Running a salon, in practice
No-shows, commission, stock, pricing — how salons actually handle the parts that are hard, written for owners rather than for search engines.
Stock that never matches
Four causes, in the order you should rule them out.
When a salon’s stock figures stop matching the shelf, the first suspicion is usually theft and it is almost always wrong. The gap is nearly always one of four ordinary things: product used during services and never deducted, refills received but not recorded, sales rung up against the wrong item, and a physical count that has not happened in long enough that nobody trusts either number. Each has a different fix, and working through them in that order will close most of the gap before you have to consider anything uncomfortable.
Read moreCommission structures
Three ways to pay a stylist, and what each one is actually optimising for.
There are three commission structures a salon realistically chooses between: a flat percentage, tiered bands that step up at thresholds, and a sliding scale that rises continuously with takings. They are not degrees of generosity — they optimise for different things. A flat rate is simple and predictable; tiers reward the stylists who fill their column without committing you to that rate for everybody; a sliding scale removes the cliff at each threshold but is harder for a stylist to calculate in their head, which matters more than it sounds.
Read moreCutting no-shows
The measures that work are the ones a reliable client never notices.
A no-show costs you the slot, not the service — you keep the product and lose the hour, and the hour is the thing you cannot make more of. The measures that actually reduce no-shows are reminders that arrive when there is still time to rebook, deposits on the appointments long enough to hurt, and knowing which clients repeat so you can treat a first offence differently from a fifth. The measures that do not work are blanket penalties, which cost you the clients who had a genuine emergency and change nothing about the ones who never intended to come.
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