Keeping beauty salon clients happy — 6 ways to make every customer a repeat customer

Keeping Beauty Salon Clients Happy — 6 Ways to Make Every Customer a Repeat Customer

Even during recessionary times, attention to personal appearance is one of the last luxuries to get cut from the budget. The following 6 suggestions can help you avoid being cut from clients’ budgets long after other things have gotten the axe.

Fabulous Stylists — Talented beauticians are one of the first things that keep clients returning. Not only should they be able to manage the technical aspects of styling, but they should have good people skills as well. They must be able to listen to the client while still using their professional judgment to keep clients from making a decision that will ultimately cause them to be unhappy or damage their hair.

Polished Interior — An attractive shop makes a great first impression and is often what brings clients through the door the very first time. Keep your shop clean, painted, well lit, and the furniture in good repair. Make sure styling chairs are comfortable for people of all shapes, and select a color that really adds to your décor. Make sure each customer comes to a clean station by keeping tops of stations well organized and clutter free, keeping floors and chairs clean, and by emptying trash cans often. Choose the color scheme of your salon carefully as it is one of the first things your customers are likely to notice when then open the door.

Be Punctual — Everyone is busy these days, so managing time well is a must. Being able to take clients when they are scheduled is a big plus for the stay at home mom who has to meet the bus or pick up a child from soccer practice. Customers can overlook many things except habitual tardiness. Over estimate the time it will take to finish a customer so that you always appear relaxed and are able to take your next appointment on time. The word will spread that you can do this reliably, and your shop will prosper.

Get Wired for Wi-Fi — Many newer spaces are already wired with this technology. And if they are not, adding this feature can usually be made pretty easily. For clients who rely on their hand held computers, laptops and mobile devices to keep them connected, this is a huge convenience. Even though your shop should invite relaxation, it relieves anxiety for clients to know that they can still receive an urgent email or process an order if the need arises.

Offer a Variety of Services — Offering manicures, pedicures, and massages can be a huge draw to your shop. Once you have clients who have enjoyed getting their hair done, it’s a very natural progression to take advantage of the offerings your shop has. Start slowly by offering these additional services by appointment or on certain days. Offer specials that allow customers to pay for one service and get another free. Try different combinations to see which one works best-hair and nails, or nail and pedicure, or massage and nails. Have fun with it.

Keep the Air Clean — Many products contain volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) that evaporate easily into the air. These are the odor culprits that most often make your salon smell bad. A salon that smells bad makes it hard to attract good people to work there and hard to attract and keep clients as well. One of the best things you can do for your business is to invest in an air purifier that can run 24 hours a day to keep the airborne chemicals out of your shop and your lungs.

How to pick a lock

How to Pick a Lock

When you don’t have the right key, lock picking is a great way to open just about any lock out there. Normally, picking locks is something we associate with crime and illegal activities, although crime isn’t always the case. There are a lot of instances where locking picking skills can come in real handy. Take for instance a lost house key or locking your car keys inside your car. Even though you could always break a window, calling a professional locksmith is the best to go — it can save you a lot of money in repairs, and get the lock open fast.

To properly pick a lock, you’ll need the right tool kit. Even the most basic lock picking kit will contain a lock pin and a tension wrench. If you have an emergency, you can normally replace the lock pin with a hair pin. Professional locking picking kits on the other hand will normally include a variety of tension wrenches in several different shapes and sizes, covering several different styles of lock pins. Some include a locking picking gun, which uses vibration to push all the lock pins up at the same time.

When picking a lock is necessary, the first thing to do is to insert the tension wrench into the keyhole and attempt to turn the cylinder. Next, you can use the lock pin and gently pry up on the pins. Once the pins reach the normal opening position, you’ll hear a clicking noise, letting you know that the pins are in the right place — and the lock is open.

There is also another technique to lock picking, which is known as racking. Racking uses a lower precision level, and uses a special pick known as a rake. To use the rake, simply insert it into the keyhole until it reaches the back of the cylinder, then quickly pull it out so that it hits all of the pins when it comes out. A tension wrench is also used as well, to turn the cylinder.

The hardest lock out there to pick are master locks. They offer an excellent protection system, and aren’t as susceptible to picking as other types of locks. Master locks were invented by Henry Soref in 1921, introducing the first lock to use laminated layers of solid steel. Although master locks use the same picking system as other types of locks, those that are in combined format will require a locksmith with a lot of patience — and skill.

To learn more about lock picking, there are several books and illustrations that you can buy, which will show you the techniques step by step. Often times, a video or Cd is included that will show you the techniques in action. Several books and videos were made by true locksmiths, although others are more directed for people who just want to learn a bit more on the subject. If you want to become a locksmith or a professional at lock picking, you can also find books and videos out there that will help you become proficient at picking locks.

Anytime you buy a lock, you should always keep in mind that just about any lock can be picked. Although most locks can be picked, there are some that take a bit more time and patience than others. When you buy a lock, you should always think in terms of safety and select one that you know it isn’t to penetrate. This way, you can have a sense of security in your lock — and know that you are safe and protected.

