David Miller
“With the Super Stylist course I can clearly show you on a graph that our stylists who have done the Superstylist course are way ahead of our stylists that have not done the Super stylist course insofar as utilisation, the growth of their column, average ticket, achieving their daily and their weekly targets, and how they’ve become successful quickly. The ones who haven't done the Super Stylist course are stuck in the past and they just don't understand the system.
Which is why we've put a system and a very clear structure in place that starts with the apprentice and then to graduate stylist, to stylist, to senior stylist, to style director.
So now we don't go out looking for stylists anymore. We employ apprentices, and we grow our own people, and when they progress to a particular point, I introduce the Super Stylist course because that's the point at which they start to move from being only a creative who's interested in hairdressing to becoming someone within our business that can grow a column and give the business a return on the investment that we put into their education.
Each of our salons has a bunch of wow factors that our teams must put in place. But all of those things work hand in hand with the Super Stylist course, which they all have to do.
I don’t come from a hairdressing background, but I regularly catch up with each stylist ‘one on one’ and very quickly we look at their targets and look at their results. And I ask; “How are we doing? Are we there? Are we not there? How can I help you? What can we do?”
I was able to say to each of the people who haven't done the Super Stylist course; “Here's a graph, I'm not going to put a name beside it, but it’s someone you work with, and this stylist started the Super Stylist course at this point and as you can see the line goes up. Whereas, your graph is either stagnant or going down.”
Everybody should do the Super Stylist course as part of their induction into our business and then redo it, and then redo it. I think it's something that everybody will always go back to and look at particular modules. Or I could pick up a particular module and say, listen, guys, you know our rebookings are low this month and we need to pick out the piece in the course where you go through the purpose and point of rebooking and how to do it and, and just send that out to them and say, do module three, lesson two, and it'll give us a refresh!
Having the course online is an advantage for those who are dyslexic. It also allows them to go through the course on their travel in and out of work, or if there's any white space in their column, they can immediately access it on their phone.
If I had to narrow the benefits of the Super Stylist course down to just one thing it would be getting the team to understand the importance of making more out of a single visit. So transforming a €38 euro, 30 minute blow dry, into a €3,500 a year client.
As a salon owner, who is a non-hairdresser, the Super Stylist course helped me to set targets for my team and to understand what realistic targets were.
As the salon owner the course has given me the KPIs that I need to be looking at and helped me to put the KPIs in place. So, for example; retail to service, what that percentage should be? How to work out a formula for what an individual target should be based on how much it’s costing the business.
For us, the most important KPIs are utilisation and average spend per visit. It's all about getting that average spend and utilisation as high as they can possibly be.
From a financial perspective the return on the investment for the Super Stylist course is phenomenal!“
