With Keri Davis-Duffy
Co-Founder Beauty Backbone / Co-Owner of Gila Rut Salon
Whether you are looking for something to revitalize your salon, take it to the next level, or are at the juncture where major changes need to be made, it can be hard to know the right path and even harder to stay focused on the tasks to get you there.
As a salon owner, there is always something pulling your attention away, distracting you from your business goals. Many salons resort to raising prices in order to improve growth. However, a price increase is only one piece to the complex puzzle of salon ownership and it doesn’t address internal issues that are preventing the business’s true potential. Bottom line, increasing service prices may give you a small bump in profits, but it does not result in continual growth. This is where Keri Davis, President, and Co-owner of Beauty Backbone comes in to lend a knowledgeable hand.
Keri’s list of achievements in the industry is lengthy. From Aveda Business College professor to co-owner of the award-winning Gila Rut salons, her three decades of experience have taught her that mastering the balance of business and creativity is pivotal to salon business success. She has also seen firsthand that while salon business classes are helpful, they weren’t always enough for the owners.
“I speak at these classes….and the same people would come back again. Even more, people would reach out after and want me to send more material on what I was doing as a salon owner. So while the classes were helpful and inspiring at the moment, they lacked the accountability and follow-up afterwards. Salon owners were still struggling,” Keri recalls.
That is when she and Gila Rut co-owner, Karla Lopez-Martinez, decided to create Beauty Backbone. Beauty Backbone provides a platform for learning and a community of salon owners (Keri included) to help fellow owners reach their true business potential, recognizing and overcoming roadblocks. The 7 Steps to Salon Profit is one of their most popular virtual courses, taking owners through seven modules with the ultimate goal of empowering the salon owner to feel confident in making strategic decisions that positively impact the bottom line, staff morale, and ultimately team retention. Keri also tells us there is an active Facebook group for those in the program and they all provide support and guidance to each other.
Identify Your Benchmarks
If you don’t know where your expenses live, you’ll never be able to carve a profit.
Learning how to recognize where you are spending money and reading a Profit and Loss Statement is the focus of the first module (assignment!) in the 7 Steps Program. Once established, you can begin to understand which behaviors affected your current state (both the good and bad) and understand how to drive sales. This knowledge sets the stage to identify the necessary changes and establish benchmarks to monitor progress along the way.
As a result, you are empowered to identify areas of opportunity. Next, you are encouraged to pinpoint a singular area of opportunity to begin – the one that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. The program then helps you to implement new behaviors to drive growth in the identified area. Through the modules, you learn how to create and implement the behaviors to promote change and growth.
Finding Continued Success in Salon Ownership
After the benchmark has been identified, you can start learning and making changes. The rest of the program takes the chosen benchmark and guides you through the rest of the modules:
- Identifying the behaviors that led to their current state
- Step by step guide on how to change individual and team behaviors to align with your growth goal
- Create a launch plan
- Benchmark tracking and a community of fellow salon owners to give feedback
- 20-minute virtual training in each module by Keri
- Celebrating the success of change and completion of the module
Keri explains this “hand-holding” approach is excellent in making and keeping up with change. After the seventh module is complete, the change is celebrated and then the work begins again- salon owners picking their next benchmark and repeating the program. Homework is assigned each time an owner goes through the 7 steps and they upload it to the Facebook community where Keri and fellow salon owners provide helpful feedback. This type of virtual environment allows owners to work at their own pace, but still be held accountable.
“The 7 Steps Program is a lifeline for real world salon success”- Ginger Boyle, Owner and Master Stylist at Planet Salon.
Each time an owner completes the 7 steps they walk away with more confidence to make the strategic decisions that truly impact the salon’s bottom line and how to launch it to their team with full engagement to move the financial needle in the right direction.
If you would like information and to sign up for the 7 Steps to Salon Profit program, visit Beauty Backbone to learn more.
