Truth 2 of 7 : You Create Your Game

For whatever reasons you entered the Industry you had to decide where to make your start; Apprentice therapist, stylist, receptionist, company rep, industry trainer or perhaps straight in as a partner or owner. In order to succeed whatever your industry experience, you will need to get clear on what Game you play within it.

Truth 2 is that there is a personal game that is right for you and so too, a personal game right for each team member within the salon. A good salon management plan will be flexible enough to acknowledge this truth to allow each person to contribute at their best while playing in their most fulfilling role.

Many owners we work with in-salon, have struggled with what game they want to play verses what game they believe the business needs them to play. At this point they go about the working day or week running from one game to another. Like trying to keep a full column because stepping back might hurt turnover too much, then getting stuck at reception because no one can deal with enquires, rebook and retail quite as well as themselves, then having to take a member of staff aside to deal with a personal or employee related issue, then squeeze in a meeting with the product rep who is paying a courtesy visit, then shutting themselves in the backroom while they try to catch up on office admin while pushing down some lunch.

These are all essential parts of the business, but hard to succeed at, without the time and ability to apply the appropriate amount of focus, let alone be all things from which you receive the most satisfaction. Yet these same roles may be areas other team members have an almost natural bent towards doing well.

Taking the time to document easy to follow checklists and guides on how you would like each of these salon tasks to be managed, will allow you to implement well structured ways to identify and train interested team members into taking on responsibilities that are the right game for them, freeing yourself up to focus on the game you really want to be playing yourself.

The payoff for operating your business at the level of this 2^nd truth is that you get this certainty. If for example you think you can’t afford to let go or delegate out all the different games to other members of staff because they won’t look after your business as well, ask yourself this:

Do you agree that if you were to play one game well that you would be more successful than trying to play some of all the games you need to run a salon business? If the answer is yes, then you and your business will only suffer from not implementing a way to pass the other games over.

Just decide which game you are going to play: in the business or on the business?

Once you have that clarity, you know how to preserver from now on.

Whereas at the level of the first truth, which is acknowledging there are many games to play. Such as; will I stay behind the chair or in the room with my clients to bring in the cash, will I lead from the front and manage the salon from the reception desk or will I run the business from behind and provide the environment for the team to succeed in. It’s in making the decision, which is the right game for you, that then, even in tough times or when things don’t seem to be going right, you can know that so long as you stick to your game, you can say, “This is my game, this is my game, if it’s not going well today, I’ll still turn up tomorrow because, this is my game!”

By having this conviction to preserver at your game, you can resist the old tendency to dive back into the other games when they don’t look to be as perfect as you’d like and so allow others to improve in the growth of their own games to free yourself from being tied to them.

With Nexus Revolution, you do not have to tackle this alone. If you would like to call upon our 12 years industry experience implementing salon management systems customised to your situation, email us at info@nexusrevolution.co.uk

7 Levels of Truth – Applied to creating wealth in salon industry

Are there Truths that work within a Salon Business?

Actually there are 7 truths that exist to succeed in whatever industry or game you work or play in. I’ve provided Salon Management examples of these principles of Wealth Dynamics from the accompanying video presented by Roger Hamilton, to explain how they can be applied for you to play your own part in the Salon Hair and Beauty Industry.

The first thing to do when talking about anything complex or having more than one level, is to get clear about the agreement of what the truth of those levels are.

This is particularly important for salon teams with different years and levels of experience and responsibilities. Why? Because the level of our learning and so our understanding, happens at the level of our own personal belief, our level of truth. For example, if you told your team there was a bonus for any who reach a salon target to sell a retail item with every client visit for the month, many probly wouldn’t even be interested, because they don’t believe that target is possible. If however, your customer service training already had a clearly established philosophy that the salon is stocked full of select product ranges to complement and enhance every service your salon offers and that as trained professionals it’s our responsibility to inform our clients what we would recommend they use at home to continue to get the best out of their service. The level of personal belief of the team can shift to knowing that they could match the correct recommendation to the clients advantage and simply ask each one, “would you like to take these home today too?”

Better still, by documenting a clear understanding of your teams’ different salon levels, you can establish a clear agreement of what is expected at each level and set your commission structure accordingly. That way the level of your employee’s truth expands according to their level of learning. The bottom line is, if you want a shift to happen in your salon, where for example; achieving targets is a collective belief everyone has, you will need to introduce an environment that allows each level to take clear and agreed steps towards that change, until the change becomes the salon’s new ethos.

Which leads us into the 1^st Truth;

Truth 1 of 7 : There are different games to play

Business is just a game and within the game we all have our own natural flow to play with. This is your path of least resistance to your successes.

A salon can either run as a business, where we each play our part or it can just be the workplace for our job. A job is just an exchange of your time for pay, where a business can become a game because when we focus on the right parts something much more fulfilling and beneficial results for all involved, staff and clients alike. When each player understands what their focus should be and focuses on being a better player at that for long enough, it results in being able to do the role so successfully that work becomes play, play is fun and both personal and collective rewards are the result.

Business is a team game. Team games require each person to train in their position to best cover the roles needed to achieve the goals of the days play. The team structure needs a balance of roles and levels of skill in order to consistently perform throughout the entire season. In a salon there is always the need to schedule around staff away or to rearrange the roster when they are promoted to higher levels, pricing points or roles of responsibility. Salons that don’t have a plan for keeping a balanced structure are at risk of being top heavy where all members have a relative high amount of years experience. This creates an environment where everyone must work hard to cover all the salon operations with high cost employees, putting a strain on wages verses the income they need to produce to be profitable. Good people can work hard for a while, but inevitably this is not sustainable and work effort drops, service standards drop and focus on other necessary business operations gets left.

To operate smart we recommend in addition to recording how you want your salon to operate day to day and service standards you want every client to experience in your team member handbook and customer service manual, is to also provide your team with a clear progress ladder in the form of position descriptions that encourage balanced growth by making it the responsibility of higher levels to train others into their positions before a space in your salon structure is created for them to move up into. This further strengthens the flexibility of your team because each person is not only trained to focus on their current role but be looking to learn the next, while mentoring the one to follow them.

Nexus Revolution has more information to help produce a strategy for your own salon situation and can be contacted at info@nexusrevolution.co.uk