 All right, we're gonna get started. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming on a Monday morning. It's great for me to be here because I'd be up in New Jersey to have another storm and now all these businesses are closed and I'm down here with you, so that's awesome. We have a mix just to set the stage. We have a mix of millennium, MEVO, and non-millennium clients, but the way we set up, speak up is that you're gonna get a lot of what and then you're gonna get a lot of how. So what's really great is I'm gonna talk to you about some concepts. I'll talk a bit about how. I'll touch on certain things in millennium, but whether you use a millennium or not, the concepts purposely are valid, even if you use it in a different software. And I think it's a great time at the beginning of the year to consider yourselves or encourage yourselves to think differently. Whether you're a small salon or not, you're allowed to think big, right? And with the tools that are available anymore, I think it's really great that you can actually look big even if you're not. So if you're big, there's some tools that you're probably not using that I would encourage you to consider using in 2015. If you're medium small, think big. The tools are gonna allow you to do the same stuff that the biggest salons and spas out there are doing. So that's really what this is about. Now, you'll also see that we gave you the Speak Up Action Plan. For anybody that's been to our experience that we do for millennium, one of the things I really encourage is I really don't want people to come to something like this, get that temporary motivation and then you go to the salon tomorrow and all hell breaks loose and you forget about all of it and none of it happens. You've invested your time. You're here today. I wanna make sure that you actually get some really actionable concepts. We've got all these little areas throughout the booklet you were given to take notes and I encourage you to take notes and really try to take at least one or two of these concepts and implement them in your salon over the next coming weeks. So that's my goal because just to be here to entertain you, I'm not that funny. I can be funny. I was telling them I can be funny. Anybody trying to tell them how funny I was wasn't funny. So I'm hoping that we actually have a good time here. I wanna encourage you towards the end of the segments. I'll give you an opportunity to ask a couple of questions. So the format is basically, I'm gonna go over four concepts, four strategies that can help you grow this year. We'll take a short break, let you grab another coffee, bathroom break and then Matt Beck from freesalineeducation.com is gonna come up and really give you the nuts and bolts of what he does within his salon on any given week and given day. So along the lines of several of these concepts. So what's great is you're hearing me, the software guy, but I've been doing this for 27 years. I see a lot of familiar faces here. So a lot of you know who I am and my passion for this industry but then you get somebody that's doing it coming up and really kind of digging a little deeper. So and then at the very end, we encourage you in the back, we've set up a few stations for you guys to actually go back. We have tech support people here. Ask the questions that you have, if you're a Millennium client. If you're a Millennium client interested in Mevo, what's this Mevo all about? We've got Mevo set up there, you can check it out. And if you're not using Millennium or Mevo, we encourage you to check it out or talk to the big guy in the back, big John, I'm a little John, that's big John. And he can answer any questions for you if you're not a Millennium client. So we actually have two people or two guests in the class that I've never had before. One is a little lizard here on the ground, right here, which I was gonna tease Jen and actually say, can you pick up this pen and I wanna hear a scream but then you guys all came and she wasn't here and ruined that joke too. But and we have a little baby in the back, which is amazing, I love that, that's so cool. Welcome and I think that's awesome. All right, so let's get going on it. So I told you we're gonna talk about four strategies and these are actionable strategies that you guys can do things with. Now anybody that listens to me at conferences or classes, I never do a class where I don't talk about these first things. So anybody that's heard me before can probably guess what this is gonna be and it's the growth indicators. So many salons spend so much time just focusing on revenue and the way I describe revenue, obviously revenue is important, right? That's what's feeding your employees, feeding you. So revenue is important, but it's not the, it's the result, right? It's the result of doing things right is how, whether I provide great services, I've got a great environment, I'm doing the right things business-wise to grow my business, yeah, revenue matters. I track revenue in my company, trust me, it all matters. But what, my first section is gonna be about what we call the growth indicators because what I like about the growth indicators is their forward focus, revenue's not. Revenues, I talk about it with an analogy of like you're driving a car. You wouldn't drive your car down the road looking in the rear view mirror, right? Rear view mirror is to meet revenue. It's what you did yesterday, how much money you're making today. But what can I do today or what can I analyze today that's gonna make sure Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday are successful? That's important, revenue's not gonna tell you that. Even if you look at last year's revenue, you get an idea of what you did last year, but it's still gonna come down to how well you're doing certain things. And it's around these things that we call growth indicators. So first strategy is really focusing on growth. So growth indicators, they're future focus metrics to help you grow sales, all right? And again, anybody that hears me do these classes knows my passion for the front desk. Because when you think about what I do for the industry for 27 years or what my company does, we provide tools to help that front desk and your business grow. That's what we do. I mean, when you go back 25 years ago and look at our mission and vision, it wasn't about technology, it was about making sure that we educate the industry and help them grow. Because if I do that, you're gonna want whatever I've got, right? So to me, it's win-win. And it was about 1997 where I actually had finished putting in a lot of the features into salon solutions at the time that became Millennium. And we had an amazing appointment book and automatically found openings. We had the first online booking ever in the industry. So we'd done all these things. But even though I'm a technology guy, technology doesn't turn me on. What turns me on is business tools and help people grow. So when I, in 1997, found out about these things called growth indicators, I got really excited. And we were one of the first software companies that actually built our tools around it. So let's just go over what those are. They're pretty simple. But you know what's great is the growth indicators apply to salons. They apply to an oil change company. They apply to any type of service business where you have repeat guests. So the first one that you wanna track, sorry, I will tell you I'm coming up with seven weeks of bronchitis. So once in a while, the throw to go. I got some water. So far, so good. So the first thing is you wanna track new clients per month. And new clients per month is gonna help you measure how well your advertising's working, how well word of mouth is working, client referrals. So you wanna know on average how many new clients are coming into your salon each month. Now, I'll show you after I go through each growth indicator, where in millennium you would find this. You can find this in several different places, but I'll show you the best place to go. Kind of one-stop shopping for all these growth indicators. But the other thing is, again, for the people not using millennium, I think our competitors have done a good job of analyzing millennium, and you probably have it in your software too. So new clients per month, I couldn't tell you where to find it though. But new clients per month. So we wanna measure, you wanna watch, are we trending down? Are we trending up? Bob McConie, who works for me for 17 years now, has owned a couple salons, sold one. He's down to one salon, just focused in on that. And he, actually over the last couple of weeks, accumulated a lot of vacation time, and I'm like, Bob, you gotta take this time. So he's like, you know what, you're right, I'm gonna go take a couple of weeks and spend it at my salon. So he went to a salon, and, because his wife is kinda behind the chair, and he has a front desk manager, but he hadn't been there really focused on his salon for probably six months, or maybe even longer. And so he went in there, and he just starts calling my phone off the hook because he's running the reports and seeing the stuff that's really making him frustrated. And his, for instance, new clients per month went from, I'm making these numbers up, because I don't remember the exact number, I just know the trend, and the trend was say 200 new clients a month, 160, 140, 110, 80, 60, and he's like, oh my God. Then the next thing is, when he was analyzing that, and he, so that's the problem, right? What's the solution? And that's really for you guys to determine based on, did we stop advertising? Did we, have we reduced our staff? Are our staff, are we encouraging and tracking our employee referrals? Are our own employees referring our salon and bringing in new guests? So there's a lot of different things you can do to actually analyze that. And then I would really encourage and track, and we're gonna get into that a little bit later with some client loyalty stuff, but in ways to, and goals for employees. But one of the things you should be tracking on an employee are how often are these employees referring guests into the salon, either to themselves or somebody else, and our software is gonna allow you to track that. But you need to know what your new clients per month are. Then the next thing you need to know are, of those new clients, how many of those are we retaining? Now that is usually an eye-opener. So the industry for as long as I had known at least the first 15 years of myself in an industry, all the statistics published about new client retention had to do with just one repeat visit. So on your notes, if you look at the packet we gave you, it says, okay, there's kind of two different columns. It's like, okay, what's the industry average and what's the goal? The industry average for new client retention is about 35%. A goal is 50%. And again, these are generic. If you're in a mall, if you're in a certain, if you're in a hotel, you're not gonna have that type of retention. But if you're at the typical salon or spa, the 35% is an industry average and a 50% is a goal. So your goal is half the people that come in that are new, we're gonna do our best to retain them. Well, I was at a chain salon show and one of the people that used millennium came up to me and said, I understand what you're saying about the industry average and even when I run my retention reports, I'm at like 48%. But when I look at the number of new clients or my client base over the last five years that I've used your product, he goes, if it grew 48% with the new clients that were coming in every year, I would have twice the clients I have. So something's not right. So I was talking to him a little bit more and we had some dialogue going back and forth and I started to realize that he was right. The industry was only