Making a hire is a guaranteed way for you to grow your salon’s revenue.
It is easy to get stuck in the thinking that hiring is just an expense to cover but we have to look beyond the initial investment to the bigger opportunity for our salons when we make a hire.
It is true that making a hire can be expensive- You have to consider the expense of payroll, training materials, discounted services, educator time, and training program required to bring your new talent up to speed. When you add up this expense it can feel pretty hefty- especially the payroll portion of the expense. However, as an industry, we fail to realize the expense to our business that occurs automatically due to the fact that we wait too long to hire.
If you are scrambling to make a hire because you lost a staff member there is a financial expense to your business. If you feel like you need to make an urgent hire because you just realized there are no Saturday appointments for 6 weeks there is a financial expense to your business.
If we want to move beyond the expense to our business, then we have to start thinking strategically about hiring.
My favorite way to get to a hiring strategy is to get very clear on the revenue growth available to the salon when you make a hire. This figure will help you put your expenses in perspective and feel more comfortable saving and planning for hiring investment.
To get a sense of your growth potential I ask clients to have a look at the annual sales of some of their busiest stylists and to then reflect on their numbers for 2 years prior to seeing how much their actual sales dollars have increased each year. In most salons, once a stylist has reached a certain threshold their revenue increases start to level out and you see a much smaller year-over-year increase. Too many salons get focused on building and scaling a team, so they are all busy but stop bringing in new talent in the meantime.
Doing this is killing your revenue growth potential.
Once you see the small annual sales increases coming from your busiest stylist’s growth you should go have a look at the sales revenue for a new hire in their first two years in your business. Now imagine if you had that kind of increase + the increases coming from your existing staff? Not only are you going to have more growth in your business, but you are also going to have more safety and less expense when you do lose a staff member in the future. (And we all lose staff members)
Revenue is not profit- but the more revenue we can bring in while maintaining aligned expenses, the more profitable our businesses stand to be. If you want to maximize your growth and profitability, then you have to start hiring- regularly.
Do you need some help figuring out what this looks like? Sign up for the Build your Beauty Dream Team Salon Recruitment Course and I’ll walk you through it from A-Z!
Or, if you prefer to be part of a more intensive recruitment strategy program sign up for our exclusive VIP offering.
