 Brought to you live from New Hope, Pennsylvania. It's the Matt Back Show. 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go! In this episode, we discussed buying your salon from your salon owner. We also discussed upgrades in beauty school. Very important. And what else did we talk about? Oh, separate bank accounts between your behind-the-chair needs and your salon needs. Where to put your dollars? In my pocket. Welcome to the Matt Back Show. This is our weekly podcast with Thad Bolanized and me. You didn't sound too excited. You're like, this is the Matt Back Show with Thad Bolanized and me. I feel like I don't know. You should be excited about yourself. That's a good call, Thad. I like that. Thank you guys so much for watching. This is episode whatever. I don't even know. But we'll just call it the Q&A part of the vlog for the week. I'm really excited to go through everybody's questions. Thank you for submitting those questions. If you want to submit a question to this show, best thing to do is to use the hashtag D Matt Back Show on anything social media. But if you definitely want me to see the answer, then you should go to FSE Social App. Yep, officially. FSE Social App. Go to fsesocial.com. You can download the app for your iPhone, your Android device. And you can start talking with all the hairdressers on there, posting questions, posting your work and getting involved in the community because it's really awesome. I'm really psyched for everybody that's on there. And actually a couple of questions from today came from this forum. And you can also watch the sibling rivalry of Drea and myself as to who's going to be number two on the top users. Yeah, Drea and Thad are fighting for who's the top user on the app. She doesn't know this yet, but... You know you're getting a like from either Drea or Thad if you post something on there. She doesn't know this yet, but I hit her computer and her phone. Oh, nice. Good job. All right, cool. So let's get into the questions. No more wasting time. First question. Pull up the thing. We only have a few questions today, but they're really good questions and kind of long questions. And we don't have a ton of time. So first one is if I'm going to open... This is from Lisa on our free salon education community. If I'm going to open a booth rental salon and operate one chair myself, should I have two separate accounts for the salon and my behind the chair needs? I feel like the behind the chair needs and the salon needs are one and the same. Yeah. But definitely have two separate accounts between those needs and your personal account. Yeah, because I mean you're going to be giving yourself a paycheck. No matter what the entire thing is your business. So like even though my salon is not a booth rental place, I still give myself a paycheck from the work that I do. So if I take clients all day Friday, I cut myself a check for the clients I did just like I would cut anybody else a check. And then so it is two separate accounts. I have my personal account and I have my business account, but I don't have two separate business accounts. There's no reason to do that. Even if it's booth rental, I don't think there's a reason to do that. Treat your booth rental as your business. Write yourself a check from your business and then put that in your personal and that's a legit way to go about it. Yep. Cool. That was easy. Sounds legit to me. Yep. All right. Next one. This is, I believe, let's keep it anonymous. I've decided she or he says, I've decided to ask my current owners if they'd sell me their business. I'd love to take it over. Do you have any suggestions on how to approach them? Is this brand new? I know. Right. Is it no secret that I aspire, or it is no secret that I aspire to be a salon owner and that, oh my gosh, I can't read this. It is no secret that I aspire to own a salon and there have been comments slash talks before, but not in a while. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Also, I love your salon gratitude website. So I can assess a few of those things, even the website. I was in the same situation. I worked here in this building for a couple years. I found myself being more involved in running the actual business side of this. The owner moved away. And so the opportunity approached and I just called him up and I said, this is what I have to offer you. I would like to buy your business and he was very grateful. I think this is a funny question. I think you just came up with a clever way of telling your story. I know, right? Because this question actually describes exactly what you did. Yeah, it is. I think it happens a lot. I think a lot of people, this is how salons either, this is that transition that you make. So you're either right now about to go work somewhere else, maybe go try to open your own, but it's harder to open your own than it is to buy somebody's that is already established. I was very lucky in the fact that I had already established my clientele here, so I didn't have to lose any of that. I had already taken over his clients because he moved away. So I had a book where even if I didn't hire, this was like my big thing at the beginning, even if I didn't hire anybody else, I could pay the rent here based on the hair that I did and still be okay. The business would be able to stay open. That gave me the freedom because as long as I can survive, I've never been afraid of like struggling because that's what part of business is. So now I'm not afraid to fire anyone and I don't say that in a weird way. It's just you need to be in a spot where you're not afraid because if you're afraid to fire people and you're afraid that your business is going to fail if you fire people, if you've set yourself up that way, then your business isn't going to be successful because everyone else is going to try to run it for you. So my big thing is try to buy the business if you can. The problem with salon owners is they overvalue their business because they don't realize that most of the time it's the salon owner that brings in all the money and then in most cases that's the busiest person and then the other people aren't as busy. So they're putting the value on their book and it's really the value of a salon for the most part unless it's a really profitable successful salon with employees and the owner isn't the main producer. The value is only in the equipment. That's true and I think that that assumption that their business is valued more goes back to the fact that a lot of salon owners are learning as they go. They didn't necessarily go to business school. This is their first run out of business. They're not necessarily CEOs from another company. They're learning about how to be a business owner as they go so they wouldn't know exactly what the value of their business is because they've never dealt with that. Exactly. So I would, to have somebody take a look at it you really need to know the inside of the business and understand that. And I think I overpaid for this business a little bit in the fact that it was my customers at that point. It had been my customers. But you know what? You don't want to underpay for it either because you're not there to rip anybody off. So just offer what you can. If they say