Keynote speaker Julie Piantadosi at the Salon Profit Secrets seminar in Melbourne, Monday August 9, 2010

If you have NOT yet booked tickets for this one-day “How to Market Your Salon” seminar, time is running out – and it’s our LAST seminar in Melbourne this year.

Call the Ticket Hotline 08 9381 6621 or order online here.

Join other more than 100 salons and meet Australia’s hottest salon entrepreneur – the dynamic millionaire salon chain owner Julie Piantadosi as she reveals from the stage how she built a huge chain of salons in Australia and the USA employing over 500 staff – and still stays sane while raising a family of three young children!

Julie’s ‘call a spade a spade’ delivery will have you laughing and crying at the same time as she teaches the brutal reality – and the joys – of managing staff so effectively they worship you. (There’s a simple but devastatingly effective technique to this – that most salon owners never discover.)

WARNING: Julie’s presentation is for grown ups only – running a successful salon is not for children. She knows, because she tried it once, and went bankrupt!)

PLUS – you’ll meet John Lees, former Schwarzkopf national marketing manager, the funniest and driest public speaker in Australia today, as he teaches Customer Service so cleverly and clearly you’ll have your clients eating out of your hand and falling over themselves to buy everything you have to sell.

AND…Worldwide Salon Marketing CEO Greg Milner destroys the Myths and Pure Fantasy about salon & spa marketing – why everything you’ve ever been told about marketing is WRONG…and how to get customers queuing up at your door with simple Direct Response Marketing that’s been proven to work by more than 2,000 salons all over Australia.

Adam Fox from Simple Salon will be there to show you how you can automate your entire salon booking system, appointments, staff performance reporting and budgets with a completely online software solution – and why you’ll never need to pay thousands of dollars for a salon software system. (And he’ll show you how you can run your salon from anywhere in the world, on a cheap laptop computer or even an iPad – while you’re lying on the beach in Bali!)

PLUS – you’ll get to participate in our Ask the Experts panel session, and get your burning questions answered by some of the most accomplished salon owners and business experts in Australia.

Get your tickets NOW – call 08 9381 6621 or order online here!

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Inner Circle member Gai Hudson of Hair on Bridge Street, Sydney; sold 15 mini-memberships in a month.

There is MUCH more to being an Inner Circle Premium member than simply getting proven marketing tools. Being in business means understanding that confidence is about making a decision even if you’re only 80% sure. If you have to be 100% sure, that’s just procrastination.

As Gai Hudson writes this week, it’s the boost in confidence that’s made all the difference.

“A big thank-you to Worldwide Salon Marketing! Since attending my first Salon Profit Secrets conference in Sydney in March and receiving my Toolkit, I never thought it would change my thinking as much as it did.

At first it was hard and a little daunting, but as time went I got into the swing of everything. I had staff that did not have the right attitude for my new business venture. But my WSM coach gave me the strength to focus on what’s important.

After losing a senior and an apprentice the salon attitude has changed… if your staff will not help you, show them the door ….they are costing you money.

I can’t thank Worldwide Salon Marketing enough for the confidence to do that.

In three months my clients have grown into the clients I want in my salon and in numbers. I have sold 15 mimi memberships in a month and have told my clients how to spend their tax refunds on their hair memberships, then they don’t have to find the extra money for at least their next three appointments.

The bigger the membership value the more in my bank to pay the Tax man, and or maybe take a holiday.”

Gai Hudson, Hair on Bridge St, Sydney.

New Inner Circle Premium member Celine Rattray of Mandurah Beauty Clinic - one of the first salons in the world to take home the brand new Second Edition of the famous Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit at the Perth seminar

If YOU want the kind of results in your salon that Gai and hundreds of other salons are getting, then you simply can’t afford NOT to be part of the world’s biggest marketing & coaching program for salons and spas.

Go here to complete a Pre-Application questionnaire and you might qualify for a 30-day Risk Free Test Drive of the entire system, including the famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®

Alberto Cirillo joined the Inner Circle Premium program back in October 2009, didn't do much with it till a couple of months ago...then, things started to happen!

