If you want to make your hair or beauty salon more profitable then take a long hard look at your marketing mindset.
Are you still clinging to habits and beliefs formed when the economy was deep in crisis? It’s too easy to stay in that ‘batten down the hatches’ rut when it comes to salon prices and clients.
Tough decisions will make your salon more profitable
If you want to become a more profitable business then stop hanging on to low-grade clients and put your prices up. Be hard-nosed.
Four client groups fuel your salon profitability
Salon clients fall into four broad profit categories depending on their spend, frequency of visit and maintenance level.
A List: High profit/Low maintenance
B List: Medium profit/High maintenance
C List: Low profit/Low maintenance
D List: Low profit/High maintenance
What do I mean by maintenance level? Simply how much salon time and resources are needed to service them.
Which clients will make your salon business more profitable?
A Listers: we love these. 🙂
B Listers: you need to take a careful look at the Bs.
C Listers: are fine but they won’t make you rich.
D Listers: may well need to be fired. They take up too much time and resource.
Are these clients stopping your salon making more money?
D List clients. All salons suffer from them.
You know the ones. They spend little, yet want the best possible deal and the juiciest discount.
They cancel last-minute, forget to turn up, mess you around, don’t buy retail, drive your team bonkers and generally keep you from servicing your profitable clients.
You don’t need D Listers. Not if you want to make your hair or beauty salon more profitable.
Take the plunge. Ease them out and free up precious resources to spend on building relationships with lucrative clients.
Okay so losing clients may seem like the wrong way to go about making your salon more money. It seems counter-intuitive to shrink, rather than build, your client base. But in reality letting D List clients go is part of a sensible management strategy to increase profit.
Breaking up is hard to do… but good for your bottom line
It’s never easy to say goodbye to clients, especially when they’ve been coming to you for years. It certainly shouldn’t be done lightly. But you need to bite the bullet – these D Listers are losing you money and holding you back.
The best, least contentious way to do this is to increase your salon prices.
Your unprofitable D List clients then have a choice.
- They leave of their own accord taking their high maintenance/low spending ways to bleed one of your local competitors dry.
- Or they pay your increased prices.
Either way you win.
Managing your salon to make it more profitable
Losing clients is not professional suicide. On the contrary it’ll allow you to direct your time and resources to giving your A Listers all the love and attention they need and deserve. Nurture them.
It is these A List clients who will try new services. Buy retail. Recommend you to their friends.
You only have finite salon marketing and customer care resources so use them where they matter most if you want to make your salon or spa more profitable. It’s good old-fashioned common sense.