This salon is closed!
18 Months ago I moved into the village I live in. At the same time a new salon opened just behind my home. That’s an actual photo of the salon above.
I went in one day to buy some hair products and have to say the salon looked very, very nice. They’d clearly spent a small fortune on it.
I’d tale a guess and say they have five stylists and maybe three trainees and a receptionist.
The furniture looked like premium stuff with everything shining like new. As I took the photograph I wondered what had gone wrong?
They certainly never opened, invested and slaved on the basis that they were to close down yet they have clearly closed down.
The consequences of closing down are dramatic of course. Lets guess the owner had signed up for a lease on the property for 10 years. That means that despite closing the business he or she still has to pay that lease for the next 8.5 years!
And of course there’s the whole emotional drain, the mental pain and the feeling of failure that goes with it.
But I can tell you this just through simple observation… MORE salons will go bust during this crazy economic time than maybe ever before.
WILL YOU?
The truth is it really doesn’t have to be that way at all. Let me tell you about Grace a client of mine.
Grace has a new salon in Birmingham. When she first got in touch her salon had closed dues to just not being busy enough. Not enough clients meant not enough. Her salon just folded.
A year or so later Grace decided to try again. This time she rang me to ask what she needs to do to get her salon right from day one. So after numerous training calls on the day Grace opened her new salon her appointment booked was packed solid despite never being opened for business before.
Yes salons around her are going bust. Yes salons around her are failing. Yes salons around her are suffering a slow death to no business.
Grace called me last week to talk about a new marketing strategy we had talked over several times.
She said “Alan I have a problem I’m not sure what to do with”
I asked her to tell me.
She then told me that since doing what we had talked about her phone has almost exploded. She has around 450 buyers of her latest offer and she has no idea how she is going to service them.
I did say FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY new clients. What I didn’t say is they all booked within DAYS not months.
Excited news in these dire times right.
I can tell you what happened to the salon in the photograph above. It’s really simple. The did no marketing, did no promoting, had no idea of the marketplace and like a lot of salons they believed that having good skills would be enough to get them busy.
- Do you need more clients?
- Do you need to get busier?
- Do you need to know how to survive this crazy economic climate?
You can do two things.
1. Go buy a good marketing book buy say Jay Conrad Levinson on Marketing then try and work it out and apply it all to your salon.
or
2. Go look at Salon Extreme 21 you will find Everything you need to know on how to pack out your salon in 30 days or less.
Or of course, you can always book some consulting time with us here at Salon Punk.? To do that simply hit reply and we’ll get back in touch with you.
So despite the closures around her it looks as though Grace is about to have her very best Christmas ever.
Will you?
All the very best.
Alan, Salon Punk.com
