The Most Vital Information to Know About Your Business

In a world of information overload, we sometimes focus on things that don’t really matter and gloss over the information that really does.  Today, I want to talk to you about a piece of information that is really easy to get – yet almost nobody pays attention to it.

But it is vital in building any salon business and even more vital in making sure that you’re not wasting money every month.  That’s right wasting money every month because you’re “trying to guess” where and how your clients are coming to your salon.

Over the last few weeks, I asked a group of salon owners where their new clients were coming from.  Half of them couldn’t even tell me how many new clients their salons were getting every week.  And almost all of them, could not tell me with any certainty, how many clients were coming in from what source.

In other words, how many were coming in from their website or how many were client referrals or how many were just driving by, etc.  Now, why is this so important?

By the way, your HairMax Salon Software has a report called a Salon Activity Trend report that will give you the number of first-time clients your salon gets every week and the average number over the last 6 weeks.  Now back to why this is so important.

Well, it’s probably best to give you a little story that will bring this to light.  A few weeks ago, I did a survey (that you may have been part of) that told me that 71% of survey participants (salons) already had a website.  Yet, better than 3 out of every 4 of these salons were unhappy with the number of new clients they were getting each week from the Internet.

In fact, 68% of those salons were getting less than 3 clients per week from their websites.  Now that may not be a real shocking number to you because you may be one of the 68%, but here is the real kicker.

Almost 90% of these salons, updated their websites over the last year!  In other words, they are still spending money – even in this terrible environment – on their websites even though they are getting a measly 3 clients (or less) per week from the Internet.  Now, why do I say they are “wasting” their money?

Answer: Because they are doing nothing more than “dressing up a pig” in most cases.

It’s all about results.  And when you make changes to a website or spend money on advertising – you do it for one purpose only – to get more new clients.  If your website is not generating the results, simply changing a few things here or there is like just throwing the money away.

Now, I’m not going to get into what these salon owners are doing wrong in this blog post – that is coming over the next few weeks.  But I will say that if you don’t know how many new clients you are getting every week (and from where) – it is highly likely that you are making the wrong decisions for your salon.

And in this environment, how many salons can afford to make the wrong decisions?

In your HairMax salon software, you can easily track where your new clients are coming from.  You can create a simple list for the receptionist to choose from (located in system configuration by the way).  You can get a list of these first-time clients every week right out of your salon software.

Once a week, you should be printing off the list and checking to see where the clients are coming from.  The whole process will take less than 10 minutes a week in most cases.

Bottom Line: The first step in making better salon decisions is identifying the really important information.  Don’t waste your time looking at just the service sales or retail sales for the week.  This information is nothing more than a symptom – the devil is in the details!

Best regards, Steve Sampson

HairMax Salon Software is a product designed to be the best investment your salon has ever made.  It is not only the easiest and most powerful salon management software on the market.  It is from a company dedicated to becoming the ultimate VALUE source to the industry.