Category Archives: Results

Measure Up!

17 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in Developing talent, Effectiveness, leadership, Management, Results

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If we worked together to take a snapshot of your salon’s culture, what would we find? If we examined the series of people, events, and decisions that led to your current situation, would we discover something planned and cultivated or something that, “just happened”? If you had it to do over—or better yet—if you were to be more proactive in the future, where would you start?

Lead by setting standards of performance.

I continue to find four key areas that we must proactively manage in order to drive a very large piece of our salon culture to ensure our long-term viability as an organization. Each of these areas must be a priority, they must be constantly explained, examined, and shared by every employee and manager, and they must be executed to a certain level of excellence. In other words, there must be standards of performance against which we all must measure up.

Revenue. Many, if not most, salons are not generating basic income-expense=profit/loss reports. Even fewer pay attention to them as fundamental decision making tools for planning their viable futures. I am not exaggerating: it would be better to redirect any/all money that you spend on coaching, consulting, and seminars each year and spend it on a bookkeeper every month. The two standards of performance we should work toward regarding revenue are:

  • Leadership: To understand and communicate the amount of revenue required to be profitable—down to a daily basis.
  • Team: To understand the share of revenue each person is directly (or indirectly) responsible to generate—down to a daily basis.

Technical Skills. This is the first thing it takes to make revenue. Our stylists, and other practitioners, must perform services if we expect our guests to pay us. All our schooling, apprenticing, and ongoing technical education must be in service to our technical skills. If you think about an assistant, recently graduated and licensed and newly hired, she wouldn’t claim to be a “stylist” just because she learned our shampoo bowl ritual. Similarly, we wouldn’t consider her a stylist if the only service she could perform were a blow out. Two standards of performance we should work toward are:

  • Breadth. To satisfy the broadest range of potential guests, in the most convenient way for them, every stylist should receive education to enable her to create a minimum set of cuts, colors, and styles. Then, with practice and eventual mastery, each of our stylists must be able to handle women’s short hair, women’s long hair, up-do’s, single process color, highlights, men’s short hair, and so on. The idea is to set a minimum performance standard around how many different types of looks each of our stylists can create.
  • Depth. This is about developing true mastery. Hearing about how to do a chin-length bob is different than attending a hands-on class. Attending the class is different than practicing on a mannequin, and that’s different than doing it for a model or a paying guest. Set a performance standard around the number and types of education, practice, and live performance each stylist must complete—and then measure his results on a consistent basis.

Guest Experience. This is the second thing it takes to generate revenue. In my opinion it is also the area that is talked about the most—with the least to back it up. Most salons I’ve worked with have a technical training calendar which they refer to as education. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guest experience or people skills training calendar. We need to set these standards of performance.

  • Leadership. Since it’s likely to be a new activity for us, the first thing we need to do is set a standard for how many guest experience and people skills classes we will conduct each and every month. The idea would be to start with one and then grow it to two, then three, etc. until we find an optimum number of “soft skills” training to balance and enrich our technical training.
  • Team. With virtually the same intent as our technical training, we set standards around how many types of classes each team member must complete in order to measure up to our people skills and guest experience expectations. The basics could be chosen from a list like: Intro to People Skills, Active Listening, Building Rapport, Making Conversation, and then move into experience stages such as Phones, Greeting and Check In, Shampoo Bowl, Consultations, and so on.

Personal Strengths and Development. Just because I’m writing doesn’t mean you’re reading. The same goes for setting performance standards—just because we set them doesn’t mean our team will take them seriously. This is hard work for everyone involved and it requires long-term commitment. The best way to start is by listening and communication not by dictating. I’ve always found that people are naturally motivated when they get to spend a great deal of time in areas where they feel strong. Let’s find out what those strengths are.

  • 1:1. One-on-one meetings are a must. They need to happen 3-4 times a month, last at least 30 minutes, and be guided by an agenda. Among other things, the agenda must include time for us to listen to, and get to know, each of our team members. Find out where they believe they are strong and compare that to your observations—and to the standards of performance you have set for the organization.
  • Development Plans. Listening and learning allows us as leaders to choose the best path for improving our team members’ performance from where it is to where it needs to be. Whether that’s revenue generation, technical skills, soft skills, or organizational behavior, try to avoid “fixing” everyone’s weaknesses, rather, start from a position of strength and build them up until their comfort zone expands and their improving confidence inspires them to take on new challenges.

 

Communication Plan

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Concentrating effort, Continuous improvement, Effectiveness, leadership, Management, Results

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In an earlier post we explored the definitions of Leadership, Management, and People Skills. Among all the people skills, e.g., self-control, social awareness, and problem solving; communication is by far the most important. After all, what good is a leader, manager, or employee if s/he can’t convey basic information? As much as we may try we can’t read each other’s minds. That’s why communication is #1.

