Why sell retail? Because you’re a professional! You shouldn’t be recommending any colour work you are doing in your salon if that client is going to go home and use a $2.00 shampoo and no conditioner on their hair! This SHOULD be part of your service! Ask every client: “So, you say your colour fades?" "How often do you shampoo and condition you hair?" "What do you use?” Clients are buying their hair products from somewhere, so why not from you? You can start by aiming for 10% of your total sales coming from retail sales alone. Most retail efficient salons will have retail sales at around 20% of their total sales. Some of the best are up near 35% and are able to cover their salon rent/mortgage from their retail sales alone! Here is a 5 step process to making a retail sale. 1. Consult the client about what they are currently using and what they like/dislike about the product. 2. Select the item/s you are going to recommend to them and place it on the station bench in front of them. 3. Explain to them the features and benefits they will receive when they buy it and none of the other crap. They don’t care if it has drops of lemon juice infused with unicorn horn! Or a fart from a pixie and blood from an owl sacrificed under a full moon! All they want and need to know is WHAT IS IT GOING TO DO FOR ME AND HOW MUCH IS IT GOING TO COST? This is what the client wants to hear from you. “You said your hair was super oily and you are shampooing each day. This shampoo is lemon based for lifting and removing all that oil, which will help keep it oil free for longer. So your blow-dry will stay super sexy and not go all flat and limp LIKE YOU SAID IT DOES after you put in all the work to get it looking fabulous!” 4. Tell the client the TOTAL price of their visit today including the shampoo. Most people know their total available dollar amount before they enter. If their service was $60 and the shampoo is $25: “Your total today is $85 including your shampoo, cut and blowdry AND your new shampoo to take home.” 5. CLOSE THE DEAL! “How does that sound?” “Would you like a bag?” Total up the whole amount for services and any recommended retail and say “That will be $232 including your Shampoo and Conditioner.” These are all retailer tricks to get the clients sale. Be confident. Assume that they are buying it. Why wouldn’t they? It’s the best! And that’s how you sell retail in 5 easy steps! This is to all the businesses that love to learn. We have a very successful Facebook page here... We are the largest independent Facebook page for the Hairdressing industry in Australia. We love learning and have attended lots of seminars with Sydney Uni and had the pleasure of networking with some of the "most influential people in social media" according to Forbes Magazine. So I'd like to share 2 of my faves with you. Unmarketing. Scott Stratten is the president of Unmarketing and the best thing about him, besides his snarky, cheeky humour is that he tells you how NOT to market. There are a million books and web sites that tell you HOW to market your business but after a while, they seem to be confusing, annoying and all preachy preachy. Scott is a no bullshit guy with a lot of smarts about him. His pod casts and his books are hilarious and we have learnt many things from him. He is motivational without being cult like and he talks like a "real person". Not a business bore, banging on about blah blah blah. Check out Unmarketing on Facebook and like their page. They have a website, blog and podcast but it's easier to keep up with them starting with liking their Facebook Page. Perfect for those planning to grow your BUSINESS as a whole and learn how NOT to market. Short stack. Short stack is a fab Facebook page, website and blog as it talks to you in real people words about the constant changes to Facebook. They also communicate, how to get around their new algorithm's. Eg, how to keep your likers seeing your posts without always resorting to Paid Ads with Facebook. Short Stack have hot tips constantly for creating content and engaging your audience. They update their content as soon as Facebook changes any of their stuff. They will teach you how to beat Facebook at their own game by keeping your posts "newsfeed worthy". We get asked a lot about tips we have for planning, setting up and/or opening a new salon/business. Here are our top 6 things you should do when starting a new salon. 1) Have a contingency (extra dollars, generally 10% of your total budget) in your set up budget just in case there are hidden costs. Things like bonds on electricity and phone connections are often not known until you try to connect. A contingency will help even just to cover costs until people start stepping through your door. 2) Marketing. Have a good, strong marketing plan that you begin to implement BEFORE your doors open. Plan and implement your ongoing marketing AND NEVER STOP! Don't forget to include marketing and advertising in your budget from the start. People don't come in to a salon because you have expensive, fancy massage basins. They come in because you have marketed to them. They return to you because you delivered a great service and you continue to market to them! 3) Make sure all your council permits are in place. 4) Keep EVERY SINGLE receipt and set up simple record keep from the start. We recommend a good quality software system that can manage your appointment book and all your expenses. (Reviews to come) 5) Join Hair And Beauty Australia, especially if you are intending on hiring team members. They will keep you informed of all the latest information, laws and pay rates. They will also go in to bat for you if things do go sour with an employee. They can help with contracts and legal information surrounding them. 6) Have fun, focus and trust your gut. You are now not just a hairdresser! You are suddenly SUPERHUMAN! You are now a BUSINESS OWNER so please, behave like one and follow our tips. Your job is now not just cutting hair. Your job description now is; - Head of Marketing and Advertising - Accounts and Payroll - Business Manager - Complaints Manager - Financial Planner - Educator and Trainer - Stock Controller - Customer Service Manager - OH & S Officer - General Cleaning and Maintenance Officer Once you forget one of these, your empire will crumble. This is now your job description. Welcome to the game!
Then using your profit and loss reports, bank statements, phone bills etc, and work out a weekly, fortnightly and monthly break down of how much you CURRENTLY spend.
This needs to be exact. You then need to work out which ones you can’t change, the ones that are fixed. For example, Rent. For everything you can adjust, spend the time to make calls, do research. Here is what I saved from 2 days hard work on the net and on the phone. Electricity $300 per year if I paid a set amount every week so I was always in credit. Phone and internet $40 pm as my plan had not been updated for 4 years $480 pa Wages, by getting a staff member to start and hour later or finish an hour earlier on the quieter days, i saved $120 Pw $6240pa Changing from buying Magazines from the newsagents to subscriptions I went from paying $1560 per year to $600 saving $960 per year I changed out SIM card for our SMS to an unlimited one for $29 pm saving $240 pa Call your bank, see if they can’t do you a better rate on your loan. Flip your credit card to a 0% balance transfer then GET RID OF IT! Now a days with savings debit visa cards, why use someone else’s money and pay them for the privilege with interest if you can just use your own. Clean your dryer filters, oil your clippers and scissors regularly to save money on repairs and replacements. Now this is the big one. For Salon use products like colour wastage, we went back to basics and went through mixing ratios and application to ensure, quality services but with minimal wastage. Bear with me on this one. Example. The colour range we use is 1:1 and come in 100ml tubes. Basic regrowth application was 20mls peroxide to 20mls of colour. Out of shear laziness, team members were mixing up DOUBLE this and slathering on colour unnecessarily. Now, last financial year, we did over 2000 colours. We were only getting 2.5 colours completed from 1 tube of colour, so we were buying 800 tubes of colour totaling $7960 JUST ON TUBES of colour. No peroxide or lightener, shampoo or conditioner or styling products. Once we completed basic mixing and application training and I explained all the costs to the team, things turned around. We now get 5 colours per tube. So 2000 clients can now be done with 400 tubes, only costing us $3980, HALVING our cost per year. All that money goes into my pocket and it’s something that you should review at least every year as companies love to do deals to get you to continue to do business with them. It’s your profit. Keep IT! |
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