The Substance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhQ1QfH23iU

http://vimeo.com/30637569

Posted this with the permission of my friend Bill in Chicago who sent this to me a few months ago. Bill’s a sales and marketing genius. Last year, he outsold everyone else in his home office combined.
Here’s his recap of this strip mall merchant’s success story — quick and concise the way all effective marketing and sales should be.
Lawrence,
Thought you would appreciate hearing this success story.
Tonight I took my daughter to get her hair cut and colored.
Went to a new place, and ended up talking with the owner for 2-and-a-half hours about business, marketing and life in general.
Check this out.
He opened his salon 17 weeks ago with zero clients.

Now he is seeing, on average, 55 clients a week, with an average $100 unit of sale. That’s $5,500 a week or $22,000 a month, or $264,000 annualized.
Guess what? The local market did not need another hair salon. I’ll bet you the existing salon owners are all moaning about how ‘bad’ business is in ‘this’ economy.
But Carlo had a different idea. He set up shop and is thriving.
How did he do it?
Carlo opened up and shared with me three marketing strategies he’s used. They are all brain-dead easy. The first one obvious (but I bet most start up owners don’t really get it). The other two are not as obvious, but are working like magic.

1. He smartly opened shop in a strip mall across the street from a 700 home sub-division where the average home is worth more than $1 million. Classic Dan Kennedy strategy: target people with MONEY. 700 women with money to burn, who all want their hair to look better than anyone else’s, live across the street.
2. He has a killer offer: 50% off your first visit. How can anyone resist HALF-OFF a service you were going to buy anyway? This offer is in every single one of his ads (and unlike most business owners he didn’t stop using it after the first 30 days. It worked, so he’s still using it 17 weeks later).
3. Carlo has the best referral strategy I’ve ever seen anyone ACTUALLY USE. Here’s what he tells EVERY customer: For each friend you send to me, you get $25 off your next service. Send me two friends, you get $50 off your next visit, send me four friends and your next color or highlight is FREE. And he tracks this on a super high-tech system: 3 x 5″ cards.

Three simple strategies THAT WORK LIKE MAGIC.
There’s more to the story, and he is a smart guy who’s doing lots of things right… but those three strategies are the key marketing approaches he’s focused on so far.
Zero to $264,000 in year one. Not bad for a guy cutting hair.

http://vimeo.com/28292408New Article

Anyone with any interest in marketing and business owes it to themselves to watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4

It may not be new information to any real nitty gritty business people out there, but it's well packaged and codified and inspiring! And just think of how much this applies to the atmosphere of a salon... This explains the entire difference between a Supercuts and a Robert Cromean salon in a nutshell.

I wrote a reply, but then I read it out loud with music because I like the song Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrman.

So here it is: http://blog.antimullet.com/wp-conten...Hairscreen.mp3