Salon Today - February 2009 - (Page 23)

Players of the Game The strength of an industry-speciﬁc advisory board lies in comparing apples to apples—after all, a salon is not a bookshop, dental practice or law ofﬁce—and membership parameters can be drawn tighter yet. Feeling that even comparing Granny Smiths to Red Delicious would be too scattered, BOA members conﬁne their board to urban, moderately large salon businesses. “Someone with a four-chair salon in a rural location probably would not beneﬁt much from our discussion,” says Rash, who owns La Jolie in Princeton, New Jersey, and is a past president of Professional Beauty Association (PBA) salon section. “Our group is employment-based; we’re not interested in talking about booth rental. There are great associations out there that represent everyone. We’re not trying to do that.” Participants should also be compatible in their ethical views, she adds. Yet, if the member businesses are too similar in brand and market, they’re likely to be competitors, which compromises the candor. And if individuals mirror each other in management style, “groupthink” can set in at the cost of a diversity of opinion. BOA jumbles up the demographics of its six members by including four salons in different sections of the greater New York metropolitan area and one salon in Boston and Washington, D.C.; both sexes; a range of ages; and varied professional backgrounds. “You learn a lot when you get outside of your own little box but stay within the box of your industry,” comments BOA member Frank Zona, owner of Zona Salons in Norwell, Massachusetts. “We’re geographically separated, and there are differences in our size, product lines and corporate structure, but in effect we’re all in the same business.” BOA’s nearly full-day bimonthly business meetings, typically kick off with a casual dinner the night before and proceed like any board of directors meeting, starting with old business and proceeding to new business, when members present their current challenges and receive feedback from others. This structure tends to limit the size of the board. “Other business owners live the emotional life and experience the same risk tolerance that I do. The board establishes a like-mindedness and a joint commitment in helping each other along that’s naturally effective.” —Frank Zona, owner of Zona Salons, Norwell, Massachusetts “You can run out of time if your board gets too big,” says member Serena Chreky, who coowns the D.C.-area Andre Chreky The Salon Spa. Zona puts the maximum manageable number of members at eight. Sometimes the group works around a theme. For example, after having read the business book Setting the Table, by Danny Meyer, the board members visited Meyer’s restaurant to witness the book’s principles in action. At their meeting to close out stormy 2008, they each outlined their expectations for the business climate in 2009. Although it’s not the purpose of an outside board to trade services, Zona says that membership does offer him access to valuable resources. “I’ve tapped into legal advice from the law firm and financial advice on two different levels,” he reports. With 10 salon and spa locations, a school, a product line and annual receipts totaling nearly $20 million, Eveline Charles has few peers among her fellow Canadian salon/spa owners but feels it’s essential to solicit feedback from a panel of knowledgeable business owners. To ﬁll this need, Charles pays three local businesspeople from other industries to attend a full-day quarterly meeting focused only on the Eveline Charles business. The three provide insight after Charles and her four-member executive board deliver a report on the quarter’s budget ﬁgures, strategic plan progress and new developments. The timing of this year-old advisory board is no accident; Charles hopes to enter semi-retirement soon. She assembled the advisory board and executive team with the intention that the two bodies would work together and continue to grow the business without her daily attention. She > Rolling the Dice BOA participants stress that their organization is neither a networking group nor gabfest. “This is ofﬁcial business,” notes Rash. Giving the group a name helped to emphasize its professional nature and enabled the members to draw up a legally binding conﬁdentiality agreement. “The conﬁdentiality document added a seriousness to this and, thereby, a freedom to really let down our hair,” Rash adds. “That was key; it glued that trust for us.” Legal documents, travel and a full day away from the salon come with a price tag that Zona estimates may run as high as $10,000 a year. “But the return on investment is high,” he qualiﬁes. “For each expense, I determine: Is it a good use of my time and money? This deﬁnitely is.” Alternative Play BOA accounts for only half of Zona’s advisory board activity. He attends a second bimonthly meeting as the only salon on an advisory board composed of Boston-based business owners. These meetings are run by paid facilitators and outside experts ﬁnanced by annual board membership dues of $7,000. www.salontoday.com February 2009 | 23 http://www.salontoday.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Salon Today - February 2009

Salon Today - February 2009 Contents Editor's Note Reception Spa Menu Decor Inside Look Custom Color Board Games Where's My Exit? Products Owner to Owner

Salon Today - February 2009

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.