Can having just one single aim, just one goal to focus on, make a bigger, more impactful difference to your salon business than measuring a more standard list of KPI’s?
Welcome to a new type of post here on salonbusinesssecrets.com. Those of you who are part of the SBS Community or subscribe to the newsletter will be aware that I tend to write more detailed lengthy posts, which is why I often refer to them as articles. To complement these longer posts I thought adding in “Quick Tips” here and there would be useful. These are going to be shorter posts, readable in just a few minutes and focussing on just one question, idea or thought. As always it would be great to know what you think, so just leave a comment below if you have any feedback, comments or questions.
Where were we . . .
Back to the question at the top of this Quick Tip. Recently I wrote an article about KPI’s, what they are and how to make them work in your business. In that article I suggested measuring 7 KPI’s at any one time, but to only focus on improving 2 at a time. Even when I wrote this I thought these figures should really have been smaller, but business people who do measure KPI’s like to measure a number of them and I didn’t want to put people off.
However, I recently read an article about a business who only has one single KPI by conscious decision. They had previously measured, tracked and targeted a more standard list of performance indicators, but they found that some of these could conflict with each other. They found that their team would spend a few days focussing on improving one of the KPI’s then notice one of the others slipping and switch to focus on that one.
They decided which single aim was the most important true KPI and only measured, tracked and targeted that one. The company in question was not a salon type business, it was in fact an internet marketing company, but the logic holds true in any salon business environment especially where there is a team of people.
Note: If you would like to read the original article you can find it here . . . Original Article!
The company in the article realised, based on data they had already collected, that all of their real business goals could be achieved if they simply attained a certain number of visitors to their website. They knew how many website visitors became customers, how many customers they gained and lost over a period of time and on average how much each customer spent with them. So they set their single goal to attract a total of one billion people to their website!
One Billion Visits!!!
Now one billion is a pretty big number so they gave themselves plenty of time to do this and to help keep things on track they broke down the one billion in to a monthly target and from there a daily target. They were still only measuring that one number though. They then physically projected the target and the number of customers on the wall of the office so the whole team could see how things were going in real time every single day.
There were no longer competing goals, yes there was still things to maintain like customer satisfaction, existing customers, accounts, invoicing etc, but everyone could focus on this one main overriding goal.
Putting this to Work
Could this work in your business? Could you take all the KPI’s you currently measure and strip them back to just one single KPI? Set a long term target for that one KPI, get your team involved in the process so everyone is invested and focus on just that one number. You would need to measure it daily, breakdown the long term goal in to a monthly, weekly and daily target and display it on the wall of your office or staff room for everyone in your team to see.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this as an idea so please leave a comment below. If you would like to try this, but need some ideas, advice or guidance just drop me an email to adam@salonbusinesssecrets.com and if I can help a few of you out I will and together we can see what difference having just one KPI can make to your business.
