Phorest FM Episode 130: Seán O’Sullivan On Setting & Managing Salon Staff Targets

Killian Vigna: Welcome to the Phorest FM podcast, episode 130. I’m Killian Vigna.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: And I’m Zoe Belisle-Springer. This week on the show we’re joined by Phorest’s Education Manager, Sean O’Sullivan to discuss all things staff targets: how to set them, get employee buy-in, create collaboration and more.

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: Everyone’s favourite. Staff targets. I suppose there’s no real beating around the bush with this one, is there?

Zoe Belisle-Springer: I suppose, yeah. Meetings and targets, they tend to be the two topics that get people twitching a little bit.

Killian Vigna: Yeah, exactly. Well, we’ve done an episode very recently. What was it, episode 119, you were saying it just there a minute ago. Episode 119; where we discussed the A, B and C players in your salon, or any business really. But we didn’t go too much into staff targets. I don’t mean like I staff targets, I’m pretty sure you have staff targets, everyone in their business has staff targets. It’s something that you just get so used to doing, but you forget to step back and ask where did these tags come from?

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah, and there are so many different ways of setting them as well. If I look at my role, for instance, in Phorest, I think we’ve tried and tested about three or four different methods for staff targets. Either KPI’s or OKRs, or all of these different marketing, I suppose, targets that you’d have. There are so many different things that you can do.

Then also, like you were just saying with episode 119, most of our guidelines, most of our handbooks and stuff are made for, like Amanda was saying, for the 80%, for the people who need those staff targets. You only have maybe 20% of your staff who will always reach whatever you give them: the high performers, the A players. You give them a slightly little bit of info, and they’ll just run with it and exceed all expectations all the time. But it’s not always like that for everyone. A lot of people need guidance.

Killian Vigna: Well, I would pretty much say that a fair chunk of your team would need guidance as well. Otherwise, they’d be out setting up their own businesses. It’s just not for everyone. Not everyone has that drive or is on that level. For most people that do try, they burn out very fast.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yes, absolutely. I suppose it doesn’t come at a better time this episode because we launched that on #SalonRetailWeek last year for the very first time. It stemmed from the #30Days2Grow Challenge. This one is just a week, and it starts on Monday. Obviously, with retail, you’re going to want to set targets, right? Without further ado, let’s welcome Seán O’Sullivan. Listen, thank so much for joining us today on such short notice as well. Very appreciate it.

Introducing Seán O’Sullivan

Seán O’Sullivan: My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Killian Vigna: He’s sitting here beside me and I can see that it’s killing him sitting there for the treatment. It’s not saying I need… He’s absolutely dying to just get into it. We had a quick chat about this this morning and he was spitting stuff off and I was looking at him, he goes, “Oh, I’m only just paraphrasing.” I’m going, “What?” This man is eager to get into it today. So, Seán, I suppose, do you want to give a bit of an introduction about yourself?

Seán O’Sullivan: Yeah, sure. I suppose so. As they were saying at the start, I am Phorest Education Manager. I look after the education globally for Phorest. Before Phorest, where I’ve been for the last two years all, I spent almost 10 years working across retail and restaurants. As a general manager for restaurants before coming into Phorest. As I’m sure you’ll have the same in the beauty industry, restaurants are very target driven. So it became my day in day out was targets, targets, targets.

The importance for businesses to have staff targets

Killian Vigna: I suppose the next question we’re going to ask is, why are we talking about staff targets? Because I know when I turned to you yesterday, and I said, “Do you want to be on the show? It was pretty much the first thing that came to mind.” It just seems to be a bit of a passion for you.

Seán O’Sullivan: It definitely is. It definitely is. I think it comes from; it’s such a… People could be very nervous about staff targets, especially when it comes to underperformers, that they don’t want to upset them or they want to keep it very private. For me, and all through my working history, I’ve been very open about staff targets both myself. I want people to know if I’m doing good or if I’m doing bad.

