I own a hair salon. Typically, November is my busiest season. It has been SO quiet. A lot of my colleagues are also saying the same thing and have had to close up shop because of it - or get a second job.

People keep saying it will get better and the economy will bounce back but I don’t know. I am so close from just throwing in the towel, closing up shop and getting a corporate gig.

  • WhizzlePizzle@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I don’t know how or what your marketing is.

    However, I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of small business owners during my career.

    I cannot begin to tell you the number of business owners who have told me, “It has been SO quiet. A lot of my colleagues are also saying the same thing” exactly as you did. Tens of thousands of times, in good times and bad, business owners say this. Trust me.

    Without fail, the ones who always do best and never worry about customers are the ones that invest heavily into marketing, and marketing correctly, of course.

    The major problem is almost all business owners say either of these two things:

    1. “I have enough business, why should I waste money on marketing?”

    and

    1. “I’m not making enough money, I don’t have money to spend on marketing.”

    It’s much better to start marketing when you are in the position of “1)” above.

    .

    Coca-Cola has the top 5 brand/logos in the world. You have no chance of every having that much logo/brand recognition.

    However, do you think that Coca-Cola, because they are the most recognized brand in the world, don’t have to market? Most everyone knows that they can and shout and do market the shit out of their products. They spend $4 billion with a b on marketing every year.

    Yet business owners, while knowing this, don’t apply marketing to their own business. Probably because they don’t know how and have spent money with no return before. They’ve done it for themselves, hired people to do it for them - no luck.

    However, when you have enough business, you market even harder. This is the time to test, not when you have no customers. If you are in the situation that if you market and get too many clients and you don’t have the room for more, there are a lot of things you can do. You can raise your prices. You can add other add-on products and services that you charge for that require almost no time and effort and give you great profit margins. You can fire your shitty customers. You get so many more options, and there are a ton of them.