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.)

She features on the cover of this week’s issue of Business Review Weekly in a story about her $120million empire. But the really interesting thing is the idiotic spin the magazine used in its press release, describing breathlessly how ‘un-supermodel’ like was her behaviour during their interview and photo shoot.

The magazine said Macpherson could be beautifully charming but also “controlling and prickly”, yelling at her staff and only approving certain photos for use.

“During her sit down with BRW, Macpherson insisted on scrolling through the images captured by BRW’s photographer saying `yes, no, no, yes’ as she checked the screen on the camera,” BRW said in a media release.

“When a question made her uncomfortable, she had no qualms about shouting at her minders to keep quiet so she could concentrate.”

Macpherson refused to disclose how much she was worth, and told the magazine she credits her “vision and balls” for her success.

Controlling and prickly? Bravo! Vision and balls? Excellent. Why, I wonder, would she want to portray anything else? Business is ABOUT being controlling, being demanding, having vision, and being possessed of Big Kahunas. The mystery here is how a business magazine could be surprised, even offended by this. Er, do they somehow believe that just because Elle MacPherson happens to be six foot two, 45 years old and still looks stunning, she should fit a soft, gooey sterotype?

Good grief. That fact that the softest part of Elle is her teeth should be a matter for applause, not surprise.

The quote above from Abraham Lincoln came to me this week as I turned 54, an age by which – ten years ago – I would like to have been ‘retired’, whatever that means. Now, to my surprise, I’m finding it is the most productive and enjoyable time of my life.

I started this business when I was 49, an age at which most people are winding down, not gearing up. Ray Kroc would not have been surprised. He started McDonalds when he was 52, suffering diabetes, missing a gall bladder and most of his thyroid gland, but was “convinced the best was ahead of me”. Kroc spent the next 30 years building the company into a global phenomenon. Victor Kiam was in his late fifties when he famously ‘bought the company’ – Remington Products – in 1979. If you’re of a certain age (like me) you’ll remember his TV ads where he declared boldly ‘it shaves as close as a blade, or your money back!”

The point is this: energy and enthusiasm comes from actually doing things. Age has nothing to do with it.

Last week I reached a personal milestone. To you, fishing may well be nothing more than a jerk on one end, waiting for a jerk on the other.

But it has been my recreation for more than 30 years, though I had never reached the sportfisherman’s holy grail. Yet on a flat-calm sea aboard my friend John Davidson’s game fishing boat Incognito, nearly 40 nautical miles out to sea, I hooked my first marlin. Well may you yawn, but to me this was akin to a golfer achieving a hole-in-one after 30 years playing that infuriating game. It took 40 exhausting minutes to bring the great fish to the boat, at which point it shook its massive head, snapped the leader and swam away.

Which was fine by me, we were about to cut it loose anyway.

Two weeks from now I reach another milestone, when Michelle makes an honest man of me. It will be my third marraige. A couple of friends have asked why, at my age, I’m bothering to get married at all. I joke that it’s because I haven’t gotten married for more than 25 years, but that’s being deliberately glib.

As I see it, it’s simple. Age has nothing to do with anything. It has everything to do with commitment. When you commit to something – just about anything – you create for yourself a platform for success. Nothing worthwhile can be achieved without commitment. With it, you can achieve almost anything. Life itself becomes more fulfilling.

That’s why I continue to push the barriers, chase goals, seek adventure. Couple of weeks after we get married, I’m borrowing my brother’s 55ft boat and heading off to the Abrolhos Islands for a week of fishing with Michelle and three other couples. Not for me the sedentary cruise ship.

I would rather take risks, literally drive my own boat, than be a passenger…waiting for other people to make decisions and simply, passively reacting to them.

It is, I suppose, why I am at heart a marketer and entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is a lonely place to be. Risky, sometimes dangerous, rarely secure. But to my mind it is better to take risks than to take the safe way, risk nothing.

Nobody who has never risked anything has ever achieved much either. And it’s a funny thing, the older I get, the more risks I like to take. What, after all, do I have to lose?

Let’s get on with this week’s offerings….

How to ‘eavesdrop’ on what’s working for other salon & spa owners…

One of the hardest things for any salon or spa owner is working in a vacuum. In America, there are more than 300,000 salons & spas, large and small. In Australia and New Zealand, more than 35,000, in the UK, at least 60,000.

And for almost every salon & spa, is an owner who goes to work every day and tries to re-invent the wheel. The beauty ‘industry’ is a multi-billion dollar beast, but its arms and legs are all moving in different directions. There might be 50 salons, clinics, spas within a few miles of each other, but the owners all turn up at work having no idea what’s working for the others.