As a business owner or a business manager, I want my staff to be performing to targets because it makes it more profitable; it makes the business flow better. Especially when done correctly, it really brings a high level of morale across your team and makes them driven, and they enjoy coming to work.

Whereas I found quite strange when you don’t have targets, in the end, a lot of those teams end up becoming quite demoralized, or they become bored in their work. So, targets give a lot of incentive and drive to teams. This is why I’m so passionate about them.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Well, it helps you. We were talking about complacency just a few episodes ago, and it helps you not become complacent really.

Killian Vigna: Exactly. Even what you were saying about in episode 119, with your A players. It’s very easy for an A-player not to be an A-player if they’re not driven by targets, and you’re not making them achieve… Everyone can step it up more than they’re currently delivering.

Seán O’Sullivan: I think we’ve all been in that situation. We’ve all had different jobs. Somewhere target driven, somewhere you just go to work, and you do your day-to-day. They’re the ones who get bored of very fast, I’ve noticed. There’s always that whole thing with the target itself. Oh, I’ve got targets at my job, and I have to hit them consistently. But that’s actually the one that keeps you on your toes. That’s the one that makes every day, I suppose, different and interest. Where when you go in, and you don’t have targets, it’s like, what are you achieving? How are you progressing professionally, how are you developing if you’re not hitting targets? To be able to have someone to set out fair targets for you as well.

Getting started with targets

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Yeah, 100%. If you’re in a business and you’re setting targets with say, a staff member, but you’ve never actually seen this person perform before, how do you even go about setting a target?

Seán O’Sullivan: You can get really detailed. It’s a good question. We can get really detailed into how to set targets for people. I’m also one of the data people for Phorest. So, believe me, you can create as many spreadsheets as you want. There are so many variables in how you can come up with targets, but you keep it simple, especially for a new staff member that’s client-facing.

The best thing to do is to work out how much you’re paying them. To keep it very, very simple, if you are paying someone $10 an hour, you want them to be getting at least $40 an hour in revenue so that you know they’re making money for you, and why it would be four times whatever they’re earning is. You have a quarter of that is going towards your wages. A quarter of that is going towards your cost of goods. A quarter of that is your overheads and the last quarter then is for anything miscellaneous. So, you have a profit for yourself. It’s a really good measure when someone’s starting as their initial target. Then very quickly you’ll get to know what they can achieve. Maybe they’re doing double that. So, it’s much easy for you to get a [inaudible 00:07:09] at the start, keep it simple and quadruple whatever you’re paying them per hour.

Killian Vigna: How often then should you be doing these staff reviews? You’ve got your new staff member. I know what else we have quite regular huddles, and we do weekly, or the biweekly, and then the monthly huddles. Is that the norm? Should every business be doing them that regular or are we doing them consistently enough?

Seán O’Sullivan: Completely. I think we almost don’t do them regularly enough. I always follow with staff targets, especially when you can see how everyone else is performing. The more often and the more frequent you can do them, the better. When I was in restaurants, every single day, it started your shift. You get everyone together. Talk about the performance for the month today, for the last week, the current week, and how you want to do today. It gets you into the rhythm of talking about the performance of the business. Because with staff targets, not only looking to get people performing, you also want them to buy into the business of why this is important. Tie it into your client journey, your client satisfaction so when you’re looking at something like we were in the last question on dollar value target, how you’re doing that is providing excellence and service to your clients by recommending the right products. It’s tying those things together in your views, every single day that makes it so important. Your targets should be the lifeblood of your business and like a constant with all of your staff.

So, yeah, daily huddles are one of my favourite things to do. Get everyone together and update them. Then on a one to one basis, I would do that once a month, once a quarter at the very minimum, once a quarter so that everyone knows how they’re performing. You never want someone to be surprised if they’re not performing. They should always know where they are, and it keeps them on their toes as well.

Killian Vigna: Once a quarter nearly sounds too long as well.

