25. Salon Business Benchmarks: Growth, Profit & Client Retention with Antony Whitaker

And then there's all kinds of other layers of context once you really start to dig into the weeds.

And I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll use, you know, expenses versus revenue so that, you know, 30,000, you know, what does it mean? As you said, comparative to what, number one.

And then underneath it I would say, relative to what? Um, relative to your payroll.

So 30,000 for a salon that has 20 employees versus a salon that has 10, you know? And you know what I mean? They both could be making 20.

So you s- you, you can g- you, you can, and should, once you start to understand all of these different numbers, y- you start to connect the dots in, in different ways.

And I always think from a, from a hairdresser perspective, it's like looking at a haircut.

Growing up in beauty school, spending 20 years in that part of the industry, you know, I was never a hairdresser, but watching great educators go, "Okay, that looks great.

Now let me put my hands into that haircut.

Let's, let's look at how did you build your weight up, what ang-" You know, they s- they start to see on the surface how something might look great, but they also can see within it greatness versus not in, on two different heads depending on the technique she used.

Yeah.

I, I always think that the...

You know, when you really try and understand and break down what the, the challenge is for salon owners running businesses in our industry is that they're often not great with numbers.

They're a bit frightened of numbers.

Uh, and they shouldn't be because, you know, in one of my presentations I talk about how hairdressers are really good with numbers, as long as it's the numbers they want, i.e. the numbers that are on a bottle of peroxide or the numbers that are on a tube of tint.

You know, they're numbers and that's our language.

Because they're not comfortable with often the, the, the numbers in business, they tend to, instead of relying on facts...

And that's what numbers are, numbers are facts.

And hairdressers, we tend to be very emotional characters.

So, uh, the, the numbers become a bit of a moveable feast.

And often, you know, I, I always had this visualization of when I talk to a salon owner and we're talking about their business, that it's a little bit like watching those, um, you know, I don't know what you, what, what you refer to this as or what you refer to these people as, but, you know, um, sharks or cowboys or whatever you wanna call them, where they do what we call a three-card trick.

And so they, they might have three cards, and they're moving them around, and then you're meant to guess which card is which.

Or sometimes they'll do, they'll do it with a ping pong ball and, and a, a cup, and they'll put it in...

They'll have three cups.

They'll put the ping pong ball in one, and they'll move the cups around.

You're meant to guess which one it is.