Task Force
If there is one thing you do this month, get back to school!
You want your salon business to be the best, and often that means learning more – every day’s a school day, so get cracking! Speak to most bosses and their priority is the bottom line, whether it’s through improved management skills, individual staff development or an overall shake up of the salon. A great place to start is the Wella Professionals one-day Maximising Potential and Performance, which helps ensure your training programme results in improved performance on the salon floor and increased turnover, rather than just time out of the salon. For the nitty gritty of boosting your bottom line, its two-day Grow Your Business course addresses how to improve profitability – covering financial accounts, targeting customers and reducing costs and expenses – and sends you back to the salon armed with a bespoke business plan for growth.
Increasing productivity while streamlining expenses is at the heart of both a successful salon business and Aveda’s two-step Benchmarking for Success course. The follow-up two-day programme, Rituals for Retention, delves deeper into the cornerstones of sustainability: profitability, leadership, staff recruitment/retention and a continuous customer cycle.
Once management and productivity have been tackled, you can look at individual training needs. To achieve a revenue boost for individual staff members, and ultimately your salon, HOB Academy’s How To Build Your Column tackles everything from client consultation through to retail sales. Wella Professionals also runs two courses – Column Consequences and Client Consequences – that offer solutions for delighting your clients, both as an individual stylist and as a salon.
If you want to handle PR in-house rather than paying an external company, Goldwell’s ‘PR Your Salon’ offers the definitive guide. This workshop helps identify your salon’s image as well as offering advice on successful campaigns and tips for dealing with the press, and you get to keep a Getting Started guide, with all the tools you need to promote the salon the moment you return!
Tips
WAYS TO MAKE IT PAY – THE EXPERTS’ VIEW
“Before you book anything, ask yourself ‘What is my training budget?’”
Gill Pope, education manager, L’Oréal Professionnel
“Set clear expectations as a result of the training. Education is a huge investment and only worth it if you are able to measure it and gain a return”
Sheila Jackson, partnership service manager, Wella Professionals UK & Ireland
“Target specific areas of weakness. Find out where your clients find fault or why they lack enthusiasm in booking for a particular service”
Robert Resnick, academy manager at HOB Salons
“Don’t just focus on the business you have today – what about the business you want tomorrow? Analyse what services your salon is not currently offering and then focus a course on this new service”
William Wilson, head of creative direction, Goldwell UK
“Choose a course that stretches you, rather than a course where the content is something you are already comfortable with. If it was easy to make a change within your business you would’ve already done it. The hard things are what other people fail to do”
Ken West, director, 3.6.5 Education
