How do you future-proof your salon? With last-minute cancellations and no-shows affecting revenue, and many salon owners finding themselves time poor due to busy work schedules, it’s more important than ever to put strategies in place to protect your business and make profit a priority.
We interviewed Loz Main, educator and salon owner of The Rumours are True in Melbourne, who shares her tips for setting achievable goals, forecasting, and implementing a strong cancellation policy to protect your salon from no-shows.
Why is forecasting so important?
When I started forecasting, it changed the game. If you don’t know where you started, how do you know that your hard work has paid off? Or what areas you need to work on?
The Kitomba Business summary report is so good for this because it has so many snippets of insightful information. To be able to track your rebooking, your retention, and your retail sales—to be able to see those numbers in a snapshot is so powerful because it means that I can hone in on the areas we need to work on.
How did you set targets?
Every staff member at The Rumours are True has a target structure which is set up in Kitomba Targets. I make sure to talk through these targets with my staff so they feel clear and confident about where they are and what they need to do to achieve them.
We charge per hour, so our price list is a mathematical equation. It’s been a lot of years to finesse that and get it right. Their targets are then set relative to the hours they work and their hourly rates, to ensure the target is achievable based on our pricing structure. Then, with our retail sales, we use the 10% rule.
What’s great about Kitomba Targets is that maths isn’t everyone’s strong suit. So to be able to have it broken down and the equations there for you, to know how many more clients or retail sales you need, or those one percenters to get your targets across the line, really empowers your team to make it feel achievable because the working out is there for them.
How do you track your team’s progress?
We conduct weekly 30-minute one-on-one sessions with our team. I think that regular check-ins with your team are vital; it’s about more than just numbers—it’s about wellness and culture. These sessions transformed our salon when we committed to them weekly.
Our mornings also start at 9:30 am with a 30-minute huddle. We discuss any challenging clients, areas of concern, and offer support. We also share gratitude and encouragement, ensuring our meetings are positive and help to keep our team united and aligned. Again, having regular communication with your staff is game-changing and creates such a good culture and vibe for everyone working.
Tell us about your cancellation policy and how you enforce it
Our cancellation policy evolved due to the hectic pace of modern life. We found that 24 hours wasn’t sufficient to fill cancelled spots. Extending it to 48 hours provided us with more flexibility. We have a policy in place that if a client cancels their appointment and we manage to fill their spot, we waive the cancellation fee. Extending our cancellation policy to 48 hours allows us to do the necessary groundwork to fill the gaps in our schedule.
To support quite a tough cancellation policy, we send an email to our client a week beforehand that states all of the services that they’re booked in for, as we will charge them if they want to downgrade their service. Then, three days beforehand we send a text message that has the yes or no auto-confirmation feature to make sure that the client remembers that they’ve got an appointment.
The reason we send the email a week beforehand is to stop any instance of a client coming into the salon and saying “I thought it was just a haircut” because the email beforehand saved us from having that difficult conversation.
Why is it important to have a cancellation policy?
Implementing a cancellation policy is terrifying but because of Kitomba, we could run a report on how many cancellations we were putting through, and we gave away a senior hairdresser’s wage in a year. That was enough fuel to my fire to implement a very strong cancellation policy.
There’s no time like now to implement a booking policy and a cancellation policy. We can’t even go to a restaurant without putting a deposit down. So get on board!
Why is having good salon software important?
I think salon software is so important because it is the heart of the salon. Everything runs through your computer software, your bookings, your sales, your retail, and your tracking of everything that you do within your business. If that’s not functioning and serving you well, it means that you’re spending a lot of unnecessary time trying to make up for its shortfalls.
If you want to get some time back into your life, you want to make sure that your computer software is there to support that.
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