Caroline Sanderson | 4 Tips for a Successful Restart

Caroline Sanderson is The Salon Jedi and coaches salon owners to achieve success alongside running her own award-winning salon in Scotland.  Here she gives her tips on a successful restart.

As salons across the UK open their doors again or plan to do so soon, I’m reminded how it’s going to take more than a lick of paint to create salon transformation post lock down .

There is a saying that “if you keep doing what you’ve always done you will keep getting the same results.” This is so apt for the moment.

Salons who struggled pre lock down due to things like :

✔️Staff issues 

✔️Money worries

✔️Growing bills, VAT and bad debt 

✔️Loss of salon control 

✔️Lack of systems and clarity 

✔️Low self-worth and confidence issues

✔️Feeling trapped in the tools 

✔️Lack of clients 

✔️Struggling with pricing 

The list goes on …these salons, unless they have made huge changes during lock down, have merely pressed pause on some HUGE issues.

Problems that don’t get resolved have a way of rearing their ugly head again!  So, what can salons do to make sure they restart a successful salon business?

During the last recession of 2009 I didn’t have any government support, unlike what has been available during this lock down. I didn’t know how I was going to meet payroll and  there was no-one offering to pay my team  80% on furlough while I took time to figure stuff out and plan for the future. I had to think in my feet and take immediate action.

Here are some  tips that will hopefully help you like they did me back then.

1. Mindset Mastery – This was the absolute foundation and catalyst for my own transformation which resulted in my salon transformation. It all starts with YOU.

             Strengthen yourself from the inside and you will see better results on the outside.

1. Marketing Mastery – Mastering your mindset comes first then it’s your skillset, starting with marketing. Marketing is everything, everything is marketing. If mindset is the ‘core’ of re-building your salon business, marketing is the clients. There are only so many ways to grow your salon business:

             More clients 

             More visits 

             More spend 

Become obsessed with these three things and build your marketing strategies around them. 

You can turn your marketing activity down during busy times but never turn it off altogether. 

1. Management – Mindful management is the way forward.  Leadership of your team led by your core values is crucial. Trying to motivate and inspire a team is often the hardest, most stressful part of our job as a leader. Being mindful of the universal drives that humans have can remove the emotion of management and convert it to passionate leadership – leading by example rather than feeling completely out of control and a ‘bad boss’. When you have strong core values that you stick to you naturally lead by example.

1. Maintenance –  Maintaining standards and systems is imperative if you ever want to get off the tools more. This is the key part that has helped me get off and stay off the tools while keeping a steady stream of new clients to the salon which the team is more than capable of taking care of – I don’t need to head up the technical side as well. There has never been a more perfect time to build your operations than while in lockdown, but if you haven’t done any of these things It’s not too late to commit to changing your salon results. 

Salon Jedi is launching a brand new 30 day Mindset Magic Miracles course on 2nd August – details launching soon. For more info see https://salonjedimarketing.com/