Seán O’Sullivan: Yeah. That’s as far as I would go. Even once a month is probably… It doesn’t need to be like an hour or two-hour-long meeting. Literally, it could be a 15-minute catch up once a week, once a month. That’s all you need to do is keep in that tiny bit of communication. I think with a lot of managers, that’s why they don’t talk to their staff because they think of it as a large time investment. Whereas if you’re already spending 10-15 minutes just updating your staff member quickly when they’re coming in for the day, that’s a really good use of that time. It’s something that we don’t do enough of, I think.

Encouraging a healthy culture of performance

Zoe Belisle-Springer: We mentioned that at the start of the show, staff targets could be something that makes people twitch a little bit. I can imagine the little eye twitch emoji on our Slack. It’s my favourite emoji for the past two months now. But seriously, high-performing work workspaces sometimes will… First of all, they’re great because it forces everyone to better themselves and go for higher achievements. But sometimes it can become really easy to slip into a negative way of talking about targets of performance. Everybody feels the stress, and then everybody’s performance gets hindered by it.

Seán O’Sullivan: Yeah, really easy thing to happen with staff targets for them to become a negative in the workplace. It requires a lot of work —

as with everything to do with staff really — in fostering that culture of acceptance and encouragement to stop staff targets becoming a negative. One thing that we would do is don’t just set targets for people. The targets for each person should be set in conjunction with them. You’d always have your salon targets, but every person should also have their individual targets. You would never expect a junior stylist to perform to the same level as a master stylist. So, you should always set different targets for them.

It’s agreeing with those people what those targets are and helping them develop towards them. That’s the first step in stopping targets becoming negative in the workplace. It shouldn’t just be that this is for the financial gain of the business. Even though at the end of the day, of course, it’s going to make the business more profitable, which is exactly what everyone wants. It needs to be tied to their development. It’s better service; they’re providing better retail advice to clients. It’s tied into something personal for that person. That part of staff targets is incredibly powerful with your team. It’s not just talking about them every single day. There’s a full journey in setting staff targets, and staff development all comes into effective targets within the business.

If you do feel that the staff targets are starting to have a negative vibe in the salon, sit your team down and be very open with them. Open communication and honest communication is the most powerful thing you have in any workplace worldwide. Having that conversation with your staff and asking for feedback: “What’s not working with these targets and creating a negative atmosphere? Are they set too high, are they unrealistic, or are they just feeding too much pressure on those targets?” And then work with them for a plan on how to make it better.

So, keeping that communication flowing, so you don’t get this, they’re the management, and we’re the staff. You want it to be a symbiotic relationship. Communication around staff targets is the most powerful thing to stop it from becoming a negative.

Setting targets and communicating with staff

Killian Vigna: What about then actually creating the staff target, not what we talked about at the start of the show. More like, you’re the salon owner or the manager, surely you have a better idea of what targets you want to set, and the staff member you want to set the target for. Do you approach the staff member say, “Here are your targets.” Because you mentioned about getting a little bit of feedback from the staff members. Are they too hard? Why isn’t it working? But, should you actually work with them to create the targets in the first place?

Seán O’Sullivan: Completely. You absolutely should. There’s a bit of pre-work as well before you set targets with your staff members. In Phorest, for example, we have our three values. We have a can-do attitude, growth, mindset and serve as gained, which guide everything that we decide as a company. In conjunction with that, we have our business growth metrics.

We already have them at the start of the year or in this case, in the next few months when we’re coming to decide what will targets be for 2020? Using those with your team as the grid to what your targets could be. For instance, in Phorest, Serbhis Go Hiontach, which is excellence in service for anyone who doesn’t speak fluent Irish. This would be applicable to our support and education teams. You would race your training or your support call at the end of it.

We might go to our team and say, okay, for service [inaudible 00:13:14] took for 2020, what could you target yourself on to show that you are delivering service [inaudible 00:13:20] to our clients? Invariably, they’re going to come back with support call ratings or the average support call rating and give you a figure. It’s not that it’s a free for all. Of course, that wouldn’t make any sense in any business. You’re giving them the framework and leading them towards what kind of KPIs you’d be looking for. In a salon environment, what you would break it down to.