Keeping your project on schedule

Keeping Your Project on Schedule

As both an active project manager and a project management trainer, people often ask me what are the fundamental aspects to successful project management. Whilst there have been many great books written on the subject, I always summarise what I believe to be the best practices at the heart of good project management.

Define the scope and objectives

For any project to be successful you need to understand what the project is supposed to achieve. Suppose your boss asks you to organise a campaign to get the employees to donate blood. Is the aim of this to get as much blood donated to the local blood bank? Or, is it to raise the profile of the company in the local community? Deciding what the real objective is will help you to determine how you go about planning and managing the project.

The project manager also needs to define the scope of the project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the blood bank within the scope of the project? Or, should staff make their own way there? Deciding which activities are within the scope or out of scope of the project has a big impact on the amount of work which needs to be performed during the project.

An understanding of who are the stakeholders is also crucial if you are going to enlist their support and understand what each person expects to be delivered from the project. Once you’ve defined the scope and objectives, you will need to get the stakeholders to review them and agree to them as well as agreeing who should be on the list of stakeholders.

Define the deliverables

To achieve the desired outcome from the project, you must define what things (or products) are to be delivered by the end of the project. If your project is an advertising
campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one of the deliverables might be the artwork for a newspaper advert. So, you need to decide what tangible things are to be delivered and document in enough detail what these things are. At the end of the day, someone will end up doing the work to produce the deliverable, so it needs to be clearly and unambiguously described.

Once you have defined the deliverables, you will need to have the key stakeholders review the work and get them to agree that this accurately and unambiguously reflects what they expect to be delivered from the project. Once they have agreed, you can begin to plan the project. Not defining the deliverables in enough detail or clarity is often a reason why projects go wrong.

Project planning

This is the time when you define how you will achieve the desired outcome of the project embodied within the objectives and definition of deliverables. Planning requires that the project manager decides which people, resources and budget are required to complete the project. You will need to decide if you will break up your project into manageable phases, decide which products will be delivered in each phase, and decide the composition of your project team. Since you have already defined the deliverables, you must decide what activities are required to produce each deliverable.

You can use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to help you to achieve this. You will need to estimate the time and effort required to complete each activity, dependencies between related activities and decide on a realistic schedule to complete the activities. It’s always a good idea to involve the project team in estimating how long the activities will take since they will be the ones actually doing the work. Capture all of this into the project plan document. You also need to get the key stakeholders to review and agree to this plan.

When developing the project plan, a project manager is often under pressure to produce a plan which meets the (unrealistic) expectations of some of the stakeholders. It is important here that the project manager comes up with a realistic schedule — one which he/she thinks is realistic to achieve. You will be doing nobody a favour if you succumb to pressure and agree to deliver the project in a totally unrealistic schedule.

Communication

Even the best made project plans are useless unless they have been communicated effectively to the project team. Everyone on the team needs to know exactly what is expected of them, what their responsibilities are, and what they are accountable for. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by big colour print outs of his latest plans. The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he hadn’t shared the plan with them. Needless to say the project hit all kinds of problems with people going off and doing the activities which they deemed important rather than doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway and you have an agreed plan, you will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of the project against the planned progress. To do this, you will need to get reports of progress from the project team members who are actually doing the work. You will need to record any variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You will need to report any variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if the variations get too large.

There are lots of ways in which you can adjust the plan in order to get the project back on track (rearrange the order of tasks, assign tasks in parallel if the variation is small, or add more staff to the project or reduce the scope if the variation is very large).

All projects require the project manager to constantly juggle three things: cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager increases one of these, then one of the other elements will inevitably need to be changed as well. So, for a project which is running behind schedule to recover so it can be delivered to it’s original planned schedule, the budget might be increased by employing more staff (although this invariably never achieves the desired result of reducing the time left to complete the project), or the scope will need to be reduced. It is the juggling of these three elements — known as the project triangle — that typically causes a project manager to tear their hair out in frustration!

Change management

All projects change in some way. Often, a key stakeholder in the middle of a project will change their mind about what the project needs to deliver. On projects of longer duration, the business environment has often changed since the start of the project, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often results in the scope or deliverables of the project needing to be changed. If a project manager simply accepted all of these changes into the project, the project would inevitably be delivered late (and perhaps would never ever be completed) and would inevitably go over budget.

By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of project success because the project manager controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes effectively is often cited as a major reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are any events which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. I’ve worked on projects where some of the risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work properly, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room being at risk of flooding in a major thunderstorm and many others. Risks will vary from project to project but it is important to identify the main risks to a project as soon as possible and to plan the actions necessary to
avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to at least mitigate the risk in order to lessen its impact if it does occur. This is what is known as risk management.

