Business coaching for beauty salon and clinic owners

Many beauty businesses started with waxing, nails and lashes, and are now moving into laser hair removal and advanced facials. When you've spent thousands on a machine, it's tempting to price cautiously so your regulars don't baulk. That usually leaves the kit underused and underpriced.

We work out what each treatment needs to earn per hour, including the cost of the equipment. Then we plan how to introduce your existing clients to the higher-end menu, so they move up gradually rather than all at once. That includes when to suggest it, which is rarely in the middle of an appointment.

Most beauty owners I meet are spending hours on social media and getting very little back for it. Posting more is rarely the answer.

For many salons at your stage, a modest budget for paid adverts on Facebook and Instagram will bring in more of the right clients than another month of daily posts. Most owners have never run an advert and don't know where to start. I'll help you decide whether you're ready for paid marketing, how much to spend, and how to tell whether it's working.

Recruiting good therapists in the UK is hard, and keeping them is harder. On top of that, there's the stress of a team who are fully booked one week and quiet the next.

Memberships are my answer to those peaks and troughs. When clients pay monthly for regular treatments like facials, brows, lashes and waxing, the diary fills more evenly and your fixed costs are covered before the month begins. Done properly, a membership isn't a discount club, and it earns you more per client than one-off bookings. That steadier income also makes it easier to pay your team well, which helps you keep them.

Retail is a sore point for a lot of beauty owners, and with good reason. Brands that were sold to you as professional only now turn up online and in department stores, often for less than you can sell them for. It's understandable to feel let down and stop bothering with retail altogether.

There are better options than giving up. We look at which brands genuinely protect their salon partners, which products are earning their shelf space, and whether a white-label range of your own makes sense, since the margins can be far higher than most branded lines offer.

If you bring in an aesthetics practitioner one day a week, sooner or later you'll wonder how much you should be promoting them. Some owners put the practitioner on their website, mention them to every client and treat filling their diary as part of their own job. Others feel just as strongly that it's the practitioner's business, and getting busy is up to them. Both views are understandable, and the gap between them causes a lot of quiet resentment on both sides.

The right answer depends on how the arrangement works. If you take a percentage of what they earn, their busy diary is part of your income, so promoting them makes sense. If they pay a fixed room fee, there's less reason to do their marketing for them, although you still want that room earning and your clients well looked after. We'll work out where you stand, agree who is responsible for what, and get it written down before it turns into a falling-out.