Beating the credit crunch in your hair salon

Hellen Ward is managing director of the Richard Ward Hair & Metrospa in London’s Sloane Square. She has introduced various schemes to ensure her successful salon in the centre of the capital is running at its full potential. Here is her advice on maximising your business and how to fight the economic downturn.I want to bring in some revenue from other income streams in my salon. Any ideas? I hate to see salons where space isn’t utilised and maximised to its optimum potential. Over the years we’ve experimented with loads of different services and ideas, but there are some that have proved to be very productive:

• In-salon catering is a great idea if you have the space: not only do you offer your clients (and busy staff) a more comprehensive service, but if you sub-let the area to a professional you can get some extra income too.
• Creating a relaxing backwash area where you can offer conditioning treatments is a great use of dead space and a brilliant promotional and marketing tool.
• Creating specialist areas works well – nail bars, colour bars, consultation zones – I would always focus on anything that helps you highlight your professional services.Some manufacturers are willing to help with branding and may help financially too, so there’s no excuse to turn dead space into an extra staff room.

If you’re short of space, you can still implement additional services. Manicurists who work while your clients’ hairdressing treatment is in progress don’t take up much space and can really increase the client experience. Rival salons keep discounting their services and promoting colour sales. Should I follow suit? Not unless you want to cheapen and devalue your brand and your staff’s expertise. I never agree with discounting services. This style of promotion and marketing normally attracts a transient clientele – you will probably find you’ll have to work much harder to gain their long-term custom and loyalty, as they’ll be shopping around for the cheapest deals. Half-price sales can have the reverse effect of actually driving full-price business away. It can also be demoralising for team morale, especially if your pay structure is performance related. So go for an ‘added value’ promotion, such as receiving a complimentary conditioning treatment when a client books a colour service and reward your clients rather than penalise them. I keep being told by product companies that I should focus on trying to increase my colour business. Is this right or should I be looking at other aspects? There is a reason why manufacturers are looking into the colour aspect of our business. Often, they statistically compare the UK with other European countries and our percentage of colour clients is lower than countries like Spain and Italy. They see an opportunity to educate the UK consumer into becoming more likely to have professional colour and so focus much of their activity on growing this sector. Colour can be a huge part of your business – particularly if you go the specialist route and promote team members to solely be colour technicians. This is a huge investment training and marketing-wise, but can pay dividends if you build up your technical expertise and promote colour as a specialist service. But there are other services that are burgeoning and should be given attention. We have been marketing our weekly or twice-weekly blow-dry services with younger, more inexpensive team members as a new revenue stream. Some of our regular cutting clients are happy to see more junior team members for their blow-dries and are encouraged to stick to their senior stylists and colourists for their other appointments. It’s a great way of getting apprentices on to the floor and a good introduction to the experience of having their own clientele. Standards have to be extremely high, so it’s a great training exercise too, and offering these services to loyal, good clients has been a great double-win for us and the team. How can I promote the services of staff who aren’t busy and are finding it difficult to bring in new clients? You need to train and educate your team members to learn how to develop their own clients through upping their service, selling other salon services that they (or other team members) perform, through retailing, and generally looking for every customer opportunity at every level. This is all time consuming and it’s hard to make time to do it, but you must. Speak to your main manufacturer to see if it can help with training at this level. It could run an incentive scheme or competition for your team to encourage them to sell other services and retail, which works on building the clients they already have. With regard to bringing new clients in, ask your manufacturers again. Can it help with some marketing to new potential clients? If you don’t ask, a manufacturer it may not think to offer help. It could perhaps support you with some branded promotional leaflets that you could link up with other companies in your area to do some cross-promotional events. All of the above will drain your most precious resource – your time. But only by taking time out to develop these other areas will you get the turnover you need to secure your business. Arrange an urgent meeting with your rep and see how they can help you increase and develop your business – tell them what you want to do and see what ideas they can come up with.