In most cases, now, I’m sure there’ll be differences. You have your services, and you have your retail. When you’re looking at that, if you want to be excellence in retail, tied into amazing hair quality. More than likely, the staff are going to come back with something related to the percentage of retail sales or dollar retail sales per customer. So, they’re already going down the right path to targets. When you’re looking at what value they should be, you should already have your data from whatever your point of sale software is, what your last year’s figures were. What it was per person, so they can use them as a guideline.

It will be very, very rare… Now, it might happen. It’d be very, very rare for a staff member to give themselves a target lower than what they did the year before. You want them working in a group together. What tends to happen in group environments is that they’ll try and up themselves to be more in line with the groups. So, someone who was much lower than last year will invariably give themselves higher targets.

The last part of that then after you’ve done your group consultation is you’re one-to-one with each staff member because you also want to guide them. If someone you feel is giving themselves a target that they’re probably not going to be hitting next year, you want to help them decide at a lower target than that. If you feel that a high performer’s undervaluing themselves, you want to question them and ask them why don’t they think they could stretch themselves and achieve higher?

Again, it comes down to communication and making sure that the staff member that’s agreeing to these targets with you, not you just telling the staff member what these targets are. Because if you do just tell them the target and they’re unhappy with it, they’re more than likely not hit that target and or have a negative outlook towards those targets in the coming year.

Killian Vigna: When you’re looking at the increase then, is it as simple as going, well last year you did X, this year you’re doing Y, the year and year growth and then you’re going to use that year and year percentage to … Just off the top of my head I’m going, yeah, that seems simple, but your face tells me a lot more.

Seán O’Sullivan: It comes down to the type of work that we do. If I’m a stylist and my utilization is 90%. Targeting me with 95, probably completely unrealistic. Because the amount of work that they’re already doing is really, really high. The targets can’t always increase; it’s the same with dollar value. You can’t increase the dollar value every single year unless you increase the price as a business. For a very experienced staff member who generally is very busy, the likelihood of them increasing their sales value for services is probably quite low.

You need to be reasonable as well with your targets. If I’m already achieving really good utilization, really good service value, I’m maximizing my clients; you need to look at other targets you could give to this person. If that person is already achieving the goals of your business, the top performer, you need to start then looking at, okay, what other things can they do that will contribute to the business? Personally, I’d be saying, “Okay, here’s Amanda; she’s a junior stylist. I want you to mentor her this year.” As well as maintaining your normal targets, I want you to be responsible for bringing her up to your level or close enough to her level. Maybe not the same in one year, probably be too much.

Target, it can be quite difficult to decide what targets to build. As a business, it’s a bit easier. You can definitely use percentage growth year on year because you have more control over that. You could hire more stylists or maybe open a second unit. There’s a lot of scope for expanding. When you’re looking at individual performance in a service-based industry, there’s only so much you’d be able to target them on. It starts looking into for the top performers, different ways of expanding on their capabilities, bring them up to the next level because everyone wants to be advancing in their life.

Killian Vigna: That makes sense, and you’re increasing their responsibilities too.

Seán O’Sullivan: Exactly.

Culture and collaboration: the key to success

Zoe Belisle-Springer: But then as a salon owner, you need to have that mindset of allowing those high performers to do that. Because if you have, and I don’t want to say poor culture, but if you have a culture that isn’t as strong as it could be, people tend to compete against each other anyways. You’re talking more here about collaboration.

Seán O’Sullivan: I think it comes down to leading by example. Changing culture is one of the most difficult things you can do as a business. Because culture is ingrained from the very start, and it’s a daily habit, very, very difficult to change that. It starts by making small changes. It’s that first meeting on targets. You probably will, if you have a poor culture, get a bit of kickback on it, to persevere and to keep doing it. It might take three months, six months or even a year, but you need to keep communicating with your staff and leading by example in those changes.

Because of course if cultural change doesn’t come from the top, it’s never going to change as a business. It needs to be buy-in from the top level down to your stylists. It comes down to your hiring as well. When you decide, if you do have a culture that can be improved, that you want to change your culture drastically or even like a minor bit. When you’re hiring new people, you need to ensure that all of those new hires fit the culture of your business.

