Once again, we look down the hill of a post-peak season nearly upon us. The winter’s “peak” months traditionally generate about 60-65 percent of our year revenue … and during that time our mantra is, “Let the good times roll!”
But then, there’s July through December – the bleak months of empty salons and no cash, and that “second season” is now only 60 days away. So what do many salon owners do when the long lines of March, April and May customers are gone? They go on vacation. Not an actual, six-month vacation, but a mental one. Salon operators usually conclude, “Let’s just try to keep the bills paid and scrimp until the next New Year’s Eve ball comes crashing down for another peak.” However, in some ways, the last six months of the calendar year can be some of the most exciting.
With low aspirations and expectations, most owners don’t recognize that there is a lot of incremental revenue to be made, but it all comes down to attitude and effort. A positive attitude and hard work, combined with close attention to your numbers and enthusiasm from your reduced staff, should produce higher revenue numbers than your last year’s performance. After all, any gain on last year’s second season is a big gain … almost like “found money”! I have yet to see a salon that cannot do this, and the extra money generated does wonders for our attitudes and encourages our efforts.
It’s always nice to have some dollars we never planned on for the downtime months, because fixed expenses are just that … fixed! It’s a lot easier to pay those summer A/C bills with an unexpected thousand bucks here and there. In order to get that extra revenue, it is necessary to give personal attention to each customer, so every salon employee needs to ramp up their service level. After all, there should be no excuses about having too many people to serve on any given day when summer/fall is upon us.
Are you in need of an infusion of go get ‘em attitude to ramp you up for the second season? Here comes a shameless self-promotion: sign up now for the Sun Is Life® three-session educational webinar program this month, for some tips and tricks about how to make the last half of the year profitable. The May 2nd webinar topic is “Sustaining Sales and Profits Beyond Peak Season” – not the cleverest title, but you get the idea. On May 16th, we present “EFTs, Upgrades & Up-selling” and on May 30th we’ll discuss “Membership Retention & Keeping your Best Employees”.
The topics covered in these webinars will help you make plans to not only have your pockets full of cash in June, but to prevent you from scraping by from July through December. (Just visit johnrfarr.com for webinar sign-up instructions).
