Kitomba blog

Benchmark contains lots of information. Understanding how to interpret this information and turn it into action can be the difference between losing money and literally adding thousands of dollars to your bottom line annually. Benchmark is here to help you:

1. Understand your numbers in the context of what’s happening in the industry, and
2. Display core business information in a visual format – perfect if you or your team team don’t find it easy working with numbers.

Why are numbers in context so important? 

If you are a coffee house and this week you sold 5 cups of coffee and next week you sold 10 cups of coffee it would be natural to think that business was improving. But if next week actually turned out to be ‘International Coffee Week’ and everyone else was selling five times more than you, you’d definitely want to know about it!

Turn the visual information into action

We know you’re busy people, so to keep things simple, we’ve focused on three actions you can take from tracking your Benchmark results regularly.

1. Red rectangles
2. One at a time
3. A little can lead to a lot

Red Rectangles: Make the big red rectangles smaller

The big red rectangle represents your biggest challenge in every key success area of your business. In this example, the whole team could benefit from improving their rebooking number, but Tony’s low rebooking number is having the biggest impact on your business.

When gazing upon your beautiful reports, always look out for, and focus on, reducing the size of all the big red rectangles!

One at a time: Focus on improving one key area of your business at a time

By focusing on improving one key area of your business at a time, you give your team the chance to adapt their approach and improve their results in that area.

Rebooking should always be first. Once you have customers coming back for repeat visits, you will then be able to look at increasing their average spend, selling them more retail and introducing them to new services.

A very easy way to improve client rebooking across the business is to run a team competition over a period of six to eight weeks. The aim of the game is to achieve the best rebooking percentage improvement rather than highest rebooking rate. This approach should even out the playing field for your team. By running the competition over a 6-8 week period, you should see most of your client base come back through your door and it will give your team the opportunity to adapt their behaviour.

Embed a rebooking culture in your salon and it will soon become second nature for your team, leaving you time to focus on the next big red rectangle!

A 75% rebooking percentage will effectively fill up your calendar for the next three months. A healthy rebooking rate = a healthy business.

A little can lead to a lot: Keeping your prices in line with the industry 

Knowing how much you charge for your chemical services or your face or body treatments and how that compares to the industry is a very important number for you to understand. When you fully understand the difference between what you are charging and what the top 25% of the industry are charging you will know that you can confidently raise your prices by even only just a small amount, and it can make all the difference at the end of the year.

For example, a $10 increase across 200 chemical (or facial) appointments a month equals $2,000 extra profit per month, which gives you $24,000 of additional profit per year. That’s right, profit. You haven’t had to use any more product, nor gain any more customers, or even spend any additional time on delivering the services – you have simply raised your prices…safely (The price increase is safe because you know how the industry price this comparable service, and how much room you have to move).

So don’t be scared to raise your prices, just make sure that you are putting prices up in the correct areas and by the correct amount. Benchmark helps you make this decision an informed one.

And there you have it, three quick tips on how to get more out of Kitomba’s Benchmark.

• Red rectangles
• One at a time
• A little can lead to a lot

I really hope this helps to make you guys more successful and I look forward to sharing more insights on some of Kitomba’s key features in the future.

Award-winning Papas & Pace talk Benchmark, Kitomba One and more:

Get Benchmark today.

Darryl Gatward is Kitomba New Zealand’s National Sales Manager and is passionate about helping our industry be more successful. Darryl has previously led the Kitomba Support Team, has extensive experience in the fields of learning development and training both with Kitomba and elsewhere. Follow Darryl on Twitter: @gatward