Salon Business: When the going gets tough, the tough get…selling!

by Greg Milner on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 11:56 pm

Me in the middle with the US Inner Circle members Steven & Susan Woodbury of Village Image salon in Belmont, NH, and Kanna & Dr Tim Reilly of Body Solutions Laser & Skin Care in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The occasion was the Your Beauty Network annual Business Retreat. With me is Your Beauty Network founder & CEO Bert Carder, at the Retreat’s opening-night party. Bert is about to put me to the sword.

It’s 10pm Monday night in California, and on CNN in my hotel room, Larry King and every other talking head in America is forecasting the end of the world as we know it after the biggest one-day fall on Wall Street in the known history of the universe. Anderson Cooper rubbed it in. “If you’ve got retirement savings in stocks or managed funds, here’s what you’ve lost:

$1,200,000,000,000!“

Apparently, the sky is falling in.

Well, I beg to differ. And so do a bunch of our US Inner Circle members. In a packed conference room this morning at the La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, several got to their feet and told the room how

business has never been better!

Tamara Schultz-Snyder, who owns a salon in the little town of Tehachapi, north of Los Angeles, says she’s picked up TWO HUNDRED new clients since she started marketing the smart way – with the tools in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit. And that was only in June.

Susan Woodbury and her husband Steven flew clear across America from Belmont, New Hampshire just to meet me. Susan joined in January. Her sales are already up $45,000 this year, she’s gone from working 6 days a week to just two days a week on the floor.

And of course I was delighted to meet Tim & Kanna Reilly, from Scottsdale, Arizona. Their Body Solutions Laser & Skin Care has gone from the verge of bankruptcy to a $700,000 a year cash generator – and will be doing a million dollars by the end of this year – thanks to one thing: the willingness to

TAKE ACTION!

I told the room that ‘if you don’t mind, I and hundreds of our Inner Circle members around the world choose to opt out of the recession’. That we welcome the media-led ‘recession’ because it leaves more of the market open to us marketers – those of us who ‘get it’ that when the masses run for cover, pull down the shutters, stick their heads under the blanket and wait for things to get better, it leaves more of the market there for the taking.

By those who know how to market themselves. Not with ‘brand’ marketing, but with hard-nosed, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners direct response marketing, the kind that actually gets customers, not just warm-’n-fuzzy compliments from friends and family.

Clearly, many of those in the room ‘got it’ too. We welcomed a bunch of new members, including Margaret Lewzcuk of Salon 675 in Deerfield, Illinois, Alison Hilton of Compliments in Phoenix, Arizona, Dawn Ellinwood of Ubuntuhairstudio in Solana Beach in California, Brigette Solus of Salon Sola in Chicago, Karin Mortellaru of The Art of Change in Sierra madre CA, and Cindy Tran of Delight Hair Salon in Campbell, CA.

All will shortly be receiving their Toolkits, and if they simply follow the system, all will be putting extra cash in their bank accounts within 14 days – or less.
They at least have a better-than-even chance of not only weathering the economic storm – real or imagined – but prospering in it.
Shocking fact: revealed at the Your Beauty Network Business Retreat – in America alone, no fewer than EIGHTY salons and spas are closing their doors every day.

Why salon & spa businesses should be embracing the recession, not fearing it.
The first question I asked at the seminar was “Who’s feeling the effects of the ‘recession’?”

Almost every hand in the room went up, a vivid demonstration of the self-perpetuating fear that seems to grip America right now. It is as if the country has buried its head in the sand in a desperate effort to hide, hoping it will all just go away. Trouble is, when your eyes are full of grit, you can’t see the opportunity either.

And there is opportunity everywhere.
During a half-hour chat with one of our members right after my presentation, I gave her just one ‘marketing-to-the-affluent’ strategy which she agreed would add tens of thousands of dollars to her sales in the coming months.

Recession or not, America is still awash with money. That cash is in the hands of those who are last and least affected by any economic downturn – the filthy rich.

The day after the retreat, I was collected at the resort by a business contact and taken on a drive through some of the most expensive real estate in southern California.

There was Janet Jackson’s house. A dozen doors away, one of Bette Midler’s homes. And between them, a big-name NBA star was spending $30 million building a mansion overlooking Rancho Sante Fe. And there are hundreds of thousands of no-name but equally-wealthy multi-millionaires who despite what the media says, are still spending money on themselves.

This acquaintance should know. He took me to his girlfriend’s house, a $12 million spread on 3 acres of hilltop paradise in the same gated community. She’s 43, a cardiologist who helped invent a simple but crucial medical device now used in heart operations around the world. She leased the patent to Johnson & Johnson for $600 MILLION…plus $25 million a year.
These are the kind of people who are affected least and last by any recession.

Your job, as the marketer of your salon, is to devise offers and products which are attractive to them…and then actively seek them out, through your marketing efforts.

Why doctors are no smarter than the average hair salon owner.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading this newsletter for even a few months that I have little regard for ‘image-y’, brand-style marketing. It’s expensive, in most cases can’t be measured, and usually does little more than stroke the ego of the business owner.

Which perhaps explains why doctors who own medspas are easily-seduced ‘advertising victims’, if the example shown here is anything to go by.

A lazy, wasteful 'image' style medspa ad. About its only saving grace, the coupons at the top. The rest is a criminal waste of expensive advertising space sacrificed for the sake of actually having to come up with compelling copy. If you own and manage a medspa and want to know how to do it properly, be at the 'Recession-Buster' Medspa Marketing Intensive at the Sheraton Mission Bay in San Diego on Tuesday, October 28.

And yes, before they found that success, they had to put aside their ‘professional’ egos too. But then, not everybody wants to be proud and broke.)

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.