Pay Attention To What You’re Doing, Don’t Worry About What Your Competitors Are Doing!

by Tim Reilly on 10/09/09 at 12:26 pm

Tim & Kanna Reilly of Worldwide Salon Marketing in Scottsdale, Arizona, and owners of Body Solutions Laser & Skin

My beliefs in universal laws have been confirmed this week.

I’ve always been taught to do the right thing, be nice to people, treat people like you want to be treated… you know the whole Golden Rule Principle.

I’m a believer in karma, the sense that what goes around, comes around. Sometimes it looks like people doing bad things seem to get away with it, but the universe has a way of righting things.

Case in point – We moved our Med Spa into a retail shopping plaza just over two years ago. We went into a small suite because our business was not doing well. We wanted the benefits of a retail center, but needed to keep costs under control, therefore we went with the smallest suite available.

There was another day spa in the center that did mostly hair and nails but also did facials and massage. Not to worry, the services we performed were of a higher grade of service because of the advanced training and equipment we had.

We were supportive of the other spa as much as we could be. We would refer some of our own clients to them for services that we could not provide. In fact there was a time that I personally walked one of our clients over to their spa to see if they could accommodate this client with a massage.

We tried to be the good neighbor. There were times that the “rival” day spa had clients that would walk into our office accidentally. What would we do? Well we would tell them that they were in the wrong place, that they were looking for the other day spa right across the parking lot. We would point them in the right direction and off they went. We did this not because we were so busy at the time that we didn’t need the business. Just the opposite, we hadn’t started marketing the “Inner Circle” way yet and believe me when I say we were starving. We pointed them in the right direction because it was the right thing to do.

Well, you might expect that this “rival” salon would do the same thing for us…and you would be wrong!!

On too many occasions to count we would “lose” a new client to the other salon. Not walk by traffic mind you; I’m talking about people who saw one of our Direct Emotional Response marketing pieces, called our office, booked an appointment and was looking forward to their experience like the Hollywood Glamour Makeover Package. Some of our new clients would walk into the other salon by mistake.

But surely the other salon would point them in the right direction, let them know that the salon they were looking for was just across the parking lot. It would be the right thing to do, right? Wrong! They would take these clients and perform their version of whatever facial special we were running.

The sad part was that the client got caught in the middle, feeling like they were misled by the other salon. We’ve had several clients call us after realizing that they had been had by the other spa and apologize for missing their appointment with us.

We confronted the salon about this increasing problem. Amazingly, every instance we brought up there was a huge coincidence that they had someone with the same name at the same time for the same service on their books!

Wow, what are the odds??

The problem continued and we contacted the landlord. The landlord contacted the owner of the rival salon who denied knowing about any of these problems but assured the landlord that there would be no problems in the future.

That really put our minds at ease….NOT! But we focused on what we learned to do really well. We continued marketing to get new clients with all of the great tools and strategies that we learned as Inner Circle Members and we got a little more explicit with the directions to our salon, you know, to help avoid any confusion. But the problem still went on.

We had estimated that we were probably generating about $5,000 – $7000/year to the bottom line of the rival salon from the clients that they would “steal.”

We stayed focused on our goals and objectives and after 15 months we had completely outgrown our 3 room suite. Luck or coincidence (you decide) would have it that a 7 room suite had become available in the very same retail center. Another business had closed its doors due to the horrible economy.

We moved our Med Spa into that 7 room suite, more than doubling our space and ability to service more clients, aware of what our “rival” salon, our competitor was still doing but not being caught up in it. After all the universe has a way of taking care of things.

I went into our Med Spa Monday morning to get some things in order to close out the month. Another shop owner in the center and a good client of ours stopped by to say that our “rival” salon had gone out of business, moved all their stuff out over the weekend.

My thoughts, the universe is just.

Don’t worry about anything that you don’t have control of. There are bad people out there. There are people that will cheat and steal from you if they have the chance, but you can’t let these people change who you are.

Develop laser beam focus on your business goals and objectives and take the action steps necessary to get you where you want to go and you will earn your success!

The universe is just and sometimes (more than you may realize) nice guys really do finish first!

Rating 3.00 out of 5