Salon Today - May 2008 - (Page 12)

[RECEPTION] Proﬁt Tip L Looking for a way to cash in on Mother’s Day? Try one of these five marketing ideas from the SALON TODAY Retail Reports e-newsletter. 1. Pair up with a local radio or TV station to create a Mother’s Day makeover competition. Get a local boutique involved as well. 2. Offer discounted services for moms and daughters. For example: buy one, get one 20-percent off. You may already have mom as a client, so this is a good way to get her daughter too! 3. Send an e-mail to the man in her life promoting your spa packages. 4. Serve champagne and chocolates to the moms who come into the salon or spa on Mother’s Day. They’ll remember the extra touch. 5. Create packages just for the day: Nail Crazy (spa mani/pedi with extra foot and hand massage), Face Forward (facial, make-up application and parafﬁn dip for hands and feet), Hair Makeover (cut, color, style and free product). Are you always on the lookout for new ideas? Sign up for SALON TODAY’s Retail Report and Business Builders e-newsletters. Visit www.salontoday.com for more information. [NO-COMPROMISE LEADERSHIP] Does your business suffer from ‘intolerable toleration?’ that you have direct reports who are stuck in the “I’ve done everything, but nothing changes” quagmire. Think about behavior or attitude issues, chronic lateness, poor follow-through or inconsistent performance. This boils down to a leader’s “acceptance” of sub-par performance. I use the word acceptance because it most accurately deﬁnes the problem. Let’s go back to the “I can’t get them to sell” issue. When a leader says, “I’ve tried everything, and nothing works,” what’s really being said is, “I choose not to venture beyond my comfort zone to address the problem and move the company forward.” When I presented this thinking to the owner, she immediately responded with, “So you’re telling me to ﬁre them if they don’t perform.” This knee-jerk response actually reveals what’s preventing this leader from successfully navigating through a behavioral-performance problem. Fear of confrontation is preventing action and, therefore, allowing sub-par performance to continue. I wish the word confrontation could be banned from business and leadership thinking Neil Ducoff recently served as a judge for the Global Salon Business Awards with SALON TODAY Editor-in-Chief Laurel Smoke. A business owner is continually frustrated with her service providers’dismal retail sales performance. The problem is that only a handful of service providers follow the system. When asked what she has done to turn the situation around, the owner responds, with exasperation, “I’ve talked to these people, addressed it in daily huddles and weekly meetings. I’ve set goals, used scoreboards, even threatened to lower pay. Nothing changes.” I’ll bet that, as a leader, you can easily insert a similar story of your own. I have little doubt and replaced with “opportunities for growth.” Could you imagine a leader saying, “I hate opportunities for growth!”? It’s interesting how quickly the leadership pendulum can swing from what I call intolerable toleration to the opposite extreme of ﬁring the offenders without exploring all of the possibilities that exist in between. Every leader needs to recognize where his or her personal intolerable toleration line is drawn, in order to prevent inaction on opportunities for growth. Every behavior issue and performance problem is a call for leaders to engage in coaching and innovative collaboration. Yes, the process may become heated and uncomfortable, but the alternative—not to engage—is intolerable toleration of the completely unacceptable. Simply put, it’s a failure to lead. Only when all reasonable opportunities for growth fail to yield positive results is it time to give employees the opportunity to work elsewhere. No compromise. Neil Ducoff is the founder and CEO of Strategies, a business training and coaching company specializing in the salon and spa industry. During his 38 years as a business trainer, coach, keynote speaker and author, Neil has gained respect as the guru of team-based compensation. Neil is the author of Fast Forward, the deﬁnitive business resource book for salons and spas. For more information, go to www.strategies.com or e-mail Neil at neil@strategies.com. 12 | May 2008 www.salontoday.com http://www.salontoday.com http://www.strategies.com http://www.salontoday.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Salon Today - May 2008

Salon Today - May 2008 Contents Editor's Note Reception Fashion Sense Spa Menu Round Table Decor Rave Reviews Power Players The Business of Make-Up Products Owner to Owner

Salon Today - May 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.