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Do you need to hire more staff? With Caylee Augé
143 Plays1 year ago
Here’s a question for you. Is there a shortage of staff these days ? Maybe the bigger question is, do we need more staff or should we be looking at how to optimize our salon or spa to do better with the team we already have?
Hey beauty and barber pros, welcome to The Business of Style Podcast, brought to you by the BeautyCouncil. My name is Greg Robins and today in our first episode, we tackle the thorny problem that so many of our members are talking about - staff shortages.
My guest today is Cayle Auge, a well-loved coach to the professional beauty industry and previous owner of the highly successful Vancouver salon, Hype. Stick around to hear how Caylee offers strategies to thrive with the team you have today in this 20 minute episode.
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Transcript
Is there a staff shortage in salons?
00:00:01
Speaker
Here's a question for you. Is there a shortage of staff these days? Maybe the bigger question is, do we need more staff or should we be looking at how to optimize our salon or spa to do better with the team we already have?
Introduction to the Business of Style Podcast
00:00:23
Speaker
Hey Beauty and Barbara Pros, welcome to the Business of Style podcast brought to you by the Beauty Council. My name is Greg Robbins and today in our very first episode we tackle the thorny problem that so many of our members are talking about, staff shortages.
00:00:39
Speaker
My guest today is Kaylee O'Shea, the well-loved coach to the professional beauty industry and previous owner of the highly successful Vancouver salon, Hype.
Kaylee O'Shea's journey in the salon industry
00:00:48
Speaker
Stick around to hear how Kaylee offers strategies to thrive with the team you already have in this 20 minute episode. Okay, Kaylee, we are here in our very first podcast. I'd like you just to quickly introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do.
00:01:04
Speaker
Awesome. Well, hello to all you amazing salon owners listening. I am Kaylee O'Jay and I am a business coach consultant and I am helping salon owners who want to grow, expand, or sell their business. I love that. I mean, really what else is there? I mean, get a business, grow it, make it successful, as I always say, retire with dignity or build it and make it so attractive that somebody wants to come along and scoop it up, right?
00:01:30
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah. Have a legacy plan and have something to show for all your hard work.
Challenges in finding qualified salon staff
00:01:35
Speaker
And that's one of the biggest things I see, um, you know, getting clients that have been in business 10, 20 years that have just accumulated debt over their whole entire journey. And, um, I think that needs to change. Absolutely. Now in 30 seconds, just quickly give us a little bit of a background on you, who you are, like where you started, what you owned and how you got to where you are today.
00:01:56
Speaker
Oh yeah, I got that all summed up. I spent the first 10 years serving my clients. I skipped high school to go wash hair at a salon and got in really early. The second 10 years was my salon ownership journey where I grew my business from $200,000 in sales to over a million dollars and went through all the hard bumps and rocks and
00:02:17
Speaker
didn't meet payroll, had to change pay scales, had to have a huge business learning curve. And since 2019, I sold my salon and I
Optimizing business operations to reduce staff dependency
00:02:27
Speaker
will spend the next 10 years serving salon owners and helping them avoid all of those mistakes I made and showing them how I was able to make that successful.
00:02:35
Speaker
and how we've helped tons of clients make their businesses successful as well and so we're just well into that journey with a lot of great track records and I love love love helping salons turn around from you know maybe just breaking even or losing money to having a really great growth and legacy plan.
00:02:55
Speaker
Fantastic. I love that you're giving back in the way that you are and passing on all the lessons you learned once upon a time. So you must speak to a ton of people all the time every day, sort of as part of your job, a variety of salon, salon owners, salon locations. What is the biggest challenge you're hearing these days?
00:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, Greg, the biggest challenge I hear consistently is I don't have staff. I can't find staff. I can't find qualified workers. I don't have enough people. And this is not just in our industry. This is kind of globally. I mean, we tried to go skiing in France and the mountain was closed randomly because they didn't have enough staff to open. So this is just
Managing financial drains in salon businesses
00:03:38
Speaker
a real concern. It's a real external concern. And I think that's what we're here to talk about today, right?
00:03:44
Speaker
Absolutely. And yes, you're right. I can't tell you how many times you have to be very patient when you go out to eat, right? Like there's one server for the entire room. So hold your breath and just go by. Of course, the question is, where is everybody? What's everyone doing? So these are external things. So let's talk about that. What is the difference between an external threat or effect on your business versus an internal one? Maybe just unpack that for us a little bit.