measuring that second visit. So I went back and definitely the last few years I haven't been coding as much anymore. I'd be built the team out and now I'm actually directing the developers more than I'm coding and I miss it. But when I coded, I could actually go, okay, that's a great idea. And I went back to the room. It was a Sunday night, it was a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday event. By Tuesday morning, I pulled him over and said, you know what, let me show you what the problem is. And so I'd written a report and it was the first report in the industry that tracks new client retention through six visits. So at two visits, you know, we've done this on hundreds if not over a thousand salons that we've personally that I've looked at just to see, okay, where is this at? It's pretty much clockwork and you with Millennium can go back and actually check this out. By the second, so the second visit, roughly 35 to 40-ish percent. You go to the third visit, that drops to about 22 to 25%. When you get to the fourth, fifth, sixth, when you get to the sixth visit, it's 10 to 12%. And now it starts to make sense. Now if you look at a hundred new clients coming in within probably three to six months, that 100 is down to probably 20 and by the end of the year, that 20 is 12. So that's the reason why when you look at all this hard work that you're doing and the money that you're spending on advertising and you see these new clients coming in. But at the end of the year, if you started with 2,000 clients, you don't have 4,000, right? You don't have 3,000, you might have 1,900 depending on repeat client retention, which is what we're gonna look at next. So how well are we keeping? How well are we doing at bringing in a quantity of new clients and retaining those clients to make up for what? The repeat clients either move, unfortunately die or just stop coming to you, right? So you always wanna keep that equilibrium or have those new clients and that retention of those new clients outpacing the people that you're losing. Again, in Millennium, that's the ME-200 report and we're gonna glance at that in a minute. But it's really super important. If you ask me, John, what's one report? And I'll just tell you what I do. When I go into a salon, first thing I do, if I went into your salon, I'd run the ME-200 report and I could tell you stuff about your departments, about individuals and you'd be like, oh my God, he's got a camera in here because he's exactly right. He's right, that's the top stylist but a retention is terrible or that's the top stylist but the frequency of visits awful. Or that's a medium person, but guess what? They're medium, they're not the highest dollar but their retention rate is great. They're getting people in at a higher frequency than that top person and that's why their revenue is roughly the same with fewer clients as that top stylist. So understanding this stuff is really important. So and that's also why when I go into a salon and I consult, I said one of the last things I do with the salon are two things. One is raise prices, right? There's so many other things you can do before you raise prices and definitely things that most likely you already know are wrong that you could fix on costs and improvements you could make to your business before you would raise a price on a client. That's the easy kind of way out. I'm not saying to never raise prices, 100% you need to at certain points but it's usually one of the last things that you do when you're trying to fix revenue or profitability. The second thing that I tell people is the last thing you do is increase marketing expenses because I'm able to show people why are you gonna dump another $500 a month into marketing when you're keeping 12 out of the 100 people that come in? So let's fix some of these other things. They're gonna help increase your revenue and profitability without spending money. So that's what I would encourage you to do this year too is just to analyze these things that I'm talking about before you worry about that next big marketing campaign that you're gonna do. That was social and everything else going on. There's so many things you can do that are low cost so I'm not discouraging social and marketing and things like that. I'm saying do not go in and start spending big money on marketing until you know what your new clients per month is and what your new client retention is and fix the problems before you move on. Now what would cause, you're smarter than me. See I learned from you for 27 years. So what would cause in your mind what would be a reason for low new client retention? Yes. Mm-hmm. Right now we're sticking up. Mm-hmm. By the time it all goes away. Right. Yep, yep. So in millennium, so his question is he is high, the snowbirds come down and then they leave. Also a salon that's in a mall might have high, forget what we call it in millennium, but people that just passing through, right? Transient, thank you. So in millennium under appointment types that's where you can actually tell it does not count towards client retention. So you're gonna create a snowbird, snowboard. See I'm funny. Snowbird, appointment type and you're gonna turn off counts towards retention. Now there's also defaulted into millennium, a transient appointment type that you turn off counts towards retention. I would also do it on wedding party, right? You know, event, event client, right? So that if you have an event you're encouraging these people to come to the event but you know that it's an event. You hopefully keep some of them as clients but that one visit you don't wanna count towards your client retention number. So it's important that your software actually allow you to determine that. So again, so many years in the industry and trying to make these numbers meaningful that's one of the first things that I did is add the ability to really say okay, when I booked that appointment just put it under snowbird or put it under transient so that it knows not to count that person and show lower retention. Cause you wanna focus in on the people that you can really make a difference on not somebody that's back up in New Jersey that you're not gonna be able to get to come back. Now, the other thing nice about that is in the client selection screen you can actually select certain types of appointment types when you're doing marketing and not market to that snowbird and waste your money like you're doing a special next week and it's June, they're not down here. So where I was going with the new client retention is that I think the other thing that you need to analyze. So I'm not a stylist. I've done this for a long time. I really can look you and I and say I understand you. I understand the industry. I understand your front desk. I understand stylus. I was joking around and I'm schizophrenic. I'm a drummer, but I'm a programmer. So I'm right brain left brain and you guys are right brain so it all works out. I don't think if I was a programmer, a typical programmer this industry would have driven the typical programmer crazy. I love it. So from that perspective understand I do understand your business. But what I've seen with new client retention is that a lot of times we're not feeding those new clients to the right people. What's your first intent? Oh, let's give them to the best stylist. Well, guess what? The best stylist is so busy that after the second visit that person disappears because they can't get in on a Saturday. They can't get in on a Friday night. Or what do we do? We have a new stylist fresh out of school so we just start pumping all the new clients to them and maybe they're really not where they need to be yet or they still need some training and that's not necessarily true. There's some, we're in Paul Mitchell School, Miami and I want to just thank Hector and the team here for allowing us to have our event here. All the Paul Mitchell schools and a lot of other schools in the United States use Millennium and when I go see future professionals or re-bring the future professionals into our experience, they actually get to do a hair show for us and all kinds of stuff, I'm blown away. So by no means am I saying every new future professional that comes in you shouldn't give new clients to because there's some amazing artists out there. But there are somewhere, maybe we're giving them new clients and we're not realizing there's a problem and if you analyze by individual that new client retention, you'll identify possibly a problem. Maybe you could have three new future professionals and just one of them, man their retention rate's like 10%. Well there's a problem. I can't fix it, you guys can. I'm sure you can figure it out but you want to be able to watch those things because you're pumping clients in, they're not coming back after that second or third visit. That report by the way if you want to write it down by the new client retention area, it's called new clients by visit. So it's under analytical reports in Millennium. So it's an analytical report called new client retention by visit and that's the one that'll show you through six visits. Now I encourage you to do all of last year. So you do it from like January through December and it's gonna show you actually even better would be if you did like if you have enough data, I would go to the middle of 2013 all the way to present and it's gonna really give you, it's gonna give all those people from 2013 plenty of time to come back six times and you're gonna get some really relevant data. Now why did I do six visits? Because the average salon, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but the average salon only gets about five visits a year on a client. Now you've got nail clients that might come in 18 times, you've got color clients that might come in four times but your hair client is in that six range, right? Every two months. Now we'd love it every month and for men it should be at least every month but that's why we went out six visits so that you can kind of look at a year and say did those people come back six times and you'll see the graph and you'll smile when you look at yours because it's gonna probably be in the eight to 15% at the high end range of new client retention and then you start analyzing monthly the other retention reports under analytical reports. There's a retention summary that does it by employee so you can start to identify, okay, John's retention is really great but Jen's is medium and Suzie's is awful so let's figure out why and let's stop giving clients to her until we figure out why, okay? So that's important. You work hard and spend a lot of money usually to bring those clients in and a lot of times we're giving them to the wrong people either the super busy person that can't retain them because they're too busy or the prices are too high or the new person that just isn't quite ready for that onslaught of new clients and we're not keeping up with whether or not they're keeping them or not, yeah. Five, 4.88 to be exact so I'm gonna get to that in a second so I jumped ahead of myself so repeat client retention, let's hit on that and then the next one's frequency of visit. So repeat client retention so we analyze how many new clients we're bringing in a month then we analyze how many new clients we're keeping then we analyze how well are we doing at keeping the people that already love us and are loyal to us and have been here at least X number of visits coming back. Repeat client retention industry average is around 70% and the goal is 85% and the 15% attrition you allow and I've heard people say this and I just kinda find it funny is it allow people to move or die but otherwise you want them to come back, right? Those are the two excuses that's why you get that 15% but 85% of your repeat clients and again a repeat client