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Welcome to the Salon Owner’s Podcast, Phorest FM Episode 87. Co-hosted by Killian Vigna and Zoé Bélisle-Springer, Phorest FM is a weekly show that puts forth a mix of interviews with industry thought-leaders, salon/spa marketing tips, company insights and information on attending Phorest Academy webinars. Phorest FM is produced every Monday morning for your enjoyment with a cup of coffee on your day off.

Phorest FM Episode 87

September: back-to-school, warm winds from the last bits of summer. Another month, another round-up. This week’s episode discusses everything that’s happened on the Phorest Blog and Phorest FM over the previous 30 days. From the most popular blogs to snippets from previous Phorest FM episodes, announcements in regards to the Salon Owners Summit as well as upcoming Phorest Academy Webinars and trade shows, you’re sure to get all the marketing advice you might have missed.

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Popular Blogs of the Month

Upcoming Webinars & Trade Shows

 

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Transcript

Killian Vigna: Welcome to Phorest FM Episode 87. I’m Killian Vigna.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: I’m Zoe Belisle Springer. This week’s episode is our monthly roundup in which we’ll be discussing the best bits from this podcast, the Phorest Blog, and announcing what to expect this coming October.

Killian Vigna: So, grab yourself a cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and join us weekly for all your salon’s business and marketing needs. Good morning Zoe!

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Good morning, Killian.

Killian Vigna: I feel like this is our third attempt now, to record this episode, but third time’s a charm, and we’re not going to delay it too much just in case anything happens again. We’re just going to get straight into the episode because we’re a little nervous now at this stage.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah, I feel like I haven’t spoken to you in a little while, but we haven’t really released any episodes this month. We’ve released them in bulk instead.

Killian Vigna: Yeah. I think the last one, it was pretty much the August monthly roundup, and now we’re doing the September monthly roundup, but like you were saying, we did have a treat where it was two episodes released last Friday.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah, we released them both last week. We’re back on track by the time, and I’ve done the math this morning, by the time we’re at the Salon Owners Summit live episode next year, the first episode of the year, as always, we’re going to be at Episode 100. We’ve no more choice. This is it!

Killian Vigna: This was all planned from day one. This was planned 87 episodes ago. We knew right, we’re not going to do episodes of bank holidays, we’re going to do one less episode in August. Also, Ronan could turn up with a big 100 episode cake for us at the live podcast, so yes. To be fair though, the last two episodes that were released there on Friday are actually two really good episodes. One is with our very own Melanie Icke and she shares some insights into what she’s going to be talking about at the Salon Summit Workshop, and then another one comes from James Parnell who has come in and done a few workshops here of his own and they’re all about time management and productivity. I think they’re are two very beneficial episodes to be fair.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah, 100% and we’ll play some snippets further down in this episode anyways, to give you a bit of a taster. If we get into the blog first, right, because I feel like we haven’t spoken about the blog in ages.

Killian Vigna: Yeah, the first one is about your latest adventures which brought you to Denver.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yes, so I was in Denver mid-September. I was meeting Sinead Carroll from our own PR and events team, and also one of our salon business advisors. September 16th and 17th was the two-day industry workshop in Colorado called the Thrive Sessions. It was hosted at the Curtis Hotel downtown and the whole idea behind the weekend was to get artists and creatives who were attending to explore creative potential, find their edge to grow their business, find new ways to increase their client base and thrive in today’s competitive salon environment.

It’s more of a gallery, it’s more of a photo gallery, I suppose, because I went behind the scenes. I attended all the sessions that were hosted in those two days, so four sessions of three hours each, it was very hands on to be honest. There was one on Modern Hair Cutting with Sally Rogerson of SR Education. Then there was one on the Mastery of Extensions with Lindsay Guzman of Elle.b Academy. Then there was also one on Creative Placement with Lindsay Ryffel of The Business Of Balayage. Finally, there was a business session, so kind of more of a keynote kind of vibe and that was on Instagram Stories and how you can leverage them to grow your business and that was led by Natalie Boos of The Business Of Balayage team as well so yeah, very instructive weekend loads of fun.

On the Sunday night, there was also an evening for networking and a great talk by Jenny Strebe of the Confessions of a Hairstylist. Yeah, very, very fun weekend. I can’t imagine all the attendees, their head must have been buzzing at the end of that weekend but yeah, definitely loads to take in, loads to help grow your business.

