Last month we got candid with our panel of Vish expert users to ask about their favorite business reports which play a vital role in outlining finances, strategies, and plans for growth. Learn what tools they’re leveraging to see sustained success in 2023 and beyond.
Allyson King
Co-owner of Hair & Co BKLYN, Brooklyn, NY
A wise friend and mentor of mine once said: “Whatever is measured improves” – words I now live by. I also believe you can be paralyzed by data, so it’s important to keep data easy to access, meaningful, and telling. I mark my data as red, yellow, or green. Green = Wahoo! Yellow = Dig In, Fix Early. Red = 911 Drop Everything.
Our costs pretty much self-manage themselves within our systems. So for us, it’s all about growing the business, and we have benchmarks for key areas.
I have three reports I live by:
- POS – Value of Future Appointment – What do I have in the book today and this week? It serves two purposes:
- Identify and Close the Gap – What’s the gap between what’s on the book and our sales goal? If I know the gap I can game-plan and ensure we make the day and make the week.
- Flex Support Staff Payroll – While we have a “set schedule” for our support staff we flex the schedule up or down based on sales. It allows us to optimize our business in a busy week or reduce support hours in a slow week to maintain profits.
- POS – My Performance – It gives me each team member’s personal goals and key metrics for my team: Rebooking, Average Ticket, Retail, Clients – everything I need to high-speed coach the team during the day.
- Vish Dashboard – While the dashboard is data-rich I’m focused on the reweigh. The team all use it, so if we can deliver 95% reweigh we can minimize waste and reduce the amount of product needed.
Luke Huffstutter
Owner of Annastasia Salons, Portland, OR
I’m currently analyzing color usage reports within Vish, which will allow me to drill down into what we are actually using and what we hold on the shelves. I already use Vish reports when ordering inventory, but this will enable me to make more precise decisions because I’ll know exactly how much we use at various times of the year, helping to identify seasonal usage trends for next year. I also compare waste percentages and reweigh percentages to track what’s working and what’s not.
To get a broader picture of the business, each month I pull up my five favorite reports: average tickets, no-shows, online bookings, retail to service, and retention, and spend 20 minutes building a scorecard. Our Vish reweigh stats are also included in this. Having this data captured on one report rather than five gives me instant oversight of all the important aspects of the salon.
James Alba
Co-owner of B-Hive Organic Salon, Hillsdale, NJ
While I value all the Vish reports in terms of identifying waste and overseeing the additional charges that may be due from the client for color usage, my favorite is inventory reports. Vish can zero in on each individual shade by a selected time period. Instead of tearing off box tops or other creative ways salons have done color inventory, this data is exact. It arms you with the information needed to scale up so there is enough inventory of the popular shades necessary for a busy stretch like the holidays. It’s also great if you need to scale back for budgeting.
Jessica Arrindell
Co-owner of Luscious & Co Beauty, Shelton, CT
We operate our business with a balance of heart, forecasts/goals, and a budget. Reports are the main source to measure our success and provide opportunities to plan ahead.
Daily, weekly, and monthly financial trends are the reports we use most frequently. This summarizes our revenue based on booked appointments and the value of each one. It outlines revenue opportunities for each stylist that we can manage at a glance by opening the door to expanded appointments with add-on services or longer appointments (if they are available).
We also run our Vish product report to identify color usage of all color supplies down to the gram. This arms us with data that dictates what to order, ensuring we keep a healthy stock supply available to our team (not to mention saving employee man hours converting the time into revenue-generating opportunities). In today’s day and age, maximizing margins is the key to sustainability and growth; the secret sauce of a healthy business. Businesses may not be able to predict economic and trend changes, but we can be prepared with tools like Vish on our side.
Laura Watkins
Owner of Pure Salon Spa, Louisville, KY
We are very intentional about monthly reporting and tracking the numbers for each of our technicians individually but also for our business as a whole. In our salon, we teach that benchmarks are a reflection of how well behaviors are being executed in our cycle of service. For example, if a technician’s pre-booking percentage is low, we know there’s likely a correlation with how they are positioning pre-booking the next appointment. This indicates that they are asking IF the guest wants to pre-book instead of making a recommendation about when they need to come back for their next appointment to maintain the look. This gives our team an opportunity to provide education on how to better nurture those conversations.
We use the Vish Dashboard to make sure our reweigh percentage stays at 90% or higher and to identify any red flags around color waste from a particular technician or if product cost is out of line for a particular service.
Some of our other favorite reports to run are:
- Percent of Customers Pre-booked – this tells us how many guests book their next appointment before they leave the salon
- Staff Service Productivity – tells us how booked each technician is
- Aveda Client Retention – tells us how many of our new guests come back within 90 days, and how many of our existing guests are coming back within 90 days
- Bledsoe Retail Units – tells us on average how much retail is being sold per guest by the technician
Interested in how your salon can leverage color data to make more money? Learn more about the benefits of Vish.
