Are you taking advantage of the situation and planning how to increase the average customer sale? Even when you are flat out there is an opportunity to let the back end of the business actually shine brighter that it has ever shone before. You can increase the average customer spend by doing small things that will get clients loading up their pockets with extra retail sales.

What are you doing for your clients to increase their average spend?

The tools that you use to increase the customer spend are not new and they are easy to implement, if you have the  right marketing tools and know how.

But first, we need to look at your sales process first, and see where you can improve.

When you go through the local “Golden Arches”, have you ever wondered how it is that a crew of hormone laden teenagers, who have the ability to focus for all of 2.74 seconds at a time, manage to build a burger, yet alone  an empire? Simple – they use a “system” that works, and they ask the question that no one else wants to ask: Do you want fries with that? (Up sell!) And they ask this question hundreds if not thousands of times a day.

Oh, and by the way, the results are worth it. It is worth $2 million dollars A DAY to them globally!

So back to your salon, and see where it is that you and the staff can ask the question. Look at how it is that you can improve the clients life by giving them a product or service that will give them great rewards far beyond what they originally came in for.

Your salon can also look at several other methods to increase the client spend, some of which are described below and other are found in the Essential Salon Owners Toolkit.

You can have products that are to be purchased at the point of sale. Places like fuel stations are experts at that. Milk, bread and chocolates are the real reason that fuel station exist. Petrol product sales are not that a bigger earner (1c per litre), so they use the petrol as a lead generation tool to get clients in, and then pitch to the paying client as many products of convenience that can be bought. The real profits for these places is the price that a client is willing to pay to purchase an item THEN AND THERE! It increases their profits hugely.

Or you can make the clients feel more at “home” by offering subscriptions to your salon.  Or you can have “in salon” promotions only, that they clients who come in will only have access too. The options are endless and the time is right for you to look at how it is that you can get more money from existing clients.

NOT yet a Member of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program? Don’t yet have the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit? Click here to find out more and apply for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit, one-on-one coaching (with our experienced coaches who are all salon & spa owners themselves) and access to the Members Only resources website.

Get both of these elements right and you can charge what you want, when you want, and make PROFITS while other salons fall off the face of the earth!

The Experience will get your clients back in the door time and again.

You have to be able to deliver a service AND product that will provide the clients with the ultimate experience that they have never had before, or a service that you can deliver time and again to the most incredible levels so that clients WILL NOT WANT TO GO anywhere else. This will start from the very first phone call booking an appointment, through to how the receptionist says good bye to the client after they have taken the investment from the client and made the next appointment.

So the big question here is: How do I figure out what I can do to create this raving fan who never wants to go anywhere else? How do I create the ultimate client experience?

The answer: Reverse Engineering

For those of you who are not sure of what this means, it is about looking at the point of view that you as a client would have when you are client leaving the salon with a feeling of sheer delight , and then telling all your friends about it. Form there you will then start to map out the process that this “client” will follow so that they have the best experience every time, and that it is delivered consistently across all staff and all clients.

How do I create business consistency?

Consistency is created when policies and procedures are installed in to the business, and when you go through and actually use a lot of little marketing tools all at once, as part of a system. This may be an offer that you have created from our range of templates found in the Essential Salon Owners Toolkit, and that you have implemented into an email, SMS and Facebook campaign. You will advertise this offer in several media all at once so that you are creating the biggest splash possible, and letting your clients know that you have an offer so good that they will be mad to NOT take you up on the offer.

The major difference between you and your opposition is the marketing. The ability to get your message out to your clients and know that you are going to get a response from an ad, means that you need to focus your time on the marketing message that you are portraying to the clients. This message will have two parts and is about your salon as it physically presents, both in the paper and in the store front sense. But also consists of a lessor known form of marketing, that is just as important.

