Articles – Page 4 – ESP Online

Re-Investing in your business

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

What do you do with your hard earned money? Do you invest it in the stock market, buy property, spend it on renovating your house, a new car, going overseas or do you just keep it under your mattress for a rainy day?

In last month’s article I wrote about motivating business owners to grow their businesses and setting achievable and measurable goals in order to do this.

This month I would like to talk about re-investing in your business in order to supplement the process of growing it that I spoke about last month.

Motivating Salon Owners

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

When it comes to motivation in the salon it is generally the owner who is trying to motivation their staff. This will come in the form of motivating them to sell more retail, upsell on services, sell more of a particular type of service or retail, rebook their clients next appointment, follow up with clients and everything in between.

A lot of time and effort will go into monitoring staff performance, from using daily tracking sheets to more sophisticated business intelligence processes in order that staff appraisals can be done. Salon owners mentor hair stylists by setting targets for them, monitoring key performance indicators, sending them on training and if necessary reprimanding them so that the staff member can perform well.

The question that I’m asking, however, is are you motivated as a salon owner? What are the key performance indicators that an owner can be measured by? Who mentors the salon owner?

The X-factor

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the owner is physically present? I mean the kind where the owner walks around from table to table stopping to greet you and make sure that you are enjoying your meal. In all likelihood they will be a great character, full of charm and wit. They will get to know you and you will get to know them and your experience of their restaurant will be very much tied up with their prescence.

As a patron of their restaurant you will get to experience the essence of their vision. You will get to taste (excuse the pun) just what it is that sets them apart from the rest. You will get to experience their X-Factor. The more colourful they are the more “X” you will experience.

Happy New Year

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

Happy New Year! No, I am not a little slow … I’m talking about the new financial year, which started (for most) on the 1^st of March. The date today is the 3^rd of March. Last week the budget speech was delivered by finance minister Pravin Gordhan and the 1^st of March marked the first day of the new financial year.

The 1^st of March is similar to the 1^st of January in that on both days you may have woken up feeling a little worse for wear. However, the 1^st of March will most likely have been due to the pressure of getting all your financial information together for your accountant in order that they can submit your relevant returns on time causing you to wake up the next morning suffering from symptoms like headaches, disorientation and even nausea when you realized how much tax money you had to hand over.

Strategic Planning

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

The following dialogue is taken from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland between Alice and the Chesire Cat when Alice asks the cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

To some all of this up: “If you don’t know where you are going it doesn’t matter how you get there”.

Tax annualisation

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

Hopefully you are reading this article before 28 February 2013. If not then at least you will be prepared for 2014, because I wanted to discuss a few points regarding tax that may be applicable to you and your staff members.

11 tips for salon computerisation

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

Buy your software. If you somehow obtain free software it does not have value to you and there is no pressure to ensure that you get return on your investment as you have invested nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Software implementation is a journey its not a single event in time. Have clear objectives of what you would like to achieve through your salon software and set timeframes to implement these. Start with very basic goals, like balancing your cash up. Then move on to stock control, wages, SMS etc. Read more

Best Salon Practises

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

As we approach the end of the year I thought I would reflect on some business processes and practices that I often encounter when dealing with salons.

Over the years at ESP we have seen (and still see) many situations where salon owners are not managing their business processes in their best interests (according to best practices). As a result ESP actually trademarked the term BSP (Best Salon Practices) as we see this as the entire foundation for the use of our software in the salon industry.

Best Salon Practices is the application of the generic term Best Business Practices (BSP tm) into the salon environment based on common salon business processes.

At certain points in the future we will visit more Best Salon Practices (BSP tm) in the form of articles as these are numerous and evolving.

Seal the deal!

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

Sports metaphor … it’s Monday, the 1st of October 2012 and the Sprinboks have just beaten Australia for the first time in about 6 matches and for the first time in the new format of the Tri Nations (the Castle Rugby Series).

Heyneke Meyer (Springbok coach) has managed to redeem himself and avoid being lynched by the South African rugby fans, for the next week at least. It’s so funny how quickly we change our minds as only a few days ago most were calling for his head as coach of the Springboks. Let’s see what happens next week …?

For those of you who are rugby Houdini’s and have managed to escape all news about the current state of South African rugby the new coach has received severe criticism for persisting with his game plan of kicking rugby as well as using players who fans think should not be in the team.

Integration and Partnership

24 February 2014/in Articles, Hairdressers Journal /by Karl Markwald

While he was still alive Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) were asked in a joint interview what character traits they admired most about each other. Steve Job’s answer was that he admired Bill Gate’s ability to partner with other companies.

The reason he said this was because his vision for Apple had always been to control as much of the end user’s experience as possible. However, he learned that you cannot do absolutely everything and that certain partnerships were necessary and would result in a better product and also a better experience for their users.

Bill Gates, from early on in his Microsoft career, had employed a much more open policy allowing Microsoft products to run on other companies hardware and as a result led to distribution of Microsoft products through many more channels with other 3^rd party development companies being able to develop their own products to run on Microsoft Windows, which further strengthened Microsoft’s position in the market place.