Goal-setting. Some people laugh at it, they find it cheesy or cliché. I think it’s the only way we find our way through things. I’m not talking about New Year’s resolutions. I’m talking about tangible, reachable goals that are based on data. Goals can serve a purpose even if we fail at reaching them and have to readjust. Imagine deciding to run a marathon, but having no idea how many miles long it is. How would you train for it? How would you commit to even running it? How would you get better? And how would you know when you made it all the way? Creating goals for your salon helps you to track measures of success. This goal-setting methodology can apply to retail sales, new client referrals, client retention, pre-booking, individual stylist and salon service dollars. These measures also allow us to justify a request to raise our commissions or increase our service prices.
The starting fundamental goals I encourage salons to set and track are New Clients, Pre-booking Percentages, and Individual Stylist Service/Retail Dollars. Again, there are many others to expand upon, but these are the basis to build off of. The biggest key to goal-setting is accountability. You need to establish a goal, find ways to track it, and commit to tracking it on a regular basis. You need to also decide what your regular basis check-ins are for tracking these goals, whether they are daily, weekly, or monthly. You cannot avoid checking in on the status of a goal! It can be difficult to face the beginnings of tracking a goal and not meeting expectations you have set for yourself. If that is happening for consecutive weeks, make sure that the goal numbers you have set are appropriate and feel free to readjust them a little bit. Starting with a small and reachable goal first is the best way to hook into the feeling of reaching it, and encourages you in being able to reach the next benchmarks without giving up.
Note: All the goal-setting benchmarks I am going to explain in this blog post are entirely up to you; the numbers that you choose, that your salon or boss chooses - those numbers will vary based on your location and current numbers. Additionally, tracking these numbers can be done if you use a digital booking software or on paper if your salon is not using software for reports. All of these goals are applicable for booth renters, salon suite stylists, employees, or salon owners.
New Client Goals can be based off of a variety of numbers, which could be a percentage of New Clients that you want to obtain, or a physical number of clients you want to obtain. I typically choose to look at my amount of New Clients vs. Returning/Regular Clients in numbers rather than percentages. For example, if I see 100 clients per month, and all of those clients are considered Returning/Regular Clients, the only way I can increase my revenue is to continue to raise my prices or upsell each client every visit. Instead, we need to constantly be making sure to add New Clients to our books. This is important because we will always lose clients, due to a variety of factors, leaving gaps in even the most booked schedules. Tracking this number by having a goal is important to make sure you retain your minimum book, and especially if you are in a position to be growing your book of clients. Setting a goal for New Clients in a month may be 3 new clients, it may be 10 new clients. It may even be 1 new client! The point of this goal is to regularly check your client numbers. Tracking this can be done by running client retention reports, but if you are using a paper calendar system, you can do this by simply keeping a list. Monitor that list weekly! If you know that two weeks into the month you are not reaching your set goal, work on advertising yourself through your salon, social media, or referral program to meet that goal. If your avenues of advertising yourself to New Clients are not helping you meet that goal, that is also a great indicator of how to change the way you approach gaining New Clients.
Pre-booking Percentage Goals are a classic salon tracking goal. I find that we are one of the only service industries that can make a reasonably accurate prediction of how much revenue we can produce in weeks and months into the future thanks to Pre-booking. You can be a fully-booked or new stylist and still achieve a high percentage of Pre-booked clients based on how you approach and train your clientele. I used to find the idea of having “too many” pre-booked appointments somewhat stressful, to be honest. What if I got sick? What if I need to move clients for an event I found out about? As it turns out, my clients are more than happy to rearrange appointments if needed; they are just happy to know that they have an appointment or two scheduled out no matter what. Some of my clients book out their entire year of appointments. The feelings of knowing I have a guarantee of revenue far outweighs any worries I have about needing to rearrange pre-booked appointments. You can also retain gaps for new clients if you become fully-booked and have a high Pre-Booking Percentage. Remember, you are in control of advising clients when they should be pre-booking, what your availability is, and how you want your schedule to look. The beauty of Pre-booking is that you get to create that ideal day or week, versus lots of last minute appointments.
Individual Stylist Service/Retail Dollars Goals are definitely the most exciting goals to set and track. I am going to focus on Service Dollar goals because this applies to Retail the same way if your salon situation does retail sales credits per stylist. Having Service Dollar goals is vital to be able to earn enough for not only our basic survival, but to actually make money! What do you need to make per month to survive? That answer needs to be the starting point for the goal to be created. Stay with me here, because it’s about to get mathematical:
If you need $4,000 take home monthly, you need to generate:
$8,000 in Service dollars monthly
$2,000 in Service dollars weekly
$400 in Service dollars daily (based on a 5-day work week)
When you look at the breakdown of this from the larger number of $8,000, down to the daily goal of $400, it feels a lot more attainable. This also allows for us to make up for low Service days with high Service days when tracking numbers daily and weekly. If you create a chart that allows you to track these numbers, running daily and weekly reports of Services dollars and filling them in, allows you to see in real-time how close you are to meeting your set goal. I created these charts, laminated them for each stylist, and we had them hanging in our breakroom. The stylists filled out these charts daily and weekly, and the end of the month did a final tally. The feeling of reaching the goal was an incredible success. Being able to chase the goal when some days or weeks were slower was also motivating.
This type of goal tracking is a way to plan each day before it starts. When we discuss planning how to upsell services to our clients, part of it should be in order to reach a Service dollar goal, but it should be in the best interest of our client’s needs. If we utilize a dollar goal to reach, while looking at the scheduled appointments in a stylist’s book, we create a custom plan for each client while also maximizing the Service dollars with authenticity.
I have utilized this Service Dollars Goal setting method in the form of quarterly goals as well. Once you are accustomed to setting this type of goal, it is helpful to think bigger picture. Setting a quarterly goal (3 months at a time) and breaking it down backwards is usually done after looking at the stylist’s Service dollars from the previous quarter, or the same quarter of the previous year. Then you would divide the total Service dollars from the quarter into 3 Month totals, and use the monthly breakdown formula I have above to get down to the daily goal number. Using that previous quarter as the starting point, I would recommend repeating the same numbers for one full quarter. Once those numbers are met, increase the goal by 10%. If the 10% goal is met, increase it again. If it isn’t, try reaching for a 5% increase. If that isn’t met, a reevaluation of why the increase is not being met needs to occur, and a smaller focus needs to happen. Try going back into monthly goals to identify where the stylist may be struggling with weak service sales points.
This formula of goal setting for Service Dollars is a great way to measure growth. Commission raises, price increases, and bonus incentives are options that can be offered if the business is able to by utilizing this statistical data to give a clear path to stylists on how to succeed and further their revenue streams. At the very least, this goal set will give stylists the opportunity to monitor their income and increase it within their chair.
All of the goals I listed above will ultimately need to be increased when they are met, and might need to be lowered or slightly adjusted if they begin too high. If these goals are set correctly and are consistently not met, this also allows for important evaluations on areas of improvement that may have been otherwise undetected.
I could write forever about how important goals are in our industry. Without them, we are hoping for busy days and success to come our way and it is easy to become discouraged. Keep in mind that there are many other goals to set besides the ones I have listed here, if you aren’t ready for these. Get to work 15 minutes earlier than normal. Stretch for 5 minutes a day. Try a new hair color tool (my favorite is the handheld Color Mixer) or visit a hair show and take a Product Club class! I believe in you, you got this.