Killian Vigna: Yeah, I’m trying to follow Instagram account, you had all the pictures up on that and it looked like a great day and you have some really nice photos now that we’re going to see put up over time.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Absolutely. You can have a preview of them anyways on the blog. It’s called Behind The Scenes of the Thrive Sessions Denver Workshop and it’s on the Phorest blog.

Next, because it’s our monthly Roundup, so we’re talking about the most popular blogs, we have one called Stopping a Salon Employee From Always Getting Away With It. That’s written by one of our very regular guest contributors Valerie Delforge. You know that kind of employee who’s always just always late with their tasks, is late in general coming into work or has, I don’t know, causes for everyone else to have to pick up on their stuff, right. You know that kind of vibe?

Killian Vigna: Yeah, if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah. Not going to say anything after that.

Killian Vigna: Yeah. No, it does have massive knock-on consequences because while they’re not usually realise they are doing it, it affects everyone around them, which is the worst bit. What does Valerie say to do?

Zoe Belisle-Springer: First of all she tackles, she gives an example from her past and her experience of having to deal with that, but then she also explains how that dynamic has all round repercussions like you were saying, it does have a knock on effect on everyone, not only the staff but also your clients and also the manager. She explains the type of issues that have considerable effect on others, so poor time management, bad attitude, bad habits. She also shows how it impacts others around that person.

At the end of the day, the essence of her blog lies in going from a personal experience to explaining how this dynamic has a really bad effect on the entire team, on your whole salon itself and on your customer journey as well, and what you can do to overcome that. She calls it quick solutions for time starved managers. Before taking the performance management road essentially, trying to figure out what are quick and easy things that, well not necessarily easy, it’s always going to be a hard conversation at the end of the day.

Killian Vigna: It’s going a tough one yeah, you have to nip it in the bud because they might not even be aware of how much of an effect this is creating on everyone else.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: She has quite a few good ideas, one of them is the mystery shopping. She’s actually writing a blog for the month of October, so you can look out for that one, that’s going to be really interesting. I know we’ve been talking about mystery shops quite a bit in the last months, so to get a better understanding on how you go about it and all of that, she’s going to tackle that topic in October. She also suggests buddy systems, good behaviour boards, all that kind of stuff. There’s quick solutions to try and overcome it, and if that doesn’t work then you can go down the performance management road, but there’s definitely stuff that you can try and do before going down that road.

Killian Vigna: Exactly. Our final blog, and this is from a new guest author.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yes, Julie Lee is a UK salon owner, educator, a second manicurist and a salon coach. She has written a book called Setting Up Your Hair, Nail or Beauty Business, and that’s kind of where this blog comes from: The Importance And Benefits Of Having A Business Plan For Your Salon. Whether you’re building it up from scratch or buying an existing one, or expanding into a second location, you need a business plan, you need to be able to forecast what’s coming to you, because it’s really exciting to have that dream and it’s really exciting to put all your efforts into building your baby essentially, but if you don’t plan ahead and you don’t know what’s going to come to you, unfortunately that dream might turn into a nightmare really fast.

Killian Vigna: Well it’s a whole new journey for you, and like she put in the blog which is put really well, imagine traveling to a foreign country, how do you get there? You have to map it out. You’re setting up a salon, you’ve never done it before, how do I get there? Map it out and don’t just think about the fun, cool, glamorous side of it, build it from the foundation up.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: If you go on to the Phorest blog and check that out, it’s called The Importance And Benefits Of Having A Salon/Spa Business Plan; she’ll talk about how anyone can open a salon, but not everyone can run a successful one. How to overcome the excitement of opening one and making focus business decisions. She explains essentially what will happen if you don’t plan, what will happen if you do plan, so you get the both sides. I’m telling you, planning is definitely better.

Finally, she’ll give you kind of the next steps, what do you need to do now if you’re heading onto that journey of opening your own business. Definitely have a good read at that, I’d say it’s probably a 5 to 10 minute read at most, but you’ll get loads of information. There’s a link to her book as well, it’s on Amazon, it’s available so if you want more information at least on setting up a salon or a spa… yeah. That’s there, great resource.

Killian Vigna: Now that brings us over to our Phorest FM recaps and like we already mentioned at the start, we have only done three episodes this month and that includes this monthly round up episode, but we did release two really good episodes last Friday, so just there before the weekend, and one was from our very own Melanie Icke. It’s a sneak peek of the workshop that she’s going to run at the Salon Owners Summit 2019, which is titled Getting To Know You.