Information is the lifeblood of your organization. If information isn’t flowing in a regular, efficient, and predictable way you are starving your team of the very thing they need to adopt your values, purpose, and vision as their professional cause.

Here is a simple and effective way to set up communication within your organization.

Yearly. Once a year host a celebration for the entire team. Make it all about the goals you’ve achieved together, the goals and priorities for the new year, and a time to strengthen your emotional bonds. Whether your celebration feels like a business function or a flat-out party is up to you.

Quarterly. Every three months bring the team together in a business or semi-business atmosphere to discuss this year’s progress toward your goals and priorities—including financials. Spend 2-5 hours together sharing information, improving your plans, and figuring out how to do things better. Document your take-aways.

Monthly. This is the classic rhythm to conduct one-on-ones. It’s also the best time to share financial, operational, personnel, and educational details. Celebrate outstanding performance. Think: client champion of the month and major projects completed, as well as upcoming promotional events, etc.

Weekly. Start every week with 45-60 minutes of group discussion about your book, employee schedules, promotions/events beginning or ending, and news that affects everyone. It’s hard to get the whole crew together once a week so consider doing a conference call using a free call-in service.

Daily. Start everyday with a team huddle. Talk about your book, who’s working, and share any last-minute reminders. Use the daily huddle to help the whole team get into their client service mindsets. Feedback on performance should happen daily—as close to the example as possible. All good, of course.

Constantly. It used to be the only way to post timely information was on a white board. Use technology to communicate in real time, make documents available to anyone day or night, or start a new discussion. Dropbox and Google Drive are great for storing and sharing documents. Consider how social media like Facebook Groups and messaging apps can help with real time communication.

Leadership is a Verb

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Concentrating effort, Contribution, Effectiveness, leadership, Management, Results

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I searched amazon.com for “books on leadership” and it returned 21,000+ hits. I googled “leadership seminars” and received 76 million+ results.

Apparently, people buy products and services with the word “leadership” in them. It’s a lot like how the word “natural” or the word “organic” helps companies sell food (and haircare products). We know that we want those things even if we’re not precisely sure what they are.

Many of my clients struggle to develop a shared understanding of what leaders are supposed to do versus what managers are supposed to do. Here is how I define these terms simply and usefully. Please give this some consideration—it may save you a lot of reading!

MANAGEMENT

The manager’s job is to create results. When J. B. Say defined management in 1767 he said, “The manager is responsible for directing vision and resources toward greater results.” Of course, he’s talking about one person’s impact (a manager) on more than one other person (employees) in an organization.

LEADERSHIP

The leader’s job is to create priorities and then stimulate individuals and groups to take action. This definition tells us that “leader” is not a noun it’s a verb. In other words, a leader is not a special type of person. She or he engages in a special type of action, that is, pointing others in the right direction and stimulating them to pursue a certain end.

PEOPLE SKILLS

The ability to communicate, interact, and connect with individuals and groups. We all need people skills regardless if we are managers, a leaders, or followers.

STYLE

Leaders and Managers can do their jobs, using different styles, and almost any style can be successful. Prevalent misconceptions are that successful leaders have a particular style (e.g., they are charismatic) and that managers have a particular style (e.g., they are boring). The truth is that any style can work—as long as the person has the people skills to get others to work toward the organization’s vision, mission, and goals.

Instant MBA

19 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by in Branding, Concentrating effort, Customers, Management, Results, Shared values

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Printing Money
Every new salon is created with a “License to print money,” because the money making potential in our industry is virtually unlimited. To use your “license,” you need an activation key but only 5-10% of all salons know how to obtain it. What is this secret activation key? It is:

Knowing the difference between running your salon and managing your salon.

Here is how you can start managing your salon today.

Create a Customer

Every institution must create certain benefits. The role of business—your business—is to create a customer. No matter if you’re a creative, a geek, a hipster, or just a regular person, your only concern at work is delivering what your customers value. Everything else is either secondary or an outright distraction.

Communicate Your Vision

Your first priority as a leader is to constantly communicate and reinforce the values, purpose, and vision of your salon. The time you currently spend on everything else must come after you describe what you stand for, why you’re here, and the future you are creating.

Develop a Shared Understanding

If there is a trick between Running Your Salon and Managing Your Salon it is to create a shift in thinking from “I” to “We.” No one is exempt from this rule of management. If effort in your salon is individual, energies will be scattered. When effort is concentrated you will make a powerful impact together.

Understand Your Guests

Recognizing is not understanding. Know specifics for every guest. Name, age, significant other, children, visit frequency, likes/dislikes, recent issues or triumphs, satisfaction/trust level, income, job, upbringing, etc. To create a customer you must know who they are and why they want what they want.