A great example is actually, which I would encourage everyone to use when looking at staff is the values and performance matrix. It’s a really good grid. One axis is your values as a company. The other axis is performance. You want everyone high in values, high in performance-

Zoe Belisle-Springer: In an ideal world.

Seán O’Sullivan: But they could be… In an ideal world, exactly. Wouldn’t we all love these A-players across the business? But then there are two areas where most of yourself will fall into, where they have high values, and low performance or they have high performance and low values. As a business, for your culture, the most dangerous person you could have is someone who is high performing and low values, because they will not deliver what you want them to. In general, will kick back against your cultural changes.

Values become ever more important as a company. You’re delivering an experience at the end of the day, and to deliver that experience, you want people around you who have the same values as you do. So, getting those people around you with those values and leading by example when you’re going through a cultural change will help you in buy-in to staff targets and collaboration and building an open and honest team.

Incentives and rewarding employees

Killian Vigna: Would you include any motivating factors into targets? If you’ve hit your target, any rewards, benefits, commission? Because not everyone offers commission.

Seán O’Sullivan: That depends, I think on the culture you already have. I’ve been in a lot of different business units. Sometimes giving monetary rewards as an incentive works well. Because the team has such a strong bond, you don’t get… What can often happen when you give money as a reward for targets is that people will start deliberately or just subconsciously sabotaging their colleagues so that they get the reward and their colleagues don’t.

What type of rewards you give does depend a lot on culture. I’ve always been against giving monetary rewards for targets. I think it’s much better to give experiences as an award for targets. When I was working in restaurants, so waiters and everything, we got tips that we shared. There’s that side as a reward already. But we had our targets as a business. We didn’t want to give money as a reward for achieving those, because it tended to create a bad atmosphere among waiters.

What we did — which can be done in the hair and beauty industry as well — we would go to a local business like another restaurant or a cinema or a hotel and say: “I’ll give you a 10 euro vouchers for our restaurant if you give me a 100 euro voucher for your hotel or your cinema.” Then we could give them to our staff as rewards. It costs us nothing as a business really because we’re getting more customers from the hotel or restaurant or the cinema. So, win-win for us. We’re giving our staff the opportunity to have an experience.

If you give someone money, the likelihood of them remembering what they’ve done with that money is quite small. If you’re giving them the chance to go to a restaurant with their loved one or a friend or go to the cinema or the theatre, whatever it might be, well, hopefully, they’ll have good memories of that experience and are going to tie that back into work. It’s creating positive experiences tied to your workplace, which I think is far more powerful than giving someone just money as a reward.

We can spend money on anything. It might be your Christmas shopping, that’s where you spend your bonus money every Christmas. Exactly, or bills, everyone’s favourite thing to spend money on.

Killian Vigna: I worked really hard for that target to pay for my Internet.

Seán O’Sullivan: Exactly. You could see, just what you’ve said there, not going to happen. Whereas to be honest, like myself, I would rarely go out to a restaurant for dinner. I usually prep all my meals for the week, very boring. I know. At the weekend, because we [inaudible 00:22:28] we still tend not to go to restaurants. So, getting a restaurant voucher as a reward makes me put the time aside with my husband to go out and have dinner together. I’ve already created that nice experience from, I did really good at work, they’ve rewarded me, and I tie that back in. It keeps me motivated to continue achieving my targets.

Killian Vigna: Then, your husband tells you to work harder.

Seán O’Sullivan: Exactly. Now I have to work even harder to get more restaurant vouchers.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: I love that. But in fairness though, we’re talking about incentivizing targets and such. Just this week, I got a leadership nudge by David [inaudible 00:23:02] in my emails. He was explaining the ABCs of human behaviour. He talks about three dimensions that would have a positive impact on seeing those good patterns, good behaviour repeat that you had to reward those good behaviours by something positive immediately and every single time. How do you go then about publicly praising high-performers or staff that are achieving targets in front of lower performers? Is that not demoralizing?

