The focus of 2022 centers around health, wellness, and overall well-being. It’s a time to embrace healthy habits like proper nutrition, getting enough exercise and rest, and taking time to rejuvenate for the sake of one’s well-being.
Now, let’s apply that same healthy mentality to your salon. With every new year, it’s essential to do a little reflecting on the past one. Let us show you how to perform a virtual check-up and take the pulse of your business.
We suggest starting your virtual check-up with reports. They can provide helpful insights, including your salon spending, profits, and growth. Reports are beneficial to forecasting the year to come, can help produce your marketing plans, annual budgets, quarterly goals, and decision making for your business.
Start with Reports
A great place to start your business checkup is with your Total Sheet. With this report, you can see a breakdown for a given date range by service and retail sales, payment types, employee tickets, memberships, packages, and more. This is your daily go-to to balance credit cards and check amounts, but it’s also ideal for reviewing the past year overall.
To see how services within specific services categories perform like haircuts and hair color – run a client analysis report. This report can also help you analyze and consider how to deal with client behaviors such as cancellations and rescheduled appointments and reveal who regularly cancels less than 48 hours before appointments.
Now examine how your team is doing. To view sales by service provider, run an Employee Sales Summary report. The Productivity report will help analyze your staff’s overall efficiency and maximize your space to generate the most available revenue while employee sales performance is outlined on Sales Analysis reports. These reports are helpful to reward or reset your employee performance expectations moving forward.
While getting everything together for your taxes, be sure to pull a tax liability report. Use this report to determine the amount of use or sales tax you owe to your local tax authority for sales for the year.
Get Professional Help
To prepare for the year ahead, consider making an appointment to consult with your CPA so they can advise you about any new requirements for 2022. Either they or your business coach can help you read your numbers, identify trends, and create a plan for the year.
Okay, you’ve checked the pulse of your business by examining your reports and have sought out professional help… now what? Now is the time to optimize how your salon operates.
Assess Your Team
A great place to start your optimization is with your team. Before diving into the numbers with them and outlining expectations for the year, make sure your team is healthy, happy, and well-balanced. You want them to have a good work/life balance and plenty of opportunities to succeed and advance in their careers. Make plans to accommodate time off requests for the year, adjust schedules as needed, and look into ongoing education and team-building exercises to strengthen the culture of your business.
It’s also time to assess the overall morale of your team to make sure you have a positive work environment. Is your team happy with their choice of profession? Do they function well as a team and support one another? Is each team member working to their strengths but improving their weaknesses? Do they feel valued and appreciated?
On the other side of the spectrum, do you have staff members that are repeatedly causing too much disruption or negativity in the salon? Do they bring others down and think only of themselves? If they are not team players or don’t make positive contributions to the team, it may be time to sever the ties to protect your salon culture as a whole.
Next, schedule your professional development meetings with team members to address personal, professional, financial, and wellness goals. Set benchmarks together and ask how you, as a leader, can help hold them accountable.
Here are a few examples of how that conversation can go:
- Reviewing your prior performance, this is what I see; tell me what you see.
- Here are the growth metrics the salon needs you to hit this year, what tools do you need to get there?
- How do you want to personally reward yourself for your professional achievements this year?
Check out our blog for more resources to help solidify your salon team coaching and culture: How to Build Your Salon Team Culture
At the salon level, find out what motivates your team and use appropriate incentives to keep your them on track. Find ways to make goal setting and achievement fun and exciting, then develop a plan that makes the most sense for your business. The more fun your team has, the more engaged they will be, and the healthier your bottom line will be throughout the year.
Optimize Your Operations
Now, let’s look into ways to increase client retention and grow your business by turning all of your clients into your best client. You know the ones: they come in every five weeks, are always on time, and buy everything you recommend. Simply introduce a rewards and referral program and let your best clients know you’re looking for more clients just like them.
Communication is an essential client retention tool. Stay in touch and engage with your clientele in between appointments, making them feel special and appreciated, by using automated and mass text and email marketing.
Set up automated messages to remind clients when they are due back into the salon, wish them a happy birthday, thank them for their business, even remind them when they are running low on products. Just set up the automation once, and let the system do the rest. Your clients will love the extra attention and appreciate the reminders.
You can also send out regular communications to any segment of your client list, letting them know about events, promotions, trends, and exciting news within the salon. A quarterly salon newsletter is always a great place to start engaging and informing your clientele. There are even easy templates that can help get you started and keep your communication efforts on track. To learn more about marketing, tune in to our next webinar on 3/18 with SalonInteractive.
Minimize costly behaviors like client cancellations and no-shows by using automated confirmations and reminders. You basically set it up one time with the timing that’s appropriate for your business, then you just let the software work its magic from there.
This is the year to enforce your cancellation policy and also eliminate client tardiness and no-shows by making deposits a part of your booking process. When clients have money in the game, they respect your time and are more likely to show up for their appointments.
Get a Features Checkup
Now it’s your turn – fill our prescription for optimizing your business by letting one of our software experts run a quick features checkup. They can help you discover features like online client scheduling, automated marketing, and Rosypay integrated payment processing to ensure that your salon is on a path to success. Give them a call at (877) 346 7679 or schedule a time by emailing support@saloninteractive.com.
If you’re not a Rosy user, now is the perfect time to try us on for size. Start your free 30-day trial here: https://www.rosysalonsoftware.com/free-trial.
Leave a Reply