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- #61
I am on it 
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- Thread starter
- #63
A few days late but here comes the report on June's activities.
I will not share the revenue figures because I don't see the point to do it anymore. It is still steadily growing.
A lot of the money we had been making in the previous months have been used to buy the material and furniture for the refurbishment of the salon but all this is now done. So I have been able to sleep a little bit more which was much needed.
Now, most of my time is used to prepare the opening. As always, I have been lucky because just as I finished the refurbishment, I had to start travelling again for my job which would have prevented me from working in the shop but still enables me to work on the organization stuff so the timing is quite good.
I am now dealing with a new problem: the last and most important pieces of furniture accepted our order saying that they would deliver in 3 to 5 days and they are now coming back saying that it will take 6 weeks. So I am trying to cancel the order which they don't seem to be ready to accept and if I don't manage to get it my way, well, I don't know yet but I will have to find a solution because there is no way I will wait 6 more weeks before opening.
I am also looking into hiring a second therapist. I have a meeting with one of the best candidates tonight... I will keep you posted.
These are the facts but my assessment on the situation is: if I manage to do a good marketing, which seems to be the case since I started, with two people working in this place and with my day job, I should be able to open a second location in a few months. So although this business is nowhere close to be a fastlane at the moment, I can see how I can turn it into one and hopefully quicker than I had initially expected... Future will tell.
I will not share the revenue figures because I don't see the point to do it anymore. It is still steadily growing.
A lot of the money we had been making in the previous months have been used to buy the material and furniture for the refurbishment of the salon but all this is now done. So I have been able to sleep a little bit more which was much needed.
Now, most of my time is used to prepare the opening. As always, I have been lucky because just as I finished the refurbishment, I had to start travelling again for my job which would have prevented me from working in the shop but still enables me to work on the organization stuff so the timing is quite good.
I am now dealing with a new problem: the last and most important pieces of furniture accepted our order saying that they would deliver in 3 to 5 days and they are now coming back saying that it will take 6 weeks. So I am trying to cancel the order which they don't seem to be ready to accept and if I don't manage to get it my way, well, I don't know yet but I will have to find a solution because there is no way I will wait 6 more weeks before opening.
I am also looking into hiring a second therapist. I have a meeting with one of the best candidates tonight... I will keep you posted.
These are the facts but my assessment on the situation is: if I manage to do a good marketing, which seems to be the case since I started, with two people working in this place and with my day job, I should be able to open a second location in a few months. So although this business is nowhere close to be a fastlane at the moment, I can see how I can turn it into one and hopefully quicker than I had initially expected... Future will tell.
@Roland Awesome ! Nice pics too mate, Your persistent & a do'er .. Wish you great prosperity ahead!
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- Thread starter
- #65
At the end I managed to cancel the order for the last pieces of furniture, got my money back, ordered from somewhere else and after 20 minutes on the phone, I managed to get the delivery just before the weekend.
The salon is now open.
We have had a few bookings already and I am spending all my time doing marketing.
Now, on a more personal level, I have to admit that I was concerned about this phase we are now in and it turns out that it is an even worse feeling than I was expecting. To describe it, I would say that I have had to stop doing something that was already making decent money to dedicate my time to something that might give me better money later but which for the moment is reducing my revenues. This is one part of the struggle which I was more or less prepared to but there is another one which I naively didn't see coming. All the preparation phase, refurbishment, material preparation you name it, although it was tough and long days and so on... I was fine with it because I could see progress. Now, I am doing marketing and although I am still working the same rhythm as before, progress is very small: facebook audience is building up, we got a few bookings but apart from that... not much.
OK, I get that to do a good marketing you need to invest a lot of money for it to be effective, but that is not an option for me at the moment so I have to find another solution and there must be one. I just haven't found it yet.
Sorry for the long post this time, I think it is more for me than for sharing what I am doing. It helps me organizing what I am doing and stepping back from the blockers.
Another thing I am going through at the moment and this one is really new to me (actually it is the first time I feel that), I took a job three months ago in order to cover the costs of my flat and the rent of the salon in case I don't make money which is great because even now, I don't have to worry too much if I don't make as much money as I would like but on the other hand, and this is the very first time in my life I say that, I hate this job. Actually not so much the job itself but the company and the way of working. It is the worst company I have ever worked for and by far and thinking that I am giving them most of my time and energy when I would use it better and more effectively on my project is very hard. I am looking for a solution to that as well because it is stupid to waste my time like that. I just need to mitigate the risk of not making any money with the salon because as I am in a foreign country, I don't have anybody to fall back on if money dries out.