Seán O’Sullivan: It’s a good question. What I always used to do with performers, because you’ll always have high performers and it’s so easy to praise a high performer because they’re probably always beating their targets. They pull in the cash and the raving reviews for your business. So, really easy to praise what they’re doing and very easy to forget those people that aren’t performing as well as they are.

I think it’s looking at everyone’s achievements. You’re entirely right in what you were saying that you need to praise in the moment. One of the most powerful things that we had when… This was back in the days when people used to write reviews on little hand cards in the restaurants. One of our staff members who’d never really, middle of the road performance-wise, got one in and just immediately gathering all the team together in the back of the kitchen, mid-service rush and just saying, congratulations for getting this really good review in and reading the review out loud. That really motivated that person.

It’s not just praising high performers when they’re reaching their targets. The small achievements and rewarding good behaviour in even a small incremental change in the low performer’s performance will help them to keep pushing towards their targets. Because you’re right, it can be very demotivating when you’re a bit far away from your target. When they start exhibiting positive behaviour, encouraging that in any little way you can is super important.

Killian Vigna: If you’ve developed your team culture strong enough, people will be supporting each other.

Seán O’Sullivan: Exactly. That’s what you want to get to, where the high performers are automatically listening in to what low performers are saying when they’re talking to clients, giving them tips and tricks. The low performers as well, coming and listening to, okay, what are they saying when I’m finishing up with the client? How are they cashing the client out or what are they saying to get them rebooked in?

Building that culture of… It’s almost like Amazon’s culture of fail fast forward. You want them to keep trying new things and keep trying new things, and not being afraid of making a mistake or failing, but that they keep trying and learning and developing themselves to achieve a new level. I think that part is really important in a team culture.

Dealing with staff underperformance and/or missed targets

Zoe Belisle-Springer: What happens then in your personal opinion, if say, someone who isn’t achieving their targets, you can tell that they’re trying and trying and trying and you’ve been helping them and helping them and helping them, but it’s still just not working. What do you do?

Seán O’Sullivan: It’s a difficult situation. What I’m pretty sure, every business at some stage is you’re going to come up against it. Some person in your business at some point in time is going to be a poor performer, and won’t be able to improve. I think that’s when the values and matrix performance comes into play. You need to weigh up how good their values are, do their values and current performance, is that enough for your business? If their performance is so low that it’s not sustainable for your business, it does come down to make that hard decision at the end of the day.

As long as you’ve communicated that effectively with them; that you’ve set clear targets and goals, and you’ve done close to everything you can to develop that person and give them the tools to succeed… If they’re still not succeeding, it does come down to that difficult call of if it’s a possibility, they might need to move to a different position within your business, or they might need to move on to another job.

What I would like to add is by the time you’re getting to this conversation, you should have already been discussing their performance against their targets and gone through development opportunities with them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to the person. It’ll only be a surprise to someone that they’re underperforming and seriously underperforming if you haven’t communicated regularly with them.

Killian Vigna: The information is in front of you. It’s not just your word against theirs to say; you know what. “I don’t think it’s working out. I don’t think you’re performing.” You can backup your reasons.

Seán O’Sullivan: Exactly. I think it’s something that we kind of start to miss out on with the amount of technology that we have today. It’s those people skills. Communication is still the most powerful medium we have as a race. We don’t do it enough. We go onto Messenger or Slack in our case, instead of just being face to face with that person or on video messaging if you’re in a different continent and having that honest conversation with someone. You should never be afraid to have an honest conversation with someone. It might get emotional. We shouldn’t be scared of emotion or upsetting someone, because respect is built by being honest with someone else.

Killian Vigna: Well, Seán, listen, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. That’s over 40 minutes long.

Seán O’Sullivan: Target achieved.

Killian Vigna: But I feel like it was a much-needed episode. As we said, it ties in well with the episodes we had recently 119 and with Retail Week as well, so thanks so much, Seán.

Seán O’Sullivan: No worries. Thanks for having me guys.

