As a business owner, it is crucial that you stay on top of your outgoings to ensure you aren’t haemorrhaging money. This is particularly important if you’re a startup salon business, or struggling to make a profit.

Here at Salons Direct, we are always interested in discovering hacks that save you money. In this article, we discover how and where to save money within your salon business on everything from salon consumables, the necessities that you need but aren’t exactly the most exciting purchases to larger outlays such as furniture.

We’ve also enlisted the advice of Marc Westerman, Director at Westrow to discover more about his approach to managing salon costs!

Marc says …

There are four main costs when running a salon business:

  1. Wages
  2. Rents/Rates
  3. Stock
  4. Utilities

Typically the costs above will account for 75% and above of the salon’s turnover. These are also the costs that need cutting if you want to substantially lower your overheads.

On the whole…

Rents/rates are generally fixed so you can’t reduce these. If you shop around you may be able to save approximately £200-£300 per year on utilities. And your stock is an area where you can possibly see significant savings – especially professional stock used to carry out services. As an example, if a salon turnover is £500k and you typically spend 8% of this turnover on professional stock you will spend 40k. Every 1% reduction in spending will save you 5k. By cutting out wastage and implementing an efficient stock control system this is very achievable.

Wages…

Wages are another area where money can be saved. If all the team is working to capacity there’s not much you can do to cut wages costs, but if there are team members who aren’t and who you feel may not in the future, then you need to ask the question: do you need them?

Discover: How to manage underperforming staff in your salon

Other costs associated with running a salon, such as insurance, laundry, flowers, magazines, refreshments, etc, can of course be looked at and reduced, but the savings in total may be only up to 2k to 3k per year and although every penny saved helps, it won’t have that much of an impact on a weekly/monthly basis.

To save on larger capital expenditure, i.e. furniture, it is always worth looking at spreading the cost over a period of 12 months if you can without being penalised, as this may significantly help cash flow as you can spread the cost.  

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