Lorenzo colangelo - diary of a top salon owner: november

In the first of a new series, owner of award winning salon The Gallery in Southborough, Kent, Lorenzo Colangelo offers an insight into his working life with a monthly business diary. Time always seems to go so fast at this time of the year.  It only seems like yesterday that we were on stage picking up the Salon of the Year 1 Award in September.  But this quarter of the year is always incredibly important for us to start planning for the New Year and checking that our in-salon Christmas offering is all underway and in place. We kicked off this month with a business seminar for L'Oréal at Gatwick.  It was part of the L'Oréal Professionnel ID Artists programme.  It was a bit of a mix of hair trends and business, chatting about the Salon of the Year win, and just about some of the things that we do as a salon and a business.  It was really great and we got some fantastic feedback from it. Expansion Planning Having really consolidated our business offering over the last three years, we are now planning an expansion of the salon, which we want to carry out in second quarter of next year.  Although that seems a long way off we really need to get all our planning sorted so this month. I have had meetings with architects and salon designers to get plans for expanding the salon and also refurbishing it.  We are looking to extend to create more space for stylists, increasing our styling stations from 16 – 21.  We need to plan this carefully as we will need to be closed while the works are carried out, which needs to be factored into our budget plus we need to have any new staff recruited and trained and ready to go! Making changes to services One of the things we do each year is look at the profitability and demand for the services that we offer.  This year we have highlighted that there are some beauty services that simply are not working for us in our salon.  It is the spa style, skin care, in-depth treatments that are not being demanded and are therefore not profitable.  The quicker more essential grooming services are the ones that clients do want - nails, waxing, spray tanning, eyelash and eyebrow tinting.  I think it is incredibly difficult to marry up a fast-paced, buzzing hair salon with the tranquil spa setting needed for these treatments. So we have taken the decision to cut our beauty offering back and offer grooming services only – removing all skin care and body care services. We have now produced a minimised menu which looks more attractive and less complicated.   It wasn’t a decision that we took lightly at all as we know it would mean that we would have to lose a very long-standing member of the team.  But one of the most important things I have learnt from my business coaching is that you need to remove the emotion when making business decisions, then put it back in when you need to deal with that situation.  In order for our salon to grow and move forward, this change makes sense in so many ways.  We can ‘steal’ back a bit of the beauty/spa area to create more space for the hair services, and still offer our clients the services they do want.   Setting our Christmas Promotion This month has also been about client promotions – every Christmas we do our ‘Christmas Tree’ promotion – it is incredibly popular with our clients so this year we have teamed up with Jaguar and also local restaurants to offer some ‘star prizes’.  We start it about six weeks before Christmas and so we have just had our 1,200 ‘gift cards’ designed and printed now – each of these goes in an envelope and every client who comes in over the next 6 weeks gets a gift – this could be a free product or 20% discount in January, or it could be one of our star prizes! We produced a client newsletter this month too – both printed and email version so we can get it to all clients.  We don’t do these every month, but usually two or three times a year with an update on what we are doing.  So this time we wanted to tell them about our award win, but also about the changes to our beauty menu and staff promotions, maternity leave and new staff who have joined.  I think because we don’t bombard our clients with these newsletters every month, they welcome them and enjoy reading them. Team Activity This month is Quarterly staff Appraisals.  I do the four management team members and then they do the rest of the team.  We look at and discuss: Service targets Recommendation targets Behaviour/attitude Team Training Last Tuesday we closed for the day to do an intensive day of training on classic men’s cutting. Every two months we close the salon and work on something that we and the rest of the team feel needs some additional training – it might be doing a specific hair cut, it might be a colour technique, it just so happened that this time all the staff felt they needed a refresher on men’s hairdressing.  While that was happening, as I am very short of time this month, I used the day to interview some new potential staff and do some trade tests.  It is very important for us that we get the right people, so we never look for a specific level of hairdresser, but more at the person and what they could bring to the team. Suppliers November is also the month for our annual review with L'Oréal to discuss our business with them over the year, and a look at next year, not just in terms of our stock requirements but also, education, iD programme activities and potential business seminars. Well I think that is enough to be getting on with until after Christmas, so you all have a good, profitable one and I shall be back with my business diary in the New Year.   Lorenzo Colangelo, Director, The Gallery – Winners of The British Hairdressing Business Awards - Salon of the Year 1 2014 & 2015