As of June this year, I have now spent 15 years in the hair and beauty industry. It is hard to believe really – my entire professional life. A significant chunk of that time has been spent sitting in treatment rooms with salon owners talking about their business performance, or analysing rebooking rates of hair salons versus beauty salons. And I have loved every minute of it.
Evaluating Your Business Performance
One of the biggest insights I had early on, was that you could get a feeling for how a salon is performing with just two numbers: your average bill and your number of clients per week. It doesn’t matter really what type of salon you have, or where the salon is located; these figures always work. Even more importantly, as a salon business owner, if you focused only on improving those two numbers, your salon would grow almost guaranteed.
The Only Two Numbers You Need To Care About As A Salon Owner
Focusing on these figures – average bill and clients visits – brings to light other problems or opportunities in the business. For example, I can always tell salons who use marketplaces or deal sites apart from those who don’t, only because their average bill declines over time. Another prevalent problem in the industry is good performing salons who have never increased their prices over many years. In my experience, if you have a utilisation rate of over 70% and haven’t raised your prices for five years or more, you should be increasing them by at least 5%, if not 10%. With every salon I have seen do so, I have noticed that their average bill increases without any change in appointment numbers.
It was also because of these two numbers that we came up with our company mission nearly ten years ago now: “We help salons get their clients back in more often, spending more.”
This mission inspired us to develop most of our most powerful tools, such as:
- TreatCard – brings clients back more often and increases their average spend,
- Salon Branded Apps – gets clients back in more often,
- SMS Marketing – helps your clients spend more,
- Client ReConnect – gets your clients back in more often.
And whenever we start to work on a new feature, we always ask ourselves: “How will this tool help with our mission?“
Related | What Types Of Salon Loyalty Programs Actually Add Value?
Introducing The Revamped Weekly Update Email
Until now understanding how your average bill and client visit numbers were doing in your salon (and whether you are improving those numbers or not) always required you to access the KPI reports of your Phorest Salon Software manually. Starting next week, we are going to be sending you a very clear overview of your business performance at the top of your revamped Weekly Update email.
The rest of the weekly update is going to focus on the different things you could be doing in your salon to grow these two numbers. What made us now change up the weekly update email in this way?
In short, one of our team members here in Phorest Salon Software, Faelan Herriott (who I am sure many of you know from your days of getting setup with our product) did an analysis of which salons were growing rapidly. He found that the 25% fastest growing salons using Phorest Salon Software were growing their average bill far more quickly than everyone else.
What were they doing differently to the other salons? Faelan found that they were using more of the Phorest Salon Software Grow Tools than the other salons – e.g. the TreatCard or the Salon Branded app. He was also able to drill down into each tool and see which ones were having the biggest impact. We have decided to share that knowledge with you in the Weekly Update email so you can compare your business performance to best practice.
Final Words
I hope you enjoy the new Weekly Update email, and most importantly that it helps you grow your salon. I know that I would love to have something similar for my own business! 🙂
Thanks for reading,
#LetsGrow
– Ronan Perceval, CEO + Founder of Phorest Salon Software
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