What is Melanie going to be talking about in this episode? She talks about things like DISC behaviour profiling, which is something a lot of Phorest staff here have done and it will benefit any workplace. It’s all about how your staff can really understand… It’s more than a personality, it’s almost like, I think the best way to put it is like do you know Criminal Minds, where they’re profiling people? It’s kind of done like that, but by understanding who you work with, and understanding your clients helps your business just operate so much more efficiently. You’ll really benefit by listening to that one and it will get you proper excited for the workshops coming up, so yeah, here’s a few snippets from that episode.

Snippet 1, Melanie Icke: DISC in its simplest form is that – it’s understanding that what’s important to me and what I value and what motivates me and therefore how I behave will be very different to maybe Zoe or Killian what motivates you. In fact, all three of us are quite different profiles as that happens.

Snippet 2, Melanie Icke: On the surface, we might put those things down to “Oh, that’s not my kind of person or we don’t really see eye to eye. We always fall out at meetings…” or whatever that might be, and that kind of can create conflict in the workplace. It can make people feel uncomfortable with other people when it’s actually not the person that you have issue with, but maybe some of the way the behaviours are being presented.

Snippet 3, Melanie Icke: What I’m really wanting to do is kind of distill the essence of what DISC is about and why we use it, and bring to the Summit some simple exercises that people can take away and do in their own salons if they want to do that.

 

Killian Vigna: The second episode that we released on Friday was with James Parnell and it’s all about time management and productivity. While James Parnell doesn’t work for us, at this stage it kind of feels like he does because he’s done so many of these workshops for us here in Phorest, they’re brilliant and you just get so much out of it. It’s about working smarter, not harder. Do you know when that typical excuse of, “I feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day,” well he breaks your day down nicely. He has this time management plan, but it’s not even necessarily all about, “I’m dedicating one hour to doing this here, doing two hours to that there,” it’s just how to do your best work at the right time today day.

I think one for you is like, you’re very creative in the morning so you get up extra early to do your creativity. For me, I have most of my energy late in the evening so that’s when I dedicate time to go train and things like those. It’s actually not necessarily time blocks, which is what it kind of sounds like. It’s just finding the best time in the day that you do your best work or the right time of day that you do your best work. I’m really not selling it, I’m over talking here, but just listen to a few of these snippets and see for yourself.

Snippet 1, James Parnell: We’re going work, we get organized, we focus, we plan, we collaborate with other people and we all seem to organize our work day very well, and I just don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t do that to your whole life so that what you really want to do whether it’s work or pleasure, you get what you want.

Snippet 2, James Parnell: Every different role and every different career has a certain amount that you probably can’t predict and can’t control, and that could be 20% of your workday, it could be 90%. The key question then is, what are you doing with the 10% that you can control? How are you thinking? Are you thinking strategically? Are you using that 10% to look at the unpredictability and see how you make that better?

Snippet 3, James Parnell: Are you allocating time to the things that are important to you? Are you just saying that they’re important to you and actually neglecting them?

Snippet 4, James Parnell: A lot of people think of productivity as getting more done, but I like to think of it in the opposite way, so it’s how can you actually do less and get more value out of it? How can you make your life easier?

 

Killian Vigna: That’s the podcast and the blog out of the way, and now we have the Zoe section, so you’re going to talk about your trade shows and webinars, but I think you have one more thing that you wanted to bring up just before hand?

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yes, absolutely. We released quite a bit of Salon Owners Summit announcements recently, so I just want to have a quick recap of who we’ve announced and then we’ll jump into the trade show section. First of all, main stage speakers, Jo Fairley, Ryan Holiday, Christina Kreitel. You’ve known that for months now, right? The most recent announcements have been all around-

Killian Vigna: Workshops time!

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yes, all the workshops. We’ve announced Melanie Icke, that we played snippets from just earlier, Getting To Know You is her workshop title. Then we’ve announced Steve Gomez who’s doing a workshop on Interdependent Leadership and finally a guest that we’ve had on Phorest FM before, Heather Yurko, is going to be leading a workshop at the Summit as well, and it’s all about The Secret To Building A Team Of Elite Performers and she’s based that on things that she’s learned while studying the Navy SEALs techniques. Bound to be interesting.

