Get your salon on track for growth this year with these tips and techniques designed to boost your business at every level.

Salons play an important role in society, both as hubs of self-care and as valuable centers for community connection. But in addition to their societal impact, salons are also businesses. To continue serving their communities in the long run, salons have to grow sustainably. Salon owners must put ongoing, thoughtful effort into the strategies and techniques that will increase salon revenue, reduce costs, and improve efficiencies.

These six strategies will help owners and managers increase salon revenue and drive scalable, sustainable growth.

Increase salon revenue and improve salon efficiency

Things have changed for salons since the global pandemic upset in-person businesses. In the flurry of your salon reopening effort, have you stopped to take stock of how your business runs? Eliminating inefficiencies is one of the most effective ways to reduce unnecessary costs, which in turn helps increase profit margins.

For most salon businesses, both operational realities and customers’ behaviors have likely changed during the lockdown period. Take the time to revisit your back-of-house systems, staffing and scheduling processes, and your retail offering to make sure everything is running smoothly and priced optimally to suit the new normal your salon is facing today.

Update your pricing

When was the last time you updated your prices? Familiarizing yourself with the hard numbers that drive your salon business may open up opportunities to do just that. Once you have an understanding of your best-selling and worst-performing products and services, you can make informed decisions about pricing them to move. Create promotions to clear out inventory of products you won’t restock, for example, and make sure your service prices are aligned with the current costs associated with the experience you provide.

There are also broader tweaks you can make to your hair salon revenue model or your general approach to pricing that will help increase salon revenue. For example, offer package rates for clients willing to pre-pay for repeat services, or bundle products that pair particularly well together. Have you considered offering gender neutral pricing to create safer spaces for LGBTQ+ clientele? Pricing shifts like these can help increase the average amount that clients spend either per visit or over the course of the customer lifecycle.

Retain talented staff

While many revenue growth strategies are focused on bringing in new business and expanding staff resources, looking inward to your existing team is a wiser place to start. Take the temperature of your current employees’ satisfaction levels and evaluate your staff retention rates over the past six, 12, or 18 months. Improving staff retention increases revenue by limiting the costs associated with acquiring and training new hires, while also leading to a friendlier, happier salon environment that improves the client experience.

Are your managers, stylists, receptionists, and assistants clear about their responsibilities and empowered to make decisions that affect their performance? Has the work culture of your salon fostered a positive environment where teamwork thrives? Do you offer competitive compensation models that allow employees to achieve their financial goals? Are there opportunities for advancement within the company? These are just a few of the questions salon owners can ask while assessing staff satisfaction and investing in salon staff retention.

Set performance targets

You probably have benchmarks and milestones in mind for your salon business — why not share them with your team? If your entire salon staff is working toward the same goal, everyone’s efforts will be compounded to help you achieve success much faster than if you were working alone. 

Setting clear targets for each individual employee can also help divide your big business benchmarks into more manageable, bite-sized goals. Whether you decide on an average dollar sale, number of clients booked or served, or some other metric, shooting for agreed-upon targets can also alleviate some of the awkwardness that can arise during performance check-ins.

Build your digital presence

One of the most obvious ways to increase salon revenue in 2021 is to make it as easy as possible for clients to find and fall in love with your brand. If you haven’t already, make sure to launch a website that is equally beautiful and practical — clients should be able to discover your brand for the first time and book (and rebook) appointments with ease. Then make sure to optimize your Google listing using Google Business tools, so when someone searches for a salon in your area your brand will be in the running.

Then there’s social media. Salon social media marketing is a fundamental requirement for any brand looking to grow in 2021. Start by identifying the platforms that are best positioned to help you find your audience and meet your goals. That will give you the confidence to invest time and effort in building a content calendar full of creative, eye-catching posts.

Improve your tech tools

Do the tech tools you use to run your business support your goals to increase salon revenue? From booking software to salon scheduling and inventory management to retail points of sale, technology plays a crucial role in salon operations. Investing in a well-designed tech solution will reduce overhead, increase efficiency, and empower your entire team to provide your clients with extraordinary service. 

In the best case scenario, your salon tech stack will either be well-integrated, so that the various systems you use can share data and communicate with each other, or will all be rolled into one salon management platform. For example, Boulevard offers everything from self-booking capabilities to secure payments and client management to internal reporting. The platform helps salon owners eliminate the costs and inefficiencies that come with cobbling together disparate systems, and supports all the other techniques and methods you’ve already implemented to grow your business and increase your salon revenue.