The lesser known message that salon owner’s miss  is the unwritten and overlooked “non verbal” cues that you DON’T say to your clients, that can undo ALL your marketing. I am talking about how you and your staff present to the clients. ( Ask Greg about the tradesman that tell you a time and then don’t show up! What sort of message does that tell clients?) Do your staff wear pants that have stains, or my personal favorite, pants that  have hems on the floor and are torn or frayed from being dragged across the ground. If you stop and think what this message presents to the clients, what would you do in that situation? I know that I would never go back. EVER!

Your opposition may not have figured this out yet, that clients are after an experience for their money,  but very soon they will figure “it” out. When that happens you will want to be in a position where you ALREADY KNOW what they have just figured out.  You want to be the front runner in the local area with the knowledge and experience so that you can use your marketing skills as a weapon.

We know that times are tough for some, and that there people out there who are in real trouble, but for the entrepreneurs amongst us we can’t allow this to slow us down.  We have to make sure the “who” that we have in our salons are the ones that are affected LAST when times are tough. You will want clients that have money to spend on looking great, and who don’t have to stretch their appointments out to 10 or 12 weeks.

Your sales process needs to make sure that you are getting the right “who” into the salon. The right “Who” will make a massive difference in how the bottom line of the business looks. If you don’t have  the right who, then CHANGE what you are doing and make it so that you start to go after the “Who” that have the money.

NOT yet a Member of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program? Don’t yet have the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit? Click here to find out more and apply for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit, one-on-one coaching (with our experienced coaches who are all salon & spa owners themselves) and access to the Members Only resources website.

Remember when a Motorola brick cost half a year's salary and you got a workout just lifting it up to your ear?

Yep, hard to believe, considering you can now pick up a TV that’s twice the size, ten times the clarity and half the weight for what amounts to chump change…a few hundred dollars.

What happened with the TV market is the same as happens with almost all products and services…sooner, rather than later, they become little more than a mere

commodity

Prices – and margins – fall through the floor. Readers older than 40 will remember when those early Motorola brick phones cost six months salary. Today you can buy a faster, better, smaller and smarter mobile phone for a hundred bucks.

Every business faces this same inexorable slide into commoditization.

And the more the business relies on the blunt instrument of price to compete, the faster the process of aging. Before you know it, you’re rotting away faster than Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button. It’s a cancer.

And it affects the hair & beauty industry as much as any other.

Yes, it’s true that at least in the foreseeable future, a haircut or a facial is not going to be something you can buy online at Amazon. People will always need hair & beauty treatments in person. Even Bill Gates hasn’t worked out how to administer a brazilian over the internet.

But that doesn’t mean you’re immune. By and large, as far as the general public is concerned, one hair salon is pretty much the same as the next. A facial is a facial is a facial.

So how can you tell when you’ve become a commodity? The warning signs are obvious, if more than a little frustrating, frightening and perplexing.

When phone inquiries start with “what’s the price of a X?”…

When your clients complain about the price.

When you phone a regular client you haven’t seen for three months, only to be told “Oh, I couldn’t get an appointment with you last time so I went to that place around the corner, and I kind of just kept going there….”

That’s when you know you and your salon have become a commodity. Invisible, interchangeable.

Now, before you rush off for a health check, there ARE ways to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. Here are three:

1) you can innovate. A new product/service, even a slightly up-graded one, can give you an edge over the competition.

2) you can bundle, or package. Garden variety service like a hair cut, juiced up with add-ons and/or ancillary services that increased perceived value.

3) you can slice and dice your client list and/or target market so that you can more carefully and precisely match your product/service offer or package with the buying preferences of that particular niche market.
(Any and all of which, of course, require a carefully crafted salon marketing message to support them)

Even that may not be enough to halt the slide. So what else can you do? Here’s where it gets trickier…and requires more brass balls.

a) you can put your prices UP. A lot. Proudly, with your head held high. And no, there is absolutely no value in telling your customers your prices are going up soon. Just put them up. One of two will raise an eyebrow. The rest will simply fall into line.

b) Choose which customers you want to do business with, and those you do not. And fire them. Nothing creates and fosters demand for your services like the perception of scarcity, of unavailability. You may lose a few customers. But those who remain will be more profitable.

c) pay bonuses based on profit margin, not merely turnover. Nothing focuses an employee like “Sure, go ahead and spend money on new chairs, after all, some of it’s your money…”

Sound all to complicated for you? Go on then, hang out the discount sign, sit by the silent phone, and sulk as the life is inevitably sucked out of your business. ‘Cos it WILL happen if you do nothing.

