New Year resolutions: How to not wreck your salon business in 2019
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December is the time for gift shopping, meals with the family, Christmas parties, and making New Year resolutions. All the while, your beauty salon should be filled with clients looking to refresh their hair and nails, getting party makeup and hairdos, and relieving stress from the end of the year hustle and bustle.
For a business, December also means the time for evaluating your assets, implementing New Year salon marketing ideas for January and February, and making plans for the year to come. Find out some recommendations here on how to prepare your salon for the new year.
Launch New Year salon promotions the right way
The pre-holiday season is not the best time for attracting new customers. In fact, you should already have a hefty amount of regulars before any holiday. Still, reminding your customers why they need to visit you before New Year’s Eve is essential.
One of the biggest mistakes some salons make is offering huge discounts.
Think of it this way: going to a beauty salon at the end is a given. Whether it’s to get makeup and hair done for a party or people just feel like their body needs a fresh start, they already have a goal, what they need is a place. Here is how you can encourage visits from clients before the year ends, while not wasting your own money and effort:
- Focus on the gift-giving season. Beauty certificates for New Year salon specials are a perfect gift to friends and family, especially if you don’t know what to get them. Make sure that your administrators promote gift cards. You can also save money by selling e-cards.
- New Year’s resolutions. “New year – new me” is one of the most popular promises people give to themselves before the end of the year. Help them get to that point by reminding to start taking care of their bodies first thing in the new year and offer services that will be best for the job.
- Prepare for the New Year parties. It’s much easier to get a party look done in a beauty salon. That should be your focus in advertising (on social media for example): tell the clients they can get the perfect look at your salon.
The point is, more people need a beauty salon around this time of year, you just need to stir them in the right direction — to your salon.
Analyze your salon performance
After the beauty salon New Year offers are over, it’s time to sum up the year. One of the most important indicators of your salon’s performance is your yearly profit and expenses. But not only that, you have to fully understand how cash flows in your salon:
- How much you profit from services, selling products and certificates;
- Whether client payments are made with cash or credit cards;
- Whether you waste money on backbar products, etc.
If you are using Beauty Pro salon software, it’s much easier to get objective profitability and find out information about your salon that helps find ways of growing it. For example:
1. Profit and loss details. You can see in details where your money come from and where they go. How much have you spent on paying salaries? How much of the money you gained came from providing services or selling other product?
2. Client’s visits. Here you can see how many client visits you have had by department and also how many of them were from female and male clients. This gives you an insight into which of your services are more popular and what your target audience is.
3. Age groups. You can even find out which age groups of clients frequent your salon.
A year’s worth of information and its deep analysis will give you more insights into the cashflow in your salon, of course, but it also gives you a better idea of who your clients are.
Altogether, a closer look at salon performance reports and the information you get from analyzing different statistics about your salon will help you understand your its profitability and turnover, as well as identify your weaknesses and outline what you need to keep doing or change in the new year.
If you don’t have a salon management software system, it is high time to get one. Salon software is important for structuring and organizing salon processes, as well as documenting all actions you take daily (e.g., booking appointments or managing the inventory). It is indispensable when talking about salon performance analysis. It can give you crucial reports on your profit and expenses, client statistics, and other important indicators in just a click of the mouse.
Plans for the next year
December is the best month for strategy sessions and planning your course for the next year. Now that you have the data to show your strong and weak points, it’s time to plan what you are going to do in the new year, as well as your budget.
Why is planning so important? It affects the organization of all your salon processes.
Imagine it’s your first January appointment, but at the last moment, you realize you don’t have the materials to do the service, and your supplier is on a holiday. That’s not an issue if you plan how many clients you are going to have next month and buy the necessary materials.
Planning isn’t just about the supplies. It is also about identifying your goals and steps you need to take in order to achieve them. For example, how much money are you going to invest in your best services? What are you going to do after Happy New Year salon specials are over? How many clients can your salon service on a regular basis? Can you do more, and if yes, then how can you do that? Once again, you can get that information in Beauty Pro reports and use it to plan how big your salon will grow.
Here is how you can do that:
1. Profitability of services. If you take a look at the profitability report, you can identify which of your services are the most profitable and where you are just wasting money, so you know where your investments should go.
2. Revenue by departments. The report will show you which of them generate the most income. As for the departments that don’t profit much, it is an incentive for you to dig deeper and find out what is holding them back: lack of advertising or bad customer service? On the other hand, it might be that your clients are simply not interested in the services and it is time to let go.
3. Client’s referral sources. This report will show you which channels of advertising are worth investing in. If you get more clients, for example, by giving out flyers or through contextual advertising, you should focus on that in the new year.
And just in case you have found that you have more weak point that strong ones or your salon doesn’t give you as much profit as you thought it would — don’t panic. Here is what you should do:
- Start your business plan from scratch.
- Write down all the mistakes you’ve made with your business and analyze them.
- Think of how you could have avoided them.
- Answer the question: why do I want to have a beauty salon?
- Write down your perspectives, your vision of the salon’s future, your goals.
- Decide what tools you need to adopt in order to correct previous mistakes and achieve new goals.
You still have time to grow a more profitable salon. If you start making smart goals, plan ahead, and use the right tools, soon your salon will reach a new level.
In conclusion
Analysis and planning are two major tasks your the success of your business depend on. But it’s not something you can effectively do with only pen and paper. That’s why you absolutely need a salon management system. It’s like a giant beauty calculator that does a lot of the business math for you.
Most importantly, it provides you with reports that allow you to analyze the statistics and be a few steps ahead in you planing. Beauty Pro salon software helps to structure your work and organize the salon processes. It can hold a lot more information and use all of it at the same time: add, change or retrieve data about your clients and employees, analyze performance, plan financial goals.
You can download the Beauty Pro 14-day free demo and see for yourself how your business can transform in just a couple of weeks.
