Starting a Hair Care and Beauty Salon Business
Starting a Hair Care and Beauty Salon Business.
Hair care and beauty salon business is actually a lucrative small business idea. Hair care is part of our daily life. We live in a society where everyone is conscious of how they look.
The way we take care of our hairs go a long way in determining our general outlook. Our hairs add to our attractiveness. There is no one whether young or old who will not require hair care service. If you should account for the amount you spend on the maintenance of your hair in a year, you will be amazed at the figure. In essence, hair care business is a good business one can consider if you have the required resources.
Why Hair Care Business
- Hair care business can be run in a part time basis.
- You can run hair care business as home-based business. There are hidden benefits in starting your business small.
- There is constant demand for hair care services.
- It can be combined with the sales of hair care products
- You don’t need to develop or produce your own products before you start hair care business.
Read Also: How to Start a Perfume Business
How to Start hair care and beauty salon
I know the question that may be going on in your mind is “how do I start my own hair care and beauty salon business?”. If that is what you are thinking, you are actually thinking in the right direction. To start your own hair care and beauty salon, there are basic steps you need to take. These are enumerated below:
Register your business
I will say that you are not yet ready for business if you are not willing to register your business. I wonder how some people will claim to be operating a business when the business is not registered. I think the reason why some people don’t register their business is as a result of ignorance. It is either they don’t know the benefits of having their business registered or they think that the business name registration process may be cumbersome or too expensive. You don’t need to spend huge amount before you can register your hair care and beauty salon business. You can register the business as a sole proprietorship. This is the simplest and cheapest form of business legal structure. Surprisingly, you may not need to engage an attorney or an accountant to have your hair care and beauty salon business registered. It is what you can do on your own. The fact that you are not paying fee to any attorney will reduce your business registration cost significantly. As your business continue to grow, you may choose to change the business to a limited liability company.
Prepare Business Plan
When I talk about business plan, you may be questioning the need for it. You actually need a business plan for your hair care and beauty salon business. It does not need to be a document that runs into several pages. It is not the length of the business plan that matters but the content. No matter how lucrative a business idea may look, there will always be some surprises along the way. The effects of such “surprises” will be mitigated if you plan ahead. It is risky starting a business without adequate planning. In fact, one of the major reasons small businesses fail is because of lack of adequate planning. Therefore, if you don’t want your business to fail, you must plan. What are the things you need to plan for? Your planning will entail how to source for capital; location of your hair care and beauty salon business, market potential and how you intend to have a good share of the market, marketing strategies, staffing and financial matters. If you intend to combine sales of beauty products, you need to determine your source(s) of supplies.
Choose a Location
You need to choose the location of your hair care and beauty salon business wisely. To be able to choose the right location, you need to first of all determine who your customers are. Where you they live or work? Who are your competitors? Where are your competitors located? What is your budget? Some of these factors will determine where you should locate your hair care and beauty salon business. If you prepare a business plan for your hair care and beauty salon business, some of these must have be adequately addressed in the plan. It is important that you make your salon convenient and comfortable for your customers. The ambience you create within the salon can make your customers feel at home. For instance, having a set of comfortable chairs with television showing interesting programmes or playing videos that are entertaining will make your customers to feel relaxed while waiting for their turn to be attended to.
Read Also: How to Choose Business Location for Your Business
Engage Competent Staff
By the time you open your hair care and beauty salon business, you may soon realise that you cannot manage the business alone. This will necessitate that you hire additional hands. The competence level of your staff will determine whether your customers will continue to patronise you. In case, you can’t find staff that are competent enough, you may need to invest in their training. This is an investment that will definitely yield good returns to you.
Offer Good Customer Service
You need to offer your customers good customer service. You need to treat your customers well. Hair care and beauty salon business is not just about providing service alone. It is about relationship. Part of the training you need to give your staff is how to be polite to customers. If you are good to your customers and you render quality service to them, they will like to come back to you. However, if your staff is rude, it will take a very loyal customer to tell you about this. Some of the customers may disappear without giving you a specific reason.
Marketing
Mostly, the customers you service will live within your neighbourhood. Therefore, your marketing efforts should concentrate around where your hair care and beauty salon business is located. You can adopt the following strategies to win customers.
- Word of mouth.
- Discounts in the initial months to attract customers.
- Excellent Service
- Printing of Fliers
Key to Success
Some of the success keys to operating a hair care and beauty salon business have already been mentioned above. But for the purpose of emphasis, I need to restate them below.
- Good knowledge of Hair Care business. You need to be seen as an expert before you can enjoy good patronage.
- Employee Training. You need to keep training your employees so that they can be up to date in the latest styles.
- Constant eyes on competitions. There is need for you to keep monitoring your competitors. Know their strengths and their weaknesses and see how you can capitalise on them to win more customers.
- Good Customer Service. Your customers deserve the best. You need to keep your customers satisfied. One unsatisfied customer can have a drastic effect on your patronage.
- Good location. This cannot be over-emphasized. Your location should be easily accessible to your customers.
- Conducive environment. Your shop should be conducive for your customers. Make them feel at home while they wait for their turn.
- Convenient Open Hours. You have to be available to your customers when needed. This means you may need to maintain a long open hours daily.
- You should be flexible enough to cater for both walk in customers and those ones that may require special appointment.
Read Also: How to Start a Beauty Product Business
Requirements
Before you start your hair care business, it is important that you develop a business plan. This will allow you think through all aspects of the hair care business. Apart from office space, the following equipment will be needed
- Curlers
- Hair Brush
- Hair Comb
- Hair Dryer
- Hair Rollers
- Hair Wand
- Hair Waver
- Scissors
- Straighteners
- Clippers
- Mirror
- Display Shelf
- Comfortable Chairs
- TV for customer entertainment
- Barber Chairs
Please note that the equipment you require for your hair care and beauty salon business will depend on the market you are targeting e.g. men and women.
Services You Can Render
- Unisex Hair cut for children and adults
- Hair Colouring
- Shampooing
- Sales of Hair Care Products
What to Watch
In most cases, people only focus on good side of any business idea. Hair care business is actually a good business idea but it can easily attract competitions. There is no entry barrier. This means that the market can experience influx of other people who are interested in the same business. Every successful business will always attract competition. People are watching at you. They knew how you started and the rapidity of your business growth. So, supposing that you have other new two people located their businesses very close to your own, what impact will it have on your business? The only thing that we distinguish you is the quality of your service. No matter how a customer may be loyal, if he or she discovers that he/she can enjoy better service somewhere else possibly at the same amount you charge, the customer may soon disappear.