Lorenzo colangelo – diary of a top salon owner: february/march

Lorenzo Colangelo director of award-winning salon The Gallery in Southborough near Tunbridge Wells, shares some of the highlights of his year so far in the continuation of his regular diary, exclusively for HJi. This year seems to have got off to a flying start and I can’t believe we are already coming to the end of the first quarter! So here is a little overview as to what I have been up to since January. Team Celebration Last month I told you that we hit our £1 million turnover at Christmas and so in celebration of this I decided to shut the salon and take the whole team up to London for a day of celebration, fun and just really to say thanks to all of them for all their hard work in helping us reach that target.  We went to Hint Hunt the interactive locked room mystery game near Euston and then on to Bounce, in Shoreditch,  Europe’s largest purpose built ping pong club finally finishing with dinner at Red Dog Cafe.  It was a great day, one which combined team building, competitiveness, laughter and lots of fun! The L'Oréal Colour Trophy At the beginning of this month we found out that we had been successful in all three categories that we entered in the L'Oréal Colour Trophy Awards.  So now we will have three teams at the Southern Backstage Final on the 19 April.  This month we will be working with our models, sorting out make-up and a clothes stylist for three models instead of one.  But I am not complaining, I love that the whole salon will be involved and those who aren’t competing will be there to cheer them on! Training Seminars and Presentations February has been a busy month for Creative Director, Mario.  We started a Foundation Cutting Course for external stylists this month, running a workshop every Tuesday for four weeks, lead by Mario.  It worked very well and it is definitely something that we will look to repeat and expand. We were asked to do the Fellowship stage at Salon London on the last weekend of February so the creative team lead by Mario worked together planning the presentation and rehearsing before finally taking to the stage at the event. Local PR I recently did a business feature for one of our really lovely local magazines, SO Tunbridge Wells.  We are really lucky here as we have very good local media and over the years we have build up a great rapport with them. We do a small amount of regular advertising with them, but we find the returns on that are very good as they will always give us some editorial coverage on news that we send them.  Mind you we don’t inundate them and do wait until we have something worth telling them. Awards Activity Begins It might seem early but I started talking to the team and my PR about award entries in February – actually before any of the major awards launched, but so that we could get a good head start on them.  I know that some people don’t see the value of them, but for us, they really work on so many levels.  First of all when you go through the criteria, it makes you think about how you run your business, look after your staff and treat your clients.  It also helps evaluate how much you have done through the year and in our case has really boosted our local reputation as we have focused on the awards that are about the salon and our team – rather than individual awards. And so the end of this month will mark the end of the first quarter and a time to review our activity and see how we are doing on last year.  I find that treating the year in quarters means that you have manageable chunks to review and also you can re-focus or get back on track if things have slipped a bit!  If you leave it all until the end of the year, then you forget what you were doing, what was good and what wasn’t working and you have no time to change things. Till next time! Lorenzo Colangelo is director of The Gallery, winner of The British Hairdressing Business Awards Salon of the Year 1 2014 and 2015