yes then great. I think a lot of people think they're going to build up a business, sell it for a million dollars and then that's the retirement. I don't think that's the typical salon transaction. So just, you know, I would assess how many chairs it is. If you want to repost and ask me that question privately I would definitely assess, help you kind of assess that. But just look at the books. You need to understand the business before you put in the offer to buy it. I already knew this business. I knew we were writing the paychecks. We were the ones that weren't able to cash the paychecks. We knew everything about this business when we bought it. So you need to know the insides of it. All right. Hopefully that helps. And then our salon website. We actually use a company called Wix. Wix.com. And it's such an easy way to make a regular website. Like any hairdresser anywhere, any human being can make a website on Wix. It costs, there's a free version, but then for $9 a month you can have your own domain name. I think we pay maybe $15 a month for Wix. But it's literally the easiest thing you could possibly do. You don't have to know how to make a website. You just have to know how to kind of, they give you a template and then you add your pictures in and your menu. So it's really, really simple and affordable. All right. One of the last questions comes from, let me just make sure this isn't anonymous. No. It's Jason. Jason sent me a message on email. So that's pretty cool. I have a question from Matt. I'm a cosmetology student who has a steady flow of guests. And when I don't use my time to work on a mannequin at school we have a system designed to reward students who reach certain set of goals to move up in level. I reach the guest count and haircuts and colors but fall short on other categories such as referrals and add on treatments. How important are these levels to employers? How important are they to you? I feel that I am growing as a stylist regardless whether or not I move up in level and remain intensely passionate and excited about learning with each and every guest. Just curious also can students purchase products from the site at the professional cost? Referrals and add-ons are very important. They're basically how you grow and give yourself a bonus. So I would say that that is a hard yes that employers definitely look at those as positives. Here's what I'm going to tell you. Anything that you're ever going to do that seems more difficult than other things is probably what's going to make you more successful than most people. There's a point where people sit in a comfort zone and you can do cut and colors all day. You don't have to go hand out cards. You don't have to. There's a lot of things you don't have to do and you're still going to get customers but it's that little bit that you grow above and beyond where you're going to see that it's going to separate the successful hairdressers from the non-successful hairdressers. Add-ons are important. When are add-ons important? If you're booked all day then maybe an add-on isn't as important that day but if you have a few clients that day or if you're booked that day and you're trying to book other days or maybe two weeks from now you're not as busy then you have that busy book to offer add-on services that two weeks from now you can do on those people that you currently have that you're busy doing right now. There's a lot of... Everybody looks at what their day is today and then I love watching people on Facebook and it's like, oh I'm not busy today, shit. That's when they start worrying about it is the day that they're not busy. Add-ons are also great to make up lost revenue. So let's say you have a foil and a haircut and then you have a men's haircut following that. That men's haircut cancels, you add on a conditioning treatment you just made up that men's haircut. You didn't lose any money. You gained a lunch break? Maybe during that 10-15 minutes while the conditioning treatment is hanging out to put them underneath lights or something. I've always been a person that's very driven by my paycheck. So when I was in hair school if a client canceled I was like, hell yes now I can go do something else and even practicing. I would rather sit there and practice on a mannequin than deal with hair school, just whatever. But when I got into the real business of doing hair I realized that that relationship everything that you're doing with that guest is so important because you've got to bring value to a person. Every guest that sits in your chair you can't just do a cut and color on them because the more services that you add on to it the more value you're bringing to your situation and your relationship that you have with that person and so you're going to make them stay with you. Like that might have a guest where he just does a cut and color on and then they can't get in with that that day so they go somewhere else where they can get a cut and color. But if that's doing Olaplex and so he sold you on Olaplex and how much he loves it and your hair can't go without it and maybe a super silk and all these different services that you do different highlighting techniques now it makes somebody scared to go somewhere else they feel like if they ruin the relationship with that how are they going to find all these other things that they're used to getting. So add-on services not only are a boost in your paycheck or from an income standpoint but they're also great for relationship building as well. That also goes, you can double that with referrals because if you have clients that are so devoted to you that they're telling their friends and family to come to you they're less likely to leave you as well. True. True that. Mic drop. Mic drop. Alright cool so that is the podcast for today. We're going to do some hair. Thank you guys so much for watching. We enjoy the questions. Enjoy getting together every week. I would love to continue these conversations on the FSE social app. So go to the app store type in either just type in FSE social it will come up and that's pretty much it but you can get involved on the conversation with us there and you can watch the fight between Thad and Dreia. Right. Well they can't watch the fight. They'll just see the... They just see you popping up and down. Yeah or you can try to beat Thad and Dreia which would be even better. Or you can help me beat Dreia by A, conversing with me or B, help me hide Dreia's electronics so she can't use them. Yeah. Alright cool so you can follow Thad. Thad Bolognais. Thad Bolognais or everything. I think I'm just Thad Bolognais on FSE. I don't know. Yeah. And find him on FSE. It's like my own cell phone number. I don't know. But we have a couple thousand hairdressers now and counting it's going up about 100, 200 a day. So I'm enjoying having everybody get on there and follow us everything at Free Salon Education and appreciate all the conversation you guys are making with us. Use hashtag TheMapBeckShow if you want to ask a question or post your questions on the forum app. Done. Got anything? I'm just Thaddeus Bolland on FSE. I looked at that. Okay cool. Thaddeus Bolland. Alright guys thank you so much for watching. We'll see you guys on the next show. Thanks.