Transitions: From Classroom To Clinic To Salon

Moving from mannequins to talking heads is a world of difference. Here’s how to make the transition a smooth one.

Beauty pros in-training really make the client transition twice—once from classroom to clinic and again, from beauty-school clinic to salon. While the fi rst transition can help you prep for the other, don’t count on many similarities. The student salon is more about practicing technical skills than connecting with clients, building a business or savoring salon life. In fact, the salon experience is so different, that some stylists say you’ll set yourself back if you expect salon clients to look and act like those you snipped in school.

How easily you can make each transition depends in part on the quality of the operation—school or salon. But it helps to understand the norm, the main challenges and the proactive steps you can take to ease your way from A to B to C.

Puttin’ on a Clinic

Today’s student salons have transformed themselves from the old perming factories to as close to the real deal as they can get—it helps if the schools are salon connected. For instance, at Eric Fisher Academy in Wichita, Kansas, the student salon uses the same booking system as Fisher salons, and even gives students a “paycheck” in the form of credits. Credits accrue for pre-bookings and add-on services, and can be used toward purchases in the student store. (A low attendance or GPA voids the check, so students can see just what they lost.) At the Carsten Aveda Institute in New York City, manager and lead instructor Gloria Hortua says students start on real people pre-clinic: in the classroom, models who get free cuts often replace mannequins. But, she says, once in the clinic, students have to sell their services, which requires confidence, and building it is the biggest challenge.

 Part of the problem is there is so much to remember and practice technically that soft skills—talking to clients and building relationships—fall by the wayside. They just aren’t the main focus, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start working on them.

“People skills are hardest to develop, but if you have them, the client will come back; if you’re fantastic technically but have no people skills, clients won’t return,” says Hortua. “To build confidence, we advise students to avoid telling the client it’s their first time cutting. Also, remember it is a school clinic: the client knows this, is paying a lower fee and has signed a release form. Think of it as just another class.”

Talking the Talk

Patti Black, an Eric Fisher Academy educator, who was Milady’s 2011 Teacher of the Year, agrees that building confi - dence is the biggest challenge, and says when it comes to soft skills, utilizing pre-planned scripts make it seamless.

“Role play with friends to get comfortable with a script in a safe environment,” says Black. “Then you can start using your own words so it sounds natural. In the clinic, we have our students ask what challenge or concern the client has with his or her hair. Another way to get comfortable is to invite your friends and family to the clinic, which adds friendly faces. At Eric Fisher Academy, each student can give five friends or family members a card for hefty discounts on the already-low clinic cost.”

Since the clinic is all about skill development, focus on quality, not speed. If you mess up the structure of a cut or a color formula, speed of service doesn’t matter, says Hortua, noting that a 2½-hour bob is not unusual for a first clinic attempt when each step is checked by an instructor. Plus, if you’re taking your time, you’ll be able to calm yourself, focus and think of important hair-related questions to ask the client.

Finally, if you are having a problem, never be too shy—or too arrogant—to excuse yourself from your client to get help or call an instructor over. One big difference between the clinic and the salon is no one can fi re you—yet. Other tips for transitioning to the clinic:

♥ Continue to practice on mannequins at home.

♥ Don’t work on friends at home if you can get them in the clinic, where you can receive guidance and make the experience pay off for both of you.

♥ Don’t insult people to get them in the clinic. Saying “Your color is mousy” is not going to encourage anyone to let you touch her hair!

♥ Don’t be a slacker on attendance. The old joke is that showing up is half the job, but it’s too true in beauty school. If you don’t have a specific number of hours, you can’t work on the clinic floor.

♥ Use a checklist for at-home review—some students get so fl ustered, they forget to drape clients or remove the cape when done.

♥ Start developing good habits, like asking clients to pre-book and educating them about styling products.

♥ Take it easy on yourself; now is the time to learn from mistakes.

Training Days You just fi nished school, so why should you spend another year training in a salon? Continuing education is part of the business, but the other part of the story, sorry, is salon owners say new grads don’t have enough experience to “hit the ground running.” Owners pay a lot to get good clients, and with one wrong remark, slip of the shears or bad color mix, you can send those clients packing. But there’s another perspective that goes straight to your own heart.

If you only apply at salons that will put you on the fl oor as soon as possible, you’ve missed a great opportunity with incredible future benefi ts. This is why most successful stylists advise you to choose a salon with a one- or two-year assistant training program. But more and more, these salons are big city/high end, because of the economic cost of training to the owner and apprentices’ impatience with the long wait and low pay—about $50 a day.

