Preparing for a successful team meeting

Regular communication of both your vision for your salon business and the practical steps you want your team to take to deliver are key to running a successful salon. Ryan Fox, salon management consultant offers some advice on the approach you should take and what you should cover when running a team meeting. "Salon owners often have a clear vision in their heads about how they want their salon business to run but one of the keys to making it happen is to have regular communication with the team about it," says Ryan. "Team meetings are one of the most important methods of getting your message across, so be sure to have them regularly and have a clear and comprehensive agenda." Big Picture Team meetings are a great opportunity to keep the team motivated and inspired but also to get everyone focused on the same page. The salon owner or manager should relate the content of the meeting back to the overall aims of the business which may include their Vision, Philosophy, Mission and Business Plan as well as current goals and targets. Tactics It’s really important to inspire the team with the “big picture” but it’s also vital to talk about the practical things that you want them to do and the behaviours you want them to display. So do a little planning before your meeting so you can explain, for example, how you see things working with a promotion you are running or the procedure to follow at the backwash. Have a standard agenda In order to keep you on track and provide some consistency to your regular team meetings it’s a good idea to have an agenda form that you can either type up the day before or print out and write your notes on. A good team meeting agenda should cover the following sections:

• Vision – start and end with how everything you are covering fits into the Big Picture and overall Business Plan
• Operations – cover any general operations issues, housekeeping, new things or changes that are happening
• Performance - report on how close the salon is to target, what more needs to be done, highlight good performance and point out areas for improvement
• Training – review training just done, upcoming training and run a bite size training session
• Retail – discuss current retail products or any new ones
• Marketing  – Plan the next promotion, Discuss the current one and Review the last one. For more advice on this you may find it useful to read my article on using the 3 Step Marketing Plan approach on my website at www.umbrellaconsulting.co.uk/services/salon-marketing-services/

Ryan Fox is a hair and beauty salon consultant who improves salon performance through training and innovation. For further details visit www.umbrellaconsulting.co.uk