers it to them, and 46% of online bookings happen outside of opening hours. Therefore, you need to make sure your offline reputation matches your online reputation, or you run the risk of losing out on appointments.
How often do you ask your existing clients to review the services you provide on Google, Facebook and/or Yelp, and reply to both good and bad reviews? Share this feedback on your social media accounts? All of your online activity, as Mikey illustrated in his presentation, impacts your SEO and inherently your salon’s Google ranking.
For more insights on the effects of online consumer reviews on purchasing decisions, download the free Phorest Online Reputation eBook here.
But let’s say you’ve got that under control. Mikey Cannon’s second point was about delivering custom branded experience. “At Phorest, we’ve completely redone our Branded Apps experience,” Mikey explained. “The main reason and the main focus was about ensuring the salon was communicating who they were online and controlling the experience they get.” If we understand a brand as a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organisation, then must agree that a brand is dynamic, “some people connect with certain aspects of a brand, while others connect meaningfully with another. And oftentimes, a person’s relationship with a brand can really develop – increasing trust, loyalty, meaning, and engagement.”
Provided you deliver exceptional service, getting that first online interaction right ensures new clients book in and existing clients return, hopefully in time creating a reliable database of ideal clients.
This is where Mikey’s concepts come full circle with Olivia’s social media keynote. Once you have an ideal client base to grow from, you can use it to its full extent and draw in similar people on Instagram, using targeted advertising.
After all, social media perhaps isn’t the beast we make it out to be when we strip it back to business priorities, now is it?
Thanks for reading! #LetsGrow!
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