As I already said in one of my previous posts I think, I stopped worrying about the problems I can find on the way because they usually solve themselves down the line but it is really hard for me to hardly see any progress because I feel my project is stucked. It might not be, but that's how it feels.
Ok enough of the complaining, I think it calmed me down to write all that down so let's get back to work... I'll keep you updated
The salon is now open.
We have had a few bookings already and I am spending all my time doing marketing.
Now, on a more personal level, I have to admit that I was concerned about this phase we are now in and it turns out that it is an even worse feeling than I was expecting. To describe it, I would say that I have had to stop doing something that was already making decent money to dedicate my time to something that might give me better money later but which for the moment is reducing my revenues. This is one part of the struggle which I was more or less prepared to but there is another one which I naively didn't see coming. All the preparation phase, refurbishment, material preparation you name it, although it was tough and long days and so on... I was fine with it because I could see progress. Now, I am doing marketing and although I am still working the same rhythm as before, progress is very small: facebook audience is building up, we got a few bookings but apart from that... not much.
OK, I get that to do a good marketing you need to invest a lot of money for it to be effective, but that is not an option for me at the moment so I have to find another solution and there must be one. I just haven't found it yet.
Sorry for the long post this time, I think it is more for me than for sharing what I am doing. It helps me organizing what I am doing and stepping back from the blockers.
Another thing I am going through at the moment and this one is really new to me (actually it is the first time I feel that), I took a job three months ago in order to cover the costs of my flat and the rent of the salon in case I don't make money which is great because even now, I don't have to worry too much if I don't make as much money as I would like but on the other hand, and this is the very first time in my life I say that, I hate this job. Actually not so much the job itself but the company and the way of working. It is the worst company I have ever worked for and by far and thinking that I am giving them most of my time and energy when I would use it better and more effectively on my project is very hard. I am looking for a solution to that as well because it is stupid to waste my time like that. I just need to mitigate the risk of not making any money with the salon because as I am in a foreign country, I don't have anybody to fall back on if money dries out.
As I already said in one of my previous posts I think, I stopped worrying about the problems I can find on the way because they usually solve themselves down the line but it is really hard for me to hardly see any progress because I feel my project is stucked. It might not be, but that's how it feels.
Ok enough of the complaining, I think it calmed me down to write all that down so let's get back to work... I'll keep you updated
Dont worry about marketing too much, theres going to be ONE area where you need to kill bigtime to really drive your bookings.
Customer experience
So your a new salon in a place where theres plenty of demand, problem is many people already have somewhere to go that they probably have been going for years. So you think marketing will get you loads of customers? no chance!
But you have a few bookings right? What kind of people are these?
They are people willing to take a chance on you, they want something to talk about with their friends....
So you have to give them the best freaking experience that they HAVE to tell ALL their friends about, this will blow any facebook marketing out the window. Well actually it will be facebook marketing but done by your customers
This is a big trick used by the restaurant industry for years, treat your current customers like kings and they will bring new customers.
Good luck man!
Customer experience
So your a new salon in a place where theres plenty of demand, problem is many people already have somewhere to go that they probably have been going for years. So you think marketing will get you loads of customers? no chance!
But you have a few bookings right? What kind of people are these?
They are people willing to take a chance on you, they want something to talk about with their friends....
So you have to give them the best freaking experience that they HAVE to tell ALL their friends about, this will blow any facebook marketing out the window. Well actually it will be facebook marketing but done by your customers
This is a big trick used by the restaurant industry for years, treat your current customers like kings and they will bring new customers.
Good luck man!
- Thread starter
- #67
I agree on everything you said here, EXCEPT that marketing is not going to bring me customers.