to his point would not be a snowboard, it would be a snow bird it would be somebody that consistently comes to your salon at least once every 90 days. So repeat client retention is another thing you wanna analyze because what I basically told you and I'm gonna show you in the ME200 report is you wanna keep a balance you wanna be retaining more new clients than the repeat guests you're losing because it's real simple if you don't it's gonna be real hard for your sales to rise because you're losing clients, it's gonna decline. So you wanna be able to track that and the next thing I wanna touch on is my favorite growth indicator this is the one where I can go into the typical salon anywhere in the United States and look like a hero because frequency of visit is the number one growth indicator you should focus on the most. The reason I say that and I really encouraged it in 2008, 2009, 2010 when the recession took a dive I started pumping out stuff to our clients saying listen the least important thing right now are new clients and new client retention because at that time when the economy took a dive if you even think about yourself nobody was looking to switch salons at that point or everybody was kind of frozen you just kind of kept doing what you were used to or back if you used to go to the salon every month you went every six weeks or eight weeks depending on if there was a financial reason or a concern that you had but at that point clients weren't bopping around as much as they are now it's when things are good people kind of go here they'll try that there's a promotion over there but when things get bad they kind of buckle down and what I was explaining to salons is right now is not the time to try to bring on new clients when the economy was down your number one thing is take the clients that already love you and come to you and get them to come in more often and the salons that did it were pumping us back with feedback to stankings say oh my god we've actually grown 15% even though we lost clients so how do you do that is pre-book so you know I want to explain cause you know if I went around the room and said how many of you pre-book a lot of you would probably say you do but when you walk into a salon that has a culture of pre-book and does it right it's a whole different game it's a whole different game and we all do it we all go to the dentist and we'll pre-book that six month out appointment but then we think that our guests aren't willing to pre-book for next month they are as long as from the day from the, and I like to encourage from the moment that new client comes in that's where you want to start that whole mentality of this is what we do and it doesn't start at the front desk it ends at the front desk it starts with the reception I don't even like reception it's the front desk professional when they're first booking that appointment and then when the service providers taking care of that guest before they finish their hair they're already talking about well so you know talking about the style talking about how great it looks and saying okay so I'm gonna need to see you in five or six weeks so I'm gonna walk you to the front I always use Susie, Jen always makes fun of me she's like who's Susie? I go I don't know Susie's the first name it always comes to my head so Susie the front desk professional so the stylist would say you know I'm gonna bring you to the front and Susie's gonna book your appointment in five weeks so which you know if it's today our Monday's really good for you or is there a better day and so the question isn't do you wanna book your next appointment the question is what day and time works the best for you and you don't let Susie have that conversation you let the person that just touched them styled them, made them happy have that conversation with them that is a night and day difference you're gonna go from 25% pre-book to there's salons going 75% 60 to 75% consistent day over day pre-book using that methodology you have to actually solidify it even more if you use Millennium and you print your work tickets you actually the stylist will actually engage in that conversation and write the recommendation right on the work ticket so that the guest is actually saying okay I'm telling her to see you the week of you know February 16th and then they walk them to the front and Susie here you go and thank you and now it's a professional recommendation not Susie just saying oh would you like to book another appointment no I'll call you back when I look at my schedule that's what you're gonna that's why you get 10%, 25% pre-book when a salon goes from that 10% range and gets it above 50% the growth is crazy it's 15 to 25% because it's real simple if I just told you the industry average is five visits a year it's actually 4.88 but let's just call it five the industry average is five the goal should be at least six and a half to seven and the good news is when Bob was looking at his salon he got back to me and he said well this is the bad news the good news is because our client base is shrunk so much the book has opened up and my frequency of visit is going up so he's going up from the five range to the seven range so they're doing something they're pre-booking more so they're realizing wow we're you know there's not as many phone calls coming in there's not as many clients coming in there's something they need to fix but what they did is start pre-booking and they were able to actually the revenue has only dropped slightly because the frequency of visit went up now if you think about let's just say four visits to make the math easy and not keep me doing math while you look at me four times is really easy so if I get one more visit right one out of four is 25% so if I get one more visit I just grew as a stylist my business 25% it's real simple to explain to them one visit is 25% if I got two visit I just went 50% higher and most likely my productivity is just going above 85% to 90% okay now the thing is there is an equilibrium here and you got to keep an eye on things because what happens when you keep increasing that frequency of visit at some point it could affect retention right there it gets to a point where now you've got people coming in at such a high frequency that I can't get it on a Saturday and now all of a sudden now I start to go to somebody else so there is a whole science of watching productivity as well if I see that somebody's productive three months, 90 days straight averaging over 90% productivity I guarantee you and I've done this and blown people's minds I said oh really 90% and their salon owner's happy right he's 92% productive for like six months straight I go really one of the lowest frequencies of visit huh we run the MA200 frequency of visit 3.8 right so um so what happens is uh... you have to watch it because the productivity goes over 85-90% those are the times where now you've got a good problem you've got somebody that everybody wants to go to the frequency of visit's great but at some point that frequency of visit's going to go from 7 to 6 to 5.5 because now people because he's doing everything right he's filling up his book now I can't get in in four weeks I gotta wait 5 right she can't come in in six weeks she's gotta wait 7 or 8 and so you keep an eye on it now what do you do that's your indicator to go ahead and raise prices or elevate that person from a stylist to a senior stylist or make that change because you almost purposely move some of the clients over to other stylist the goal is not that they leave the salon the goal is that they stay with stylist there at the $50 price range and now you're moving her to the $65 price range and you purposely do that adjustment at that time so when people ask me when do I raise prices it's more of an individual thing for me and when somebody is productive eighty nine ninety ninety two percent ninety to a hundred and twenty days straight those that's where you can consider it before then there's so many other things that you can fix like I said raising prices I'll help you grow your business 15 to 25% and never touch prices most of you because there's so many of these low hanging fruit things that I'm talking about you can pluck off the tree before you start raising prices but once productivity is that high on an individual the only way for them to make more money or the salon to make more money is to raise the price so that's an indicator frequency visit productivity are indicators of when you can mathematically or even subjectively uh... I'm sorry objectively make a decision of when it makes sense to allow somebody to raise the prices k pre-booking is just that's the first thing I start with it a salon all will go in and look at the pre-book percentage because like I said it's easy to look like a hero because you come in and they're at twelve percent you talked about creating that culture that handoff from the styles everything else they do it within ninety days the calling you going oh my god it's that easy now what what what's interesting and i'm gonna show you in a minute in a program called what if is when you get people to come in more often not only does your service revenue go up your retail revenue goes up because you have that many more opportunities you have two more opportunities per guest to get them to buy retail maybe they only buy retail every three times right so now what happens is when that frequency goes up so do your retail uh... dollars even if you're just doing the same thing because they have more opportunity to purchase retail average ticket so again what i'm what are we going over we're going over these forward focused things they're gonna tell me how next month's gonna look not revenue that tells me how last month look so we looked at new clients per month new client retention repeat client retention frequency visit now last one is average ticket people will look at all these big things they need to do it really comes down to five dollars seven dollars eight dollars per guest what's that conditioning treatment that we could add on how often are we cross-selling our services so they come in at eight thirty and they look and they go okay i'm gonna start looking at the other guests that are coming in and see if they've ever gotten a manicure before and maybe i want people that have gotten a manicure before to let them know hey would you like to come in a little early or stay after and we'll give you twenty percent off your manicure and now we're taking that spot and filling it with service rather than you know it's like fruit right once it spoils it's done once that time frame goes by i'd rather get take twenty percent off and get that nail appointment in then get zero so there's so many things that that front desk do i do a whole class on just front desk professional getting that front desk to think differently and they don't just answer the phones and ring up sales that's like the byproduct of what they do the real stuff they do is fill up that book fill up that book pre-book and help that way so average ticket really is a measure of how well we're selling retail house how well we're upselling services cross-selling services and again just finding people think that you have to do the big thing you don't find that five to eight dollars per guest that you could really encourage again is it a conditioning treatment is it a scalp massage is it i don't know you guys are better at this than me like i said there are plenty of things you can do and actually uh... i will give uh... we do a lot with pulmage we do a lot with a lot of the manufacturers but we're here at the pulmage of school i'll tell you that i think they've done what they call the wash house amazingly where they actually have these up sell services and things you can do while the person is getting the head