Salon Today

THE YEAR OF TENACITY

If I had told you this time last year that your business would soon be forced into closure for a number of weeks—even months, would you have believed me? Could you have imagined that you would need to lay off your team, apply for loans, ask your landlord for rent forgiveness and implement entire new systems? Did you ever think one of your biggest leadership responsibilities would be to quell fear and reassure your team and your guests of their health and safety when they walked through your doors?

When you look back at 2020, it had a way of encouraging each of us to reach deep within ourselves to draw upon the talents and characteristics that we may not have known we even possessed. When the clock rings in 2021 in a few short weeks, we’ll still be in the midst of a pandemic and a shaky economy, but I believe most of us will still breathe a sigh of relief that we made it through one of the toughest years in our history. When you look back at all you accomplished this past year, I hope that you take great pride in the way you managed an unimaginable situation, and you feel empowered to tackle whatever the New Year brings.

I am grateful for and proud of the Bobit Beauty, Health and Wellness team that leads SALON TODAY and our sister media brands MODERN SALON and NAILS, and all the ways we pivoted to help an industry we love:

• We set up a COVID-19 Resource Portal where owners could download free white papers on a variety of topics to help them navigate their new reality.
• We scrambled to identify experts and organize more than 10 webinars that offered advice during every stage of the pandemic from shutdown to reopening to recovery.
• We tapped into Zoom to record daily interviews with salon owners and industry leaders who were developing innovative solutions to real-world problems.
• Our 2020 Technology Issue detailed all the new available technology tools to embrace the needed paperless, cashless, contactless processes.
• We reimagined our landmark competition, the SALON TODAY 200, to reflect the successes of 2019 and the survival strategies of 2020.
• We reinvented our live business event into the virtual Data-Driven Salon Summit, delivering more than 12 hours of valuable metric-driven strategies and tactic for rebuilding your business—and we offered it to any beauty professional for free.
• And, to top it off, in this final issue of the year, we gathered your most pressing business questions and asked a variety of coaches and consultants to give their sagest advice.

No matter what 2021 yields, we now know we can handle it, together!