The salon landscape is shifting at a quick pace and the savviest owners and managers agree on one thing data is key to growing and maintaining the health of their businesses. Why this is true is simple…data doesn’t lie!
Stacey Soble, the well-known and respected Editor-in-Chief of Salon Today Magazine host of the upcoming Data-Driven Salon Summit event in Atlanta-shares her thoughts and top reasons as to why data is so critical to salon success and growth in 2018 and beyond:
- Data allows you truly understand how you are performing against prior years, the competition, and delivers insight into national averages. Many people don’t really know how they stack up against the competition or if their team is performing against set goals at the same level as their peers, and across the country. Data shows you exactly what’s happening in real-time and is essential for identifying and highlighting growth opportunities, business trends, exceptional team members (or conversely those who could use some extra guidance or education), and so much more.
- Data takes the emotion out of managing people. Data eliminates “the feels.” As stated above, data doesn’t lie. It’s based on hard, irrefutable facts. Imagine a team member coming to you with a statement like: “I feel like I’m rocking it and that it’s time for a promotion,” “I feel like the front desk isn’t giving me enough new clients,” or “I feel like it’s time to raise my prices.” Now imagine the data tells another story. Maybe the stylist has a low client retention rate, a low productivity percentage or a low pre-booking or product to service sales ratio. By looking at your data you can easily see how many services they booked on average, their increases in service or product sales, what their client retention rate is, whether or not they increased their retailing, or if they are measuring color and reducing waste as recommended. You are able to measure effectively against goals and work off of facts – not emotion – which is a huge, beneficial advantage. Plus, you can easily point to areas of improvement for them to meet their personal goals.
- Data allows for growth tracking. Data can help you make other important decisions for the salon, such as predicting when it’s time to expand, bring in a new retail line, raising prices, or adding staff. For example, you may feel like it’s time to expand but the data may reveal that you have room to grow at your existing location by reconfiguring your space, making sure service providers are close to 100% productive, split-shifting or expanding your hours. With data you can predict when expansion is needed or identify whether you are not quite at that stage in your business yet. The insights allow for targeted strategies to be developed to support those goals.
- Data is your digital “twin”. We all want to clone our business-selves to handle more work and increase productivity. Data can actually be your business “twin” in some key areas:
- Data helps manage your business more efficiently – from inventory, detailed client records, bookings, digital marketing, waste reduction, what’s trending, what’s declining, and more. It saves you time to focus on other areas.
- oIt helps manage your team’s performance and track goals.
- oIt allows you easy access to vital info – anytime, anywhere, and designed to help you.
- Real-Time Data = Real-Time Management = Savings. Real-time data and reports, like those SureTint™ offers for your hair color business, allow you to identify, assess and address any issue quickly – not in a month or two. They can include product waste, surface an under-performing team member, or over-ordering on inventory. Time flies by and money is lost when you don’t know what’s truly happening. Your bottom and top line will thank you.
- Data is Motivational. Salons that track data quickly discover it’s a key motivator for driving performance. Team members are naturally competitive and when their real-time performance is being tracked they naturally compete against their goals, against their own best averages and against their fellow colleagues. As a result, their higher performance not only helps their own wallets but helps the salon’s bottom line.