Inside Phorest: reflections, upcoming events & final words

Killian Vigna: Okay, moving onto the second half of the show and kicking it off with the Phorest Academy. Phorest Academy, we’ve just launched to all of our US clients. It’s still in the beta testing mode. But what it is, it’s your one-stop education shop. It’s an online learning portal full of fun, interactive and bite-size, self-talk courses covering every area of the Phorest system. You can learn on the go with the downloadable app. You’ll have access to a library of regularly added and updated courses. You’ll get to play around with interactive Phorest systems. Most importantly, you’ll be able to download your Phorest Academy certificate for each course.

Zoe Belisle-Springer: Next on the Inside Phorest segment, we have a brand new webinar taking place on September 2nd at 11:00 AM UK Irish time, and is with salon business coach, David Barnett. It’s all about his three steps salon retail technique, which has helped salons around the world smash their targets again and again. If you don’t know David of the High Performance Stylist, he has spent a career working on some of the world’s leading salons in the UK, Ireland and the US. Some of his work was featured on New York Fashion Week, the Grammys, MTV Awards, and he’s even had his California salon chosen to do a pop up for the Superbowl 50 VIPs.

Here’s the deal, if you’ve listened to episode 52 of Phorest FM, you’ll have heard about this technique a little bit already. If you’re taking part in #SalonRetailWeek, you’ll get to know his technique and this time around September 2nd is your chance to spend an hour deep diving into this technique. It’s simple, achievable, and incredibly effective. This is not a webinar you want to miss.

Next up, we have the Salon Owners Summit. The Dublin flagship event and the Salon Owners Summit Roadshow. The first one of which is taking place in January 2020, so the Dublin flagship event that is. We have our first main stage speaker, and our first workshop speaker announced. The tickets are on sale. You can request a callback for those, and then we have the Salon Owners Summit Roadshow taking place in Philadelphia on October 21st, that is a Monday. The time of the event is from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. All education, and then we have a networking reception from 5:00 to 7:00. It’s taking place at the Lucy, like I said, in Philly. Up until August 31st, if you use the code EARLY BIRD, you can receive 15% off your ticket price.

By the way, everything that we mentioned here, all the links are in those notes. So, do check them out. The announced speakers for the Salon Owners Summit roadshow at the minute, are Ashley Toliver-Williams, Olivia Smalley, Jay Williams, Rachel Ringwood, and Josh Hafetz. If you’re based out of the US, I would strongly recommend you check out this event. All the information can be found on salonownerssummit.com/Philadelphia, and we look forward to seeing you there.

Then we have the Salon Retail Week. We’ve been talking about it since the start of the episode. It has kicked off today. However, it is not too late to take part. You can register for free salonretailweek.com. The idea for selling retail week is that for seven days straight, you’ll receive an email containing your retail task for the next day. Each task has been carefully crafted to get your products off your shelves and into the hands of the people that need it the most, aka your clients.

This is a free collaborative event. It’s designed for you and your team to work together and to help you see the impact that consistently selling retail can have on your overall business goals and targets. Of the participants who took part last year, on average, they increased their retail sales by 78%. Can you match that number or even exceed it this year? Let’s find out. If you haven’t signed up yet, do that today and join thousands of salons for the biggest retail week for your salon yet. Again, it’s a free event. You don’t need software to take parts. All you need is a bit of motivation and a hunger for success.

Finally, the Salon Mentorship Hub, as you know, is always there available for you. We’ve teamed up with coaches and consultants to offer you a free 15 to 30-minute consultation on a topic of your choosing. If you’re struggling with anything in the salon, head over to salonmentors.phorest.com, and have a look at who is there ready and available for you to help you see perhaps your challenge from a different perspective.

Well, that’s all we got for this week, guys. As always, if you want to share your thoughts on this episode or have any suggestions, send us an email phorestfm@phorest.com or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We genuinely love feedback and are always looking for ways to improve the show. Otherwise, have a wonderful week and we’ll catch you next Monday.

Killian Vigna: All the best.

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