00:04:07
Speaker
Sure. Well, the way I see it is the external ones are the ones out of your control. And so there's nothing you can do to influence it. There's nothing you can do to change it. And that's what makes it like external. It's your circumstance. It's your environment that you're in. Whereas the internal things are the things that you have
00:04:25
Speaker
um, the ability to influence. And so you can influence change and you can make them better and you can optimize them and you can make them more efficient. And those are the ones that I like to focus on because if we just keep talking about these external
Achieving profitability and business viability
00:04:37
Speaker
problems over and over and over, those aren't conversations that are going to help grow our business. Yeah. That's a really important distinction to make. So there are things that happen, uh, that are outside of your control. And there are things that happen that are things that come along that you can control. Is that, is that, am I getting that right?
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So how do salon owners who have a staffing model, I suppose you could say, how do they feel about this when they come across this external factor and they feel that there's a real lack of staff out there? What goes through their minds and how do they respond to that?
00:05:14
Speaker
Well, I don't think that they maybe realize that it's external. They just are hyper focused on that. That's the solution to all their problems.
Efficiency through workforce optimization
00:05:23
Speaker
And so they just think, you know, if I just found the right staff, if I just found the right staff, if I just hired one more person.
00:05:30
Speaker
And I want to kind of dispel that myth because, and I'll give you a personal example. You know, the few years into my journey of owning a salon, we did 600,000 in sales. And that year I only had a 1% profit and I worked for free the whole year. I didn't even pay myself.
00:05:50
Speaker
And so, you know, 600,000 is in sales. That's at least six busy team members, right? And so you can have, you can keep adding team members to your business without adding profit. You can keep adding team members and sometimes it actually multiplies your loss.
00:06:08
Speaker
So some of these salons that don't have a good foundation, that don't have a really strong base, as they're adding people, they're actually adding to their liability and they're adding to their lack of cashflow and they're adding to accumulating bigger piles of debt. And so when you are there thinking to yourself, and that's what I see a lot of salon
Benefits of a shorter workweek for salons
00:06:30
Speaker
owners doing, they're thinking, you know, if I could just solve this problem with bigger team,
00:06:36
Speaker
I want to dispel that myth that that is not what's going to solve any challenges that you're facing. And so what we need to do is we need to drill back into our business foundations and fundamentals and get those really strong and get you less dependent on your team members so that when you do grow, you're multiplying something that works really well and not multiplying something that actually makes your liabilities even
Using pricing strategies to manage demand
00:07:03
Speaker
worse. So, you know, your risks, I would say.
00:07:06
Speaker
That's really interesting. I went to business school and one of the things we learned right up front was your biggest expense, one of your biggest ongoing continuous expenses in any business is human resources. That is the people that are there working for you.
00:07:22
Speaker
And so to keep that in control and to monitor that and to be most efficient with that cost is actually the thing that's going to determine your profitability at the end of the year. Not only profitability, but overall success, workplace happiness, competitiveness in the market, ease of management. So would you say that holds true for the salon spawn barbershop industry?
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's three main leaks in the salon and barber industry,
Kaylee O'Shea's free resources and invitation to connect
00:07:51
Speaker
especially the ones doing all of the services and that would be your back bar is just out of control. Payroll is too high or the rent agreement that you got into is
00:08:03
Speaker
likely too high for the volume of sales that you're doing. So those are the three biggest things that we see and have a lot of strategies to combat that. So it definitely agree with you. Payroll is one of the things that you can fix. It's always the scariest one to fix because you're messing with people's money and you're changing deals. And when you change things, people can leave. So it's definitely like the scariest place to look. But it is the quickest way to solve some of those issues that you're having in your business.
00:08:33
Speaker
And I just wanted to mention, you know, a lot of owners are not money motivated. Um, and then I don't even know if the word profit like would resonate with many of our listeners. I'd like to hear back from all of you listening. Like does the word profit resonate with you? Um, and so when we're talking about profitability, like let's say it's a viable business, right? Let's just say like you have a viable business.