Killian Vigna: I remember doing a podcast with her and I just came out of that episode feeling so inspired, just had all this energy after it. She is an incredibly positive person. One of her key things is like I’m ever busy on being productive. Can’t say enough about her, you’re going to come out her workshop feeling… you just want to start now. You just want to start your work now. Very good, very interesting person.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: And our other announcement unrelated to the Summit this time, but still very important because I think that’s the one word that’s on literally everyone’s lips these days. Instagram: we’ve written a 55 page ebook on Instagram.  The Salon Owners Ultimate Guide essentially on how to leverage Instagram to grow your business. What can you expect in this ebook? I mean 55 pages is nothing small, right? You can expect industry insights. There’s a Q&A interview with Victor Valverde, who’s the owner of Kut Haus Salon in Claremont, California, really interesting interview to be honest.

You’ll also find strategy recommendations, so from basics to specific Instagram features our tips on creating and optimising your strategy, and finally, everything you need to know about analytics, tips on understanding your audience and identifying what works best for your salon or your spa. I hope you enjoy it. If you have any feedback on it, actually I’d be really happy to hear about it. Just reach out and let us know what you think about it and if it can help you.

Listen, jumping into trade shows because trade show season has started, has kicked off. Some of our team is actually in London at the moment at Olympia Beauty, so that kicked off September 30th and it’s on as well today. Next trade show that we’ll be at is Professional Beauty Ireland, so in the RDS in Dublin, October 7th and 8th. After that we’ll be at Salon International from October 13th to the 15th and that will be in ExCeL London. Then finally, we’re going to be at Professional Beauty North in Manchester on October 21st and 22nd. Come chat to us, all our booth numbers are linked up in our Facebook events. If you go into our Facebook page, in the events section, we’ve created an event for all those trade shows that we’re going to be at, so you can find the booth numbers that we’re going to be on in those events and to register for your tickets, you go into get tickets section and it’ll bring you to the trade shows websites where you can register there.

That’s kind of it for the trade shows. I mean that’s pretty much one every weekend, so I think that’s fair enough. Other than that, webinars, we have one on Salon Email Marketing, so we’ve run that one in September already. There’s another session for this on October 15th at 3.00 PM UK Ireland time, 10:00 AM US eastern time. If you want to sign up for that, just look at the episode’s notes in this episode and the link is there. Then, that’s kind of what’s coming up in the next month, I suppose. Quick note, we have announced the Salon Retail Week winners and there was a feature posted up as well on Salon Today and Modern Salon posting up the results of the whole challenge itself. On average, salons have increased their retail sales by 78%, which is massive.

Killian Vigna: Yeah, that was huge when we saw that infographic. With the upselling of retail, it’s incredible once you actually just actively start promoting it and it’s all constructive education, educate your clients on the products.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: That’s what most salons we’re saying. To write that article for Salon Today, Modern Salon, I was chatting to a lot of the winners or the runner ups and I was asking, “What do you attribute your success to?” A lot of the times the answer that came back was “My clients just didn’t know. They learned that they would be more than happy to buy it from us, but they just didn’t know.” Yeah, getting that consistency of educating your client, getting the product out there, showing them, teaching them how to use it, and yeah, letting them know that you actually hold it in your salon.

Killian Vigna: I was on the opposite end of the spectrum for that. I’ve been talking to salons who’ve been doing incredibly well with the retail prior to the Retail Week and they were saying that their clients love listening to them talk about the products. That’s why they do so well. Education, they’ve like 10/15 minutes slots after every single treatment where they sit down and discuss the products that they had and the majority of time they said like 80% roughly walk away with those products. Again, just sit your clients down, chat to them, tell them what you’re using, why you’re using, the benefits of it. It works.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah. If you’re not 100% sure how to go about it, we had an episode with David Barnett a few weeks back, probably a few months back actually by now. He has a three-step technique to sell more retail and it actually really works. Definitely an episode to look back on and even if you already do sell retail often, it’s always good to have a refresher every now and then.

Killian Vigna: Oh yeah, like incredible advice Heather from Neatbeat, she mentioned that on the show that she does that same technique and I was chatting to Danielle from Neatbeat then about how to increase the upsell of retail and she said, “That’s what we do. We just have the three products, like his three tips.” That’s what they do and it works every time.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah! So, what’s coming up next? We have a few interviews coming up in the month of October. I’m not going to spill too many beans just yet, so stay tuned. If you have any feedback, feel free to leave us a review on iTunes, on Stitcher. We’re always looking for suggestions on how to improve the show. Don’t forget we’re on Spotify now, so you can also check us out there. Otherwise, have a wonderful week and we’ll catch you next Monday.

Killian Vigna: All the best.

Thanks for reading! #LetsGrow

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