There are two reasons for that:
- OK the word of mouth is going to help big time and so customer experience should be perfect. So far this is under control and the people we have are actually referred by other people or knew us from before and were willing to come to us even if they were normally preferring mobile services delivered to their houses. But there is one big problem with this: it takes a lot of time to build up a customer base that way and this brings me to my second reason
- While we do our best to deliver the best customer experience possible and while the word of mouth is helping us growing slowly but surely, why not take advantage of the remaining time to do proper marketing? I mean if it was so useless, why big companies spend so much money on it? something to know about my area of business is that contrary to what you think, women are not so attached to a specific shop, or salon, or brand. Men are much more. So even if it is only one or two more customers I can get from the marketing I do, it is still better than just waiting for the word of mouth to do its job. Actually at the moment, the marketing is bringing me about 25% of my bookings. This is a big difference from what I was doing before because it used to be about 75% of my bookings by word of mouth when we were working mobile. Now this kind of customers are different so I have to find what "clicks" with them first.
so yeah, customer experience is a great tool but this is down to my employees to make sure that they deliver a world class service (which they do), but my job is to make them busy. As I tell everybody, my job is to get the customer to come the first time in our place, then, my employees will make them come back again and again...
There are two reasons for that:
- OK the word of mouth is going to help big time and so customer experience should be perfect. So far this is under control and the people we have are actually referred by other people or knew us from before and were willing to come to us even if they were normally preferring mobile services delivered to their houses. But there is one big problem with this: it takes a lot of time to build up a customer base that way and this brings me to my second reason
- While we do our best to deliver the best customer experience possible and while the word of mouth is helping us growing slowly but surely, why not take advantage of the remaining time to do proper marketing? I mean if it was so useless, why big companies spend so much money on it? something to know about my area of business is that contrary to what you think, women are not so attached to a specific shop, or salon, or brand. Men are much more. So even if it is only one or two more customers I can get from the marketing I do, it is still better than just waiting for the word of mouth to do its job. Actually at the moment, the marketing is bringing me about 25% of my bookings. This is a big difference from what I was doing before because it used to be about 75% of my bookings by word of mouth when we were working mobile. Now this kind of customers are different so I have to find what "clicks" with them first.
so yeah, customer experience is a great tool but this is down to my employees to make sure that they deliver a world class service (which they do), but my job is to make them busy. As I tell everybody, my job is to get the customer to come the first time in our place, then, my employees will make them come back again and again...
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Yeah I understand what your saying and its very important when you just opened and your not busy, hopefully thats not the case for long.
Lets say you got the occupancy of the salon up to 60% with some hard marketing work, FB ads, flyers on the street with a good offer, adwords on google etc. These tools are fricken expensive! they will get you customers but probably at a loss.
The main driver of sustainable growth is the customer focused marketing, where they become your marketing machines.
Now you got this great service and customers who love it, now you need them to spread the word right?
They will do this naturally but you need to pour some petrol on it son!
Membership Club (Sign up to your mailing list for 10% off and they enter some personal details, get their birthday!)
Loyalty Card (If you dont want to go the members way)
Host monthly parties where they come and get some free champagne and nibbles with their treatment, do it in the evening
Give your good customers £10 off vouchers to give to their friends
Free treatment on their birthday (members)
Offer a party treatment night on their birthday (50% off normal price)
Im sure theres a lot more you can think of
All this stuff is still marketing but your marketing to your current customers, its a different way of thinking. They then get others on your behalf.
Lets say you got the occupancy of the salon up to 60% with some hard marketing work, FB ads, flyers on the street with a good offer, adwords on google etc. These tools are fricken expensive! they will get you customers but probably at a loss.
The main driver of sustainable growth is the customer focused marketing, where they become your marketing machines.
Now you got this great service and customers who love it, now you need them to spread the word right?
They will do this naturally but you need to pour some petrol on it son!
Membership Club (Sign up to your mailing list for 10% off and they enter some personal details, get their birthday!)
Loyalty Card (If you dont want to go the members way)
Host monthly parties where they come and get some free champagne and nibbles with their treatment, do it in the evening
Give your good customers £10 off vouchers to give to their friends
Free treatment on their birthday (members)
Offer a party treatment night on their birthday (50% off normal price)
Im sure theres a lot more you can think of
All this stuff is still marketing but your marketing to your current customers, its a different way of thinking. They then get others on your behalf.
- Thread starter
- #69
These are great ideas and I will definitely use them.
With regard to the "standard" marketing, I will always have it or at least for a certain time because as soon as this salon is occupied enough, as I don't need its money to survive, I will use it to open another one somewhere else. So I will have to start again from scratch and build a new customer base somewhere else.
That's the plan
By the way: do you know the different between the theory and the reality?
No?
Well, in theory it works
With regard to the "standard" marketing, I will always have it or at least for a certain time because as soon as this salon is occupied enough, as I don't need its money to survive, I will use it to open another one somewhere else. So I will have to start again from scratch and build a new customer base somewhere else.
