Salon Marketing – turning a Disadvantage into a raging Advantage

by Greg Milner on 28/01/10 at 3:40 pm

I’ll often hear salon business & spa business owners saying “my salon has no passing traffic so it’s harder for me”, or “we’re in a poor area, I can’t raise my prices”, or “…there are roadworks outside my salon, and my business is dying…”.

If you spend enough time thinking about it, you can write a long list of reasons why others are successful and you’re not, why others seem to have an ‘easier’ time in business than you do, why the competition appears to be doing better than you are.

In fact it’s deceptively easy to find reasons for failure, but they are, in the main, mere excuses. Barring cataclysmic events – like an earthquake in Haiti – there are almost no circumstances where not even a sliver of silver lining can be found in the cloud.

(Even in Haiti, I’ll bet there are some enterprising souls capitalizing on the devastation, and I don’t mean pure looting. In the West Australian goldrush of the 1890s around Kalgoorlie, the people who made the big money weren’t the prospectors, they were the people selling water and beer TO the prospectors.)

All of which is a round-a-bout way of introducing Cheryl Bown, one of our Inner Circle Premium members from a salon called Imagine in Tea Tree Gully, South Australia.

Inner Circle member Cheryl Bown of Imagine in South Australia - 'outside the box' thinking produced a brilliant result

During a recent heatwave, where the temperature topped 40C (about 105F in the old money) for days on end, Cheryl was faced with a real business challenge.

Her salon’s air conditioning died.

Many would simply use it as excuse to give up, close the doors, go home and wait for the repair man. Not Cheryl. Typically, she found a brilliant, innovative and simple way to turn disadvantage into advantage.

Here’s what Cheryl wrote to me this week, just five months after joining the Inner Circle Premium program and receiving her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®

“I now only work 3days a week, amazingly the turnover has not dropped, ee have had 317 new clients join us since beginning of July’09, and a consistent TO of $6,110 a week for the past 20 weeks.

“In the last 6mths of the business growing, I also sold my house and moved, I was presented at the North East Business Awards with an AWARD for ” BEST NEW ENTERPRISE” – I couldn’t believe it I was so excited, on the way back it was a stop at the liquor store and back to the salon where the girls were still workin,g to celebrate with the team and clients.

“I have just introduced Birthday Letters, and the very next day we had 3 clients in delighted with their Birthday Gift. I have only touched the surface with a lot of the opportunities that are available to me, I started to delegate work, eg.. I have now hired an ironing lady and house cleaner, I’m so proud of myself:-) I’m on the road to my 6 series convertible BMW. I used to aim small, not any more.”

So, what would YOU do if faced with a heatwave of epic proportions, no air-conditioning, an unbearably hot salon, terrified clients would take one step inside and bolt?

What Cheryl did was an exceptional case of ‘thinking outside the box’ – and INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS can log in here to the Members Only sealed section and read her description, as well as viewing a terrific photo that shows exactly what she’s talking about.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

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.