If you ask me, “Why do my customers buy their professional hair care products from big box retail, drug stores, specialty retail, or Internet distribution channels instead of buying them from me?” I have a pretty simple answer.

The first purpose of any business is, “To create a customer.” Doing that successfully usually means:

• Precisely identifying your target customer
• Understanding her needs
• Having an insight into how to meet her needs better than the competition
• Putting the right product within reach, at the right time, in the right quantities, and at the right price with the right support.

The fact is you already understand this. Think about it. You already create customers for professional hair care services. You have a salon. You have a staff. You have a list of services with prices. You have clients. However imperfect it may be, you have figured out how to create a customer for a hair cut, a hair color, a blow out, and so on. My educated guess is that you spent a lot of time thinking and dreaming about owning a salon. You studied and trained for years. You had your ups and downs but you stuck with it. You thought of nothing else but “doing hair” for decades. Some people have thought about it their whole lives.

Well, as it turns out, retailers spend the same amount of time thinking about how to sell retail product to consumers. In fact, some of them have been doing it for generations and others have been doing it long after their companies’ founders retired or went to the “big box in the sky.” In other words, they got good at because they focused on it. And guess what? It makes your job harder. But, guess what else?

They have not made it impossible.