For a long time now it has been the “this is how we do it” mentality that has slowed down so many salons that I can not keep count of the numbers. All because we are “conditioned” to not think outside the square. It has killed off more salons than any GFC or “recession”.  A well intentioned new salon owner opens, or buys their first existing salon… (And this is where the plot thickens).  Now that we have the passion, ambission and skill – what do we do now? I know what we do-

THE SAME AS EVERY OTHER SALON!!!

Well let me tell you that this will not work. Cannot work, and even deserves to fail.

“But I am a good technician” I hear you say. I know that all salon owners are great at what they are technically taught to do. No doubts about this at all. However, when you are training for your trade, they do not teach you how it is that you HAVE to run a business. Nobody tells you that staff will steal from you, or not show up, or make it so that you have to fire them. They do not tell you how it is that you are to let the whole universe know that your business is out there. So the question has to be asked:

Why should you be the 5% of businesses that survive? What are you doing to make your salon stronger and more unique than all the others that exist. Are you making sure that you are taking lessons from those people that have used marketing formulas in their business? Do you listen to how it is that other salon owners seize opportunities to make their salons grow? How can you make sure that you are the “lion” in the salon jungle – the one who gets eaten last?

The answer is really simple – Don’t be a SPORK!

Sporks – for those who are not sure – are a tool that TRIES TO BE EVERYTHING TO EVERYBODY! ( They are a cross between a spoon and a fork.  It tries to cover 2 bases, and in the end it does a bad job 0f both. )

You have to learn how it is that you stand out from the sea of salons that exist. Only by having the right tools and the right mentors can you successfully change your salon from a “same as everyone else” salon, into a well defined, structured salon that is the expert in the field.

So how do you find out how to be different? Where do you go to discover how all these salon owners are going great, even when it is a little quiet? Where do I go to “meet the Experts????”

The Salon and Spa Superstar Bootcamp 2011 is coming to you form the 4th of July! We are going to be in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth throughout the month of July.

Come and see our guest speakers, Julie Piantadosi and Greg Milner, as they take the floor to talk to you about how your salon can be run from staff issues through to salon marketing, and a whole lot of territory in between. This is for the serious salon owners only. The program for the day has taken months to create, and has been refined to give salon owners the most information that they can take in one day. The program format has even taken a change, and you will be able to sit in groups at round tables so that you can actually talk to, and interact with other salon owners.

This Bootcamp is designed to help you take your salon from “drab to Fab.” All the tools will be there, all you have to do is get there! The benefits of this day have been long known. At first there is the “A-ha” moment, where you realise that all the marketing advice that you have been given is WRONG. Then you will have a moment where you see with clarity that salon marketing is simple, as long as you follow the rules.

NOT yet a Member of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program? Don’t yet have the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit? Click here to find out more and apply for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit, one-on-one coaching (with our experienced coaches who are all salon & spa owners themselves) and access to the Members Only resources website.

We literally bounced back from the financial crisis, while other countries, like the US, Canada and much of Europe are still in the doldrums.

In the UK too, whenever I talk to a salon owner there, I always get something like “Oh, it’s no wonder we’re not making any money, the economy’s just so bad here.”

Having just interviewed two of our newest Inner Circle member salons in the UK, I find that a very interesting comment. Listen to these two owners of combined hair & beauty businesses – one in Manchester and the other in Hertfordshire – and you’d think they’re speaking from a totally different country.

Hertforshire (UK) salon owner Kelly Hollingsworth of 'Vintage Rock' - took the advertising and marketing templates in the Toolkit and turned her salon completely around in less than two months - while working from home...