shampooed i mean for me one of the favorite things for me is being able to lay back on a bowl and get your head massage maybe they squeeze orange juice or whatever they end up doing on it you know whatever just put on the music and make me happy massage my head for five minutes i'll pay five bucks for that so there's a lot of different things that you can do to just increase that average ticket but it's in five dollar eight dollar per guest range uh... and having dialogue the next thing that we're going to talk about after this stuff is um... goal-setting for yourselves and employees so having the right dialogue with them is so important right if you just start saying i need you to go from eighty five thousand dollars to one hundred twenty thousand dollars that's overwhelming you know that's your goal this year that's overwhelming what we're showing you here are ways that you can give them very specific things uh... to get there you know if you say to them i need you to sell five dollars more per guest that's a lot more attainable to me than forty thousand dollars i don't even know where to start you know we're gonna pre-book more and we're gonna do five dollars per guest and you're gonna get to that hundred twenty thousand dollars average ticket so industry average there is not an industry average right your haircuts different than your haircuts different than your hair cut so what i encourage people on average ticket number one is just know your average ticket your salon's average ticket is and each individual should be proud of whatever their average ticket is so my average ticket is forty six dollars and fifty cents what's yours oh i'm at forty two oh i'm at sixty one wow each individual if you walk up to them and you're running your salon like a professional business i should be able to walk up to any styles and say what your average ticket and they'll tell you and i see it all the time in the best places i also see very often that you walk into a salon and see what your average ticket they'll give you a range which means they don't know well my haircut prices this and my men's haircut prices that it's about forty five dollars which means they really don't you know if i ran the report is probably not so the most important thing for average ticket there's not an industry average just know what yours is and then as a goal increase of five to eight dollars a ticket so the industry average is for you your average is just whatever it is and your goal should be five to eight dollars a ticket uh... and again those are random numbers if i'm a forty dollar haircut fifty dollar haircut five to eight dollars uh... is a range it just makes sense if i'm doing uh... ninety dollar woman's haircuts and forty five dollar min cuts then then maybe my goal is ten to fifteen dollars an average uh... increase for my average ticket but it really depends on what you're trying to grow that year right if you're trying to grow fifteen percent then i would try to increase my average ticket fifteen percent so i said i was gonna talk about a tool called what if and it's a little hard to see this but uh... what if it's a program that uh... i wrote fourteen years ago uh... and it's an amazing tool that allows you to have a great dialogue with your front desk now if you're millennium you got this for free uh... if you don't know you lost it you don't know where it is call us will get you on it again let you download it if you're here and you don't use millennium or amiibo will give you this for free it's a great tool if i zoom in on it we have an update in about two years i think i think the last update was a couple years ago yeah so we have it the goal for me honestly is this fine time because i want to rewrite it so that it's on more internet based so you can just hit it on your phone hit it on anything so rather than continuing to add to that where the goal is really to rewrite it uh... but anyway uh... what it's showing you there is your average weekly service sales average weekly retail sales percent service new client retention rate repeat client retention rate average ticket all the things we just talked about and it's showing you that this person is doing fifty seven thousand dollars in uh... service and four thousand roughly in retail so then the next thing... so that's the left panel so i just kind of zoomed in on that if we go to the next slide you'll see that that left panel is still there but the right panel is the what if analysis uh... allows you to go in there and now change it so you can say well what if i went from uh... five visits a year which is what this person is doing to six and that's the highlighted thing it says six i think i can zoom sometimes let me see if i can get the cursor over there there we go so we brought them from five visits to six and guess what an increase my service sales by twenty percent and my retail by twenty percent by that one more visit and that's a simple thing to explain to an employee again for one more visit twenty five percent five one more visits twenty percent you want to increase your thing twenty percent this is the easiest way to do it and you do a pre-book this is where i always start whether it's with you a manager or the stylist i start here because it's the easiest way like i said to be a hero so we just saw how much that went so they just went up to eleven thousand five hundred dollars to sixty nine thousand and again we're taking a somebody only doing fifty nine thousand service which is like a new employee type of thing now if i go to the next thing uh... the repeat client retention rate was only sixty percent we're getting them up to seventy five percent so that added another eight almost nine percent so now they're seventy three thousand in service and uh... twenty eight percent growth and we're just gonna fly through these so you can see the example and so we brought them from seventy nine dollars and twenty three cents if we notice on the left hand side here that uh... average service ticket we're gonna bring it up five dollars to eighty four twenty three five dollars like i said now they're up thirty six percent on where they started so they're up to seventy eight thousand service and eight thousand two hundred dollars in retail which is ninety four percent growth in retail so in what i love about what it is even if you think about how i'm explaining it to you it's a very different conversation i want to go from fifty six thousand two hundred twelve thousand dollars in in sales you know because i want to make sixty thousand dollars a year i want to buy a house i want to new car whatever that is that discussion becomes much more easier when it's you need five dollars a guest and one more visit a guest and you're there it almost seems too easy but it's it's it's the it's the facts in millennium so it's not within millennium it's a separate tool outside millennium that will show under the harm software like to go to programs harm software it'll be there now if you don't see it means they did install it or the installed it on the server in which case just call us and we'll get you get it installed for you but it what a great tool for dialogue with the employee because they understand dollars and when you show them what one more visit means in dollars to them it's a great conversation well won't show them they'll still have to let's just you let's just say they were at forty percent uh... commission it's gonna show them their revenue so you know if you want to make sixty thousand you need to get to a hundred forty thousand one hundred thirty five thousand in service sales now i'm gonna show you how to do it so this right but it's not going to show their commission this is more the revenue side of it absolutely that's the whole point so yeah so now we're we've already taken up from fifty six i believe it was roughly to seventy eight thousand and by the time we're done with this you're gonna see that it gets to a hundred thousand they almost double what they did with small changes again repeat client retention only going up fifteen percent is very easy it's just focusing in on it you know recognizing that somebody hasn't been in the ninety days and using the tools that are in the software or even the automation that i'm gonna show you that's in the software uh... that's the growth of dollar growth that's the best so they went from they went up twenty one thousand in services just by those couple changes and then uh... so now uh... let's see we did that one and now uh... okay so the other thing that we're recognizing is that we're only given this person ten clients a month so over on the left you see ten and where it's highlighted in blue we're gonna move that up to twenty because we've talked to them about what they need to do we're getting smarter about re-booking those new clients which also helps uh... new client retention that's the other thing of the reason i love pre-book is when people get a culture pre-book their new client retention also goes up because you're not giving that client a chance to leave and forget about you they already have their next appointment book so your new client retention rate will go up with pre-book so to me if you leave this class and just take one thing create a culture of pre-book it's not saying pre-book you're probably doing a little bit of that now culture of pre-book and pre-booking are two very different things and when you see a salon that has a culture of pre-book it'll blow your mind it's like a well oiled machine and they're hitting sixty to seventy five percent pre-book alright so we did that and now they're up to ninety thousand they've increased fifty six percent in service and then i believe this is the last one uh... the new client retention we brought it from thirty five to fifty percent and let's see where we end up with all that let's zoom in so they are now at they went from fifty seven thousand in service and four thousand in retail to ninety nine thousand nine hundred that is called a hundred thousand in service seventy three percent increase and ten thousand in retail which is a hundred forty seven percent increase and nothing i did is like huge like all it's because you know they did the same that's you can't pull that off in a slide everything i just did one more visit giving them more clients because new clients and making them understand the importance of pre-book and retention of those new clients and five dollars a guest those are the key things that we did and that's the difference this is this is math it's science it's real so that's why i focus in that's why i want this class to start with the growth indicators because we're always just looking at or what your revenue what your revenue revenues the result of yesterday these things by monitoring them and setting goals on them and millennium allows you to do that mevo allows you to do that most tools do not allow you to set goals on these growth indicators uh... both at the team level and at the individual level millennium allows it how many of you in this one this one usually makes me sad jen i have to win ten thirty good how many of you use the goal setting in mevo or millennium see why it makes me sad one and he kind of went like this which means he doesn't have a culture around the goals yet but he said now that's good but it's not unusual so what happens is you you get a tool right whether it's millennium mevo or whatever tool you're using and you get going and you get a little complacent it's running the front desk you're bringing up sales things are good i can show you why you should be using goals in millennium so i'm gonna switch over to millennium quick well before we do that this is the m a two hundred report the m a two hundred report is under analytical reports m a two hundred it's my favorite report in all millennium it allows you on one