To start the transition right, says Drew Irmen, a stylist at Angelo David Salon in New York City, network at shows and find a mentor who wants to grow you.

“When I was in Ohio, I lived in my parents’ basement and went to every hair show to fi nd the right mentor,” says Irmen. “You have to sacrifice to go to the next level. Don’t just visit local salons—fi nd out what you want to do, and who is doing it at the highest level. If you miss the whole mentoring thing, you’ll miss a lot that you can’t fi gure out on your own, like how to interact with high-end salon clients.

“It was tough for me to shampoo clients 95-percent of the time. It hit my ego; I knew I could do more. But over a year of apprenticing, I learned to look at other stylists’ work and master their secrets. This developed my professional vision.”

Tale of Two Salons

At L Salon & Color Group in San Mateo, California, owner Elizabeth Stenstrom says her assistants’ program is 16 to 24 months, depending on individual progress. It’s highly structured, and allows trainees to choose a cutting or coloring specialty. It’s also designed so the trainee can build a clientele that will be his or hers upon promotion.

Bruce McGaha, co-owner of Moutons and Loxx in Grapevine and Euless, Texas, says his two salons have different business models and training programs, but the economies of salon life don’t allow for the lengthy training programs that dominated past decades.

“The longer you wait to put someone on the floor, the less confidence they have,” he says. “Young people don’t have the patience to shampoo for a year and it doesn’t matter how long the program; the fi rst day they work alone, they’re a bundle of nerves. Working on the floor with actual clients is the real learning curve.” At Moutons, training is about 16 weeks, while at Loxx, it’s about six weeks before assistants are eased onto the floor. At both salons, says McGaha, the biggest surprise new stylists face is that the salon is more “real life” than they expected.

“The perception of a paying client is very different from that of a school-clinic client, who knows what she is paying for and getting,” says McGaha.

What helped his three most recent hires: while still in school, they asked if they could come in and hang out in the salon once in a while. They would drop in after school or on an occasional Saturday to absorb the salon culture, and McGaha says it definitely made them better prepared for what salon life really looked like.

A Place of Your Own

So what truly eases the transition to a chair of your own? Scripts, again, say most pros, and careful, one-on-one coaching. Because the more you do, the faster you boost your skills; getting your own models in order to build experience is another challenge. “Our salon has a strong reputation, so we get a lot of models for trainees, who are expected to move from doing all major cuts on mannequins to doing one model a week to eventually doing five models a day for five days a week,” says Stenstrom. “This progression greatly eases the transition to becoming a designer on the fl oor. The best places for anyone to get models are malls, cosmetic counters, high schools and colleges.”

Transitioning is greatly eased if you attend every show you can, and watch professional videos, of which you can find hundreds online including at modernsalon.tv.

Still, nothing really substitutes for having clients of your own and proving you can retain them. But even with scripts, coaching, mentoring and training, full confidence only kicks in after nine months to a year on the floor.

“Through decades of doing performance reviews and tracking numbers like client retention, we know that’s how long it takes for stylists to really get it,” says McGaha.

Perhaps, the biggest assets of all are patience and flexibility. If you’re willing to put in the time and learn someone else’s way of doing things, you’re that much more likely to succeed. After all, Darwin never said the strongest or even the most intelligent survive. To paraphrase, he said the ones most adaptable to change are the ones who make it in the long run.

MY FIRST DAY
By Travis Kelley, Shear Terror Hair, New York

Paranoia…sweaty hands…the onset of fi rst-day jitters. Fresh out of cosmetology school, I’d landed a job as a stylist at Head Games Salon in Fort Myers, Florida. Although the salon atmosphere wasn’t new to me (I worked at salons on the business side before I attended beauty school), this was something entirely different. On my fi rst day, the owner gave me a client right away. I barely had time to think. What if I made a mistake? What if I she didn’t like the outcome? What if I accidentally cut her with my shears? The idea of a client bleeding all over the place from a cutting mishap wasn’t exactly making things any easier. So what did I do? I took a risk and was honest with the client about it being my fi rst day, and she was still willing to let me work on her. Then I just closed my eyes, took a deep breath and remembered to have confi dence in the knowledge and experience that got me the job in the fi rst place. By the time I was fi nished, I had a happy new client, who returned to me from then on. It’s been four years since my fi rst experience with a real salon client, and now I have my own session styling company.