Kelly Hollingsworth (left) of Vintage Rock in Stanstead Abbotts, Herts, only joined the program and got her Toolkit in late January this year. Matt Davis of Industrie Hair & Beauty in Manchester joined in late November 2010. But listen to them on this recording and you’d think they were veteran marketers…

Click the ‘play’ button to listen in…

Want the success Kelly and Matt are achieving? Click here to find out more about the Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle of entrepreneurial salon & spa owners, and the world-famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® – and how you can apply for a 90-day Risk Free Test Drive of the entire system.

*Members will receive an extended version of this interview on CD

Yet the information about what makes great advertising – for the salon business, for any business – has been public knowledge for more than a hundred years.

It was six o’clock on a May evening in 1905 when John E. Kennedy sent a note up to A. L. Thomas, the senior partner of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. Thomas was just getting ready to leave the office when the messenger brought him the note. It read as follows:

“You do not know what advertising is. No one in the advertising business knows what advertising is. No advertiser knows for certain what advertising is. If you want to know, tell this messenger that I should come up. I’m waiting in the lobby downstairs.”

It was signed: “John E. Kennedy.” Thomas read the note with an amused smile then handed it to Albert D. Lasker, the junior partner in the firm and said to him, “Well, you have been asking this question for years and nobody has yet satisfied you. Maybe here is the answer…You see the man.”

Albert Lasker saw Kennedy that night. It wasn’t until 3 o’clock in the morning before they left the building. And when Lasker left that night, he had the answer to what advertising was. What Kennedy told him that night was simple. Advertising is

SALESMANSHIP-IN-PRINT.

Salon advertising doesn't get much worse than this. It smacks of pure laziness, ignorance and desperation. With advertising as pathetic as this, the salon deserves to fail. And it's so easy for a competitor to counter with "We fix $5 haircuts."

And the core skill of ‘salesmanship in print’ is in creating a compelling offer – then building a story around that offer which virtually forces the reader to keep reading.

Most business owners are too lazy to bother with this. About the best that most can bother with is a plain and simple discount. For example,

“Half price waxing!”

That’s not an offer. All it does is train your clients to expect a discount. It devalues what you sell. And it takes money right out of your wallet.

But it doesn’t take much effort to do so much better. Take a look around at what you already do in your salon or spa – things you currently provide your clients for free, in the normal course of business.

Now, what if you put a notional value on each and every one of these things?

A stylist will typically give a client a brief scalp massage during the shampoo. A beauty therapist might, in the normal course of doing a facial, relax the client with a soothing hand massage, some eyebrow grooming, perhaps a mini pedicure.

All of these things have a value. Yet, if they’re merely provided as a freebie, without declaring that value, then in the client’s mind they are worth…nothing.

It’s only when you clearly ascribe a defined value of each and every ‘extra’ service that you provide, that you create in the mind of the client what we call in marketing ‘perceived value’.

Inner Circle member salons will know all about this. The hundreds of ad, flyer and sales letter templates in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, and in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ of this website, all contain some form of what we call

value adding.

Once you ‘get’ this, it suddenly becomes easy to create massive added value – and it allows you to actually increase prices under the valued-added ‘shelter’.

Of course, there’s much more to creating a successful ad or flyer than just the offer. I’ll cover some of those issues in future articles on Salon Marketing 101.

WSM graphic artist Vanessa Goh and copywriter Chanelle Van Der Heijden with the all-new Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit - the first major update since the product was launched in 2004

Try the Toolkit and the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program RISK FREE for 90 days – and see for yourself how you can literally DOUBLE your sales in the next 12 months. Click here to find out more.

]]> http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/salon-marketing-101-the-basics-of-building-a-compelling-offer/feed 1 http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/new-wsm-academy-salon-business-excellence-group?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-wsm-academy-salon-business-excellence-group http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/new-wsm-academy-salon-business-excellence-group#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:01:53 +0000 Greg Milner http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/?p=1320

Mark Bouris, Australia's The Apprentice host and executioner. Must-watch television for anybody serious about business

I’m an avid watcher of The Apprentice – with morbid fascination at the ruthless backstabbing by the contestants, and as a student looking through the window the show gives into the thinking of great business brains like Trump (in the US), Sir Alan Sugar (in the UK) and now Mark Bouris of Wizard Home Loans fame in Australia.

