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If you manage a team, the top salon business tip I can give you is building a solid culture. This will help you keep your team motivated and stay loyal to you. In the end, that’s the essential part of the salon manager role.
So one of the biggest challenges that salon and spa owners face is keeping the team motivated and performing. And at the end of the day, most of your income comes from your services, which are delivered by your team.
And it’s also your team that is out there meeting clients and representing your business.
And your brand is critical. The people who work in your business are motivated. They enjoy what they do and perform. But I know that many salons are struggling here and that our industry, in general, faces a too high staff turnover.
So this is a problem. And especially in the difficult times that we’ve been going through.
So today, I wanted to cover something different from what I usually share. Normally I focus on marketing and brand building. Still, here, I want to focus on a strategy that you can use to improve the motivation and performance of your team because those things are very interlinked, how your team performs and what they do.
It is your brand and is part of your marketing. So you cannot separate this. And the strategy that we will focus on today is your culture.
So before you do anything to improve your team’s performance and improve the motivation of people working for you, we need to make sure that you’re clear on your culture.
And even if you haven’t done any work on your culture before, you have a culture. The question is, is that the culture that you want for your business? And to quote Peter Drucker, one of the most significant management thinkers of all time.
Team culture eats strategy for breakfast
So if you have a good culture, if you have a strong culture, well-defined, especially in a business like yours, that is people-intensive. That will outbid strategy, and that will help you drive your business significantly.
So it is a critical component. So at the center of your salon’s culture is your salon’s mission, values, beliefs, and behaviors.
And again, it’s vital that your team really understands those values and also embrace them. And that we make sure that our culture is not something that lives on a website that no one lives by, but we need to make it an integral part of the team and how we work.
So I wanted to lead you through a few ideas of how you can do this to ensure that it doesn’t just become nice words, but really that your team will embrace it.
One thing you can do is to involve your team as you define and create your culture. So that it doesn’t become something that you sit alone and do, and then you come and deploy it to the team. But that you involve them in the process.
Maybe you’ve set some of the big picture, the mission, and so on, but that you take a day out of the salon, make it a fun thing, workshop, and have some input from the team on how we want things to work around here?
What do we want our culture to be like involving them in the process? This will make sure that you get a much stronger buy-in later on because they’ve been part of creating it so that they will feel more substantial ownership for it.
You can define specific activities and certain projects that help drive the values forward and delegate those tasks to the team.
So they own something that they work on that will help drive the culture forward. And of course, also when you see good behavior, when you see behavior in the salon that aligns with yours.
Celebrate that so that people see this as a type of behavior that we want around here.
That’s what I get celebrated for. And this way also becomes a natural part of having value, having your culture integrated into your business. And the final point would, of course, be like you are the role model here.
So, you need to make sure that you live by the culture that you have defined. Also, you are following up and celebrating the behaviors that you see that are driving your values forward.
Okay. So that’s just some of the things you can do to make sure that you make your culture part of your operation, that this doesn’t become just something that lives on your website. Now, this is highly relevant to your brand.
This is part of how you define your brand, and your culture fits into that.
And it’s something that transcends beyond just like the motivation of your team and internally. But it’s something that your clients will see, and the clients will experience that when they go in for a service with you, they will feel what the culture of your salon is.
And, getting this right can become a competitive advantage. It is something that becomes your brand and defines how your brand is perceived.
So that is important. I have another video where I talk more about salon branding, which I strongly recommend you watch after this because they are very interlinked.
Your culture is part of your values, so I strongly recommend you check that out.
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