The Empty Chair

Sound familiar?

• An empty chair appears in no report, so it never gets dealt with.
• Only daily revenue gets looked at; chair-hour utilisation never does.
• Can't count how many of last month's clients came back this month.
• Fills empty hours with blanket discounts, pulling peak clients into quiet slots.

Each chapter answers one question

1. Chapter 1: Busy salon, so why is my price list losing money?

   What does one chair hour cost my salon, and does the price list on the wall respect that number?

   A beauty salon does not sell services; it sells minutes of a chair. If you do not know what a chair hour costs, every price list is a guess.

2. Chapter 2: Did they leave unhappy, or did nobody ask them back?

   What share of my clients return within the right window for the service they had?

   Most lost clients are not unhappy; nobody rebooked them before their return window closed.

3. Chapter 3: Is my best stylist doing my cheapest work?

   How many chair hours did my salon lose last week, and how many hours of my best stylist?

   A busy salon that makes no profit usually has two problems at once: empty chairs mid-week, and top stylists' hours drifting into work a junior could do.

4. Chapter 4: Are next week's empty chairs this week's missed rebookings?

   Which numbers must one weekly page hold for me to see empty chairs and lost clients at the same time?

   Empty chairs and clients who do not return are the same problem: every client who misses their window is a chair gap next week. Put both on one page each week and one action fixes both.

5. Chapter 5: Did my fix work, or was it a lucky week?

   How do I know a change in my salon really filled more chairs and brought more clients back, rather than just coinciding with the season?

   Every fix in this book is an experiment. Without setting a baseline first and reading the result afterwards, you cannot tell whether the number moved because of what you did or because of the season.