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a way our own Inner Circle members can get a ‘seat at the table’ with similarly-accomplished business thinkers and doers (minus the backstabbing!) so I was delighted this week to launch our brand new business excellence program, the WSM Academy Group.

Starting in 2010 with a series of full-day, closed-door sessions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the Academy will be open only to a maximum of 50 Inner Circle salon owner Members of at least 12 months standing, who are serious about not just marketing or the salon business, but all aspects of business, franchising, investing, online, wealth creation and personal development. And we’ve lined up a ‘Who’s Who’ of renegade ‘outside the box’ thinkers to deliver just that.

Initial response has been overwhelming, and the group looks like being over-subscribed before we’ve had a chance to even get the details in the mail. I emailed just a few Inner Circle members about it this week, and within 24 hours we had 58 salon owners demanding to be offered one of the 50 places.

The Academy Group will be super-exclusive.

• Only ONE salon per area will be allowed in, first in-best dressed. Late-comers will go on a waiting list.
• The closed door sessions will be just that. State of the art business secrets will be revealed, Members will no doubt be sharing some of their most closely-held strategies for success.
• We will probably be asking Academy members to sign Non Disclosure Agreements.

Pricing is yet to be finalized. But considering many of the entrepreneurs who’ve signed on charge upwards of $10,000 for a single keynote speech, it’ll be ridiculously cheap.

An indication of the caliber: Justin Herald, who was told he had a bad attitude, started with $50 and turned his Attitude clothing company into a multi-million dollar global business, retired at 33, now in demand as a corporate speaker and motivator.

Inner Circle members of 12 months standing or more will be offered places first, with first-year and former Members getting a crack at it after that.

(IC members who feel they should have been offered the chance to pre-register and haven’t been, should contact the office immediately.)

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!

The harder you try to sell your prospect on how good your salon is, the faster she backs away, emotionally if not physically

A phone conversation with a salon owner this week started like this:

“I’ve got a new salon opening up just three doors down, three others nearby are cutting prices, I don’t know what to do!!”

This salon owner was beginning to panic, but she was missing the point, so I told her, ‘settle down, and think for a moment’.

Most hair salons, beauty salons and day spas are terrified of their competition, ever watchful for price undercutting, more worried about what their perceived competition is doing than they are about their own backyard.

And that’s primarily because of a misconception about who your competition really is.

Your biggest competitor isn’t the salon down the road, it’s not the worry of staff leaving and taking clients with them. No, your biggest competitor  is…

Your own prospect.

Imagine this for a moment. Your prospective client, whether she’s just walked into your salon, or she’s picked up the phone to call you after seeing one of your ads, has only four basic choices.

1) She can choose to buy from you
2) She can choose to do it herself
3) She can choose to do nothing, or
4) She can choose to do business with somebody else.

Only ONE of those four choices involve a rival salon. The other three involve only YOU.

As Harry Beckwith writes in his best-seller about marketing in the service industry, ‘Selling the Invisible’, Peggy, your typical prospect, is fearful – fearful of making the wrong decision. Peggy is not looking to make the ‘superior’ choice, she is looking to avoid making the bad choice.  It is less risky for her to do nothing.

Almost every prospect for every service would rather minimize the risk of a bad experience than shoot for the best experience.
It’s called ‘looking for good enough’. Forget looking like the superior choice, make your salon an excellent choice. Then, eliminate anything that might make you a bad choice.

And that means eliminating the risk of Peggy doing business with you, eg with a free trial, or a money-back guarantee. And make sure you deliver a good service, rather than spend needless energy attempting to convince Peggy that yours is the best service.

Peggy isn’t looking for the best. What she wants is a comfortably good result, without any risk.

Which is why, in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™, there are hundreds of already-proven ads and flyers that contain these ‘risk-reversing’ devices.

These devices haven’t been written into these marketing pieces just to fill out a bit of space. They’re there for a very good reason.