Do you manage all risks? No, because there could be too many to manage, and not all risks have the same impact. So a simple way is to identify as many risks as you can, work out how likely each risk is to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), estimate its impact on the project on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), then multiply the two numbers together. The result is the risk weighting. A high risk weighting is the most severe risk. Just manage the top ten risks i.e. the ones with the highest risk weighting. Constantly review the risks and constantly be on the lookout for new risks since they have a habit of jumping up at unforeseen moments.

Not managing risks effectively is also often cited as a major reason why projects fail.

Summary

So, in a nutshell, these best practices are the main things that I would expect all project managers to do. They are applicable on all projects big or small. Project management is not rocket science. Applying best practices on your project cannot guarantee that your project comes in under budget, on time and exceeds all the expectations of the stakeholders, but applying them will certainly give you a much better chance of delivering your project successfully than if you don’t apply them on your project.

Is the 1st thing a dog owner needs to buy

Is the 1st thing a dog owner needs to buy?

Buying a collar and lead is probably one of the first things a new dog owner does, as they are a necessity for proper control of your dog and an essential piece of equipment when training a new dog or puppy. If you have a puppy then it’s likely they will quickly outgrow a collar or lead, so it is perfectly acceptable to buy non-expensive and lightweight equipment during this early stage of their life. Many people like their dogs to wear a collar all of the time, but some ornamental collars will not stand up to a sudden movement or constant straining. You should therefore consider having 2 collars; one for ornamental purposes and another one for training your dog or puppy. Even though puppies get plenty of exercise through play you should try and get your puppy accustomed to wearing their collar and lead at the earliest age possible. Even if you do not intend your dog or puppy to wear a collar all the time you can buckle a light collar around their neck and leave it there for a number of days until your dog or puppy ignores its presence. Do be aware that the neck hair of a long haired dog will be permanently marked if it wears a collar at all times so use common sense depending on your breed of dog or puppy. A bolt and spring clip is best on the end of a lead and you should buy clips where the opening does not come at the point of most strain as they are liable to come apart. Leather and nylon leads are a good choice and although many owners think chains would be stronger they can be very uncomfortable from the owner’s point of view. If you are serious about training then you will be using a slip collar, as this will provide you with much more control. A slip collar consists of a chain with a ring at either end, the chain is dropped through one of the rings to form a loop, which is then put over the dog’s head. A pull on a slip collar is slightly uncomfortable for the dog providing focus for training, but when the lead is slack the collar is loose. The slip collar will only work well if the collar is put on correctly so you should practice to ensure the fit is best for you and your dog. When using a lead take it in your right hand and ensure your dog walks on your left hand side. If using a slip collar the ring through which the chain is slipping should be underneath. Practice as much as possible with your collars and leads so that both you and your dog or puppy become familiar with them and you can both use them in the best possible way. Once you have the right equipment you can begin basic exercises and lessons to train your dog for obedience, competitions or shows, providing pleasure and companionship for you and your dog or puppy. Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to Internet Business, do please browse for more information at our websites. http://www.adsence-dollar-factory.com http://www.100earningtips.com

How to analyze your event

How to Analyze Your Event

If you are running workshops, seminars or conferences like Oslo , Norway based Ulrika Fredrikson you won’t be doing it as a charitable act. Let’s face it, even if you were a charity, you’d have to cover your costs somehow. Ulrika runs a combination of sponsored and paid-for events which improves the ticket price for delegates but increases the pressure on her to fill seats to satisfy the advertising benefit for her sponsors.

Whether your event cost $10 or $10,000 to stage, you should, for business reasons, calculate your return on investment. This is not as straightforward as making sure that the gate money covers your costs, although that is, in itself, important. To be rigorous you will be drawing information about all of the positive and negative effects the event has had on your bank account, your reputation and your graying hair both now and in the future and you will be making it available to whomever needs to know in a form that is easy to digest.
Compiling event information

To properly compile all of your event information you might want to put some time aside to revisit all of the details about the design, development, running and follow-up activities associated with the event.

Financial Information

Put together the financial information and split it down into:

• planned expenditure

• unplanned expenditure

• direct income

• indirect but related income

Planned expenditure is everything that you predicted you would spend on the project from the first including purchases, rentals, staff hours and expenses. Unplanned expenditure is anything else over and above what you originally thought was required. You are splitting this out, not because it is in some way wrong to incur unplanned expenditure but because it is part of the learning and self-training process. When you next run an event you will have a better idea of the contingency costs you ought to be planning.

Direct income comes from ticket sales and any other sales like promotional items, books or products associated with the event. Indirect income covers any additional products or services that have been purchased since the event and the sale of which can be attributed to running the event. This is where the water starts to get a little muddy, as it is highly likely that some of your delegates will have been approached by your company many times in the past and it may become difficult to attribute a sales success to this event alone. By far the best thing to do here is to count the sale, or a proportion of it, say, a quarter and highlight it as being influenced by a combination of marketing tactics including the event.

Ulrika has been in the conferencing business for around ten years and she knows that almost 50% of follow-through sales for her own company and for her sponsors can take twelve months or more to reveal themselves. Her advice is to acknowledge this but not count it as part of this event’s income.