Nail Business - Clients and the Salon

| July 19, 2010 |

Now if you are on the other side of the coin, a salon owner, you need to be prepared as well. Unfortunately technicians can be very sneaky when looking for a new salon and will try everything, including badmouthing your salon, to get their clients to leave with them. As a salon owner you need to be proactive and make all the clients that walk through your doors salon clients, not technician clients. What I mean by this is that you need to make the client feel so comfortable in your salon that they feel they belong with the salon and not their particular technician.

As an employee I would hate it if I couldn’t fit a client into my schedule and another tech had to service them. But as a salon owner my favorite thing to see is a client who will use whoever is available. You should always have a great receptionist, it’s one of the the keys to a great salon. When a client checks in your receptionist should create a file on them for the salon. Your technicians will have files on their clients but the salon needs their own files as well.

Whenever possible you should network with other salon owners. One time I made the mistake of hiring a good friend of one of my technicians, even thought I had been warned she was a troublemaker. To make a long story short she went to other salons for a job and was saying a lot of bad things about my salon. One of the people she was trying to badmouth us to was an old boss that I had stayed on good terms with who gave me the heads up (and refused to hire the troublemaker as well). The point is that, like it or not, this industry is filled with gossip. The more people you know, and who know that you are a nice person, the better. Plus the nail technician you meet today might be your next employee.