Because your competition is not the rival salon nearby, your strongest competition is your prospective customer. And you need every means you can muster to get that prospect to make the ONE choice you want them to make.

Yep, there it is, virtually a direct copy of the ad you ran only last week.

Well, get over it. Pay it no more attention. In fact, you should be celebrating it. Because what they’re seeing (and copying) is only the tip of the iceberg of your success.

What they cannot see, and therefore cannot copy, is all that bulk below the waterline – the systems that turn that great marketing into solid sales behind the counter.

I know this because it happens to us all the time.

Just this week, one of our operatives in England emailed me a link to the website of yet another salon marketing wannabe who’s seen how Worldwide Salon Marketing has grown from a spare-room start-up into a multi-million dollar business – and wants ‘in’ on the action.

Yet another one – if you search the web long enough you’ll find more and more of these sites popping up, purporting to offer salon owners ‘the’ answers to all things marketing. Apart from a website, few have any more depth to them.

This new player – he’s by no means the first, and won’t be the last – has even gone so far as to blatantly copy our product names, e.g., he’s promoting his own ‘Inner Circle’ program, he’s offering his own ‘7-Step Mini Marketing Course’, and more carbon copies of the systems and marketing collateral we’ve developed over the last 5 years.

Our ‘spy’ was worried about our new ‘competition’. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Because I know that 99% of all start-up business owners fail to do the things which create depth, structure and longevity for their business. In other words, they do no more than enough to skim the surface for short-term cash, and don’t invest in resources to create a long-term business.

The bigger we get (400 current member salons, growing by 30-40 per month) the more we invest in strengthening the foundations.

Here at head office, there are ten staff engaged in coaching members, providing member services, marketing, internet support, accounts and product development. In New Zealand and America, we have franchisees devoted to supporting our Members in those countries, and soon, similar operations in the UK.

Over the years we’ve invested millions on establishing systems for database management, offline and online marketing, seminar events, product packaging, product delivery, intellectual property development, member services, and office management.

We do this because it’s about trust. If our systems are flimsy, if our product delivery is flaky and unreliable, if our customer service is patchy, then our customers – our hundreds of member salons around the world – will soon get fed up and leave us. And it will soon become impossible to attract new ones. Word gets around very quickly.

It takes years to build a solid reputation, and five minutes to destroy it. Sure, we have our detractors. Every successful business does. Just today, a post from a UK salon owner who, it should be noted, signed up as a Member, took the Toolkit in March this year, paid us nothing, and has refused to return our products:

“…personally Worldwide Salon Marketing is a complete rip off…(they) sell you information that is easily found for FREE on the internet. WSM just give you a flashy folder and some crappy letters to copy that no professional establishment should use for £310 a month! …I would rather spend that money on training/products and direct marketing.”

But a response on the very same forum: “All I can say is positive things about their way of marketing. Yes, it takes some getting used to but as most people on here who have tried advertising & say it doesn’t work are perhaps doing it the wrong way. It’s not the advert (ie leaflets) that is wrong, it’s the message on the advert. “The fees for WSM might initially seem steep but if you follow the strategies they recommend then you should be getting far more than this back in increased business. What I really like is having all the sales letters pre-written for you which just need tweaking to suit your own offer. Some of THE best spas & salons in Australia & NZ use WSM so they can’t be all that bad! As to the question about whether this direct response marketing works – hell yeah!!”

You can’t become as big, as fast as we have without somebody, somewhere complaining about something.

Apple Computer has hundreds of millions of raving fans around the world. Doesn’t mean there aren’t dozens of blog sites full of people moaning about Apple. And success breeds competition.

I can name half a dozen who are attempting to emulate our success by directly plagiarizing our marketing. Good luck to them. But they’ll need more than luck. They’ll need grit, depth, resources and constant re-investment to succeed. Next time you see a competing salon that’s copying your marketing, don’t be too afraid. Unless they have well-thought-out systems in place to capitalize on that copy-cat marketing, it’ll do them no good.

Customers soon find out if it’s all style and no substance.