Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva and today, we’re going to talk about redefining the salon front desk. And I actually kind of like caught ya with that subject line for the episode today because I do want to talk about the front desk without a doubt, but I also want to talk on a bigger picture about redefining what kind of support your salon business needs.
Because I think in our industry right now—I was just having a really poignant conversation about how far we’ve come. Like right when I started this business back in 2012, my goal was to modernize the salon industry and have people look at their salons as legitimate businesses, not just “I own a salon,” but like actually looking at it as a business and becoming the CEO and the CFO and the CMO and the COO and not just the talent.
What’s amazing is it’s happened right before my eyes and I really thought it would be my life’s work. Now I see those kind of words and that kind of language being tossed around the industry at large and at scale, and it’s so exciting because we’ve come a really long way.
And in so many ways, we are looking at our businesses as legitimate businesses and we’re really making good strategic decisions to ensure they stay that way. And then something comes along and I’m like, “Oh man, we still have a lot of work to do,” and one of the areas for me is the idea of the front desk.
So what I think does not work anymore is having a salon receptionist. I’ve always had some feelings about that job title, like, “Oh, they’re our receptionist,” and I think that the challenge with the front desk is it can become like the cash cow, and I mean it in a negative connotation, like your front desk can feel more like a liability than an asset.
Like you look at how much payroll’s going out and even if you’re paying somebody minimum wage, let’s say it still ends up being 10, 12, 15, $30,000 a year, depending on where you live and how full-time or part-time that person is, some real money. And so when we’re in a position where we’re like, “Listen, what do we really need?,” there’s so much that we can do with automation now and technology’s really come a long way. Do we really need a front desk?
And what I say is you don’t need the front desk that belonged in 1994, but you do need a modern support system for your salon business if it’s going to grow forward. And if you’re a salon owner and you’re thinking to yourself, “Listen, I’m considering getting rid of the desk,” I challenge you to really ask yourself, is the problem is having the front desk the actual issue, or is that you just don’t have people in the right roles in your business? Think on that for a second.
So we were a salon team where we would get front desk personnel who would stay with us for years. I mean, three years, four years, five years, six years, like long tenure, and so these weren’t like high schoolers trying to get their first job or somebody who’s in beauty school trying to get licensed. We actually tried that. We had a couple of front desk reception team members who were licensed and it never panned out for us. There was never like, “Oh, you’re good at working the desk, and you’re a great assistant, and you’re a great stylist.” There’s such different skillsets that actually never panned out. Well for us. I’m not saying don’t try it, but we didn’t have a good track record of it because I don’t believe the person who’s going to be a great stylist is the same person who’s going to be great at your desk. I think they are different people.
I think that our relationship with the desk is what’s broken and I want to give you some food for thought around what I think it would look like to have an incredible support team in your salon today from an administrative perspective.
Let me first take you on a small trip back in time to what our reception team looked like. I was the salon director, supporting the salon for an absentee owner. He was in the salon about 12 hours a month, so I was running the day to day. I never worked the desk. I only would’ve worked the desk if a reception team member was out and I needed to cover for an hour while I was waiting for somebody else to come in and cover that shift or something like that. But for the most part, I never had a shift there, that wasn’t my gig.
Instead, I had the right people there to fulfill the job and they were incentivized and the reason they stayed a long time is because it wasn’t just a clock punching kind of gig. It was something that was actually motivating. You were learning skillsets and you are a critical part of the team producing a result.
I believe the workforce of the now and of the future wants to feel like they matter. I can remember when I got some of my first jobs being like, “Well, maybe it’s just something where I can just make enough to put gas in my tank.” And it didn’t really matter what I was doing, like I just was happy to be hanging out there. This was before the times where we all lived on our smartphones, but I was happy to just be hanging out and talking.
I don’t think that the workforce today wants that. I think they want to feel like they’re making a difference and making an impact, and so when we’re creating a front desk role or a support role, I want you to zoom back and say what does your salon business need?
So for us, our salon business had things like referral programs. We had things like rewards programs. There was a time where we had built a custom app and then phased it out when we realized that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. We did things like we had very strong retail sales in our salon, very strong.
We did a ton of physical mail. Like I talk about this now, I think that over the next three to five years, we are going to see a huge push off of digital marketing and a massive pushback to traditional marketing, which is great for me, ‘cause if you’re in Thrivers Society or any of the Methods, you know that I’ve always been big on traditional marketing and it’s going to get even more important now as we shift into the consumer behavior of the future.
We did a lot of cards, physical mailers, we did a lot of events in our community. We did employee-based incentive programs where employees of other businesses could come in and work with our salon and be incentivized to be a part of our clientele.
Because we had all of this complex marketing and all of these different moving pieces, our reception team, when they were in the building, they were working extremely hard and they were incentivized to do so.
So I want you to take a step back for a second and think about what is the work that needs to be done in your salon and do you currently have team members in place who can pull it off. Think about the things that are heavy.