Sad thing is, there’s no real need to re-invent the wheel, because somewhere in the world another salon or spa owner has already faced, challenged and found answers to exactly the questions you’re asking yourself right this second. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could ‘pick the brains’ of somebody who’s already been there, done that?

That’s exactly what’s happening every month among our Inner Circle members. Just this week we had dozens of Member salons join our monthly international Group Coaching Call to ask…and get answers…to questions like:

“What’s the quickest way to capture new clients?” from Judy Swain at Glam Spa in Connecticut.

“What’s the best way to retain new clients for re-bookings?” from Amanda Anderson of Contours Clinic in Melbourne, Victoria. And from Chantal Witkowski of E’clips Hair and Beauty in Woodend, Victoria, “”I have two of my full time stylists both leaving to have babies within 1 month of each other in July/August. What is the best way for me to do this without losing clients? All future female employees will be fitted with chastity belts to prevent this from happening again!!!”

If you’re not an Inner Circle member, here’s a small taste of how these Group Coaching Calls work:

Press play….

(NOTE TO INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: The full one-hour Group Coaching call recording is available in the Member’s Only area under the top menu, ‘Group Coaching Calls’)

Of course, the Group Coaching calls are just a small part of the whole Inner Circle program….find out if you qualify by completing the no-obligation survey here.

The Price Cringe: How a single tiny change can instantly increase your sales in the salon…

I’ve often bemoaned the fact that most business owners – salon & spas particularly – would be more successful if only they’d get out of their own way, and let the customers buy from them.

The biggest mindset barrier here is around the issue of price. People in the beauty industry seem by nature to be ‘caring’ kinds of people. And that generates what I call the Price Cringe where the owner says unconsciously if not overtly

“I can’t raise my prices because my customers can’t afford it/won’t pay/I already raised prices once this decade…” or any combination of these.

It is death to play God and assume what your customers can and cannot afford, will and will not pay. I have banged on about this for years, and it seems to be one of the most diffucult concepts to get across.

So here is a proven strategy that will increase your gross sales instantly, without changing any prices at all, if that fear is too big for you to surmount.

Offer the Most Expensive Services First!

Most business owners start with the default position of assuming that customers always shop on price first. And so, bowing to the cringe factor, they offer the cheapest thing first, slowly working up to the most expensive on the list, all the while looking sideways to watch for the flinch.

Take a browse through the car ads in the newspaper and you’ll see exactly the same thinking, in print. Mistakenly in my view, the car dealers to a man put their cheapest cars at the top of the ad (the most important section of any ad) and all the expensive ones right down the bottom of the page… last to be read, if at all.

But study after investigation after focus group has shown that price is only the major issue when that is the only proposition put forward as the basis for the sale or offer.

However, even if price is the leading edge of your offer, you can instantly increase your sales by offering the most expensive items first, the cheapest last. And it costs you NOTHING to try this.

Years ago, when Jill and I began selling what was then just the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, we sold two versions – a Bronze version (just the kit itself, no frills or add-ons) and a Silver version, which came with coaching and a few other bonuses. The Silver toolkit was twice the price of the Bronze version.

We would pitch the Bronze kit first, and typically the Bronze version outsold the Silver version by a factor of two to one. Then, at a marketing seminar in Dallas, I asked Bill Glazer about this.

“Pitch the deluxe version first, the basic version second,” he instantly told me. That single piece of advice was worth the long trip to Texas alone. In the next few months, we completely turned our sales around. Fully eighty percent of our sales were now the deluxe, upmarket version!

Here’s what to do: for the next week, whenever a new client comes into your salon or calls you to ask about services and prices, simply start at the expensive end of your price list first, instead of the cheap end. I’d be delighted to report your results.

Speaking of price…

Notice of Impending Inner Circle Membership Fee Rise.

As of Tuesday, May 19, Inner Circle fees for new members (excluding New Zealand at this stage) will rise substantially. (This will NOT affect existing Members or those salons joining prior to May 19.)

The Inner Circle first-year Membership fee of $7,932 (Australia and USA, over 12 months) has been held static for more than two years now. In the meantime, we’ve added a vast array of profit-generating products and services to the program. As of May 19, that full-year fee will rise to $9,948, an increase of just over $2,000.

What this means to you if you have not yet applied to join the program:

You have until May 19 to join the program at current price levels, and more importantly, join hundreds of entrepreneurial salon & spa owners around the world who can help you not only survive this recession, but actually prosper in it.