Write Job Descriptions

Describe every job in writing and include at least: Job Title, Results, Measures, and Behaviors. Provide performance feedback on these topics during every one-on-one before addressing anything else.

Hire Good People

In addition to skill, talent, and artistic ability you need to identify, select, and retain good people. “Good” people have solid values, a strong work ethic, and good intentions. Remember, it is far easier to teach a good person how to be a better hairdresser than to teach a better hairdresser how to be a good person.

Train as Well as Educate

Continuing education is proven for success in our industry. What 90% of salon owners overlook is training employees to succeed in living out their values, sharing a common purpose, and creating a better future together through service to their guests. Model this behavior and communicate it too.

 

Art, Beauty, Love

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Concentrating effort, Continuous improvement, Contribution, Customer Experience, Customers, Developing talent, Results

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The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
-Aristotle

As part of The Beacon Program at #cosmoprofna you just experienced two days of what it feels like to be considered the future of our industry. Even though I was only privileged to sit in on a couple hours of your experience, the goodwill and concentrated effort of your PBA hosts, facilitator Geno Stampora, and speakers such as Jay Williams, showed me people putting everything they have into giving you a personal head start. When Geno shares his “Words to Live By,” or when Jay talks about “Significance, self-worth, and sense of belonging,” what you’re witnessing are two people doing their utter best to gift you a lifetime of experience so you can achieve your own riches, potential, and happiness.

With that in mind, this is what keeps coming back to me as I consider you and your bright futures.

ART

For many, art is the enduring nuclear reactor inside your heart that provides the endless source of energy and passion for our business. As you create your journey, stay closely connected to your artistic self. When people say, “Motivation and passion come from within,” accept it as an invitation to renew your connection to your art.

BEAUTY

It is useful to ask yourself, “What business am I in?” Some answer, “hair,” some will say “beauty,” and others feel it is, “The people business.” Regardless, for convenience we end up calling it the beauty business. Even though it does change, sometimes change comes slowly—too slowly in fact. Friends behind the chair were recently telling me about how in Europe hairdressers are considered “professionals” while here in the U.S. not so much. After much reflection, I think professionalism, motivation, and passion are cousins that come from the same place—inside each one of us. So, if you want to be seen as a professional, choose a professional role model and act like her until you become one too.

LOVE

I have enormous respect for how difficult it must be to be your absolute best for every client, every day, every month, year-in-and-year out. We are all human beings and we all get depleted. We have ups and downs and some of us even get burned out. Believe me when I tell you that clients can sense when you’re not feeling your best and it impacts their mood and experience in your salon and in your chair—and maybe the rest of their day. We each have to find our own little happy place where we go to get our minds right before seeing our next client. If you haven’t found yours yet, I humbly suggest love is the answer. If you can pause to love yourself, and see something to love in each one of your clients, you’ll be on your way to being your best for every client every time.

SO WHAT?

My hope is that among these 500+ words you take-away just three and let them run as a little script inside your head: Art, Beauty, Love. That’s all you really need to remember in order to succeed in your new, meaningful, and lucrative career.

What is Management?

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Branding, Concentrating effort, Continuous improvement, Contribution, Customers, Developing talent, Effectiveness, Management, Results, Shared values

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Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
Peter F. Drucker

Because few of us have had bosses who were trained managers, and because few of us have received specialized training in management, we tend to think management is some kind of gut-feel thing. In fact, there is much that is known about management as it has been defined, studied, and systematically improved over the past century. Management is endlessly fascinating and, at the same time, it is not rocket science. For our mutual benefit, and so we have a shorthand way of understanding what we’re talking about when we say “management,” here it is on one page. Again, thanks and props to Mr. Drucker.

ROLE OF BUSINESS

To create a customer.

ROLE OF PROFIT

To serve as validation that customer needs are being met.

ROLE OF THE EXECUTIVE/LEADER

To know the Purpose, Vision, and Values of an organization and to constantly communicate them.

ROLE OF THE MANAGER

To make our work productive and to help workers achieve results.

There is a lot of study and discussion about how our memory works. Authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman talk about the concept of “The availability heuristic.” Availability describes what’s happening when, “Something just ‘pops’ into our heads.” In the hustle-bustle of daily management, how we respond to (or lead) a situation is often determined by what pops into our heads. The results can be pretty random. Instead, I ask you to train your memory until the following model of how business works pops into your head. That will help you put things into perspective, help you lead for results, and solve situations in more effective ways. For every business situation you face it’s far better to rely on this model than to just wing it.