That's the plan
By the way: do you know the different between the theory and the reality?
No?
Well, in theory it works
- Thread starter
- #70
A quick update before the end of the week.
It has been a busy week with the opening of the salon last Monday. I have been fully focused on marketing this week as I said in my previous update and after a few days I am starting to see some result so it makes me think that I am doing the right thing.
To summarize quicly what I have done this week:
- Development of Facebook audience
- Membership scheme created and testing currently ongoing on both facebook and with "real people" to see what is the response to it
- Flyer created and about to be sent to printer
- Voucher designed as suggested here by @tafy which seems to work very well
- Relashionship building with the shops around mine offering them to send us some of their customers against discounted services for both the customers and the owner of the shop plus displaying some flyers of them.
- I am also in negotiation with a big online discounter website but I don't really like it because it would mean that I would lose money working with them. Their argument is that it will bring me new customers that I can have at full price later on but I am not really convinced so I have another meeting with this person on Saturday, I will take all the information but I am not sure at all that it will go further.
- I have also been contacted by someone who offered me to help me with social media. I am seeing him tomorrow evening but as for the previous one, I think that advertising companies that contact me probably need me more than I them so I will see what he offers as so far I have not been doing too bad with facebook I might be able to keep doing it by myself.
- We have managed to have almost all our customers this week to write great reviews on our facebook page which is really awesome and I can already see the difference when I publish a new post.
In parallel, I have also done some marketing to get more customers for hypnotherapy because I am running out of money and I won't get my salary before another 10 days Not a firm booking yet but some good prospect that should hopefully end up booking next week.
and to top all that up, I have still my day job to deal with which is taking me about 50 hours a week.
The good news is that I am flying home tomorrow so I will try and not have to travel next week and be more hands on with my business rather than remotely managing it.
That's it for the moment. Thanks for following my adventure!
It has been a busy week with the opening of the salon last Monday. I have been fully focused on marketing this week as I said in my previous update and after a few days I am starting to see some result so it makes me think that I am doing the right thing.
To summarize quicly what I have done this week:
- Development of Facebook audience
- Membership scheme created and testing currently ongoing on both facebook and with "real people" to see what is the response to it
- Flyer created and about to be sent to printer
- Voucher designed as suggested here by @tafy which seems to work very well
- Relashionship building with the shops around mine offering them to send us some of their customers against discounted services for both the customers and the owner of the shop plus displaying some flyers of them.
- I am also in negotiation with a big online discounter website but I don't really like it because it would mean that I would lose money working with them. Their argument is that it will bring me new customers that I can have at full price later on but I am not really convinced so I have another meeting with this person on Saturday, I will take all the information but I am not sure at all that it will go further.
- I have also been contacted by someone who offered me to help me with social media. I am seeing him tomorrow evening but as for the previous one, I think that advertising companies that contact me probably need me more than I them so I will see what he offers as so far I have not been doing too bad with facebook I might be able to keep doing it by myself.
- We have managed to have almost all our customers this week to write great reviews on our facebook page which is really awesome and I can already see the difference when I publish a new post.
In parallel, I have also done some marketing to get more customers for hypnotherapy because I am running out of money and I won't get my salary before another 10 days
Not a firm booking yet but some good prospect that should hopefully end up booking next week.and to top all that up, I have still my day job to deal with which is taking me about 50 hours a week.
The good news is that I am flying home tomorrow so I will try and not have to travel next week and be more hands on with my business rather than remotely managing it.
That's it for the moment.
Thanks for following my adventure!
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Great to follow your progress and see your business grow and go from strength to strength. All the best in the future, with your dedication and drive you will have a great chain of businesses in no time
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zac.gouveia
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Actually at the moment, the marketing is bringing me about 25% of my bookings. This is a big difference from what I was doing before because it used to be about 75% of my bookings by word of mouth [/QUOTE]
This sounds like before 25% of customers were acquired through proper marketing, and that number is still the same?
So maybe you aren't seeing a real return from spending more money/time on marketing.
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This sounds like before 25% of customers were acquired through proper marketing, and that number is still the same?
So maybe you aren't seeing a real return from spending more money/time on marketing.