sheet of paper analyze the department and on the next sheet of paper analyze the individual so you can sit there with the department sheet of paper that says here's the average ticket the client retention the frequency of visit of the salon area of our business and susie susie's a front desk bill of the stylist uh... here is where you're at and it's amazing so imagine you've got what if show them where they can go and you've got uh... the m a two hundred to show them where they're at uh... and where they're at compared to the department that's why i love this so it's got all it's got your hours work your productivity you're on the left quadrant here you've got your service sales your take-home or retail sales your percent of clients buying retail and if you scroll down this is uh... bless you this is where i love you know one of the reasons i love this report if you scroll down number one you get some eye candy graphs to show where they're going where they're trending on service and retail but above that you've got your attention to see a visit and pre-book so retention there uh... they're at uh... sixty seven percent a little and this is real data so this person's a little under the average average is seventy percent they're sixty seven new client service new client retentions at seventy one percent which is really great uh... the core clients uh... there's a thing uh... uh... right here that nine fifty seven it's something that uh... we kind of created it never existed before core clients is the difference between your retained repeat clients and your retained new clients that's that little indicator that i told you about of whether you're trending up or down on how many clients are going to have and it's projected out a year so let me explain that so the repeat client services one thousand one hundred and ten the new client services two hundred ninety eight the new call the repeat clients retained is seven hundred forty four and the new clients retained is two thirteen what we do is we take the repeat retain seventy seven forty four we added to the new retain two thirteen and we end up with nine hundred fifty seven that's that core client number a lot of people call in what is core clients it's just your repeat retained plus your new retained and then what i do when i'm consulting with people as i check that number against the current repeat client number so one thousand one hundred and ten are my current repeat guests my core clients is nine hundred fifty seven am i trending up or trending down over the next year there's a thousand right now and i'm gonna end up at nine hundred and fifty seven i'm trending down now the good news is i'm barely trending down there's times where i i'll look at someone's data and they might be at a thousand one hundred and ten it'll say that the core clients is seven hundred meaning you're gonna lose three hundred clients if everything stays the same and you don't fix something meaning i'm probably losing more repeat guests than i'm bringing in of new guests so we need to fix that we need to figure out how to get new more new guests in and more importantly fixed retention now we happen to see here that their retention rate is great for the below that is average frequency of visits at seven point five seven very good so this is i can be for an owner right it's every one sheet of paper everything you need uh... what was one question here for so her question was one that you run this report is as well how many visits do you expect somebody to come in to be considered retained and she said she plugs in six i plug in all different kinds of numbers now i would not six would be the one of the last ones i do six is where you want them to be what's gonna happen is your retention numbers are gonna be super low and and it really doesn't mean your retention it's kind of a little bit of a misnomer it's not that your retention is really low what it's showing you is what percentage of the people are really coming in six times i like to put in three the reason i like three is uh... some people put four were at least every ninety days they're coming in for color or something i like to error towards that you know what might not be the frequency i want but if they're coming in at least three times i still consider them a repeat guest just a guest that i need to work on the frequency so i put three threes the one that i use as my base but then i will run the report for four five or six because that's also when i rerun the report at those numbers i'm gonna get to see kind of what that other report was telling me remember goes out six visits i can kind of go okay well i'm at sixty seven percent on three visits then you change that to four and that goes to fifty percent then i change it to five it goes to forty percent then i change it to six how many of my guests are actually repeat guests are actually coming in six times and all of a sudden that drops to thirty five percent so i like doing that but if you use it as a base for dialogue with the employees i do it at three because you're showing them hey i'm erroring towards helping you here i'm giving you the you know i want that number to be high i wanted to be at least at sixty seven seventy percent uh... but we're only basing on three visit so it's very attainable to hit seventy percent if you do six i guarantee yours is probably in the forty percent range or thirty percent range and you're really not measuring true retention you read you're measuring how what your best what percent of my clients are my best clients they come in six times a year love this report run it now again be honest how many of you have seen this report before that makes me feel a little better at least half of you okay so that's good this is if you run one report for your dialogue with your staff let it be this one m a m a so it's under analytical reports so when you go into your reports it's under analytical and it's the m a two hundred right there and the other one that i talked about new client retention is the m a two ten i didn't have the number it's two below that new client retention by visit the m a two ten run that one and again you'll smile not smile you might frown but then smile because you then you'll know what i know i know what i'm talking about and i haven't seen your data when you see eight to fifteen percent new client retention by the sixth visit you gotta keep going here uh... so now let's talk about goals so typically when a salon sets goals it's unrevenant we're gonna try to hit a million this year we're gonna try to hit seven hundred fifty thousand we're trying to hit two million and again that's good and even my company we set those goals but it doesn't tell you how you're gonna get there and those growth indicators do so i think it's important even the salon level to set your revenue goal but also to set the goal what is our goal on pre-booked percentage what is our goal on new client retention what is our goal on uh... even gift card sales and things like that so so typically you'll set it on uh... service revenue retail revenue pre-book percentage frequency visit average ticket and client retention if you set goals just on those six or seven things that's all you need anything more than seven data points is usually too much you can't focus on that many things as a matter of fact when you leave here what i would prefer is that you pick two of those things to really focus in on so and one of them should be pre-book one of them should be frequency visit and the other one might be average ticket it might be retention if you think you have a problem after you run reports but start with just a couple but uh... millennium is gonna allow you to add me but will allow you to set uh... goals on all these things uh... even set goals on inventory value when you're in millennium in the team goal screen it actually let you set a goal and actually see your past history of inventory value there's so many salons i go into where you have fifteen thousand dollars worth of inventory in stock and that's just dead money right if you're not turning that every six to eight weeks that's just money sitting there collecting dust so you should have a goal or set a goal with your front desk to say listen we want to try to maintain in the typical salon it's eight to ten thousand dollars of uh... either backboard and or inventory and so what's great about the goal screen is you can pop in there and see oh where were we at in december oh wow we hit fifteen thousand because it creeps up on you that eight becomes ten becomes eleven then twelve and then you have a uh... a good month and maybe it drops back down to eleven and then you have a couple bad months of retail sales and now it's at fifteen thousand and you're still ordering and you don't even realize you're putting more what i call dead money into that closet or back room knowing what your inventory value is is important to this plenty of ways in millennium to do that i'll touch on a couple all together here at gift card sales setting goals for gift card revenue what i love about gift cards uh... is a couple different things one is it's money that comes in today that guarantees me at some point or at least seventy percent of those people are going to come back to my salon uh... the other thing is is gift cards generate what typically a person buys a gift card is for who somebody else an employee a co-worker a friend so now all the sudden you're generating new clients with those gift cards to typically they're not buying them for themselves uh... they might buy them for family members but a lot of times they're buying it for somebody a friend or somebody that may be not even come that may not even come to the salon so gift card uh... is a great way to do that and millennium evo all in even competing products have really good uh... gift card tracking and and real simple ways to handle gift cards uh... so even now online booking setting goals for uh... it's ways to even set goals on how many people we want to try to encourage the online book all we're only at twenty employees booking online but now we're fifty our goal is by the end of the year to get to four hundred people booking online you can actually set goals on these things as well so before going to the individual let me just pop into millennium again and i'm just gonna go up here again we gotta keep moving here i want to make sure we get to cover everything but i'm gonna go under just to show you how easy this is and hopefully make you feel terrible that you're not using it when you go to management team goals uh... this is super tiny i don't know why but i'll zoom in on it in a second when i go to management team goals stretch that out so we can see more months okay that's the whole year uh... what i love about this screen even if you've never set a goal go into millennium go to team goals go to last year now in this data i think that there's no data until you get to two twenty twelve but and then you click this button down here called show actuals what's amazing about that is when you hit show actuals now all these data elements that you could have been setting goals on that you didn't it's gonna tell you what they are to me this is probably the coolest part of millennium outside of report you would have to probably write run ten or twelve reports to get what this is giving you in one screen it's telling me by month what i did in retail uh... what i did in service gift card packages memberships tanning service per hour service per hour per provider percent services clients purchasing retail retail average ticket all these things if you don't know where you have to go to team goal show actuals there it is you don't have to go run twenty reports here it is and now and this is where i said i'll hopefully make you feel bad so so we're gonna come into we're