How To Bulletproof Your Salon Or Spa Business During Recessions

Every salon or spa business owner realizes that times are a little tough these days and because beauty services are “luxury” services, they are more likely to feel the pressure. So what steps can you take to weather economic downturns so your business can survive and thrive? Simply put, you need to cut costs, conserve cash, improve core business, keep your team’s morale high while asking for their full support during this time, and retain and improve market share through aggressive marketing.

Cutting costs and cutting fat will in turn keep more of your cash. Have you ever stopped to consider how much you’re paying for your consumables? Could you buy with a better deal with your vendors or suppliers? If you don’t know, why not ask them if they can help? Are you taking advantage of special minimum purchase offers? And if you can’t afford the full ticket offer, ask if you can have a reduced offer.

Also thoroughly review the protocols and services and then optimize them whenever possible. Check that your employees are using the correct amount of skin care products for each service and reduce waste. And then communicate the various reasons to cut costs to employees, never keep them in the dark, instead engage them by supporting and helping to reduce fat.

Employees are often the biggest cost to a business, so this means everyone must do everything they can to make every minute of the workday productive. Processing and retail throughput must be increased. So keep a close eye that you don’t have some that are a waste of time. And keep a close eye on the time each staff member takes to do each service. If a treatment should take an hour to do and they are taking an hour and a quarter, then they are losing you money. This is the time to be tough and make them aware that this is not acceptable. Don’t accept apologies.

One of the best ways to build your business during tough times is to focus on your core business. Your core business is the service(s) that generates the most dollars for the least expense. So it makes sense to encourage your team to focus on upselling these services. Conduct team trainings on methods to upsell and rebook these core services.

Keeping morale up can be difficult at times, but it’s vital that during these times we don’t allow employees to start ‘negative talking’ to customers. Clients want to receive their service in peace and quiet. Insist that your team talk only about positive and enjoyable topics and preferably talk more about the benefits of the treatment and the product and how they can make the client happy with their skin. At the end of the day, both the client and the therapist will be happy, and you will have more money in the register.

This is the perfect time to scan your competition for weaknesses. Take advantage of them to increase the market share of your salon or spa. Try to sell your way through recessions using profit-making beauty salon spa marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, many owners cut back on marketing, but this is not a good time to start taking resources away from advertising or marketing budgets. Rather, this is the time to really focus on bringing the business. So, beef up your marketing and promote all of your core services and you’ll not only weather this recession, but grow a more sustainable and profitable salon or spa business.

© Copyright Carolina Nelson 2009