What if your salon generated $1.4 million every single year? How would that make you feel? Probably really excited!
But what if at the end of the year you discovered that even though you made $1.4 million you were left with $0?
So much time and energy are put into your business. As a business owner, you put your whole heart and soul into your business. As a tech founder here at SalonScale, I do the same thing. My previous life as a Salon Owner the things that kept me up at night were money, cash flow, how I was going to be profitable. The issue then and the thing that led me to create SalonScale is where is my money going? My issue was never making money, stylists are top revenue generators. My issue was keeping money.
THE BEGINNING
When I first became a stylist I was very motivated to become the best. I saw the top salon owner in my city and thought to myself I want to be that and more. So, I worked and worked my way up to the senior stylist position and found myself feeling the way that many senior stylists feel. I felt like my salon owner was taking money away from me. So I left, went independent and faced an issue again, cash. I was making all this money but I didn’t have anything to control where all my money was going and my expenses were taking up all my money.THE PROBLEM
As a salon owner I faced the same problem. Except for this time I was bringing in $1.4 million of revenue into the salo. I knew I needed more, so I decided to renovate the Salon and bring in more chairs. Even after growing my salon and seeing more money coming in I was still left with no cash flow. One day after work, I was at Menchies getting frozen yogurt and was inspired. I paid for exactly how much was in the bowl. No more, no less. If frozen yogurt can be charged by the gram, why not hair color? A few days later I had a client in my chair that I was telling about my frozen yogurt inspired hair color charging method and the client said “what are you going to do about it?” And at that moment I had an epiphany, it was going to be a scale with an app that tracks the hair color used. I dropped everything I was doing and got my assistant to finish the client’s blow-dry. Then went to the back and drew up the first version of SalonScale. I started by testing it in my own salon and what I realized was that in order for us to be profitable the perfect formula to do that is to separate parts and labor in your salon. There are so many other industries that use that method of pricing, why weren’t we?