With Worldwide Salon Marketing in the final stages of setting up our Canadian operation, this email from Inner Circle member Alberto Cirillo couldn’t have come at a better time:

“I have been a salon owner since 1986 and have never been able to find a system to help me with marketing my salon to attract new clients, until now!
Finally! Someone to show us how to do it right.

I’ve been a member of Worldwide Salon Marketing‘s Inner Circle Premium program since October 2009 but did not use the system properly, which resulted of course with unfavorable results, until this past month.
I finally decided to take their advice and get ‘off the tools’ a couple of extra days so I can more effectively market my business. I ran the Mother’s Day Promo with a flyer and it resulted in 37 new clients for the salon in just 1 week. My total cost for the flyer was $1200 and resulted in $5300.00 of extra revenue in 1 week.

I also had a huge bill coming due so I decided to run their Mini Membership special to my existing clients. My offer was Buy a mini membership for $250 and receive $100 Free. We sold out of the limit in just 4 days so we decided to continue until June 15 2010.

As an incentive to my staff, I promised to take them to dinner if we reach 100 sales by then. I believe we will sell them all.”

Attention all Canadian salon owners! We’re about to launch Worldwide Salon Marketing Canada, with local, expert Canadian support, coaching seminars, the works…stay tuned!

NOT YET A MEMBER? Get your FREE Salon Marketing Info Pack and DVD valued at $197, mailed to you in hard copy NOW – click here to complete your postal details.

“Most business owners think the purpose of getting a customer is to make a sale. But smart business owners know the purpose of making a sale is to get a customer.”
Dan S. Kennedy, marketing guru, millionaire-maker, and one of my mentors for more than a decade.

Greg Milner, co-founder and CEO, Worldwide Salon Marketing

In any business – and the salon business is no different – the way you think about your position in the market, and how you act on that thinking, is fundamental to your future success.

And the more carefully and deliberately you design your business so that prospects and customers are magnetically attracted to you with a pre-disposition to buy from you, rather than you chasing them, the more successful you’ll be.

My company is no different in that regard. I certainly didn’t dream up the concept. I just sought out the likes of Dan Kennedy and others, studied their teachings, and applied them – haphazardly at first, I’ll admit – to my business.

Many have looked at our success – certainly by now we are the largest and most extensively-studied salon marketing and sales training organisation in the world – and tried to steal our intellectual property, emulate our success. (All have so far failed. Yapping at our heels, they purport to offer much, but none is prepared to invest in the infrastructure and customer support necessary to sustain a real business.)

Among our Member salons – currently more than 600 in Lite and Premium levels – there has been much curiosity about our business model. So here is how we apply the principles of ‘magnetic’ marketing to our business; why we do it as deliberate strategy…and perhaps the smarter ones among you will be able to study this and ask yourself “How can I apply this thinking to my salon or spa?”

From its earliest days as a spare-room start-up little more than six years ago, Worldwide Salon Marketing has hired not a single sales rep, made not a solitary telemarketing call, knocked on no salon or spa doors soliciting business, nor cold-called a single salon owner pitching our wares.

And yet the company has recorded increased annual profit every year since inception, revenue growing by an average of 48% a year for the past four years, with thousands of salons and spas signing up for the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program, and an average of 30 new Members joining each month, from all over the world. (Even had one join the other day from Finland. Finland!)

Clearly, the product works. The fact we’ve been wholly or partially responsible for making more money for more salon & spa owners than any other company in the world is testament to that. But a successful business isn’t about product (or service).

It’s about the method by which we attract our customers (IC members). We do it by NOT approaching them.

How can this be? Conventional business ‘wisdom’ has it that sales is about wearing out shoe leather, hordes of sweaty salesmen tramping from door to door, armies of telemarketers slaving over banks of phones and computer screens to get appointments, all aimed at securing a meeting in which the prospect finally and wearily signs on the dotted line if only to ease the pain of having their brains beaten in for three hours.

But we’ve never done any of that hard-labour. By deliberate strategy, we have instead forced prospective members to seek us out, jump through hoops to get to us, and pass careful but largely-invisible testing to qualify for membership.