gonna go to twenty thirteen and i have no goals this is what your screens are gonna look like you told me you didn't do it so watch why you should feel bad and why when you go back this week and you have millennium you go in and you set goals because it's even got the knowledge to do the seasonality for you so i go in here and i change it to twenty thirteen you'll be on twenty fifteen i just don't have data passed twenty twelve some in twenty thirteen there's no goal set i go in there and i i click on uh... edit don't edit my goals and i touch for instance service and now i come down here to auto goals and i say we're hoping to grow fifteen percent this year it will by seasonality set all your month goals for you and it's done in thirty seconds you can set your whole year retail service and look like a genius like you sat there through the weekend millennium did it for you so that's why you know i encourage you guys to watch our webinars go to the experience there's so much in the tools again even if you're not using millennium there's so much in your tools that you're not using so make a commitment this year to kinda really go after that stuff like i said whether you're big or not uh... you can dream big and you can actually use the tools and look big and and and what i love about this is it your time is valuable invest thirty seconds a minute and you've got your retail and service goals and it's smart enough because it's looking at last year so it knows that december is more busy than june so it's actually going to take that fifteen percent goal you want and figure out each month how to do that it's really cool how many of you feel bad that you've never done goals now uh... good yeah yeah this you know i'm really proud of what millennium is this is the poll Mitchell edition but uh... you know obviously we have several uh... versions of millennium they're basically the same just wrapped differently but we're really proud of what the product is and you know even as we build me though i go back to millennium or bob goes back to his salon and millennium and it's like this tool just does everything you needed to do yes we do uh... at the experience we do uh... front desk class called front desk professional uh... it's usually one of the senior people myself bob teaching this class because we're just so passionate about the front desk just about training for the front desk we also have recorded webinars so definitely reach out to tech support and find out how many webinar webinar credit what did i say that was funny it wasn't webinar it sounded funny but how many webinar credit credits you have uh... and they can actually watch it in their convenience so i've personally done i believe they've recorded the webinar of me doing front desk professional part of it is just one-on-one training to which you can also uh... get uh... we sell training packages at very nominal fee where they connect to them over the screen uh... what would you guys use go to meeting or okay so the webinars are free so there's hundreds of them up there so uh... definitely will be something there and then if you want the one-on-one they can connect and actually go through your data with them and a lot of times it's just uh... training them to pay attention to what's popping up or for instance you know you're looking at your retention rates and go well that doesn't seem right knowing that by appointment type i can say well don't count the wedding party because those people aren't going to come back you're always trying to set the system to encourage in favor of the front desk or the stylist to get the highest rating they can because you don't want them to be able to go well well that's because of that twenty-person wedding party we did on saturday and you're like oh yeah alright i'm going to keep going because they uh... we're going to go a little over the ten thirty because we started late and we're going to give you an extra break there so we'll just shorten that a little bit but uh... i want to make sure that i get to cover everything it's important to me now i'm not going to go into this uh... millennium to show individuals goal setting so even the individual screen in the uh... in millennium allows you to do the same thing we did for the team you go in there and you go to bill and you go to service and you go auto-goal boom there's this goal for this year fifteen percent growth all done for you so even individually you can set these goals very quickly now you do that under data employee info and there's a tab that says goals why are setting individual goals important and it's pretty obvious but when i first started the company bob was my first sale employee i never set goals for him and he used to come in and actually just ask me like you know how am i doing i'm like are you doing great and finally came in after a few months he's like every time i come in you say i'm doing great but you know great two months ago was eight sales and then i hit twenty sales last month and i'm still great like what's the goal you know i go set goals for me even if it's each month and it made me realize that they want goals and it totally changed the game uh... once i set those goals to see how they're doing now we're doing some really cool stuff in mevo too where it becomes more interactive uh... i'll show a couple screens on that but uh... where it actually goes to their cell phone and actually on the smartphone will come up and actually show trophy if they hit a goal so some really fun things that i think they're gonna really change the industry in the way that you set goals setting goals are important and again not just revenue goals it's the goals around the growth indicators uh... at a minimum what do you think we should set how are so goals at a minimum annual quarterly monthly weekly daily what's the minimum like if you don't have time to set everything what you think would be the right minimum goals to set no but i'm saying frequency you know once a year quarterly monthly quarterly month my feeling is month quarterly if you're not doing it quarterly still great millennium is going to help you track it so if you are using one yeah so then i would do monthly because it's going to track it monthly for you but if you're not using millennium and you're not using goals yet quarterly is still fine at a minimum it should be in my opinion especially if you're using a tool that tracks it that way monthly now the ultimate goal and where we're going with mevo and where you should even translate your monthly goals down to is what the ultimate goal would be day i've seen some of the best salons know exactly what they need to do that day coming into it and then there's a report in millennium called estimated sales okay there's a report in millennium called estimated sales under appointment reports and it'll estimate based on the appointment book how much you're going to do that week that day so you actually come in and know oh we're at we're at twelve hundred dollars our goal is twenty two hundred so we have a thousand dollars we need to make up and they know that coming into it so um... so knowing daily even at the individual level is the ultimate thing that you would try to do so even if you knew that they needed to do ten thousand dollars that month you translate that to twenty five hundred a week and if it's five days a week at least five hundred dollars each day in sales because that gives me something that i can do today so if i look and see it i'm at three hundred fifty dollars i know i'm a hundred and fifty short so how can we fill that book in and if you have a front desk professional that knows what they're doing or even a stylus that might have a gap in their time there are so many tools in millennium where you can set a text message in email or just pick up the phone and fill up their books so if they saw from one to three they're empty what i love to see is a front desk that's churning not just waiting for that next person to come up and get rung up or the phone to ring they're picking up the phone and going okay running a report in millennium called the client recall listing client recall listing says tell me anybody doing for services today or this week that don't have an appointment book gives you the playlist with the phone number start going down the list and fill your day appointment recall report is you guys going nuts on that one it's called appointment recall report and it's under what report category let me show you some see this button here called intelatext if you hit that i don't remember all the reports all i know is the word recalls in it so you go to this text area and i'm just gonna type recall there's the reports so the aq zero seven zero appointment recall listing uh... i click that little button right up here it looks like a text box with an arrow right here it's called intelatext it allows you just to type what you're looking for and it finds it because i can never remember where the reports are either so if you remember the m a two hundred remember how the word retention in it remember how the word recall in it you just type that text it'll help you find reports there's four hundred plus reports of millennium use that use that yes very good point so what she's saying is in the service screen when you set up a service one of the things it says is how often does this service need to get uh... done so say for a mince haircut you put four weeks for a woman's haircut you might put four to six weeks whatever for a single process color might be eight weeks or whatever it is she's correct so for the recall report to work you need to go through your services and make sure that you've got frequencies in there that make the most sense and then the recall report will work at what'll do is it'll say okay uh... and you can even with the recall report that's great is you can actually decide what service category to focus on maybe you look and see that the nail departments really needs uh... to fill up so you you select nails as the category now it's going to try to fill up uh... bring back people that are doing for nails right or color you know what i tell people on and i've seen uh... some of the top salons do is they'll start with color that's the easiest thing to get people in uh... they're already they call it chemically addicted or whatever to you and also it's a high dollar service so what they'll do is they'll select color as a category when this week boom there's a list of sixty people start calling start calling them there's a column that it says future appointment so you look for the ones that are blank means they have no appointment on the book if they do have an appointment on the book it'll show you the the date the future date and you can check whether it's that color or not actually if it was the color wouldn't have shown up recall report i call up the front desk playlist you run that and it's like amazing phone number everything start calling people and you just watch the book fill up i went to a salon in morristown new jersey couple months ago he's got wanted to raise prices and increase marketing i left there he didn't raise prices he didn't increase marketing he started pre-booking and he ran the recall report when i showed him this report is like you've got to be kidding me's been using my software for eighteen years is that you have got to be kidding me and there's the list so he started doing that actually uh... his wife started making the phone calls as we continued to uh... do our consultation work whatever and he did following day i think he was only like forty percent book by the time i left he was already booking two days out so it's it's a great great feature so individual goal-setting told you that you do it millennium super easy and you do it around these growth indicators too what your goal on pre-book