Salon Marketing – Is this guy a hair-brained idiot, or a genius?
by Greg Milner on 20/01/10 at 2:25 pm
If I told you to fire half your customers, take your name out of the phone book, pull down all your shop signs and lock your front door, you’d think I’m nuts, right?
Well that’s exactly what a crazy dentist in Queensland did, and he now claims to work just 23 hours a week and earns 250% more than he did the ‘old’ way.
There’s a couple of remarkable things about this story.
1) He’s a dentist. Like doctors and lawyers, dentists by and large already know everything, regard marketing as ‘below’ them, and that because they’re ‘professional’ with expensive university educations, customers should simply beat a path to their door, eager to hand over wads of cash. In other words, when it comes to the realities of business, these guys would rather stick their head in the sand than get their hands dirty.
2) He’s turned his business around thanks to thinking – and doing – ‘outside the box’, rather than slavishly looking around at what everybody else in his industry is doing and copying them.
Paddi Lund turned an ordinary dental practise into an 'experience' business
His name is Paddi Lund, and he’s one of our Guest Entrepreneurs scheduled to train our WSM Academy members at one of the exclusive Academy forums later this year.
(The WSM Academy is for long-term Inner Circle members who want advanced and often-secret business strategies that rarely see the light of day in mainstream small business. If you’re an Inner Circle member and want to find out more and upgrade, go here)
Paddi proudly tells anybody who’ll listen about how he
- Sawed up his reception desk and installed a cappuccino machine instead
- Now bakes fresh buns for clients
- Serves more than 30 varieties of tea in fine china cups
- Takes clients ‘by invitation only’
- His customers are clamoring for his services
- He loves going to work.
I’m telling you the Paddi Lund story because it’s a classic case of doing what I advocate so many salon and spa owners to do:
“Look around at what everybody else in your industry is doing, and do exactly the opposite”
What Paddi did was re-invent his business. He turned it from a standard, garden-variety dental practice into an ‘experience’ business, with dentistry almost as by-product.
Then, instead of dancing to the tune of the customer, allowing the customer to dictate when they would come in, when they would re-book, he turned it around 180 degrees and told the customers that he would decide when they came in, if at all.
(Anybody who has ever applied for Membership of the Inner Circle Marketing & Mentoring program will have experienced a similar practice. Of the scores of salons who complete the Pre-Application Survey each month, we interview them before deciding who gets into the program. We take only those who convince us they are willing to do what it takes to at least double their salon or spa sales in 12 months.)
We all want what we can’t have, what is just out of reach.
Just as we do, Paddi employs a deliberate strategy of deciding who – and who will not – become an elite ‘member’ of his customer group. Such a strategy requires ‘brass balls’ but produces considerable rewards – a herd of prospects banging at the door, begging to be let in.
What strategy have you employed, what steps have you taken to ‘re-invent’ your business, to take it from being a me-too commodity – “buy from us, we’re pretty much the same as the next salon” – into an ‘experience’ salon where hair –styling or body wraps are almost a by-product?
The best answer gets 500 free WSM dollars to go towards any product or service in the Worldwide Salon Marketing catalogue.
I’m only interested in stuff you’ve actually implemented, not just dreamed up and done nothing about.
Go here to send me your answer.
The world-famous Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit - just the start of Inner Circle membership
If you are NOT yet even an Inner Circle member, do NOT have at your fingertips the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® then you are running your salon business or your spa business blindfolded, with one arm tied behind your back, re-inventing the wheel every day.
If you have dismissed Inner Circle membership as somehow ‘too expensive’ – what is expensive? If you did what I call ‘accurate thinking’, you’d be thinking about Return on Investment rather than ‘expense’.
Either way, you should hustle your buns over to the Pre-Application Survey here and get typing. We might accept you on a 30-day Test Drive.
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A post by Greg Milner The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach. He (sometimes) accepts private consulting clients. |
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