What is benchmarking?

Why it matters and how your salon compares.

A benchmark is simply a reliable point of comparison. That's it. Not a target pulled out of thin air, not a gut feeling, but a number that tells you what “good” looks like.

And that's why it matters so much. A number on its own is nothing more than a fact.

A profit margin of 10%. A utilisation rate of 58%. An average bill of $110. None of those numbers mean anything until you put them next to something else: last month, last year, your own goal, or what the best salons are achieving. Once you do that, the fact turns into information you can use.

I say this to every salon owner I coach: the numbers are facts, not feelings. We feel busy. We feel like our prices are about right. We feel like the team is being productive. But feelings aren't decisions. 

Benchmarks are what turn a feeling into a fact, and a fact into a decision.

Why salons have struggled with this

Our industry has had one problem for years. Reliable benchmarking data has been hard to come by. We've picked up bits and pieces along the way, a statistic from a coaching group, a stat from a product brand, something a software company mentioned in a webinar, a number someone quoted you at the bar at a conference. Interesting, sometimes. Reliable, occasionally. But comprehensive, almost never.

That's why I was genuinely interested when Zenoti, the salon and spa software company that works with thousands of salon and spa companies across the world, put together their 2026 Beauty and Wellness Benchmark Report and asked me to take a look. Whether you use their software or not isn't really the point.

It's the scale of the data. Thousands of salons and spas, which means patterns no single owner could ever see from inside their own four walls.

It's worth paying attention to because it changes the question you're able to ask. 

Instead of “is that good?”, you can finally ask “how does that compare?”, a question with an answer.

Where the real value is

The real value in benchmarking is not just in the numbers themselves. It's in the story behind them, and what that story tells you to do next.

Say your utilisation is sitting at 58%, and you find out the best salons in your market are running closer to 85%. That gap is an indicator of an opportunity to improve. It tells you exactly where to focus your attention.

That's the shift benchmarking creates. You stop hoping you're doing okay, and you start knowing where you stand, and more importantly, where the biggest opportunity in your business is sitting.

If you would like to find out more, I broke it down on episode 360 of the podcast, The Numbers Don't Lie. So head there if you want the full picture, including a couple of numbers that genuinely surprised me. Listen to episode 360 here

You can Download the full Zenoti Benchmark Report here

Or if you'd rather see your own numbers straight away, head to the Zenoti Benchmark Scorecard and put yours in. 

Either way, stop guessing. Go find out what good actually looks like, and where you stand against it.