WARNING: we receive more than 100 applications every month, and take on only 30 new Members each month. Reason: we put enormous labor-intensive resources into each new Member. Sure, we could take on more, and I’d laugh all the way to the bank, but support would suffer, and I’d rather have 30 happy, well-looked-after new Members than a hundred justifiably-grumpy ones.

If you have not yet applied for Inner Circle membership, go and complete the no-obligation survey here.

I use the word ‘efforts’ advisedly. It’s clear to me that most owners of beauty businesses put almost zero ‘effort’ into their marketing.

The ads sent in this week were prime examples of not only how lazy most people are, but how ignorant almost ALL business owners are about the effort required to

Move the Sloth!

The MOST difficult part of any marketing is getting attention. Owners of salons & spas typically make the mistake of thinking that simply running an ad…any old ad, anywhere, any time…is somehow, miraculously enough on its own to do the job of catching a prospect’s attention.

And when it doesn’t, they blame the media… the newspaper, the Yellow Pages, the radio, whatever… and whine “Oh, I’ve tried advertising in the Yellow Pages, it doesn’t work…”

But the second most difficult part of marketing is – let’s assume you’ve actually got the prospect to read or listen to your ad or flyer – getting that prospect to take action.

Most people simply put in too little effort, have too high expectations – and are always disappointed by the results.

You’ve gotta imagine your prospect as a

…Giant mass of blubber, oozing across the couch, face glued to the television, needing an electric cattle prod just to get the smallest flicker from a single eyelid…for whom it will need an enormous effort to even reach the phone…

And yet for some reason, salon & spa owners seem to think that the mere fact they’ve run one lousy ad in a newspaper – once, three months ago – or distributed a half-assed, dreary flyer to a dozen houses within a two-minute walk of your salon, should be more than enough to galvanize every man, woman and child above the age of 8 within 18 miles to beat a frenzied path to the front door, trampling each other under foot, maddened by the terror of missing out on your wonderful services and fabulous products…

And when they don’t, you blame everyone and everything else except yourself.

Folks, a reality check:

1)    Marketing is a process, not an event.
2)    You need to earn their attention, every time. Not only with multiple forms of media (direct mail, press, mailbox flyers, referrals, free publicity, online, email, SMS and on and on) but with the right message delivered via that media.
3)    That message has to contain a sales argument that compels them to pick up the damn phone
4)    That sales argument has to contain a HUGE value added offer, one that is irresistible.
5)    It needs to be backed up by testimonials, every time. Real ones, with names and suburbs, not ‘weasel’ testimonials, eg “Mary, New York.”
6)    If being delivered by direct mail to a known list (eg existing clients) that message has to be delivered several times, in a linked sequence of letters. A single letter doesn’t even nick ‘em on the way by. If all you’re going to do is send one letter and expect the world to change, give up now. It won’t work, and you’ll waste your money. Forget it.

And if all of that ‘effort’ sounds just too much, then get out of business. You shouldn’t be in business at all if you expect the world without putting in the effort.

Our Inner Circle members at least have all the pre-done ads, flyers, letters, strategies, offers, headlines and templates at their instant disposal in the Toolkit.

They at least have zero excuse for not putting in the effort. For those who do NOT possess these tools, I wish you luck. In this market, this recession, you’ll need it.

If you are NOT a member of the Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle program, complete with the Toolkit, here is where you go to apply for a 30-day Test Drive.

The E-Myth – and Why We’re Giving Away Hundreds of Audio Books
For most of our Inner Circle members, joining the world’s biggest salon marketing & mentoring program is their first serious attempt at educating themselves about how successful businesses work.
But it’s only the beginning. I read maybe 30 business books a year, subscribe to business-related magazines by the dozen… But the publication I’ve read more than any other is Michael Gerber’s best-selling The E-Myth – the myth that most people who go into business are entrepreneurs (they’re not), why almost all start-ups fail, and how to avoid being one of them.

So in the interests of our Inner Circle members’ continuing education, we’ve bulk-purchased hundreds of copies of the E-Myth Revisited, narrated by Michael Gerber himself, as a gift to our Members. Here’s where you can listen to a sample of the audio book…

Inner Circle members will be receiving the complete E-Myth Revisited audio book on CD in the mail shortly.

‘The Gruen Transfer’ refers to the effect that visiting shopping malls have on otherwise sane, rational human beings – The term describes that split second when the mall’s intentionally confusing layout makes our eyes glaze over and our jaws slacken… the moment when we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers.

If you want your customers to spend more money in your salon, it’s worth studying this effect, and certainly watching the show if you have access to it.

A good place to start is Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen, and follow the links from there.