Why make it difficult for our customers to get to us? Primarily, because it increases our value. Pure scarcity marketing, which is what we teach all our Members.

But there is another mainly selfish reason. It’s about the quality of people we attract as Members. Most businesses will take anybody as a customer. And indeed, in the early days I did the same, and quickly learned the folly of such a strategy (or lack of strategy).

If you look at our main marketing document here, you’ll notice that there’s a LOT of information, videos, testimonials, explanation – detail, detail, detail. And at the bottom of that, a carefully-planned Pre-Application Survey designed to force the salon owner to think.

The entire page is deliberate strategy to weed out those who will not apply themselves, who are not willing to study what it takes to be successful, who not only don’t want to learn how to fish, they want the fish handed to them on a plate, preferably filleted and fried, who are only interested in an instant-coffee solution to their problems, a magic bullet they can fire with no thought, application or self-imposed discipline and application.

It’s selfish on my part because I simply can’t be bothered dealing with people who won’t read, who must be dragged kicking and scraming to the trough, who – if they manage to slip through the net (and a few do) – will sit their copy of the Toolkit on their salon shelf and expect it to miraculously leap off and gang-tackle prospects as they walk by the shop, with no input or effort from themselves. Who argue with our coaches at every turn, insisting that ‘it’ (the system) doesn’t ‘work’, despite overwhelming proof that it does work for thousands of other salon owners all over the world.

Every salon or spa has ‘project’ clients, those requiring inordinate amounts of tact, diplomacy, cajoling and nurturing far out of proportion to their value to the business. (Definition of tact: making people feel at home when you really wish they were.)

So by deliberate strategy, we’ve structured our marketing and sales process to limit not only our availability, but to elevate the quality of those we choose to do business with.

Eg., when we interview prospective members after they’ve completed one of our surveys, either online or offline via our newsletters, we carefully question them on how much they have read and absorbed the (large amount of) information we’ve published about the Inner Circle program, membership fees, rules of membership etc. If the answer is ‘nothing, I just filled in the questionnaire’, they are politely but firmly turned away, with instruction to go back and educate themselves, and then come back and talk to us.

Interesting observation: Americans don’t read any more. Our US representative – and super-successful beauty business owner – Dr Tim Reilly reports the time and time again, he’ll call prospective Inner Circle members to interview them about an application survey they’d completed only hours before, only to be told “what application? I didn’t do any application!” It seems that not only do the large majority of American beauty business owners fail to bother reading the information, they have the short-term memory of a garden-variety grasshopper.

No doubt this strict policy of being careful about who we let in has cost us dearly in terms of revenue. But I have no doubt it has also saved us much annoyance and wasted resources attempting to teach the unteachable, and diverted resources from those who have not come to us merely expecting a silver bullet, fired with no effort on their part.

Those of you who are ‘our kind’ of customers will already be studying this model and asking ‘how can I apply this thinking to my business?’

And those visitors to this site who are clearly NOT our kind of customer…well, your eyes would have glazed over before getting this far anyway, and clicked through to somewhere else where the promise of easy success with no effort shines brighter.

If you ARE serious about becoming a business owner and entrepreneur in the beauty business, not merely a technician who’s bought herself a job, then I suggest you get our Salon Help Pack and free DVD here and start educating yourself about what works.

Susan Anderson of Lillian Mac Skin Clinic in Moranbah, Queensland - $35,400 in Gift Voucher sales in three days - in a mining town of just 7,500 people!

We’re often asked ‘will the Inner Circle marketing program and the Toolkit work for me, I’m in a small country town/poor area…’ etc etc. I give the same answer every time: YES! Just check the results Susan Anderson achieved in a little mining town of (mostly men!) just 7,500 people:

“I have found that my best results for any promotions are to deliver my newsletter as a flyer. I do this once a month with my monthly specials and any other news etc that is going on in the salon.

So my April newsletter went out with (a special offer) plus the dates they were available and the terms and conditions that I have on them.  I also had it on my chalkboard outside the shop and had flyers in store.

I then sent one more flyer as a reminder the week before the event.

