Beauty Career Tips and Techniques for Beginners                
that won't be Beginners for Long!

Beauty Career Tips for Beginners will show you specific ways to navigate through salon business to maximize your cosmetologist income.

Get Pumped!  It's Your Beauty Career.

This should downright excite you because I'm going to share insider secrets with you.  Inside secrets that successful professional stylists use daily to fill their wallets and grow their beauty careers.

It's tough in the very beginning.  I think 6 months went by before I wasn't scared when I got a client.  Wouldn't it be great to have some insight before you start so you will know what to expect and how to deal with it? 

I fully understand and am going to help you out. 

I'll have you walking tall with confidence as a professional hair stylist right out of the gate.  Or at least give you enough info to help you fake it.

I know you think cosmetology schools should teach this kind of stuff.  I completely agree.  And some may touch on a piece here and there but the majority of cosmetology schools don't address real life issues that are a common occurrence in our salons. It's a shame they don't provide more to prepare you for a successful beauty career.

That's why apprenticeships are so important.  You need an ally in the camp to help you navigate the new terrain successfully. I will be your Sherpa up the slippery slope of beauty career success! Grab onto my hairstylist apron as I pull you up.

You MUST Add Value to a Salon

Adding value to a salon means contributing to the bottom line.

  Your clientele building benefits the salon, as well as your retail sales, proper salon etiquette and upselling.

But all of this doesn't happen automatically because you were hired onto the team.

You need to "Self Manage" yourself and your beauty career.  Managers do not want to babysit stylists.  You should already know the do's and don'ts on the salon floor. They expect you to know your retail, and yes, sell the retail.  They expect you to bring in clients and enhance the salon environment with your professionalism.

Otherwise you are taking up space and COSTING the salon money.

Do you get that?

It could take the average person a year to figure this stuff out while a manager is constantly wondering if you are worth the wait to develop.  Time is money.

But YOU ARE DIFFERENT.  You now have the benefit of this knowledge.  Will you use it to groom your career?
 

5 Crucial Areas that Affect Your Career Within the Salon

You are Self Managing from where you stand today, no matter what stage of your career.  The question is "Are you doing it well?"

If your life is a Hot Mess, if you are spinning your wheels with no direction, and not making any money I'm suggesting you are not managing yourself in an efficient manner to maximize your returns.

Within the Salon walls there are 5 areas that will affect the success of your beauty career:

1. Your Level of Professionalism (Salon Etiquette)
2. Your Technical Skill Development
3. Your Clientele Building Efforts
4. Your Retail Sales Ability
5. Your Upselling Ability
   

Let's begin with salon etiquette.  There is more at stake in the salon than there is in cosmetoIogy school.

 I like to think that professionalism and etiquette are not a thing of the past. 

Good professional hair stylist etiquette means the conduct prescribed by your salon culture to be observed in the professional life. 

Let's be honest.  Good stylist etiquette makes others perceive you as the professional you are and poor etiquette will eventually get you pushed out the door and back to Indeed.com.

Salon etiquette or professionalism has several advantages. 

• It improves the image of the salon in the clients' mind.
• It therefore grows the business.
• It aids in team building.
• It improves productivity for every individual cosmetologist and the salon as a whole.
• And all of this helps you fatten your wallet and grow your beauty career.
  

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Technical Skill Development

Salons do not expect you to know it all when you begin your career. But they do love to hire stylists that have a thirst for knowledge.

Learning is a lifetime endeavor.  It never stops unless you give up. 

From the beginning commit to yourself to constantly evolve in your technical development.  Invest in it.  It will pay you back in a big way.

The more you know, and the more you can do means the more valuable you are!

It is possible to gain much needed continuing education for free. 

You can also attend classes for a nominal fee and go to seminars for a big ticket price.  It really depends on where you want your career to go and what education you need to get there.

Just remember, you are a licensed professional hair stylist! You can do most things related to beauty, legally. Find someone to coach you in skill development and this will take you a long way down the road.

Always be evolving!

You Gotta Start Somewhere! Building Your Clientele.

Unless you start your beauty career in a franchise salon, you will need to get busy building that clientele ASAP.  Bodies aren't going to magically appear and you need to make money.

