Starting a beauty salon business is one thing, but managing year after year to stay profitable while surmounting all imaginable challenges is another thing. To achieve the latter as a beauty salon owner, you must know how to manage a beauty salon business or hire a manager who does. 

You must maintain a healthy balance between creating an enabling work environment and providing excellent customer experience. At the same time, you must ensure that all aspects of your business run smoothly, which means staying on top of tasks like tracking inventory and monitoring marketing efforts. 

Don’t make the mistake of many business owners who assume that they can improvise as they go without know-how or experience. You must be intentional about the success of your business — like reading this article. 

In this article, I’ve compiled some practical tips and strategies to show you how to manage a beauty salon business to ensure it thrives and sustains ongoing success. 

What does it take to run a beauty salon in Nigeria?

The best time to acquire the basic skills and experience to manage your beauty salon successfully was before you launched. The second best time is now.  

You can skip this section if you’ve previously managed a beauty salon or any other business. Otherwise, you need to acquire business skills. 

You can achieve this by learning from established beauty salon owners or managers or taking a quick online course (like this one on Udemy). 

Also, you can hire an experienced manager to help you run your salon. 

How to manage your beauty salon [9 effective strategies]

Here’s how to run a beauty salon business to encourage efficiency and stay profitable: 

1. Set up management structure

One of the first things you must do to run a successful salon business is establish basic guidelines — policies and procedures — for the day-to-day operations of the salon. These guidelines ensure your business runs smoothly and everyone knows what to do, promoting professionalism, efficiency, and excellent customer service. 

To manage sustainable daily operations and build a healthy work environment, business owners or managers must be clear about the salon’s objectives and staff’s expectations. It should cover monthly (quarterly or yearly) targets, punctuality, tidiness, ethics, core values, and customer service (including handling complaints and seeking resolution).

Here are some actions to consider: 

• Be clear. Detailedly define the role and responsibility of everyone on your team. This way, they know what you expect of them. 
• Train staff. Train employees routinely on core values, customer services, conflict resolution, complaint management, industry trends, the latest techniques, and modern technology. 
• Create a flexible staff schedule. It improves efficiency and allows employees to have a life outside of work. Splice can help you handle this.  

2. Sustain your marketing efforts

Always have a plan to promote your salon, no matter how much your business has grown. The essence of any business is to serve customers. But you can’t serve them if you don’t first reach them or give them a way to find you. 

Always have a marketing campaign going on — a promotion, a package, or a discount offer. Ensure you promote your offers to your leads and customers on social media and other marketing channels like your website and Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). 

3. Improve customer retention

At the core of how to manage a beauty salon business is creating a healthy balance between acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. You can’t have one without the other. 

While your marketing and your brand reputation, among other things, will bring in customers, you have to deploy outstanding customer service to keep them coming back. You can’t compromise on service standards; otherwise, you’ll lose your hard-won customers. 7 in 10 beauty customers cite quality of service as the reason they return to patronise a salon. 

Another way to retain customers is through loyalty programs. According to a recent report, nearly 70% of customers prefer beauty businesses that offer loyalty rewards. Create a loyalty system that rewards your customers with special discounts on services, freebies, cashback, etc., for successfully referring other customers, spending a set amount, or visiting a certain number of times. Splice can help you automate your loyalty program. 

4. Create an enabling environment for staff

As a beauty business owner or manager, you know that beauty businesses run on customer loyalty and relationships, both of which depend on your staff. So, you must hire and retain the right people for your business to succeed.  

Here are three ways to ensure your employees stay loyal and happily engaged: 

• Provide career growth opportunities. Train your employees on the latest techniques, industry trends, and technology updates. It’ll make them more skilled and ultimately more effective in serving your customers and achieving your bottom line.  
• Recognise their achievement. Your employees are humans at the end of the day. If they are doing something right that grows your business and advances your overall goal, they want to hear it from you. Do them one better and reward them for it with employee discounts, paid time off, promotions, commissions, or bonuses. 
• Encourage them to come to you. Not maintaining open lines of communication with your team can result in gossiping and a quick decline in productivity. Let them know they can always come to you with concerns or complaints and for support. 

Nonetheless, employees have to go sometimes, no matter what you do. Just ensure a toxic work culture you perpetuate is not why they’re leaving. 

5. Utilise salon management software

Running a successful salon business can be overwhelming. With endless demand for your time, there are not just enough hours in the day to pay careful attention to aspects of your business. 

Besides managing staff and customers to keep the daily operations running, you also process payments, track inventory, fulfil orders, shop for supplies, retail products, and tools, and renew licences and permits. It’s tedious keeping up with everything without a salon management system. 

Splice is a perfect example of an all-in-one salon management software that can help you save time and money daily by automating business operations like appointment booking, payment processing, and customer and staff management, among other things. 

6. Explore ways to increase revenue

A simple hack for how to run a beauty salon with multiple revenue streams is selling beauty products even as you focus on providing top-notch services. The combination will increase your customer base and grow your cash flow. 

Also, upsell and cross-sell your customers. Encourage them to get complementary products to go with the service you delivered. Or advise them to get more expensive services or products. For example, offer them nail polish to top off their newly manicured nails or sunscreen to protect their skin from direct sunlight after a skin treatment session. 

Lastly, review your product and service prices to reflect market trends and inflation. 

7. Cut down on expenses

The ultimate goal of every business is to boost revenue and reduce expenses. Simple. You must always find ways to cut costs without compromising your business. 

How much does it cost to run your salon monthly, quarterly, or annually? Compare it to how much you make in the same period. That will give you a good idea of how much cost you need to cut to stay profitable. 

Once you’ve made the necessary reductions, the next thing is to get a budget and operate within it. As a salon owner or manager, you have an estimate of future expenses at least a quarter ahead.

8. Make data-driven decisions

If you plan to run a successful salon business, you can’t run blind. You need relevant insights into your daily operations to help you make strategic decisions to keep your salon in business. 

You need data to help you answer pertinent questions like: When is the busiest day of the week? What are the peak hours during the day? How do your customers prefer to book appointments? Who’s your most proficient nail tech, aesthetician, hairstylist, makeup artist? Which staff are customers always asking after? What products should you restock, and which ones should you slow down on? What products are customers always asking about? 

How you answer these questions can completely transform your business or run it. 

The reporting feature on Splice will provide you with an accurate overview of your business, answer the above questions, and more.  

9. Maintain ongoing legal and regulatory compliance

Before launching your beauty salon, you would have registered it, obtained your Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN), and secured all necessary licences, certifications, and permits. But that’s not where it stops. 

All registered businesses in Nigeria, including your beauty salon, must file annual returns to continue their business operations. Additionally, you’ll pay taxes at all three levels of government: Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), State Inland Revenue Service (SIRS), and Local Government Revenue Committees (LGRCs). Failure to comply attracts heavy fines and possible interruptions of your business. 

Lastly, work to ensure all your licences, certifications, and permits compliance by renewing them when they are due. 

Conclusion 

Yes, running a beauty salon business is a full-time job. Still, the strategies and tools in this article on how to manage a beauty salon business will make your experience less tedious. 

As you work to turn your beauty salon dream into a profitable business enterprise, let Splice make your work easier.