Sent from my SM-N910W8 using Tapatalk
Social sites allow you to post your link on a social page.So why not use this and just post about you book on thousands of page.If anyone intrested i would love to do marketing for your book .Can work long hour covering most pages.Plan is to practise marketing and after accumulating capital outsource writers and market my own book.(m all ears) open for suggestions on profit sharing etc
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- Thread starter
- #74
What does this have to do with the topic of the thread? Have you ever read it before posting?
yeah right tafy... lol
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- Thread starter
- #78
End of the first month.
Although it has only be three weeks since we opened the salon, I can already see the revenues going up.
The good news is that we have been able to cover the costs from the first month and even make a small benefit so I am quite happy for that.
The bad news (which in itself is not so bad because its ends well) is that I have lost £300 because one of the companies we used to work with to get bookings when we were working as mobile, contacted us saying that we were stealing customers from them and that they had started an investigation on us. This went on for almost the past two weeks and they started saying that we had to pay them all the money we made thanks to them which was about 6 months of revenue. Long story short, we went to see them face to face this morning because they wouldn't answer our calls or emails and tried to show them how stupid their arguments were. Almost two hours later, they recognized that they were wrong but still refused to pay us the last bill they still owed us. It makes me sick to think how far some people would go to make a few quid but well, that's how it is so I better get used to it from the start.
Apart from that, we have launched a new marketing campaign yesterday which already brought us 13 bookings. The calendar is filling up slowly but surely which is nice to see.
On my spare time, I am also trying to improve our website as the online booking feature is not always working as well as it should and is not looking as good as I would like it to but I am getting there slowly.
The very good reviews are coming in on our Facebook page.
On the financial side, each week has been a bit better than the previous one and this is still holiday period so I am quite happy and looking forward to seeing how it is going to be in September.
And for the rest, I am starting to look at what the next step is going to be. I know I am still a long way away to be in a position to do anything but it doesn't do any harm to start looking.
If I can give my opinion to all those who have a business idea but haven't started anything yet, I just want to tell you to jump into the water and try to keep your head out of the water. There are some risks but at this stage, the consequences are not really that bad.
And to finish, I graduated last weekend from my hypnotherapy training which will enable me to take customers paying full price now and get a little bit of extra money.
That's all for the moment. I am looking forward to seeing what this coming month is going to bring us and will report here as usual as soon as something new happens.
Thanks for following me in my ups and downs
Although it has only be three weeks since we opened the salon, I can already see the revenues going up.
The good news is that we have been able to cover the costs from the first month and even make a small benefit so I am quite happy for that.
The bad news (which in itself is not so bad because its ends well) is that I have lost £300 because one of the companies we used to work with to get bookings when we were working as mobile, contacted us saying that we were stealing customers from them and that they had started an investigation on us. This went on for almost the past two weeks and they started saying that we had to pay them all the money we made thanks to them which was about 6 months of revenue. Long story short, we went to see them face to face this morning because they wouldn't answer our calls or emails and tried to show them how stupid their arguments were. Almost two hours later, they recognized that they were wrong but still refused to pay us the last bill they still owed us. It makes me sick to think how far some people would go to make a few quid but well, that's how it is so I better get used to it from the start.
Apart from that, we have launched a new marketing campaign yesterday which already brought us 13 bookings. The calendar is filling up slowly but surely which is nice to see.
On my spare time, I am also trying to improve our website as the online booking feature is not always working as well as it should and is not looking as good as I would like it to but I am getting there slowly.
The very good reviews are coming in on our Facebook page.
On the financial side, each week has been a bit better than the previous one and this is still holiday period so I am quite happy and looking forward to seeing how it is going to be in September.
And for the rest, I am starting to look at what the next step is going to be. I know I am still a long way away to be in a position to do anything but it doesn't do any harm to start looking.
If I can give my opinion to all those who have a business idea but haven't started anything yet, I just want to tell you to jump into the water and try to keep your head out of the water. There are some risks but at this stage, the consequences are not really that bad.
And to finish, I graduated last weekend from my hypnotherapy training which will enable me to take customers paying full price now and get a little bit of extra money.
That's all for the moment. I am looking forward to seeing what this coming month is going to bring us and will report here as usual as soon as something new happens.
Thanks for following me in my ups and downs
Hello,
Thank you for sharing your progress with us, i have been very interested in reading what you wrote. My understanding is that your first idea was to build a webservice to get beauty therapists and potential clients in contact with each other, earning money from leadgen to therapists in the same way as Booking.com or Uber service. Then seeing it wasn t taking off, you changed your mind to growing a beauty therapist business with your wife as the first service producer, hiring others when revenues grow up.