HOW BUSINESS “WORKS”

  • There is a customer need.
  • There is a better idea to satisfy the customer need.
  • Values, Purpose, and Vision concentrate the effort of multiple people.
  • An organization is formed to divide the work.
  • Each job is described so its contribution is clear.
  • People who share in the Values, Purpose, and Vision are hired.
  • Employees use self-control and contribution to guide the work they do and how they do it.
  • Customers are satisfied.
  • The business earns revenue, and eventually profit, as validation of its success.
  • The business shares their monetary and other success with employees.
  • The business invests so that meeting customer needs can continue.

Partner of the Quarter

09 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Customers, Management, Results, Shared values

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On a recent visit to a nationally known coffee shop this sign was prominently posted at the bar where the drinks are picked up,

Partner of the Quarter
 
2nd Quarter 2013
Presented to
Ashley Capitola*
 
Our Partners
 
We’re called partners
because it’s not just a job
it’s our passion.
Together we embrace diversity
to create a place where each of us
can be ourselves.
We always treat each other with
respect and dignity.
And we hold each other to that standard.
 

What do you think of this message? What do you think about placing it prominently within the retail space? What do you think customers see when they read this message?

I’ll give my opinions in a future post.

*Name changed for privacy.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

Can You Decide?

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Effectiveness, Results

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Executives make scores of decisions every day. Cumulatively, organizations make hundreds and thousands of decisions daily. How do you ensure the quality of your decision making measures up to your own high standards?

An earlier post explored how divergent opinions must be considered before the best decision can be reached. But your decision-making process must also be explicit if your decisions are to be efficient and effective—and subject to improvement. Drucker’s philosophy is that a specific decision-making process is essential. In summary, he calls for us to:

  • Make as few decisions as necessary. Many issues, when raised, have already been settled. Don’t waste time rehashing old decisions—unless there is new information or the context has changed. Many things that come up are just exceptions to decisions that have already been made. They don’t require new decisions so much as simple problem solving.
  • Before making a decision, establish what the decision must accomplish—including how it is to be measured and how stakeholders must be aligned for it to succeed.
  • Set aside enough time to make good decisions. Fast decisions are often bad ones.
  • Start with what’s right—not what’s acceptable—and realize many good decisions go against the grain and “The same old way.”
  • Convert decisions into action. No decision is a good decision until it has been fully implemented. Otherwise, it is just an intention.

Organizations large and small are prone to drifting. A small nascent organization is just as likely as a corporate behemoth to “fly by the seat of its pants, or rely on gut feel.” Implement a decision making process and you’re less likely to wake up one day with a mess on your hands wondering, “How did we come up with that?”

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

Where Goals Come From

06 Thursday Jun 2013

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It-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. How often do you finish your day and think, “What have I accomplished?” At the end of the month did you spend your time working on your objectives or something else entirely? Several years into your career does it all “add up”?

It is inevitable for you to lose control of your time. Daily operations steal your time and bias you toward what is, essentially, the past. Everyone wants something from you all the time. Your time is not your own and, tragically, you get a little hit of serotonin every time someone makes you feel like the business can’t live without you. But is this motion or is it progress; are you conflating the two?

Plan your work and work your plan is hardly new. In fact it may be so old that you’re bored with it. But, have you ever wondered about the proper foundation for your plan in the first place? If you’re after the right results, and you’re willing to pursue your goals, then where should goals come from? If you start from a blank sheet of paper each month, or quarter, or year you will inevitably end up back in the first paragraph somewhere.

The best place, really the only place, your goals can come from is from your strategic plan. The reason why you exist (Statement of Purpose). What it will look like when you achieve success (Vision). A three-to-five-year Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG/Mission). If everything you do is stubbornly grounded in these three founding statements then everything you do will concentrate effort rather than diffuse it. You won’t confuse motion with progress. And, you will achieve the right results more and more often.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved

An Outside Chance

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

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Executives are responsible for getting the right things done. Effectiveness means turning concepts into results and results are what happen on the outside of the business. But which results are the right results?

We know from Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman that:

Great Success=A little more talent + a lot of luck.

Let’s focus on the “Little more talent” side of the equation. Certainly, much of what ends up being the right results is a matter of luck—whether we think we’re in control or not. But for thepart we definitely can control we must compare our results to business goals. Otherwise, we are either flying blind or depending solely on blind luck—neither of which you’d probably argue in favor of during a presentation to your Board.

Right results will happen when effort is put toward your goals. Goals were originally set to execute your strategy. Your strategy was formed by thinking deeply about how to act on your aspirations. Your aspirations are what got you into business in the first place.

So, to become a great success increase your talent by investing in a well-conceived plan. Focus on it, test it, measure it, change it, and improve it after each iteration. As long as you’re working a plan that defines success on the outside—where your customers are—your luck will take care of itself.

Jim

Lucavìa
gojimlucas@lucavia.com
www.lucavia.com
(925) 980-7871

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© Copyright Jim Lucas 2007-2013 All Rights Reserved