How many of you feel like social media’s really heavy? Some of you do. I know it. How many of you know that you need to learn to build a great website or your website’s really dated and you just don’t have time for it? I know some of you do. How many of you are like, “I wish that we did better at acknowledging our guests. I wish that we did have more retail sales. I wish that we were more organized in the way that we booked. I wish that we could throw better appreciation parties for our teams.”
Those are all considered support role jobs. You, as the owner should not be coordinating the next potluck party. You have so many other things to do. You can be the one who buys the great cake that everybody loves at the end, but you shouldn’t be the one who’s doing the grunt work.
There’s a lot of business coaches who will tell you if you are the leader of a business, you’re the owner of the business. You should be doing stuff at your pay grade. So how much are you making? Break it down. If you’re currently making $35 an hour, $40 an hour, some of you are making like a hundred bucks an hour. If you look at your wage and what your production is, if you’re making a hundred bucks an hour, would you pay somebody a hundred dollars an hour to plan a potluck party?
Oh you wouldn’t? Then why are you doing it? You need somebody else to take on those things that are at a lower pay grade so that you, who is the only person capable of leading your business, can lead the business, right? That’s what’s super important.
So when I look at what I would have my salon support staff doing, I would be giving them sales goals. Anybody who worked the front desk would have a sales goal to be achieved monthly and if they achieved that sales goal, they would get a financial bonus for it.
So often what we do when we think about hiring somebody to work our front desk, what do we call a job like that? EL, Entry level, right? We’re like, “Well, I need somebody entry level. As long as they can smile and they can use some decent verbiage,” like it’s so funny because we’ll really soften our criteria when it comes down to hiring for the desk a lot. We’re like, “Well, as long as they’re able to smile and be friendly and be happy, we’ll just train them on the rest.”
If I was hiring a reception team member, I would want somebody with fairly aggressive sales experience. Somebody who was able to troubleshoot and navigate challenges, somebody who is naturally incredibly organized and somebody who comes with an insane amount of drive. And I would tell them, “We’re so excited to have you here. This is your gateway into a growth path,” and I would lay out for them what is possible.
For those of you who are like, “Oh, I wish I had a stronger right hand. I wish I could have somebody who would run social media.” Cool. Start with hiring somebody who is a support person with tons and tons of talent who can work their way into that role.
Do you know how hard it is to find somebody off the streets to just be a great general manager for your salon? I can’t give you one example of a business that’s done that super well, generally speaking. That person has to come up through the ranks. They have to gain some respect. They have to learn how the business runs and we can start them with a really highly incentivized support or reception role now.
For a lot of us, this is where we get it wrong. We’re like, “Well, can I just hire them as an assistant manager?” I wouldn’t because you want to train them from the ground up as the inner workings of your business. And we usually get it wrong from the start because when we’re hiring somebody to work our front desk or to be our social media manager, we want to pay them the bare minimum. What kind of team member is willing to work for the bare minimum? Is that somebody you think might be able to run your salon for you one day? Is that someone you think would be super incentivized to upsell? Is that somebody who you think would be super aware when booking appointments to make sure that there’s no awkward gaps? Is that somebody who would be interested in learning your full retail line and be able to sell it to clients and talk about it? No way.
The person who’s going to be driven to do that is going to want to make some money. But in turn, they should be able to produce more than you pay them. If you’ve hired the right person and you see this role correctly, you have this mindset shift of those who work my front desk are not client checker-inners and checker-outers.
Those who work the front desk are my marketing and sales force, and that’s the mindset shift I want you to grasp today. I want you to say to yourself, “What are the marketing things? What are the sales things? What are the opportunities that we’re not seizing because we don’t have the capacity to do it?” That’s who you’re hiring to work your desk.
Your desk personnel should know the intricacies of setting up a retail shelf. You all know this, right? Like a retail shelf can’t just look pretty and organized. It has to be optimized to sell. Your desk should know that, and they should be doing it every single week. Your desk should be coming up with ideas for new promotions based on sales record of retail sales products. Your desk should say, “Hey, it seems like we’ve sold 30 different in-salon conditioning treatments just today. Let’s check inventory to make sure that we’re not running low.” Your desk should be a part of the behind-the-scenes business strategy.
If they’re just punching the clock, the issue is not that the front desk is a dying art. It’s that you haven’t created a sales and marketing force that is supporting your growing business.
I believe in the salons of the future, that is going to be critical. And it’s ironic because we’re in this time where everyone’s trying to like strip it all back, strip it all back. Everything’s automated. There’s nobody who greets you. It’s all done through smartphone. And to a degree, I love all of that. Like for so long, I’ve been saying think about digital consultations. You should not be having clients text you or call you on your cell phone. I still fully believe that that’s not changed for me, but we also don’t want our guest experience to become this ultra-robotic super-sterile.
It’s almost like going back to the hair factory of the early two thousands, which we’ve been working to get away from for 20 years. And now we’re starting to shift back there where it’s like every client is just a cog in the machine and we really need to think about what it’s going to take for the future.
