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If you are ready to stop pre-booking but aren't really sure how to make that transition, this episode is for you.
You're tuned into Reviving the Stylist, a business podcast for hairstylists looking to build a dream career that creates financial freedom and flexibility. I'm your host, Kristen Lumiere and as a stylist I've had my share of successes. Building a successful six plus figure business working only three days a week while being able to prioritize my family, travel and buy my dream home. I know it doesn't sound easy, but if you put in the work, I guarantee you'll see results. No matter what your goals are. I'm super stoked that you're here so I can help you crush them. Let's start today's episode.
Kristen Lumiere 0:03
You're tuned into Reviving the Stylist, a business podcast for hair stylists looking to build a dream career that creates financial freedom and flexibility. I'm your host, Kristen Lumiere. And as a stylist, I've had my share of successes. Building a successful six plus figure business working only three days a week, while being able to prioritize my family, travel and buy my dream home. I know it doesn't sound easy, but if you put in the work, I guarantee you'll see results. No matter what your goals are. I'm super stoked that you're here so I can help you crush them. Let's start today's episode.
Kristen Lumiere 0:41
Hey, welcome back. So in episode one, I talked about the three main reasons why I stopped pre booking. And if you haven't listened to that episode, make sure you do because you really have to connect with my reasons. Now I want to talk about what I did to actually transition my clients from pre booking one to two, and sometimes three appointments in advance to walking out of their appointment without actually scheduling their next appointment seems a little scary. I know that entire sentence was maybe a little bit more than a little scary. And you're thinking something along the lines of how do your clients know what they're supposed to schedule? And when they're supposed to schedule their next appointment? Like, hello, Kristen, that seems a little crazy. What do we do here? And the answer is I set up automated appointment reminders that went out to them, so they never missed their next appointment. And if you've ever taken my business course, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So when someone was used to pre booking their appointment, let's just use a gray coverage client as an example, I'm going to show you exactly how I made that transition from them pre booking to then no longer pre booking their appointments, and then just scheduling them online themselves and taking the initiative on their size. That way I could free up my time. And I'd be able to actually follow an incredible system that was able to free up my time and make me more money. The first thing that I did is I set a hard date on my calendar. This was the day where I said, Hey, this is what I'm going to stop pre booking, no more clients are going to go up on my schedule again, unless they schedule their appointment themselves online. Next, I created a system on the backend that made it easy for clients to schedule their next appointment online. This took some time, but it was so well worth it because I could spend a week getting it done. And then in the future free up at least four hours of my time, each week I used to spend on doing receptionist work. So for me, it was like okay, I'm going to take a week to actually set up the system. And then I was able to free up four hours of time, which if you multiply four hours times, however many weeks in the year that you work, that is a lot more time than in just one week that you work behind the chair, then I would let clients know well in advance that the changes were coming. And by the way, I would never post about it on social media. For me social media is just a tool to market my services and myself is not a place for me to talk about my policies, it's not a place for me to really talk about my prices. Now I definitely have talked about my prices, just because I really love having price transparency with everyone stylus included. But it's not a place to notify people of price increases or of any business policy changes that I think is reserved for your email list. So if you have any of those changes happening, you should send it out to your clients send an email instead of actually going in and posting all about it on social media. People are not on social media, to see your business policies. They're on there to see pretty hair to see you know what you're doing. And also take a little bit of a peek into your personal life too. So instead of using social media as the notification method, I would send an email out to all of my clients about two to three months before I made the shift to stop pre booking. I also practiced scripted verbiage to let them know about the transition when they came to their appointment. So I actually had a formulated script that I would tell every single client at their appointment. That way, there was no missing point for that client. They didn't think oh, well, I didn't know because they I knew that they knew we talked about it many times. And I also sent multiple emails to them just to make sure that they knew the transition was coming. And then finally, I educated my client on how to book their services correctly online. And I sent follow up emails with the steps outlined again, that was the easiest way for me to make the transition and support my clients as much as possible to make sure that they were educated enough and felt comfortable in doing it. And then once I hit that hard date I made the switch 100% There was no more prebooking And I did not make any exceptions and you can't, you have to stick to your policies for every single person. It doesn't matter if they're super loyal client, they've been with you for three plus years or if they're a new client, I wholeheartedly believe that every single person who sits in my chair is going to receive the same level of exceptional service, no matter how loyal they are, or how new they are. And I know in part one, I talked about stopping pre booking, why it wasn't right for me. But I do just want to state again, that you can absolutely have a thriving business with pre booking clients, you absolutely can. But I'm here to challenge industry norms, because that's something that's been ground into our brain since Beauty School and I know this rack so many brains, like when I say like stop rebooking, it's going to help you feel so much more mental clarity and mental stability, at least for some stylist. But for you, maybe pre booking is something that you just can't get rid of something that you absolutely love. And I just want to let you know you're not wrong for that there is a million ways I don't want to say there's a million ways to skin a cat because I personally don't love that. I don't love that term at all. But there's a million ways that you can do things differently in your business, and still be super uber successful. For me stopping pre booking was so much better for my mental health. And for my lifestyle. I am what I have claimed a spontaneous butterfly, I flutter this way changed my mind flutter the other way. I like to live a spontaneous lifestyle and I don't like be strapped to a super stringent schedule. And if you're like that, then maybe stopping pre booking is for you to mental health for me was so important. And when I stopped pre booking, I no longer had anxiety going to work, at least not the schedule, stretch and anxiety. Of course, there were things that would come up that would make me feel anxious. But I was so much more relieved when I stopped pre booking. And maybe after listening to part one and part two, you're thinking you may want to give this a try. And I just want to let you know that no matter what you choose, you can have a business that works for you and automate the processes that you really don't love doing so you can revive your passion. Focus on the parts of business that you love, and really just live your dream life.
Kristen Lumiere 7:15
That's what it's about. Like for me, it's about living your life. It's not about like, working so much that you're just stressed out behind the chair and you're feeling burnout and all of those horrible things. This industry can be incredible. But it can also feel like a shackle and I'm here to help you uncooked that shackle or whatever you do to a shackle you like unclip it, I don't even know. But I'm here to help you take that dang thing off so you can feel super revived and passionate and just really love what you do. And we are on the tail end of another JAM PACKED episode. I hope that I have reached my goal of challenging your mindset and opening new doors for your friend. Bye for now. Thank you so much for joining me today on Reviving the Stylist. If something really resonated with you during this episode, take a screenshot share it to your Instagram story and let me know what you love most don't forget to also send it to a friend so that way they can reap the incredible things from this episode too and leave me a rating and review. I'd also absolutely just love to connect with you outside of the show too. So you can find me on Instagram at Kristen Lumiere that's L u m ay er E or my website, Kristen Lumiere calm. And before I go, I just want to leave you with one reminder. It isn't about living to work. It's about working to live and that is my goal for you, friend, because you deserve it. I'll see you on the next one.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai