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Marcy's every-five-week color client vanished for six months before a grocery-store balayage gave it away. We break down why regulars drift, how to build an "overdue regular" text automation, and the three-part system every small salon needs.
Marcy runs a three-chair salon in Green Bay and tracked 240 active clients out of a paper appointment book and her own memory — until a standing color client quietly disappeared for six months. We rebuild her system from scratch.
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Eric: ...six months. SIX months you didn't know she was gone.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Six months. And she was a standing every-five-weeks color client, Eric. Every five weeks for like four years.
Eric: And what tipped you off finally?
Marcy Hollenbeck: I ran into her at the grocery store. She had a fresh balayage that I did not do. And she got all weird and said "oh hi Marcy" and kind of speed-walked past the yogurt.
Eric: Oof.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah. Oof is right.
Eric: Okay so back up for people listening. Tell me about the salon. What are we working with.
Marcy Hollenbeck: So I have a three-chair salon in Green Bay. I opened it eleven years ago after cutting hair in my basement for way too long. It's me, two other stylists, we do color, cuts, some extensions. Mostly women, mostly regulars, mostly word of mouth.
Eric: Love it. And how were you tracking clients before all this?
Marcy Hollenbeck: Tracking is a generous word.
Eric: Uh oh.
Marcy Hollenbeck: I had a paper appointment book. Like a physical, spiral-bound, Barnes and Noble appointment book. And then everything else lived up here. Who's due, who's overdue, who I need to call, who tips weird, who hates small talk...
Eric: All in your head.
Marcy Hollenbeck: All in my head. Which worked fine for like the first eight years honestly.
Eric: Sure.
Marcy Hollenbeck: But then we got busier and I got a second kid and my head just... stopped being a reliable filing cabinet.
Eric: Okay so let me play back what I'm hearing, because I think the grocery store lady is actually not the real problem.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: You didn't lose her at the grocery store. You lost her the first time she pushed her appointment from five weeks to seven weeks and nobody noticed.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh.
Eric: Because a regular doesn't leave in a straight line. They drift. Five weeks becomes seven, seven becomes ten, ten becomes "I'll book when I need to," and then they're just gone. And if the only place you're tracking that drift is your memory, of course you miss it. You've got scissors in your hand.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah. Yeah I literally have scissors in my hand.
Eric: Right. So the problem isn't that you're bad at retention. The problem is you have no early warning system.
Marcy Hollenbeck: That's exactly it. I feel like I've been describing this to my husband for a year and he just says "get a computer, Marce."
Eric: Well, he's not wrong, but "get a computer" is not a plan.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Thank you.
Eric: So can I walk you through what we did with a client of ours who had basically the same problem? Different business, same shape.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Please.
Eric: So at the agency we run everything on this all-in-one ops platform. It's the thing we use for our clients and honestly for ourselves. It's a CRM, but it also does the appointment booking, the text messages, the email, the pipelines, all of it in one place. That's the important part. One place.
Marcy Hollenbeck: One place. Because right now I have the paper book, I have my personal texts with clients, I have Instagram DMs, I have a Square thing for payments...
Eric: Right. And every one of those is a place a client can slip through.
Marcy Hollenbeck: So many cracks.
Eric: So many cracks. Okay so step one for you would just be getting every client into the platform with two pieces of info: last visit date, and typical rebook cadence. That's it. Don't try to migrate eleven years of history.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh good because I was already panicking.
Eric: Don't panic. Just active clients. Anyone who's been in in the last, say, nine months. Name, phone, last service, how often they normally come. You can do that in an afternoon with a glass of wine.
Marcy Hollenbeck: I like this plan already.
Eric: Then step two, and this is the actual magic, you set up one automation. ONE. Called something like "overdue regular."
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: And the rule is basically, if a client's typical cadence is five weeks and they hit week seven with no appointment booked, the platform sends them a text. From you. In your voice. Something like "hey Jen, it's Marcy, realized it's been a bit, want me to hold your usual Thursday spot?"
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh.
Eric: Yeah.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh that's... that's not a marketing text. That's just what I would text her if I remembered.
Eric: EXACTLY. That's the whole game. The platform isn't replacing you, it's just remembering for you.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Huh.
Eric: Because here's the thing. When your grocery store lady drifted from five weeks to seven, if she'd gotten a text from you at week seven that said "hey want your Thursday?" she books. She doesn't have time to Google other salons. She doesn't see the Grogan ad or whatever.
Marcy Hollenbeck: The Groban ad.
Eric: The Groban ad, yeah, Josh Groban's coming for your color clients.
Eric: But seriously. The window to save a drifting regular is small. It's like two weeks. And no human running a three-chair salon can watch that window for every client.
Marcy Hollenbeck: No. No way. I've got like two hundred and forty active clients between the three of us.
Eric: Right. Two hundred and forty overlapping calendars in your head. That's not a memory problem, that's a math problem.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay when you put it like that I feel less dumb.
Eric: You should feel zero dumb. You built a business to the point where the manual system broke. That's a good problem.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Thanks.
Eric: Okay so, one place for the data, one automation for the drift. What's the third thing?
Marcy Hollenbeck: What's the third thing?
