Patrick Gildea, owner of Patrick Gildea Hair and Beauty, shares how his team has increased retail sales by over 20%, just by flipping their thinking.
"There are only so many places you can increase your profit within a hairdressing business. We’d hear ‘sell more, earn more’ – but there wasn’t anything of substance that was coming along. Retail has always been a bone of contention in the industry is retail, but at Patrick Gildea Hairdressing we’ve had a lightbulb moment about consultations and retail.
We talked with our senior team and asked - do you want to make more money? Unsurprisingly they all said yes. So, we spoke about recommending home haircare. As hairdressers we are so focused on the end results – the perfect haircut and colour – that aftercare is a last thought. Our stylists weren’t doing this deliberately. If something isn’t working in our business, it’s my responsibility to solve.
Rejection was one of the emotions that came up in our meetings. They could talk all day about colour placement and styling. But as soon as they were recommending products, they felt uncomfortable and pushy. We had to change this.
We ran a guest survey which confirmed that we were lacking in aftercare recommendations. When clients were going to the beauty therapist, they told them exactly what to put on their skin. I also spoke to a friend of mine who was a psychologist. They summarised it so simply – you have to replace selling with caring. Do you care about your guests? Do you care about your reputation? Do you care about the hair that you do? For our team, it was a resounding ‘yes’.
Out of that, we created our motto within the salon and a 12-month strategy. We started to place messaging throughout the salon. “We listen, because we care.” We printed it out a contract and made everyone sign it."
You have to replace selling with caring. Do you care about your guests? Do you care about your reputation? Do you care about the hair that you do? Yes!
Patrick Gildea
"We spoke to each member of staff to find out what makes them uncomfortable when they are talking about haircare. They replied that they didn’t feel confident and felt like they were imposing. So, we created a journey. Say if you’re going from Bristol to Manchester, Bristol is the cut and colour and Manchester is the end of the appointment. But what was happening in Bristol was that they were so focused on the result they got stuck in Bristol in the creative zone. The sat nav broke and there was no map to guide them to Manchester.
The Perfect Consultation became their sat nav. Each new guest gets a skintone analysis, colour matching, we talk about hair concerns, check for scalp allergies, which all leads into the homecare recommendations. We did a lot of role play, which helped build confidence. We created three difference guest types – the soft guest, the medium guest and the arrogant guest. We don’t use the word ‘selling’, that’s not what we’re doing. We ‘recommend’.
We have a Home Hair Care Consultation Box made up for each guest that sits in front of them. We place the products that we’re using on your hair today in front of them. Whatever we recommend, we use it at the backwash too. At the end of the appointment, we recap what we’ve done. For a new guest we build in 10-15 minutes for this, for a regular guest it’s 5 minutes. The whole conversation is soft, kind and natural.
We have seen a massive growth in re-bookings – they are at 78%. If you fall below 50% rebooking rate, we ask our stylists how we can help support them. Previous, to The Perfect Consultation, our retail was on the floor, it was at 3-5%, but now our retail is 25% of our profits this week alone. We hear that the average frequency of client appointments in the UK is 10-12 weeks, our frequency is 6-8 weeks, again all because of The Perfect Consultation journey.
We don’t feel a threat from high street products, and we really don’t get many people taking our recommendations and then buying online. Most people are happy to buy direct from us. Whether it’s a training model or a full-paying guest, The Perfect Consultation is part of our service."
