Discounts, when used correctly, can be a great marketing tool!

Do you know what gets my blood boiling?

People who say, "I would never discount, I wouldn't lower myself and sell myself short."

They have never looked at their bills and didn't know which one to pay first or even how they are going to pay it.

Maybe they were lucky and opened their salon in a good area, and it just worked out, good for them, I say. But for many other salon owners and me, it just wasn't that easy.

It's a lot easier if you are working alone, but as soon as you get staff, it gets scary. You have bigger bills than you have ever had before and more mouths to feed!

The amount of clients you need to fill the team you've got is enormous, and personally, I WILL do whatever it takes to fill them, and YES, that means discounting.

Yep, there you heard it first, Richard the coach endorses discounting.

But it has to be done cleverly, I'll explain later.....

Discounting isn't a dirty word, it isn't wrong, the people that say it is are wrong and most are hypocrites. I bet these people love a discount themselves.

In fact, all you discount haters 'I CHALLENGE YOU' next time you see a holiday, a restaurant, a car or anything else for that matter that is discounted I challenge you to either never do business with 'those type of people again' or offer to pay the FULL price.

Because you cannot have it both ways. Do you think BMW, Audi, Qantas, British Airways and many more have sold themselves short? Of course not....... they do it because they are clever!

Ok, rant over, back to my point.

You should be in business to make some profit, I'm sure you are, and the biggest bill in your salon is your wage bill. If you can get that to around 30%-35%, then you will make enough profit for it to be worthwhile. To achieve that sort of profit, you will need to get your team to hit 3x wage, and the only way to do that is attract as many clients as you can.

Discounting is only wrong if it's your main strategy to get clients into your salon.

You should already have a strategy of making your salon stand out as 'The Authority', and that will fill most of your team, but what you might need is another strategy to fill some of the quiet days of the week, and you may need to offer a sweetener to encourage them to have those days that no-one else wants, hence why airlines offer cheaper flights if you fly at the crack of dawn or last thing at night, it's the same.

So for your quiet days and quiet staff member, if you can get some clients to come and fill those gaps, you will fill your staff and help them achieve the 3x wage targets they need to hit, which in turn will give them and you fulfilment, and of course help with your profits.

Don't listen to those people who don't practice what they preach, and start making money........

Richard 'saying yes to discounting' McCabe