363 Why the Most Successful Salons Keep It Simple

Welcome to another episode of the Grow My Salon Business podcast. I'm your host, Anthony Whittaker, and it's great to have you join us here today. Over many years, I've seen the inner workings of many salon businesses in many different countries and at all levels of the market. Whether we're talking about the premium, luxury end of the market... The budget or value end of the market or anything that sits in between those two. And it's because of that insight and in the process of working with and helping a lot of salon owners that I also get to learn a lot. And I'm often asked, if there was just one thing that sets the most successful salon owners apart from others, what would it be? And I know that over the years, and even on this podcast, I've answered that question in different ways. But recently, I've started to notice something that has been staring me in the face all this time, and that is that the most successful salons keep it simple. Now, sometimes when you hear a statement like keep it simple, people misunderstand what is meant by that because they immediately want to make it more complicated than it needs to be because they think it needs to be complicated to be successful. So let me explain what I mean when I say keep it simple, because simple doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy. Sometimes when I sit down to record a podcast, I have a sort of a visual image in my mind that acts as a metaphor for what I want to talk about. Maybe that's the hairdresser in me, because as hairdressers we're often drawn to this industry because it's a visual medium, and many of us tend to be visual learners. For example, if you've seen any of my presentations, you'll know that I'll often use a jigsaw puzzle as a metaphor for a business, where every piece of the jigsaw represents one of the pieces needed to put a successful business together. And the image I have in my head for today's podcast is also of a jigsaw. But it's a jigsaw where all the pieces aren't from the same puzzle. They're from different puzzles. So as a result, nothing quite fits. You've got a bit of blue sky from one puzzle, half a building from another, the corner of someone's face from somewhere else. Individually, there's nothing wrong with any of the pieces. But put them together and the end result is chaotic. It's disjointed. It's unnecessarily complicated and ultimately it simply doesn't work. Whereas the most successful businesses... are more like a puzzle where everything fits together perfectly. Every piece has a reason to be where it is. Every piece serves a purpose and connects with the pieces around it. So that there's a sense of harmony and simplicity about how the business works. There's nothing there that doesn't need to be there. And there's nothing missing that should be there. It looks simple, but that doesn't mean it was easy getting the business to that point. And as a business owner, that's your job. Your job is to create a business where all the pieces work together. That's what management is. Good management is recognizing that nothing in your business exists in isolation. Every decision you make affects something else. Another phrase I use to describe that