I found that this was enough to get everyone talking about it and as we are a small town the message was out!!

They went on sale from Wednesday the 5^th of May to Saturday the 8^th of May, we finish at 2pm on Saturdays so I also wrote that in the newsletter too.

We did this offer for Christmas and had great results then so I was prepared to do it again, I found that we were busy right through January February and March which is usually the quiet times of the year and also found that when people come in with a voucher they are willing to spend more on other things or add more to the voucher, so my takings stayed the same and did not drop at all, also I have secured my customers for the next six months!! What more could I ask for!

The next three days were very busy selling the vouchers and we ended up  selling $35,400 worth of vouchers in a town of 7,500 people, mainly male dominated I might add, as we are a mining town, I thought this was an amazing result.

Once again thankyou so much for your ideas help and encouragement Greg it would not have been possible without you, now I can pay my tax bill!!!”

FREE Salon Owner Help Pack including DVD Valued at $197 – click here.

At Worldwide Salon Marketing we’re dedicated to creating wealth and financial freedom for salon and spa owners. But we never thought we’d be thanked for making babies as well.

Cherie Underwood (Inner Circle member two years) of Femme Fatale Beauty in Jannali, New South Wales, with baby Zoe - Cherie was able to start a family thanks to the freedom the Inner Circle marketing program gave her.

As Maureen Hardman writes, daughter and long-term Inner Circle member Cherie Underwood has been able to get married, start a family and work from home thanks to the success of direct response salon marketing she discovered in the WSM Inner Circle Marketing & Mentoring Program.

“When we purchased the salon nearly 3 years ago the old salon owner had implemented some of your strategies as she had hard copies of some of your marketing material, so at some stage she must have been a member.

“We know she had increased the business by about 25% in two years prior to her selling, due to an increase in her marketing strategies. Since joining WSM we have further increased our sales by at least another 25% by following your most recent ideas etc.

When we first purchased the business there were 2 additional full time staff (plus the owner) who had been there for a total of 9 years. They both left within 6 months, one opening up at home and taking about a quarter of the clients. (She left when Cherie returned from her honeymoon). Soon after this, with the help of the marketing templates in the Toolkit, birthday vouchers and fabulous offers, seen many of those clients return.

“We now also have someone on reception as inspired by WSM so we do not miss any calls, walk-ins etc (this is a must). The ex-employee is now working in a bar down the road (bitter sweet!). Because of this increase in sales we have put on an additional full time beauty therapist and Cherie has been able to start a family without any hesitation and will now predominantly work from home. Your stuff works and without it I may not have been blessed with a beautiful grandaughter!”

Click here to FIND OUT how Cherie did it with our FREE Salon Help Pack and DVD Valued at $197

Tracey Maryska of Passion in New South Wales

Inner Circle Premium member Tracey Maryska featured only recently here in a blog post that got a LOT of response when she told how the idiots at the Yellow Pages printed her ad with the wrong phone number – worse, they used the phone number of a rival salon instead!

But you can’t keep a good marketer down. A member of the Inner Circle program since 2008, Tracey’s salons have achieved terrific results because she figured out a long time ago what most in the hair and beauty business never ‘get’ – that she’s in the salon marketing business, not the hair cutting business.

For Tracey, everything she does is ‘marketing’, i.e., any activity which brings in a customer predisposed to buy from her instead instead of her opposition. And I have no doubt that when she got the opportunity to appear on the local TV news recently, she saw it as yet another marketing opportunity.

Tracey’s salons were among more than a hundred in her region to fit energy-saving lights – and the local TV station chose her salon to tell the story….

FLICKING THE SWITCH ON ENERGY GUZZLING LIGHTBULBS

Most owners of salons & spas go to work each day, re-invent the wheel, go home, and re-invent the wheel again next day. They work in an isolated bubble, rarely -- if ever -- getting to bounce ideas off others, instead living lives of quiet desperation devoid of the benefit of ‘belonging’ to a group of like-minded entrepreneurs and business owners just like themselves.

Fortunately for our salon owners, those days are far behind them. In Melbourne this week, a classic example of what happens when these individuals get together and start working as a team.

