More than 200 salon owners and managers gathered in Atlanta in late June for the first-ever Data-Driven Salon Summit, hosted by Salon Today and ZeeZor. Through a number of top-notch presentations from successful salon owners and outside experts and a series of interactive panels of high-performing stylists and salon owner leaders, attendees learned how to mine their data to inspire their team to better their performance, identify opportunity and launch new profit centers, and make important decisions such as when to expand.

Modern Salon Media Publisher Steve Reiss welcomed attendees and walked them through how to use the Data-Driven workbooks to enhance their learning over the next two days. Salon Today’s Stacey Soble revealed salon success benchmarks by reviewing averages from the 2017 Salon Today 200. ZeeZor’s Chris Nedza told the story of how looking at his wife’s salons through his data lens led to the development of ZeeZor, a performance and communication App that lets each service provider see both their numbers and the numbers of their colleagues at the same time. And, Clayton Nedza walked attendees through StackUp, a tool that invited attendees enter in more than 12 salon performance metrics and showed them how they ‘stack up’ to other salons in the industry.

Audience Participation

Over the two days, interactive panel sessions added to the Data-Driven Experience. In the “Secrets of Successful Stylists,” Angel Castro Ceasar, a master stylists at Aria Salon in Forsyth, GA, revealed how she earned props for the highest percentage of service guests purchasing retail; Denise Deering, a master colorist at JUUT SalonSpa in Palo Alto, CA, showed how she brings in more than $500,000 a year in gross sales without an assistant; and Gary Harlan, owner and lead stylist at NColor+ Boutique2 in Naples, FL, demonstrated how he exceeds $700,00 in gross sales using assistants.

Ceasar, Deering and Harlan each walked attendees through their daily routine, offering suggestions for tightening schedules and recommending retail, then addressed a variety of questions from the audience.

During the “Salon Owner Success Stories,” The Refinery’s Marcus Allen, Atelier Salons’ Karie Bennett, Jamison Shaw’s Candy Shaw and JUUT SalonSpas’ David Wagner tackled a number of hot topics including developing a communication strategy across multiple locations, foraying into product development, buying a rental-based salon and transitioning it into a commission-based salon, and leveraging metrics to control growth.

An Alternative View

While successful salon owners made up the bulk of the aggressive Data-Driven agenda, experts from outside the industry lent their wisdom to the crowd.

Before the conference, MI Cubed’s Tim Golden invited attendees to take a 20-minute multiple intelligence’s personality test then he and Brent Golden invited them to sit at tables with attendees with similar intelligences, such as verbal/linguistics, math/logics, spatials, bodily kinesthetic, musicals, interpersonals and intrapersonals. They then walked the audience through how each of the intelligence types processes information.

“It’s not how smart you are, it’s how you are smart,” Tim Golden says.

Pastor Scott Mawdesley, founder of Write One Line helped attendees step up their leadership by drawing on information from their past, their present and their hopes for the future. “As important as it is for a company to have a clear mission statement, individuals need to have a personal mission statement,” Mawdesley said.

He encouraged attendees to ask themselves questions: “Ask yourself, ‘Are the choices you’re making today taking you towards or away from your dreams?’ When you’re working as part of a team, don’t ask yourself ‘Do I agree?’ but rather ‘Can I trust?’ And, when assessing current challenges, ask yourself, ‘What’s the one hard decision or hard conversation that I need to have that will allow me to have a breakthrough?’”

In addition, Jake LaJoie of Bird Dog Capital Group helped consider succession strategies by walking them through how to keep their salons in saleable shape.

“When thinking of selling, ask yourself, ‘Why?’” he says. “Is it for lifestyle, liquidity or legacy? The why helps determine the right buyer and the right sale structure.”

Learning by Doing

The bulk of the wisdom of the two-day Data-Driven Salon summit was delivered by the successful owners who generously shared their best practices. Following are stories from Van Michael's Van Council, Salon Visage's Monty Howard, Robert Cromeans, Hair & Co. BKLYN's Allyson King; Ginger Bay Salons and Spas' Laura Ortmann; World Class Salons' Jim Pacifico; Gene Juarez Salons and Spas' Scott Missad and Gadabout SalonsSpas' Jana and Frank Westerbeke.  Click on their individual links below to access each story of how they use data every day to continuously grow their salon businesses:

Van Council on Living By Numbers

Monty Howard on Managing by the Data

Robert Cromeans on Data as a Barometer

Allyson Hurley King on Ramping Up Retail

Laura Ortmann on The Commitment List

Jim Pacifico on Breaking Down the Numbers

Scott Missad on Membership Has Its Priviledges

Jana and Frank Westerbeke on Finding Their True Colors