Building clientele is a puzzler for new professional stylists.

I mean, you are ready to get your hands in hair, right?! But right off the bat you have to become a marketer.  And building your clientele is not something you will only do in the beginning.  You are building a beauty career for your lifetime.

I will tell you though, that after you have a strong client base your clients will do most of the work for you.

Wherever you land, the first thing you need to do to start is get your hair stylist business cards made.  They are very important to your marketing efforts.

Click on the Zazzle banner below to find some of the most awesome card templates for hairstylists!

Selling Retail....
Yes, it is in your job description!

Let me dispel a common cosmetologist myth for you.  Not only are you a professional hair stylist, nail tech, or esthetician......you are also now a salesperson!

I've heard it a million times. "I'm a stylist, not a salesman!"

OK. I used to think that too, until I realized if I didn't learn to sell product I would soon be looking for another job!  So let me make this perfectly clear and you need to fully wrap your head around this:

Selling retail is in your job description as a professional stylist!

If you find yourself working where selling retail is not required I am willing to bet a month's pay that the salon won't be there this time next year!

Don't freak out on me yet.  You should know by now I wouldn't drop a bomb on you without giving you a helmet!  You are just beginning your beauty career so there is a lot about the "business" end that you just don't know yet.

Once you understand the BIG PICTURE you will see why product sales are very much a part of your job.

Let's Break it Down

Now I want you to put on a salon owner hat for a sec. You own La Bella Foo Foo Salon and you have 10 employees.  You can work smart, using statistics in your favor, or you can work a lot harder to make the same money. 

There is an average 5% profit margin on services and 35-40% profit margin on retail product. It's ok if you don't get the math.  Bare with me.  That means after you pay the rent, the utilities, your employees, the insurance, supplies and anything else the salon needs you will make $5 profit on every $100 in services.  BUT.....for every $100 in product sales in your salon you are seeing $35-40 profit.

With those numbers, and as an owner whose responsibility it is to keep the doors open, are you going to push your employees to sell product? Yeah, me too!

And that's WHY selling retail is in your job description.  As a professional cosmetologist your job does not end at styling. 

 If you send your client home with no way to re-create his/her hot new style you are not fully servicing them.

It is an absolute must to educate your clients on product use.

Here's how the cycle works:

Not only does retention go up (retention means they come back) but so do TIPS.  A side effect of going PRO with a beauty career.

 OH, and did I mention COMMISSION on product sales?  Most salons pay their cosmetologists commission on their personal retail sales.  It ranges in percentage depending on your employers. A few pay none, I believe the average is probably 15-20% but I have seen higher.  The higher your sales a bigger piece of the pie you get.  I know of a salon that saved all commissions until Christmas and gave the stylists a fat commission check in December.  It was like a savings account for them.  Imagine having that to look forward to.

I have literally written an entire manual to cover this topic.  I have taught classes and always leave things unsaid.  It really is that important to the success of a salon (and your beauty career).

But go to Selling Retail in a Salon and I will give you more than enough to get you off the ground and start making your commission.

Most cosmetology schools give you precious little in retail skill and retail confidence. You will be needing both as you grow your beauty career.

Upselling Services in the Salon 

What is Upselling?  "Would you like to make that a combo with a drink and fries?"

You hear it everyday.  So much, in fact, you don't even realize it's happening anymore.

First of all let me stress the importance of the upsell and the wifm of it. (WIFM is the acronym for What's In It for Me?)

Example:  A client comes in for a $30 haircut.  You are on a 50/50 split commission to make your paycheck.  If she leaves with $30 haircut, you just made $15 plus tip for your time.  However, if you upsold her a finished style by blow drying for $8, a quick front balayage highlighting for $40 and an eyebrow wax for $15 you just made $46.50 plus tip!  And so did the salon.  Are you valuable to the salon, now?

The benefit to you is:

1.  Increased Income and

 2.  Client Retention.

The benefit to the salon is:

1. Increased income and

2. Client Retention.

It's not as hard as it sounds.  Because all you need to know is one thing.

You don't ask them what they want. 

You tell them what they NEED.

Learn some groovy ways to upsell in the salon!

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