How to manage quiet spells in the salon
By Katie Barnes | 08 November 2022 | Business, Expert Advice, Feature
Every beauty business will come across quiet periods of footfall and a common time for this can be right before the busy festive season. As savvy business owners, you must think of ideas that boost profits and productivity in such times, whenever your business may experience this.
Boosting profits
During the months that you know will be quiet, you still need the cash to come in due to overheads and outgoings, so this is a good opportunity to be more adventurous. Rather than just promote a special offer, which many others will do, consider holding an event such as a salon birthday celebration, pamper evening, VIP evening for existing clients or pre-Christmas open evening.
Businesses can be so focused on pursuing new clients that can neglect their existing clientele, which is full of profitable business opportunities. Don’t forget about salon clients you haven’t seen in a while. Look back through your booking system and identify which of your clients haven’t visited over the past six months or so. Even though I recommend doing this on a regular basis, a quiet period is a perfect opportunity to send them an SMS or an email with a tempting offer to get them back to becoming a regular.
When I ran my salon, I used to send out ‘long time, no see’ postcards to those clients we had not seen in a few months. We offered 20% off their next treatment booked within a month of receipt and encouraged them to give us feedback to why they hadn’t returned. This feedback can be invaluable to business growth, whether positive or negative.
This can also be an ideal time to introduce a new treatment and offer an introductory price as you will more than likely have the column space to accommodate these bookings.
Managing staff productivity
It can be far too easy for staff to pick up bad habits during downtime. They might fold towels, talk, text or update Facebook. This isn’t being proactive. Every single minute of business time should be fully maximised, whether the salon is busy with clients or not, so therapists should continually practice their technique, particularly when there is free time in the salon, to ensure that clients return to them and recommend them to others.
Management
Managers or business owners can take advantage of these lulls to catch up with larger, time-consuming tasks that they struggle to find time for, such as: accounting, stock takes, spring cleaning, planning the annual marketing calendar, salon upgrades or changes, staff training, appraisals and team meetings. This period is often the calm before the storm, so get organised and catch up whilst you can. You can also give your therapists the opportunity to go on training courses to enhance their skills and knowledge when there is not always chance for this in the busy periods.
This can also be a great time to take on new members of staff, as this allows a smooth and timely transition period, where you can spend quality time training them up. These therapists and technicians will then be raring to go in time for the busy periods such as summer and Christmas.
Plan ahead
Devote time at the start of the year to put a structure in place across the whole business. It is important to consistently keep up to date with all the correct systems to maximise efficiency. Running a successful business can require a lot of processes and procedures but having these in place early on in the business year will make things run more smoothly as the year progresses.
I would love to hear your ideas about what you do when you are quiet!
Love Katie B x