It seems to me you took the good shift in your business model and will probably succeed this way (i consider that selling for 1£ is already a form of success, 4000 even better!).
Your history confirms me in thinking that building a booking.com type of service is quite the same as buying a lottery ticket. Nonetheless it seems that so many start ups entrepreneurs are going this way, at least the one I see around me. There is always the problem of having enough users so that your service becomes interesting to professionals and users will only consider you if you have enough professionals, vicious circle. I think you have to be an extremly good marketer or have some sort of advantage (existing customers, brand, ...) to go on with it. Finding a niche or good idea is probably not enough. On top of that it s close to a "winner takes all" type of game, there are often no more than one or two big companies who capture the entire market revenue.
But there are so many other opportunities if you just perform a little bit better than your direct competitors at marketing some product or service without the need to be the next facebook, and building on an existing market is probably the best option.
I would be interested in you telling more about your marketing strategy and tactics, interesting books or posts you read, ...
I would also be interested in you talking about what hypnotherapy brought to you on a personal level, not just as a service. You mentionned public speaking anxiety, this is a big obstacle to success. Having been a sales for 8 years with a shy personnality, i know how frightning it can be just to pick up the phone.
By the way, im also french, ca fait plaisir de retrouver des compatriotes sur ce forum que je viens de rejoindre
bonne chance et A bientôt.
Thank you for sharing your progress with us, i have been very interested in reading what you wrote. My understanding is that your first idea was to build a webservice to get beauty therapists and potential clients in contact with each other, earning money from leadgen to therapists in the same way as Booking.com or Uber service. Then seeing it wasn t taking off, you changed your mind to growing a beauty therapist business with your wife as the first service producer, hiring others when revenues grow up.
It seems to me you took the good shift in your business model and will probably succeed this way (i consider that selling for 1£ is already a form of success, 4000 even better!).
Your history confirms me in thinking that building a booking.com type of service is quite the same as buying a lottery ticket. Nonetheless it seems that so many start ups entrepreneurs are going this way, at least the one I see around me. There is always the problem of having enough users so that your service becomes interesting to professionals and users will only consider you if you have enough professionals, vicious circle. I think you have to be an extremly good marketer or have some sort of advantage (existing customers, brand, ...) to go on with it. Finding a niche or good idea is probably not enough. On top of that it s close to a "winner takes all" type of game, there are often no more than one or two big companies who capture the entire market revenue.
But there are so many other opportunities if you just perform a little bit better than your direct competitors at marketing some product or service without the need to be the next facebook, and building on an existing market is probably the best option.
I would be interested in you telling more about your marketing strategy and tactics, interesting books or posts you read, ...
I would also be interested in you talking about what hypnotherapy brought to you on a personal level, not just as a service. You mentionned public speaking anxiety, this is a big obstacle to success. Having been a sales for 8 years with a shy personnality, i know how frightning it can be just to pick up the phone.
By the way, im also french, ca fait plaisir de retrouver des compatriotes sur ce forum que je viens de rejoindre
bonne chance et A bientôt.
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- #80
Interesting books I have read, there has been one which really helped me understanding how this works: Cashvertising. For someone like me who didn't have any background in sales or marketing I think that it was a very good way to learn the very basics of the game. But I don't really like to recommend books too much because people very quickly get trapped into "one more and I'll be ready to start". My view is that you just have to learn a few things and then practise, practise, practise. The first piece of copy I wrote was crap, now I wouldn't say that I am very good at it but I know a few tricks and I have written hundreds of them and can start to see what clicks with my customers.
Another thing I try to apply is to do something the other don't. For example, last Friday, I was flying back home from a business trip abroad and during the take off of one of my connexions, I saw in a wheat field, a company had ploughed the url of their website. Being one of the biggest airport in Europe can you imagine how many people are seeing that every day? And it is people who have time to wonder: what it is and go check it. I thought that was a great idea.
I came to hypnotherapy almost by mistake when I was looking for a way to fix my fear of flying. I am flying very frequently and everything I had tried hadn't worked. It worked very well for me even today several years down the line. Then when I decided to launch this business, as there is a lot of competition out there, I wanted to do something different with the beauty treatments we are delivering. So what I came to think was: could I learn the hypnosis techniques indians used to use to perform surgical operations before chemical anaesthetics were discovered and apply them to the painful beauty treatments (hair removal mainly). And that's what I did, I started training as a clinical hypnotherapist thinking that even if I cannot apply it to my beauty business, it is still one skill more I would be able to sell for £70 an hour. Very quickly I started to talk about my project to a lot of people and some of them agreed to help me by teaching me these techniques and helping me to adapt them to my needs.