Eric: The third thing is you need a place, outside the platform, where YOU think. Where you write down the stuff about clients that isn't a data field. Like "Jen just got divorced, don't ask about her husband." Or "Ashley wants to grow it out, don't let her impulse-cut bangs in April again."
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh my god that's such a specific example and yet.
Eric: I know a lot of Ashleys.
Marcy Hollenbeck: So where does that live?
Eric: We use Notion for that. It's just a workspace, like a digital notebook. You can make a page per client if you want, or just one running doc. The platform holds the transactional stuff, Notion holds the human stuff.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: And the reason I separate them, honestly, is that if you try to put "don't mention her ex" into a CRM field, it feels gross. It feels like surveillance. In a notebook it just feels like you're a good stylist paying attention.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah. Yeah that tracks. I don't want it to feel like I'm running a dossier on Jen.
Eric: Right. You're not the FBI, you're her hairdresser.
Eric: Okay so let's talk about what actually happened when our client, similar shape business, turned this on. What did you notice first?
Marcy Hollenbeck: Wait was your client a salon?
Eric: No, ours was a dog groomer actually. But same exact problem. Regulars on a rough cadence, all in the owner's head, silent churn.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh that's funny.
Eric: What she noticed first, in like the first month, was rebookings from people she'd honestly written off. Like the text would go out at whatever, week nine for her, and she'd get a reply back like "oh my god yes I've been meaning to call." Not "you were replaced." Just "life got busy."
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah.
Eric: That was the big unlock for her emotionally. She thought people were leaving her. Most of them were just... busy. And the reminder was permission to come back without feeling weird about the gap.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh that's a good reframe. Because I do take it personal. I'm like what did I DO.
Eric: Of course you do. It's your name on the door.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah.
Eric: But a lot of the time you didn't do anything. They just drifted and got embarrassed about the drift and then the embarrassment kept them away longer. The text breaks that loop.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Huh. Okay.
Eric: The second thing she noticed, and this took like three months to show up, was her Tuesdays and Wednesdays filled in.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh those are my worst days.
Eric: Everybody's worst days. Because the automation, when it offers a rebook, you can have it offer your soft slots first. "Hey want your usual, I've got Tuesday at two or Wednesday at ten." People take what's offered.
Marcy Hollenbeck: They really do. I've noticed that. Whatever I say first, they pick.
Eric: Exactly. So you're not just recovering drifters, you're steering them into the slots you actually want filled.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay I'm getting a little fired up.
Eric: Good.
Marcy Hollenbeck: How long did this take her to set up? Because I have to be honest with you Eric, if this is a forty hour project I'm going to close the laptop.
Eric: Totally fair. Honestly, the platform side, if you're not trying to be fancy, is a weekend. Loading your active clients, setting up the one overdue automation, writing the text in your voice. A weekend. Maybe two evenings.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: The Notion side you build as you go. You don't sit down and write two hundred client notes. You just, next time Jen's in the chair and she mentions the divorce, you open Notion after and put one line. Over six months you have a real thing.
Marcy Hollenbeck: That's doable.
Eric: The trap people fall into, and I want to name it, is they try to automate everything on day one. They want the birthday texts and the review requests and the win-back campaign and the referral program and...
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah I was already thinking about the birthday thing.
Eric: Don't. Not yet. One automation. The overdue regular. Get that working, let it run for two months, THEN add the next one.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Why?
Eric: Because if you turn on eight automations at once and one of them sends a weird text to a client, you don't know which one. And you'll panic and turn the whole thing off and go back to the paper book.
Marcy Hollenbeck: That is EXACTLY what I would do.
Eric: I know. I've watched it happen a hundred times. Small, small, small. One thing works, add the next.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay.
Eric: And the other trap, which is more of a mindset thing, is thinking the automation replaces the relationship. It doesn't. It protects the relationship from your bandwidth. Big difference.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Yeah. Yeah that's the sentence I needed.
Eric: Alright so if somebody's listening to this, they run a small service business, they've got the same problem you had, what's the ONE thing you'd tell them to do this week. Not next month. This week.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh you're putting me on the spot.
Eric: I'm putting you on the spot.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Okay. Honestly? Sit down for one hour, ONE hour, and write down every regular client you can think of and roughly how often they come in. Just on paper is fine, I'm not gonna pretend I have the platform yet. Just get it out of your head onto something outside your head.
Eric: That's a great answer.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Because you can't fix a drift you can't see. And I couldn't see any of it. It was all just... vibes and guilt.
Eric: Vibes and guilt.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Put that on a shirt.
Eric: That should be the episode title. Okay Marcy this was so good. Where can people find you if they're in Green Bay and they need a color that isn't from the Groban ad.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Oh my god. Um, we're just Hollenbeck Hair Co, we're on Instagram, come say hi.
Eric: Perfect. And hey, if you're listening and this hit, do me a favor and hit subscribe so the next one shows up for you. That's it. That's the ask.
Marcy Hollenbeck: Thanks Eric. This was actually kind of therapy.
Eric: Anytime. Go text Jen.
Marcy Hollenbeck: I'm literally going to text Jen.
A daily 10-minute show for service business owners. AI tools, automated workflows, and the boring-on-purpose tactics that save you 5 hours a week. Each episode picks one niche, one workflow, and one tool — and walks you through it like a friend at a coffee shop.