I split our Academy members -- advanced Inner Circle members who ‘get’ it and want more -- into teams and set them simple challenge: in one hour, develop and present a comprehensive marketing plan for a new salon opening one month from now.

The guidelines were broad, but the required result was clear: fill the salon to bursting point from the moment the doors open.

We shot some video so you can see what happens when salon owners familiar with ‘my’ kind of direct response marketing focus their energies on a single goal.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBDZ7ri4-N4

If YOU want the kind of results these and hundreds of other salon owners are enjoying, apply NOW for membership of the Inner Circle Premium program -- and get your very own edition of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®

Mark & Shelly Gibbs owned a struggling hair salon in Melbourne, Victoria....Inner Circle membership and the Toolkit not only gave them the tools to get their salon pumping, it gave them the confidence to look 'outside the box' and branch out into other money-making ventures - like motorbikes for junior clients to sit on!

Not so for Mark and Shelly Gibbs, Inner Circle Premium members of Shellmark Hair Shack in Kilsyth South, Victoria (Australia).

As Mark says,

“When we joined WSM 12 months ago, we were in deep s**t, I couldn’t pay the bills or the rent, and the computer was in ‘sleep’ mode most of the time.”

How things can so quickly change. A year on, Mark and Shelly have not just one, but THREE successful businesses – the salon itself, an associated business selling kids’ cutting chairs in the shape of mini-motorcycles (see downloadable pdf) and a car washing business!

“You saved our salon,” says Mark.

To merely accept Mark’s plaudits with gratitude would be telling only part of the story. What Mark fails to acknowledge is the fact that all we at WSM did was give him and Shelley the tools; they provided the motivation, drive, enthusiasm and persistence.

It’s worked, brilliantly; for example, when they put the motorbike ‘chair’ in the front of the shop, their takings for kids’ haircuts soared by 84%.

As Mark details in this short interview recorded this morning, total salon figures have increased by well over 100% in 2010 over 2009.

Mark & Shelly did a JV deal with their software supplier, in an editorial-style iinsert in a big trade magazine, promoting both the software AND their new kids' chair business. Right click on the picture and 'save as...' to download the complete story in pdf format.

And check this out: Mark and Shelly bought some software to help run their salon more efficiently – and then did a Joint Venture deal with the software manufacturer to promote the software – and the kids’ hair chairs – via a special double-page spread in a major trade magazine.

That’s doing some serious ‘outside-the-square’ thinking. (Right-click on the pic and download the full magazine feature story.)

Resource: for Members interested in contacting Mark about leasing one of those cute-as-pie kid’s motorcycle chairs, visit their website,

www.chaircoconcepts.com.au

Mark & Shelly's 4-year-old son demonstrates one of the kids's two-wheeled cutting 'chairs'

Inner Circle Premium member Sarkis Akle of Hair by Phd - dramatic increase in sales and new clients since upgrading from Lite

Sarkis Akle, owner of Hair by Phd in Parramatta, Sydney, only upgraded to the Premium program from Lite in February this year. The effects on his salon’s sales has been dramatic.

It’s a testament to the power of good salon marketing copy… and implementation.

Here’s what Sarkis says:

Got some figures that I would like to share with you guys.
These are based on a comparison between April 09 and April 10, keeping in mind in 09 we had record turnover for our business and we are not working off a small base.
1. Turn over up 16.5% from $62,926 to $73,346
2. Rebooking up 19.5%
3. New clients up 104%v – 95 new clients this April.
4. Total clients up 11.9%
5. Retail up 8%
6. My personal takings are down. All the growth has been with the staff.
7. Avg client sale is only up by $3.50, however with the amount of free services we have done it’s still pretty good.
8. We sold 25 of the $99 Mother’s day packages last week, just through in salon promotion.
Thanks to you guys, I am so pumped about my business. My dream is to pay all my debts off and finally be able to buy a home for my family.
Thanks Guys!

Hearing from salon owners like Sarkis is what makes my job the best in the world – giving people the tools, and the knowledge, to make more money for themselves.

Congratulations Sarkis. You’ve won a special WSM prize, it’s in the mail!