what your goal on frequency visit what your goal on average ticket not just revenue i did throw a picture in there of what we did in mevo uh... just to show you that we're really trying to be cutting edge and we're continuing to try to evolve ourselves and this is one of the screens where it actually has for the break room uh... they're called leaderboards so they actually see where they rank on average ticket where they rank on pre-book right you can have it showing in the break room or and when they hit their goals it actually goes to their android phone their iphone and shows in the badge they just got because they hit the retail go for the month so we're doing some very exciting things uh... in mevo and again part of this uh... day this morning that we're spending with you you're gonna learn from me you're gonna hear from some real world stuff from that back and then we've got uh... system set up so afterwards if you've got time you're not starving although we have some snacks you can go back and it's a hey show me a little mevo or i have this question on uh... millennium or show me that recall report john was talking about so definitely encourage you to do that so i just gave you the one of the best strategies for filling your book up every day and that's the recall report it's also just human intuition of looking at the appointment book and having a front desk that uses their head and looks and says wow for whatever reason bill is really not busy at all this afternoon i'm gonna now run the recall report for only bills clients start to fill up his book and and that relationship there's a lot of times what the relationship between stylus in the front desk a lot of times unless their buddies is like this right they screw up their appointments you know and there's a there's a love hate there for sure and there's definitely trust issues but when that front desk starts to fill up bills afternoon and do these things that are more proactive definitely feels that relationship a lot and because they're pre-booking in things there's not as many phone calls coming into the front desk so when i pre-book then i'm also not answering as many phone calls so that i can do some more of these proactive things i actually tell salons if you don't have a front desk professional in all the stylus and i don't care whether you're four-chair salon or two-chair salon if you don't have a front desk at all uh... i strongly encourage you to do it but only once you understand the tool and how you can use it because if you bring somebody in for let's even say ten dollars an hour in eight hours you're paying him eighty dollars if they do just a couple things that i've showed you they're gonna make you eighty dollars an hour they're gonna make book six or seven people for fifty dollar services and bring in three hundred fifty dollars let's say in one day uh... so that as long as you don't have them just there and it's also for customer services just much easier for the ring out process and taking an appointment so uh... so if you don't have full-time front desk professionals i would encourage it but again only after you really understand how they can use the tool and you set them up for success on how to really help the salon and they will they're a money profit center not an expense when you do it right so i always push that client loyalty how many of you use client loyalty in millennium oh that's good a few of you the great thing about the client loyalty is you can set up a points ratio i like to use a thousand points equal a dollar you can do whatever you want the reason i do a thousand points equal a dollar if they have twenty two thousand points they have twenty two dollars real simple to figure out bob wanted to do a hundred points equal a dollar i said go ahead and do it but again then once you get to a certain number it's really kind of hard to back into the math exactly how many points that is and how many dollars it is i like a thousand points equal dollar and to me it sounds it sounds better you can determine who can get points you can actually go into the you know when you created a an employee profile it also creates a client profile right so john's one of your employees and you create that employee profile it creates a john client right so that you can ring me up for services and it knows that i'm an employee and automatically applies employee discounts well guess what i'm gonna turn off gets points or allow points on john the client because you're really an employee funny story about that matt scutter works for me for over twelve thirteen fourteen years and he goes to bob salon and bob finds out that matt's redeem so bob gives him half price on everything but then he finds out matt's showing up and using points so he's like scutter really really he's like you don't get any free haircuts and stuff after i give you fifty percent off so bob hadn't turned off the the fact that matt could accumulate points so if you are using the point system make sure you go into your clients that are employees and turn off at the top of the screen it says allow points turn it off makes no sense to give employees points if you give them a discount uh... and you can also determine which services it applies to so you have a lot of control over the point system so i encourage you to check it out uh... i call these a no-brainer points options points for pre-booking a new client i like giving a lot of points on that one because i'm encouraging that guest to come back and if you pre-book i'm gonna give you enough points that when you come back up you might be able to buy a free bottle of shampoo but the real great thing about the point system is its transaction based meaning if they pre-book but they cancel their appointment they don't get any points they actually have to get rung up for that service to generate the points so again i'm always trying to think of why an owner or why uh... stylist or why anybody would not want to use this what are the scary things that could happen so i i my job is to try to figure out some of those things i give like ten thousand points for a new client that pre-book so they have enough points loaded into the system on their second visit so they can get a shampoo or at least feel like wow i'm loyal now because i've got ten thousand points already i like giving points for pre-booking on existing clients and that's only about a thousand points if you do a thousand points equal a dollar i'm willing to kick them a dollar discount for leaving with their next appointment and again they only get that dollar if that pre-booked appointment is rung up if they cancel it they don't get it and then the third one is for referring another client fifteen thousand points i mean i want to encourage people to bring other people into the salon and it's worth fifteen dollars for a new client to come in because it's really not fifteen dollars is it if they bought product with that it's really seven dollars and fifty cents because you're paying seven fifty and selling it for fifteen so it's really only costing you half of those points so i like front loading it the whole idea the worst point systems out there in my mind are ones that just get points for every dollar spent now in millennium you can do that and i even say go ahead and do that but if you give such a small amount it doesn't really change things much the real things you want to do are influence behaviors that they weren't doing before the point system so i want to encourage pre-booking i want to encourage new referrals i want to encourage trying a new service those are the things that i give uh... large point amounts for it so what are concerns about i'm gonna go five more minutes jen what are what are employee concern it's really about the employees don't wait a minute if you're gonna let them pay for things in points you're not going to pay me that's the number one concern about the point system on the police side so the net next question is what's the biggest concern for an owner given away services wait so they accumulate these points and they come in and get a haircut and they get it for free where they get it for fifty percent off what i explained people so those are the two things the employee worrying about not getting paid uh... and the owner going i'm gonna give away the shop so the right thing to do is to really analyze this point system and make sure that you're doing it right if you do it right you can't go wrong especially with the way we did it millennium because we're doing it in a way around these growth indicators we're increasing the average ticket or they're not getting points they're buying retail or they're not getting points they're pre-booking or they're not getting points they're they're referring clients they're doing these things that help you grow so let's just say that you gave me fifteen thousand points for a new client referral and it's a forty five dollar haircut i give you three new clients within a year and i finally accumulate that forty five thousand points and that next service is free for me are you okay with that you've got three new guests hopefully coming in five times a year those three guests times five is fifteen visits let's just say that it's a forty dollar ticket i just brought in six hundred dollars every year year-over-year to your business and you're giving me a free haircut that free haircut is costing you uh... forty five let's say that uh... twenty dollars to the stylist twenty dollars for three new guests so to me if you set it up right and you see somebody redeeming and getting something for free in your mind you should be like awesome this thing's working because they gave me something far more valuable than the points or the free haircut they're getting the other thing i encourage for the people with the point system allow them to redeem the points for whole units of something you don't want to come in and go oh you know i'm gonna put the tip on my points oh i'm coming i'm gonna buy this twelve dollar shampoo i have three dollars and fifty cents in points so redeem those you know three hundred fifty points or three thousand five hundred points towards the shampoo it's a nightmare you don't want to deal with it so what i tell people is in your point system just put in there must be redeemed towards whole units of service or retail now actually going to this and say okay you want to increase influence client behaviors that's what we talked about so should it be redeemable for services only retail only gift card what i tell people it's up to you i honestly if the system's working i don't care what they redeem it for if they want to come in and say i've got fifty dollars worth of points i want a fifty dollar gift card hello i'm happy because you're gonna give that fifty dollar gift card to somebody that doesn't come here i don't have a problem given points let them use points for retail they want to use it for service now there are some people points are only redeemable towards retail because they're trying to you know that year they're trying to build retail sales you know get people trying the retail i'm fine with that but there are some people like well i don't want to let them buy gift cards with it i don't want to buy package series and i don't want them to use it for this and in my head i'm like well then you don't trust your own point system yet because if you really set it up right you don't care what they're using it for you want them you want the system to work and for the system to work they need to redeem they want you want them getting taken at forty five thousand dollar forty five thousand points down to zero again and starting over and trying to get more referrals and so i encourage you to allow those points to be used on anything other than a tip but i would allow it to be used for anything but in whole