This took almost four months then we started testing it on some of our customers (very easy). You were asking about marketing, this is how we did it: wait for someone who come to have a wax for the first time, very nervous about it and just tell them: "if you want, we have developed our own technique to reduce the pain felt during this sort of treatment, would you like to try it?" What do you think their answer was?
It worked very well and now this is more than 50% of our turn over. I am now in the process of protecting this technique as part of our trademark.
On a personnal level, hypnosis helps me to deal with the problem, to keep my reasonning clear under pressure and to manage my energy when I can't sleep enough. Basically hypnotherapy is a very powerful tool to help you find the resources you need and the solutions you have to implement to achieve your goals.
I am French but have not been there for quite a long time actually. I speak Spanish at home, English the rest of the time and French maybe once a month when I call home or when I have French customersBy the way, im also french, ca fait plaisir de retrouver des compatriotes sur ce forum que je viens de rejoindre
bonne chance et A bientôt.
Thanks for the good wishes.- Thread starter
- #81
A new month starts and with it the balance of the previous one.
I am quite happy with the direction things are taking at the moment. Money wise, we almost doubled the income this month compared to last month. Bookings kept coming in to the point that we have been refusing people over the past two weeks. So I have now hired a new therapist and launched new marketing campaigns that are starting to bring us more customers.
These are the positive points. On the less positive side, with a new employee arrived the first customer complain. It was quickly handled and sorted so no major impact to fear but still quite annoying to see that when it is not your own project the motivation is lower. On my side, I have a part of responsibility as well because it was my choice to hire someone with little experience. My view was to find someone with the right mindset and pay less attention to the experience. I can sound weird but actually I prefer to have inexperienced people for two reasons: the first one is that they are easily trainable and this interests me because we are not working by the books but by what makes our customers feel good and happy. As the new employee said, your technique is quite different from what I was taught at school... Well fair enough but as I told her, what you were told at school got us a complain from your first day whereas what we are doing got us only 5 stars spotless reviews. So I programmed a heavy training week for her and now we are back on track. The second reason why I prefer to work with less experience people is that when people start having a few years of experience, they have already found their ways of working and I want this company to be working by our ways and techniques and not by what might be OK for other people.
And last point about where I am at the moment, I am a bit lost as to what should be the next step. I am hesitating between starting to work on the trademark, saving for opening a second salon. Trying to find out as well when will be the good time to quit my job because this one is sucking a lot of my energy but at the moment I can't fully live without it. I probably need to step back a bit and look at the bigger picture. So for this month I will carry on like that, see what the revenues are with the new employee at the end of the month and carry on tackling the blockers one at a time, it has worked quite well so far.
I am quite happy with the direction things are taking at the moment. Money wise, we almost doubled the income this month compared to last month. Bookings kept coming in to the point that we have been refusing people over the past two weeks. So I have now hired a new therapist and launched new marketing campaigns that are starting to bring us more customers.
These are the positive points. On the less positive side, with a new employee arrived the first customer complain. It was quickly handled and sorted so no major impact to fear but still quite annoying to see that when it is not your own project the motivation is lower. On my side, I have a part of responsibility as well because it was my choice to hire someone with little experience. My view was to find someone with the right mindset and pay less attention to the experience. I can sound weird but actually I prefer to have inexperienced people for two reasons: the first one is that they are easily trainable and this interests me because we are not working by the books but by what makes our customers feel good and happy. As the new employee said, your technique is quite different from what I was taught at school... Well fair enough but as I told her, what you were told at school got us a complain from your first day whereas what we are doing got us only 5 stars spotless reviews. So I programmed a heavy training week for her and now we are back on track. The second reason why I prefer to work with less experience people is that when people start having a few years of experience, they have already found their ways of working and I want this company to be working by our ways and techniques and not by what might be OK for other people.
And last point about where I am at the moment, I am a bit lost as to what should be the next step. I am hesitating between starting to work on the trademark, saving for opening a second salon. Trying to find out as well when will be the good time to quit my job because this one is sucking a lot of my energy but at the moment I can't fully live without it. I probably need to step back a bit and look at the bigger picture. So for this month I will carry on like that, see what the revenues are with the new employee at the end of the month and carry on tackling the blockers one at a time, it has worked quite well so far.
