You Don't Own a Salon. You Own A Business.
In his latest blog, Leon Alexander Ph.D., challenges industry conventional thinking to help owners add more to their bottom lines.
Understanding Your Staffing Needs for Continued Growth
As the owners of Gordon Salon with four locations around Highland Park, IL, Pamela and Anthony Gordon implemented strategies that put the right people on the right bus in the right seats. Learn more of their strategies.
January 18, 2019
Gordon Salon has four locations around Highland Park, IL.
2 min to read
As the owners of Gordon Salon with four locations around Highland Park, IL, Pamela and Anthony Gordon implemented strategies that put the right people on the right bus in the right seats.
“We carefully determined which location each stylist should be placed at to maximize their growth, intentionally placing both new and experienced stylists at locations where their productivity is strongest because it eliminates the possibility of one location compromising the growth of another,” Tony says. Furthermore, the couple determined which shifts are the most productive for pulling this off requires the understanding of a few fundamental concepts:
• You must know your staff and clientele well enough to have an opinion about what they need in order to improve.
• Understanding your salon’s numbers is crucial. Look at each stylist’s productivity rate to prove or disprove your original assumptions.
• If productivity on a particular shift is high, try adding hours to the day. If a particular stylist becomes overly busy, attempt to add another stylist until the space can’t handle additional staff.
• If you don’t have enough stylists to maintain productivity or productivity is greater than 75%, consider raising your prices. “In general, we try to remain above 75% booked, but no higher than 85%,” Pam says. “If productivity is less than 70%, we do additional marketing or reduce our staff on that day. If productivity is close to or above 80%, we look at adding staff to that day. We play this strategy by ear, as it changes every week depending on the time of the year, holidays, school breaks and other neighborhood events.”
“Scheduling is an active and ever-moving target that must be managed daily. Keeping an eye on the salon’s staffing needs is one of the key ways we have been able to create substantial growth,” Tony adds.
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