While Hair & Co. BKLYN in Brooklyn, New York is just a few years young, its owners Allyson and Shannon King brought to it two careers full of experience. Shannon was a world renowned platform artist and educator with Redken, Matrix and Keune and Allyson was a former vice president of salons for Ulta and CEO of the Dessange Group for North America.

With that corporate strategy behind her, when Allyson King starts the annual planning process with her team, she starts out by asking each one what they want to make in the coming year. “Then we start playing with the metrics—we look at average ticket, clients per hour and total number of tickets,” she says. “We plug in their actuals then we look to see if they realistically can meet their goals at the pace they work in the number of hours they work each week.”

Part of that conversation includes retail goals, and King looks closely at the employee’s retail percentages. “For example, if she only has 10 percent of clients buying retail, then I know there’s opportunity.”

King rolls the overall service and retail goals into an annual planner, then breaks the goals into monthly and weekly goals for each employee. And where possible, she simplifies it. “For example, we calculate the retail goal into units by rounding the price of an average product like a bottle of shampoo and figuring out how many units they’d need to sell to meet their percentage goal,” she explains. “If you give stylists a percentage goal, who’s going to whip out a calculator and figure out what they need to sell – it’s much easier to envision a goal in units.”

Now that the salon uses the Zeezor app which allows stylists to access their numbers in real time, King says it makes the one-on-one process even easier. “I’ll start the meeting by asking them to get out their phone and let’s review their numbers on ZeeZor – then they get comfortable with doing that all the time,” she says.

When it comes to encouraging her team to sell retail, King once again looks at the big picture. “Each year we figure out how many loyalty points we need to earn to get the overseas trip with our manufacturer, then we create a contest that runs about nine months long, dangling the trip as the carrot,” King says.

At the Data-Driven Salon event in Atlanta June 25-26, Allyson King will detail her strategy for using data to inspire her team members and influence retail sales. For more information and to register, visit datadrivensalon.com.

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