units fifty dollar gift card a haircut a bottle of shampoo but no nickel in diving in the most important thing about a loyalty system the best one there's a whole culture built around it so i uh... let me just use an example i want to this uh... uh... place yesterday with the owner hector of here and it's a beer garden place or build world of beers or something like that so we want to watch the game and they had the most amazing a loyalty system their whole chalkboards had a list of who had two thousand points in their the person's name hector he had to try like three different beers he wouldn't let me pay for his beer because he wanted to be able to get his points i'm like you're kidding me so i i i i still bought his beers but i had to get him cash because you want to use his card so that he got the points the system's working but it's really amazing it showed up on uh... his phone so you had three hundred fourteen loyalty points he's gained thirteen badges this is some of the stuff we're doing in mevo now where you can kind of see that he tried a german beer then he tried a whatever beer the whole you couldn't talk to an employee there that didn't understand this system inside and out you look everywhere and it's about the system you go online it's about the membership you go and it's a whole culture where point systems fail is when you create this point system nobody understands not even the client you don't advertise or do you have a little card at the front desk that's not the way to do it the way to do it is if you're gonna embrace this and you're really trying to increase visits and you're trying to do the things we're talking about your website should talk about it the stylist should be able to talk off the top of the head about the importance of the point system you know what what can i redeem it towards and how do these points work and they should be able to answer it and they should love it and encourage using it because they don't they're they see that it helps their business now what else makes a point system fail and this freaks people out i don't agree with paying an employee less for points and there are some people that do it and millennium allows you to do it i don't like it i put it there because there's people that are smarter and override me i'm the developer and i said okay i understand we'll create it so you can pay them maybe half what they would have gotten on commission but am i going to be pushing that point system when i know i'm gonna make less no if i set up the system right and they and they're getting a forty five dollar haircut free as an owner do i care that i still have to pay john twenty dollars no because i understand what forty five thousand points brings my business so forward to work it's got to be a culture website front desk understands that employees understand it everybody's loving it and they and uh... and and we're happy when we see clients using it because it means the system's working they're gonna pull a plug on me in a second marketing all i really want to talk about in marketing is a lot of people don't realize in millennium we have the ability baked in uh... using constant contact uh... to actually uh... create your own strategy so you should do some minimal ones like birthday automatically go out each month you can set up on miss you ninety days somebody hasn't been there ninety days automatically send an email so these things that you think you have to use outside companies for or marketing company are built in the millennium it's under marketing email campaigns just go in there it lets you set up your own client selection no birthday this month or hasn't been in ninety days or has purchased retail you want to do promotion so i want to send it to people that buy retail and have been in in the last ninety days all these things you can do in millennium uh... it's right there it's easy to do we have millennium mail it's called it automatically sends the mail out if you do it that way or you can use constant contact another thing that you can do i like to do if you just pick a few you send out the birthday ones you send out the miss you because they haven't been in ninety days i like sending out a new client welcome i like sending out a new client welcome no future appointment right that one down new client welcome no future appointment client walked out the door i want to welcome them but i want to recognize that they didn't book an appointment there's just a checkbox in the client selection screen that says no future appointment then what it'll do is segment okay out of a hundred guests there's forty that walked out without an appointment and then at the bottom of that email i'm gonna welcome them and i'm gonna say and we did notice you haven't booked your next appointment click here to visit our online booking site twenty four hours a day right so you get your online booking going that millennium that you have in millennium and you put a link to it so now john who has an appointment is going to get a welcome to elicium salon gen who has an appointment uh... uh... i'm sorry came in as a new guest but doesn't have an appointment is going to get welcome to elicium salon we notice you haven't booked your next appointment we'd love to uh... take care of your next service click here anytime twenty four hours a day to book your next appointment so those types of things simple you set it up takes a few minutes and you forget about it that schedules itself it does it now the other thing that you can do uh... is used uh... demand force is another partner that we have that's from into it and they actually handle all this for you they kind of just you go through a little set up with them it's you know depending on the size of your salon it's anywhere from two hundred fifty to four hundred dollars a month but then they give you a report showing all the revenue that they help generate and all the things that happen uh... and a lot of times you're seeing yeah i paid two hundred fifty or three hundred dollars but brought in twenty five hundred dollars in revenue so it's like okay i'm okay with that those are some options that you have through us quickly online booking if you're not doing it anymore clients expected if you don't have a turn on online booking in millennium or mebo do it clients are expecting that to work seventy percent of your bookings will come from a smart phone and we have a smart phone version of our online booking that has a whole nother field it's really easy one-finger way to to book appointments millennium e-gift something we launched a year ago put a little link on your website you can sell gift cards twenty four hours a day and it actually goes right into millennium show up the next day and it shows you there's six gift cards sold so uh... uh... very reasonable uh... uh... again you can talk to the sales people i don't know exactly uh... uh... there's something called web openings you guys should check out that we also offer through a third party and it'll actually show up in your face book and other things of a last-minute opening so that's another way to encourage people uh... in the afternoon to go on there and find openings and select those appointments uh... also demand force will actually do some automation that way to how many of you use millennium go yet you know what it costs it's an iPad uh... tool for millennium you guys should check it out now we uh... just came out with a new release it's coming out in two weeks that uh... it's rock solid and you can see your point book you can read book appointments you can look up client formula you can look up client history on an iPad can we all afford free yes me too i love free and the next guy coming up free salon education dot com how much does that cost perfect perfect guess it is iPad only yeah iPad only uh... the new stuff we're doing with mevo is both because we realize that people want but this one we built specifically for iPad uh... okay so that we want you to look at that one of the thing i'm gonna talk about remote business so many people are like well you know what you know i know me was not ready for it yet but we want cloud this whole cloud thing is really been overdone you what you want is the stuff i talked about before that's going to grow your business cloud is fun and yeah you can do certain things on your phone and on an iPad but it's not necessarily going to grow your business i'm not saying it's not important but you know it's not going to take you from here to there but for the people that really want to access stuff twenty four hours a day at home on an iPad on an android on uh... whatever you want uh... remote business is part of millennium and a lot of people either didn't set it up or don't even realize they have it it'll give you access to your appointment book twenty four seven your goals your reports on an iPad panel everybody's like what see marketing marketing tees and jen i'm like you know you can't tell all the stuff that millennium can do in the cloud or on an iPad so we actually i'm teasing it because they actually just added a bunch of stuff to our website so people understand that but we need to do a better job communicating to you guys so that's been something we're pushing a lot and people realize do you know that you have remote business and so many people don't if you don't know what i'm talking about call tech support talk to these guys and say that you want to get up on remote business and then you can actually buy log in it'll honor the security you put in millennium so if i put in there that susie can log in but only see her column she logs in from home but only sees her column right as a manager i can go in and actually edit schedules on an iPad from home i want to see you guys you know you're part of the family or you're our clients i want to see you using all the stuff that we built over the last fifteen years into millennium and of course mevo is our new thing and i just you know everybody's hearing about it we're excited about it it's eye candy it's sexy that's the appointment book has something called a combo bar we can actually type haircut with john or jen tomorrow or thursday in the appointment book just morphs to those columns and it's it's pretty sick the stuff we're doing when you log into mevo you determine all the kpi's and all the key metrics that matter to you and based on who logs in it shows up up on front desk i see how many appointments are booked today uh... what the revenue is today if i'm a manager i see gift card sales i see retention i see the things that matter to me so all these dashboards you set up what matters to you here they're showing a prebook percentages at sixty five percent and what i wanted in mevo is you're not going to report mevo is built around the growth indicator so when you by virtue of using mevo it's showing you the the exact metrics uh... success center this whole thing about setting goals and getting this whole gamification of goals and making it fun this show some of the charms and gamification they can send each other carrying co-worker badges that you know whole staff will start to interact around goals and things that matter and uh... and it works on mobile devices too so so that's it i mean uh... those some of the charms these are all handmade by our graphics department graphics designers that's making it fun little charms you can say hey thanks for sweeping up my station and gift each other things uh... it's a lot of fun that's my time i want a little over but we started a little late we're going to only take about a five or ten minute break and then matt bex can come up and really talk about how to do some of this real world stuff in the salon which i think you're gonna love grab some coffee grab some to drink bathrooms are around the corner and we'll get going again but thank you