00:08:59
Speaker
And why would you want to have a viable business? Well, you want to have a viable business so that you're not winding up with debt and putting yourself in a financially
00:09:11
Speaker
unstable position. So let's call it safety. Like we want you to be safe and we want you to have a nice life. And on top of that, like I want you to reach all your dreams and I want you to have an amazing retirement set up and a legacy. Like those are all the things I want for you, but a lot of salon owners maybe can't see that for themselves and they just want some safety and they want to make sure that people don't think they're greedy and people don't feel take advantage of them. Um, so sometimes when we talk about profit, they're, you know,
00:09:41
Speaker
you're as a salon owner not resonating with that. So I just want my passion is to really see that the business is viable and see that the person's not going to get blindsided with these surprise expenses that they didn't know about and that they're like just
00:09:57
Speaker
bleeding a little bit of money every month, that's going to wind up being a big pile of debt. So that's really what I want to combat because I know there's so many well-meaning salon owners out there that are lovely people that really care about their team. They probably do charity events. They're working really hard. They want to come up with new trends and they want to do lookbooks and photo shoots and they just really want to thrive in their business. And if the business is not sustainable,
00:10:27
Speaker
it's going to be a painful experience for them. And so that's the part that I really want to help salon owners avoid. Thanks for pointing that out. You know, it's true. And we all have what's what I call a relationship with money and it comes from childhood. And so I think it's important to acknowledge that and to just honor that relationship, but really get back to, you know, supporting what it is that you want to do as a career, as your choice of work,
00:10:54
Speaker
and to support those people around you. So yeah, absolutely. Thanks for pointing that out. So what can people do in this industry who are working, have a business and employees, what can they do to control these things rather than hiring somebody else, hiring more stylists, hiring more estheticians, hiring more nail techs,
00:11:15
Speaker
What can they do? Well, this comes down to knowing your numbers, right? It was a part that nobody wants to hear. But if we can really shed down on expenses and get your, get you to a place where you've got a really, you're running a tight ship, right? You know exactly what it costs to run and that you're able to go really lean with your team and you have a pay model that really works. Now you can start to really thrive with a really small team.
00:11:45
Speaker
And I think that's what salons need to do right now. And some of the strategies are really counterintuitive. And I'll give you one example. You know, we have a salon that just went down to four days a week because of their staffing issues. And so what happens now is they lower their expenses because they need less coverage.
00:12:04
Speaker
And they actually have more of the buzz of a busy salon. So we know that busy attracts busy, right? Like when you go to, we're in Vancouver. I know you're in Vancouver too, Greg. Like when you go to the Medina cafe and there's a lineup out the door, it makes you want to go to our jam jar, you know, you want to go check it out. So busy creates busy. So when you're trying to be everything to everyone and you're opening
00:12:26
Speaker
six, seven days a week and you're having staffing issues, so there's one to two people that are not fully, you know, there's not the vibe there, then that's actually like a detriment to your business. So if you're facing staffing issues right now, one thing you can do is you can
00:12:44
Speaker
run the daily report and see what's your lowest sales day and close on that day. And so that's just like an example of like one strategy that we would put in. And it makes a huge difference because it just makes it less stressful to run. It makes the team like come together. It brings the business all in those days. And while it feels counterintuitive to close, um, it actually produces way better results.
00:13:12
Speaker
Wow, yeah, that's incredible. I suppose then, really, unless you're losing clients, your staff wouldn't see a decrease in pay. Let's say if they were in commission, let's say, because ultimately they would service the same number of clients. Did I get that right? Yeah, exactly. You'd be creating all of the same volume in less time, which would create less overhead. And again, I think the main part about that is that you're creating that busy feel.
00:13:39
Speaker
And I think that's really important. It's really hard for a business to thrive when it looks like it's a ghost town. Oh yeah. Nobody wants to go to a dead bar. In fact, way back when I was a waiter, my boss always said, Greg, seat the first people who come in at the window and that'll bring the rest in. And guess what? It worked every time. So yeah. Exactly. Now that's a great strategy and a great, something great to think of. What's another one?
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah, and one of our clients right now that we're working with, you know She's just decided that for her it's all about simplicity and she doesn't want a big team She doesn't want to like have to manage a lot of people and so we're just going through with fine-tooth comb getting rid of any extra little piece of overhead and knowing exactly what it costs to run the business and exactly how many team members we can run with and during a lot of the closures some of the
00:14:30
Speaker
results that we would get from people, from our clients was, you know, I used to have a team of eight and I made less money than I do now with two people. And so these are like, when you can get in and you can look at what are the things we can eliminate, where can we maximize?
00:14:48
Speaker
And we just tip in the scales. If you picture like the old marbles, you know, you put marble from one side of the scale to the other. And if you just putting like one little thing, one little thing, one little thing, it will start to tip. The problem is that most salon owners don't understand their expenses and they don't realize how they all add up. And I'll use the example of, um, I hate the dollar store, but my husband loves going in there and he always wonders how he walks out with like a hundred dollar bill because everything's supposed to be, you know, a dollar to five dollars. Yeah.
00:15:16
Speaker
And he's like, what, what happened? What did I buy? Like all this crap, right? And, but we don't realize like $1 here, $5 here. Like those things add up. And sometimes I'm looking with salon owners and they're like, I don't understand how is that my fixed expenses and.