- Thread starter
- #82
And something more I forgot to mention, I would like to start extend my network to people placed higher in the food chain in my industry or in complementary industries. So I am now looking at exhibitions and conferences where I could meet this kind of people and start increasing the value of my network. I'll let you know how I go with that.
Any advice or experience feedback on that is welcome.
Any advice or experience feedback on that is welcome.
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Fantastic work Roland! Thanks for sharing it is very insightful.
In regards to the complaint I think you handled it very well - but I would also use it as a lesson to remember when you are training/hiring further employees to ensure that you maintain a spotless reputation.
Agree with Tafy in regards to ensuring the best possible customer experience - there are many industries where original ideas haven't been able to get a trademark/patent however still remain on top because they offer the customer the perfect experience.
Not sure about the exhibitions and conferences, however do you sell any physical products in the salon? You could look into buying quantities of beauty products at wholesale and display them, then potentially create your own in the future?
Just a few thoughts..
You've come a long way in the past year of this thread, looking forward to seeing what another year will do!
In regards to the complaint I think you handled it very well - but I would also use it as a lesson to remember when you are training/hiring further employees to ensure that you maintain a spotless reputation.
Agree with Tafy in regards to ensuring the best possible customer experience - there are many industries where original ideas haven't been able to get a trademark/patent however still remain on top because they offer the customer the perfect experience.
Not sure about the exhibitions and conferences, however do you sell any physical products in the salon? You could look into buying quantities of beauty products at wholesale and display them, then potentially create your own in the future?
Just a few thoughts..
You've come a long way in the past year of this thread, looking forward to seeing what another year will do!
- Thread starter
- #84
Thanks for this message Harry. It is nice to see that people appreciate what I am doing.
In our case customer experience is everything. That's what took us from 0 to where we are today.
With regards to the physical products, it is part of the plan and I already have the figures ready but it is something I cannot afford just yet. Maybe next month or the month after but it is definitely planned.
The past year has been the most demanding in my life so far. I am enjoying it very much because watching something you created grow is very rewarding but I can also see that I am now starting to struggle to maintain the same rhythm, the lack of sleep is hard to manage sometimes. But on the other hand, it is as well a good thing because it forces me to think about how to remove my time from the equation. It is still work in progress but this project might take a big turn in a few months... Stay tunned
I just read through your progress thread.. Nice to see your business growing.
Wat came to my mind while reading through it is, did you think about starting to offer your "old" mobile service again, besides your salon? So you got the salon AND the mobile service?
Wat came to my mind while reading through it is, did you think about starting to offer your "old" mobile service again, besides your salon? So you got the salon AND the mobile service?
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- #86
Yes I did think about it but at the moment it is not something I want to go for because it would mean start growing a second "leg" to my business which would require a lot of effort. Effort that I prefer to focus on growing the current leg. At the moment the main struggle I have is that a big part of my customer base is sent to me by third party website who take a huge commission (up to 65%) so although I have a lot of customers through my door, it doesn't pay as much as it could do. So I need to work on that first.
User Power
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- Jan 14, 2015
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Hi Roland, interesting read.
Are this third party company literally doing your first idea then? Lead generation for that industry. Looks like they're almost able to choose how much they charge in commission. Is there that much of a lack of leads out there? Or do they just dominate the market to an extent?
I was just thinking about the TIME element of the business and then you mentioned it. As the hypnotherapy seems to be a quite important part of your business, would that then mean teaching all staff the techniques involved? Would they need to be qualified to do that or would you be allowed to just teach them basic techniques?
Apologies for the 99 questions, just thinking out loud, good luck for the future man!
Roland is relying on external deals sites, which is crazy expensive cac.
Better he comes up with some systems for aggressive referral programs and marketing campaigns.
Better he comes up with some systems for aggressive referral programs and marketing campaigns.
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- #89
The third party company sells deals as Tafy said. This is very good to get people through your door but it has also some downsides which make that this solution is not sustainable in the long run.
My buddy has an auto mobile related service and he uses something similar. They make him give a coupon(really good deal) + their take is half of the coupon price...so what he figured out is he offers this cheap deal lets say for one stone chip and he knows there will be more than one...so when the custumer makes one purchase through the site and then gets to the shop he will throw a very good sales pitch selling more services to the customer...and thats where he makes the big profit using that kind of advertising site.
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