Dear Readers,
As you read your April IST, Mother Nature has hopefully stopped beating up on you… wherever you are! Today, it’s a brisk 22 degrees where I live in MI, and if my memory serves me right, it was about 80 degrees here last year when we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day – huge change. Global Warming, right?
Every month, I spend some of my days keeping in touch with what’s happening in our industry by talking to salon owners, distributors and manufacturers. This month I spent a little extra time with distributors and manufacturers. The consensus among this group is that the weather had a huge effect on the tanning business during the first quarter, and many salons couldn’t open their doors to customers due to the extreme conditions. Some chains reported having to remain closed for several days, and some as long as a week due to power outages. When it’s February and you have to close your doors for several days, it’s hard to recover that revenue quickly. However, my conversations with a large group of salons indicate that their numbers for tanners, product and service sales were heading toward normal levels. If you’re interested in being part of the select group of salon operators that I network with every month, send me an email.
It’s never been more important to work smart and take advantage of all the resources available to help you run your salons professionally and profitably. In every issue of IST, we inform you about all the great training and educational opportunities that are offered to anyone willing to invest the time in growing their business. When putting together our content for each issue, we look to industry members for advice on matters of successful salon operation, and I hope you take time to read what they have to say. And, carve out some time to attend one of the informative and free Sun is Life® webinars we offer each month. Hundreds of salon operators are logging on for each session and benefitting from the knowledge that industry veteran John Farr and Sun is Life Director, Tony Brown have to share about how to provide more professional tanning services to your salon guests.
That leads me to our Cover Story about sunless tanning, a service that has become nearly season-less. Sunless revenue in my own salon chain is up over 2013 in the first quarter and has been increasing for 14 consecutive quarters. Be sure to read this section, and if you’re one of the VERY few salons that has not incorporated this service into your menu, you are missing out on amazing revenue potential if you implement it correctly. In addition, if you don’t offer this extremely popular service at your facilities, you are definitely sending customers to your competition. If you think you don’t know enough about sunless to make it work for you, I want to let you know that for the month of April, ist Magazine is offering the Sun is Life® “Got Sunless” training module FREE of charge. It’s time to make it happen!
Quality training is so easy to get and can significantly help you make more money. The Sun is Life program is available online 24/7 and will turn your staff into a team of professionals. I believe that only the salons that present their businesses in this way will survive the tough times ahead. I think this will be a great year for tanning – why not make it your best year ever?
Of course, another way to contribute to this industry’s health is to join the ITA – the group working to protect us from legislation that poses serious threats to YOUR business. If we all direct some energy and resources toward their efforts on our collective behalf, it will truly make a difference and we can say we’ve done our best to ensure our survival.
To summarize: Take the free Sun is Life® sunless training module, get your team certified and make it a point to join the ITA. These three things will put you on track for a successful 2014.
Thanks for reading.
