Power Book 2018

NEW LEASE OF LIFE
Forget CPR – this is how you bring ‘Flatliners’ in your business back to life –
with the help of 3•6•5’s Ken West
AT SALON SMART THIS YEAR a salon owner
and friend of mine, Carolyn Sweeney of Creations in
Chichester, joined me on stage to share how we created
a special programme together. Why, you might ask? It
was to help the ‘Flatliners’ in her salon get back onto the
upward curve to future growth. Every salon owner I know
has Flatliners – people who, whatever role they are in, have
reached that point where they are just drifting along. They
may be achieving good results or poor results, but either
way they are not growing, and probably have not grown in
a long time. They are comfortable and content and no one
is rocking their boat so they just keep drifting along.
The biggest challenge is that often it’s the salon owner
that is drifting along. Unprepared, too afraid, or just
unsure of what to do to rectify it. One thing is sure though
and that is that flatlining will never rectify itself.
So, what are the warning signs? The key indicator, in
its simplest form, is sales. If sales are flat, whether for the
salon as a whole or for any single individual then, if not
addressed, profits will fall because costs will inevitably
increase. However, that’s a simplistic answer, as we know
sales are a result of who we employ, what services they
provide, the quality of those services and our ability to
attract and retain clients. Stylists need to understand
they are responsible for, and in control of, their results.
What I do is ask stylists to share with me their own key
performance indicators:
What are their average weekly professional sales?
What are their average weekly retail sales?
What is their average number of clients per week?
What is their average income per client?
What is their new client percentage?
What is their request client percentage?
What is their client retention percentage?
The first four should be ingrained in their brains, just like
their address or their date of birth, because they are the
numbers that will affect their earning potential. Sadly,
most stylists have no idea of these numbers let alone
understand why they need to know them.
Hopefully when you took them on you set minimum
performance standards for each of your team. Awareness
of these numbers and the numbers that they are currently
achieving gives you a perfect starting place to create a
plan of action for the future. As a business, you then
need a clearly defined strategy to support and help people
to achieve their goals. Before you start to manage the
Flatliners out of your business, you must provide all of the
education, coaching and guidance that they need.
You will have heard the expression: “You can take
a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. But you
must provide the water, make it taste nice, put it in a
receptacle that is easy to drink from and then make the
horse understand why it should drink the water. Then if
the horse decides not to ‘drink’, you better find yourself
another horse because that one isn’t going anywhere!
If you do all of the above and are still not getting the
Flatliners to grow, then you have to use performancerelated
disciplinary action to manage them out. Some
people leave it so long that they think it’s too late to start
performance management. It’s never too late to draw a line
in the sand and start performance managing; it will just
take longer to reach a conclusion the longer you leave it.
06 POWER BOOK creativeheadmag.com