How to turn your salon business around with tips from ryan fox

Are you ready to start the new decade with a plan to transform your salon business? Salon consultant Ryan Fox shares his tips for turning your salon business around in 2020. Most people’s hair keeps on growing, which is good news for salons but as a salon owner keeping your business growing in today’s hectic and stressful business environment social media is far from easy. It can be a challenge to keep going and cover overheads. Here are the ten steps you need to follow if your business is going sour. 1) Understand your current position The first step I take is to sit down and talk about where the salon owner is and how they got there. It’s important to understand the journey you’ve taken, why you opened your own salon in the first place and what exactly has gone wrong. 2) Identify the key issues Strip out all of the emotion and get some distance from any contentious issues. You need to separate yourself from the business as often you, your business and relationships with people in the business are closely intertwined which can cloud good decision making. 3) Make strong decisions  One you know what the issues are you can work on them. At this point it is important to make decisions on what changes need to be made and stick to them. Making the changes happen is going to be hard enough so don’t keep changing your mind as this will send the wrong messages to your team and will stop progress. You need to create a new energy in the salon with a can-do attitude. 4) Remove unnecessary costs  Use your salon’s financial information to understand if your salon is set up to make a profit or not. If you take a look at your profit, loss and all of your outgoings, you will be able to see where you can make cost savings and strip out unnecessary costs. This has to be done in a practical way as you want to improve the service in the salon at the same time. For example, you can’t stop buying hair colour as you need to provide a hair colour service but you could look at reducing product waste or purchase from a different supplier to reduce costs. 5) Adapt to changes in the market Fashion trends, culture and technology all drive changes within the professional hairdressing market. New services and techniques can quickly make your offering in the salon out of date. This means you will need to make some radical changes and invest in new equipment or software to compete in a new era. 6) Focus on your strengths  Consider the strengths of you and your team and how you can capitalise on them. In today’s social media-driven world, it’s about identifying what your salon is really good at and being able to communicate it to your existing clients as well as your potential clients. 7) Increase the quality of your service  Concentrate on the quality of your service by reviewing the processes and the language used at each part of your service. If you retrain the team and improve all elements of your service, it will make your clients feel valued and they will be more likely to come back and recommend their friends. Similarly, it will increase your average bill and retail sales if you make recommendations for add-on services and products throughout the appointment. 8) Are you in the right place? As much as you need to separate yourself as the salon owner from your business, it is still you who will drive your business forward. You must be in good mental and physical health to steer the business in the right direction so it’s important to make time for yourself to de-stress and enjoy life outside of the salon as well. Taking this ‘break’ whether it is exercise, visiting a spa, a hobby, yoga or spending time with your family will help to give you clarity and will improve the decisions you make for your business. 9) Set new goals  A new direction will require new goals and targets so you will need to tear up the old ones that got you into a bad place and replace them with some new ones that are right for your new life. Be resolute in sticking to your new goals. Set up some new patterns the salon must follow and become more consistent in making sure tasks are done every week. This is called an activity cycle and it should be introduced into the salon to give you and the team more structure to the way you work. 10) Do you need to turn around?  Many businesses go through periods of decline and not all survive. If your salon is in decline, there are steps you can take to turn it around but you need to take action and be brave enough to ask for help. Bad energy is powerful and can lead to failure, but it can be harnessed and used as a force for good. Remember every action has an equal and opposite reaction so if things can go down, they can equally go back up again.