Now we know consumer behavior is demanding more what? More nurture, more handholding. That’s what creates the loyalty and so we can’t go so sterile that we remove all of that because what’s going to happen is you’re going to lose your business and your clients to those who have held onto those key and critical pieces. And I want your front desk team, if you have a salon team, to be a huge part of that.
So what I would have my front desk team doing today is working on sales with incentivized sales goals. They’d be sales and marketing personnel, like I said. They would need to be up to date on retail education to a point where they could host mini PK classes with my team at our staff meetings. “We have Nicholette from the desk here to talk to us about blah, blah, blah, hairspray that just came out.”
And if you’re sitting there saying, “Oh my gosh, my team would never want to learn about that from the reception team,” cool. That just better doubles down on my point that you’re hiring the wrong people, right?
When I was in the salon, if I was talking to my stylist about what a product did, they would listen to me and I wasn’t doing hair, but they would listen because they knew I was educated. They understood the position I was in and they trusted me.
For most of us, we’re hiring a reception team that’s not very well trusted. It’s more like fingers crossed like, “Oof, I hope they don’t mess up my books again. I hope they don’t check out my client wrong.” It’s like this era of you’re waiting for them to fail versus they are your greatest asset and ally, right?
Retention. Your front desk team should be retention masters. When we look at what it takes to do retention, I shared this, like the new guest amenity is what happens between guest visits. So your support person is checking with clients in the DMs, they’re sending the handwritten cards, they’re watching the books to say, “hey, that’s weird, Nick, hasn’t been into the salon in 10 weeks. He usually comes every six. I better drop him a line.” That’s what an engaged reception team looks like, right? How can they help to improve our retention?
A great reception team can run your social media for you. They can be taking the behind-the-scenes photos. They can be organizing your social content on your behalf, writing captions, like put ’em through Thrivers Society, let them figure out what that looks like. Give them my 100 Caption Guide. They can swipe all those captions and start organizing all of that for you, right?
I mentioned this earlier, but let’s go back to it. Talking about the handwritten cards. There’s so many opportunities to write a card to a client. I won’t go into the nitty gritty, like the really fancy stuff. But when you talk about baseline basic engagement with your clients, we talk about anniversary cards, acknowledging how long a guest has been with you and mailing them something because of it, right? Birthday acknowledgement, bare minimum holiday acknowledgement, bare minimum. If you don’t celebrate holidays, New Year’s card, bare minimum, like showing your clients you’re engaged and you care.
Things like website updates. Like I talked about this new and upcoming workforce—I was on a call recently and someone was jokingly saying like, ‘Listen, infants are born today with smartphones in their hand.” And it’s funny, but it’s also very true. And so you hire somebody who is of that generation, where they just know what’s up with tech and they’ll be able to do things like update your website for you, build you a beautiful website, and it feeds back to that idea of that the workforce today wants to feel like they are making a difference and an impact. If they’re not making difference and an impact, they’re right on the bubble of walking out the door, honestly. And so about ways where they can see a tangible result of their efforts, right. Then going back to those ideas of your employee giveback, your birthday celebrations.
For those of you who celebrate team members, anniversaries like a staff member’s anniversary, first of all, I think that’s critical and important, but can you have somebody who’s helping you to get that organized? Like if of a team of 18 members you’re celebrating an anniversary or a birthday, I mean, every month something’s coming along. If you were to have an amazing reception team member who could be like, “hey, listen, I noticed that Angela’s birthday is coming up in eight weeks. This is the cake that she noted that she likes. Do you want me to go ahead and place that order for you? And then I can grab you a birthday card. I can go and look for one for you.” Think of your front desk as your right and your left hand. They should be able to pick up all the moving pieces. Think of them as the most amazing executive assistant you’ve ever had. That’s what the reception team today looks like.
But what we think of when we think of front desk is somebody who’s like hanging out. “Oh, oh, Hey, are you ready to check out your client? Okay. Does this ticket look right? Okay, great. And your total today is $160.” Then they run the card and you’re like, “Please don’t forget to put my tip on there.” And then when they’re done checking out that client, they sit back down and they play on their phone again, and that’s super stereotypical. I understand that, but a team member like that, a hundred percent fire them. They don’t need to be there. That is a waste of time, energy, and effort, and money. Totally agree.
But when we say, “I don’t believe the front desk has a place in the salon anymore,” I challenge you to ask is it really that you don’t need administrative support in your salon? Or are you just misclassifying people? Are you just not looking at the potential of having somebody in your space who can truly make an incredible impact, not just for you, but for your guests?
I hope this episode was helpful. It’s a food for thought one, and even if you’re not somebody who has a salon team, even if you’re a solo stylist, I do believe one of your first hires should be somebody who can be that right hand who’s techy and who also gets it, is able to think forward and say, “Listen, here’s a gap. Here’s an opportunity.” Who wants to learn, who wants to make an impact and who really deeply wants to support you.
So I hope that this has been helpful. If you have any feedback or any questions, I’d love it if you left me a rating or review on iTunes, let me know in your rating or review what questions have come up for you. As always take a screenshot of this episode, share it on Instagram. I’d love to see it. In the DMs any questions that you might have.
And as I always love to say so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
