You have finally opened a hair salon after many months of planning and execution. You’re certain that you did everything right. But things aren’t going well, and you’re unable to generate profit.
In that case, you’re probably making some newbie mistakes. These include hiring the wrong employees, avoiding online marketing, using chemical products, etc.
In this blog, we’ll discuss three mistakes you should avoid when running a hair salon and more.
#1. Making Business-Related Mistakes
Did you know that America is home to almost 952,909 hair salons? Yes, you’ve got to compete with all of them. The only way to survive this cutthroat industry is by avoiding these business-related mistakes:
- Not having a business plan: A scalable, actionable, and well-rounded plan will ensure your salon is on the right track toward success.
- Not hiring an accountant: Without an accountant, you cannot track the daily expenses and revenue your business is generating.
- Compromising on the logo: You must create a business logo that shares a positive brand image and looks professional.
- Forgetting to secure proper funding: Your business cannot function properly on personal funds and without business loans or investors.
Moreover, your salon won’t generate revenue with unqualified staff. While recruiting, you should have some strict parameters. Examples include minimal experience, a friendly personality, and a specific age group.
#2. Avoiding Online Marketing and Community Building
Have you listed your salon in newspapers and magazines? Then, you’ve used traditional marketing efforts to grow your business. However, this intuitive strategy is too expensive and time-consuming.
That’s why you’ll need online marketing strategies as well. With it, you can build a strong brand image to attract new clients and reach a wider customer base.
You must understand your target audience’s needs, analyze the retention figures, set a budget, and use all marketing channels. An online presence will also help you garner customer reviews and feedback.
Once you’ve implemented a proper strategy, you can focus on community building. To grow locally, you’ll need to participate in community events and showcase your salon’s unique traits. For instance, you can support the local community college by creating haircare-related workshops.
All these steps will help upsell your services to new clients. That means you can successfully convince them to get a more expensive haircare treatment or buy additional products. They won’t have any objections because you’ve already built your brand’s image, which helped them trust your expertise and knowledge.
#3. Neglecting the Safety of Your Customers
Did you know that exceptional hygiene and product safety should be two important pillars in your hair salon? For instance, you shouldn’t buy chemical-based products containing sulfates, silicones, benzene, etc. If you do, then your clients probably won’t return.
Let’s discuss this with an example of the famous hair relaxers used for straightening treatments. This widely used product contains endocrine disruptors, parabens, formaldehyde, and harmful metals. Research suggests that women who use this product have a higher risk of developing breast, ovarian, or prostate cancer.
However, the cosmetic company responsible for using chemicals in this product marketed it as a safe solution for making curly hair straight. Once women learned about the manufacturer’s inability to warn them about potential dangers, they filed a hair straightener lawsuit.
This ongoing product liability lawsuit aims to collect compensation for the plaintiff’s medical expenses, lost income, permanent disabilities, etc. According to TorHoerman Law, plaintiffs may be entitled to receive settlements between USD 100,000 and USD 1,500,000.
This incident proves how crucial it is to properly research products before buying them for your salon. You need to avoid hair products that could lead to infertility, cancer, allergies, etc. Instead, you should look for ingredients like mild surfactants, seed oils, natural butter, humectants, etc.
Pro Tip: Create safety standards specific to your salon. These can include the importance of minimizing chemical exposure, safe storage, sanitation requirements, etc.
6 Tips to Help New Salon Owners Run a Successful Business
As a newbie, you’ve probably got no idea how demanding it is to run a successful hair salon. For instance, you’ll need to keep your finances in check, revamp the business plan, and work through negative customer reviews daily. All these might seem overwhelming if you don’t have a defined and scalable plan.
Therefore, you should focus on the following tips to help run a successful hair salon business:
- Manage your employee’s time properly and keep track of their efforts to provide equal opportunity to everyone.
- Use scheduling software to help automate appointments and daily tasks.
- Don’t feel overwhelmed by the competition. Instead, be clear about your salon’s mission, specialties, and value.
- Choose a robust management niche to build a loyal customer and employee base.
- You can also revamp the interior design of the salon to make the environment more relaxing, fun, and welcoming.
- You must outline the business’s services and offerings based on customer demands and needs as your salon grows.
Moreover, you should keep researching the market to understand the changing demands of the beauty industry. It’ll help your hair salon business stay updated with the latest trends and standards.
Have you heard of Chelle Neff, the founder of Urban Betty? Like you, Chelle also started her business in a brick-and-mortar salon. She used unique marketing strategies and employee retention techniques to gradually expand the team and clientele. Now, Urban Betty generates a whopping revenue of USD 3.3 million across two locations and has over 50 employees.
In conclusion, you must focus on avoiding any mistakes when running a hair salon business. These include neglecting customers’ safety, forgetting the business plan, avoiding marketing efforts, hiring the wrong people, etc. If you don’t fix such issues, it can eventually steer your business towards failure.
These could also lead to inadequate cash reserves and an inability to keep up with trends. When that happens, you cannot keep up with the competition and fail to make appointments. That’s why you should focus on the tips shared on running a successful business.