00:15:32
Speaker
you know you're showing all of these little items that's what the stylist don't understand it's what the owners don't understand they all add up and the numbers don't lie so when you can get really real about that you can really know where everything is where everything lives in your business then you can make a plan
00:15:48
Speaker
that will make you thrive in the most efficient way with the least amount of team members. And that will change your life because it will take away the bigger the team you have, the more headaches you have, the more interpersonal problems you have, the harder it is for you to manage. Your expenses go up because you've got expenses on each of those people to run payroll and all of that.
00:16:13
Speaker
If we can really dial that in and you can really know what it takes to run your business with the most optimal amount of team members, that can be really life changing for a salon owner.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, I love that word optimal and optimization is really what it's all about, right? Like to understand exactly what your costs are and to optimize your performance as a business so that you can actually reach your goals and do your look book. And you just talked about having a day off. I don't know anybody who's listening that wouldn't appreciate a day off to do whatever it is you do. Maybe you want to go knock on doors and hand out promotional postcards or spend the day with your, with your child, right? And get to know them a bit better. So there's,
00:16:52
Speaker
There are definitely additional bonuses to strategies like that.
00:16:56
Speaker
Well, and Greg, I'm not talking about one day off. I'm talking about like, how about you get the four day work week along with all your team members. Like this is, you know, we're in a new time and the hustle mentality is gone and the six day, six, 10 hour a day, um, work weeks, you know, I'm from that generation. I know it well. Um, but that's not the way of the future. And so yeah, have your day that you're working on your business, have your you day, have your family day, like,
00:17:24
Speaker
And again, sometimes my aspirations for salon owners are even more they can picture for themselves. But, you know, start with that day, start with having your business not depend on you as much. And you'll be able to see that vision of a strong future where you can not have everything on your shoulders because you know, it's all taken care of and you have amazing clarity about your business.
00:17:48
Speaker
Brilliant. I love it. And I can't wait to see those ads pop up to say four day salon, same salary. That's what I want to see. I've seen it, Greg. I've seen it. I know it can work.
00:18:02
Speaker
We're just going to wrap up here, but I do want to ask you sort of a tough question that I get as we get at the beauty council from time to time. And I have heard that people saying we're turning clients away because we don't have enough stylists to service them. So how do we address that sort of situation with people?
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, and to me, Greg, this may sound insensitive or like unemotional, because I'm not emotionally tied to this, you know, specific salon's clients or anything like that, but it's purely a supply and demand problem. And so when you have more demand on your time than you can give in supply, it's time for a price increase.
00:18:42
Speaker
And so you might be terrified. Um, but the market is telling you that you are valuable and that your time is worth more than what you're charging. And that's why you have a backlog. And so, um, if you're finding yourself in that place and you might tell me, well, I just did one three months ago. Well, that's okay. I don't mind if you do another one now, I would just say that it wasn't aggressive enough. Um, so that's the simple, you know, if that's what they're telling me that that is the simple strategy is you need to level out the demand by.
00:19:12
Speaker
making yourself less accessible, not by adding more time. I love it. I love it, Hailey. And this, again, is a very basic, simple 101 business concept, and that is supply and demand. If there isn't much supply, the demand is automatically greater because there's less supply. And so more people are clamoring for less of things. And this is why we're seeing inflation right now, more people chasing fewer goods.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah, great strategy. And I'm sure there are other strategies too, but a price increases seems like a very simple way to kind of hone down your client base and retain your, you know, your, your success as a salon and eliminate that external problem of, of, you know, as you say, a lack of, or just, just the way you perceive we need more people. Actually you need to readjust your clients, I suppose.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And if anyone would like, they can DM me. I've got a training on that free training and it's actually just a three part really quick video series where we talk about inflation. We talk about like supply and demand and some of the pricing factors that come into all of that. So be happy to share that with your audience, Greg. Thanks, Kaylee. Just tell people where they can find all that and how they can get ahold of you.
00:20:27
Speaker
Best places on Instagram at KayleeOJ, so we can tag it in, or can you do that, Greg? Can you add a little link to- Oh, we can work magic. We can do whatever you want. Yeah, we'll link to my Instagram in the link tree. You can actually book a free call with us to see if your business is a good fit for our program. You can ask us for free resources based on what we just talked about. So you can totally get in touch with us there. Thanks, Kaylee. This has been a really great session. I appreciate all your great words of wisdom.
00:20:55
Speaker
Thanks for inviting me and look forward to working together again in the future. Bye everyone. Thanks for listening.