5 Ways for Salon, Spa, and Wellness Franchises to Get Big Results from Insights

If you’re part of a salon, spa, or wellness franchise organization, you aim to create a unique product or service, standardize the entire business process, and recruit others who are looking to join you, owning their own business while receiving support from your corporate office. Building a successful franchise organization means delivering the same consistently high-quality product across every single location.

How can you do it? Well, technology can give you a significant advantage over your competitors, helping you to align your entire franchise organization, boost revenue, and improve efficiency. Couple technology and the data you need to drive decision-making, and you’ve got Mindbody’s Insights. Insights is a powerful tool that salon, spa, and wellness franchises can use to see what’s happening across their business and across the beauty and wellness industry.

Here are five best practices to get the most out of Insights and achieve results throughout your brand.

1. Identify key metrics for your brand and rally your organization around them

Identifying the four or five key metrics (or key performance indicators) that drive your franchise system is critical—but equally, and maybe more important, is ensuring everyone in your organization understands the measures, too. These metrics need to motivate everybody.

Insights can help your franchise identify the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) in your business and then share them across your organization. As a franchisor, you can define these metrics to guide the behavior of your franchisees. This means everyone is on the same page and speaking the same language.

You can also create a custom dashboard that shows what matters to YOUR business. Make a specific dashboard for the executive team, separate dashboards to share with regional managers, and dashboards for franchisees at the location level. It’s your data, see it the way you want, that makes sense for your business.

With Insights you never have to run a report to check KPIs again. Everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the front-line service provider, can see metrics on their mobile device—updated in near real time. That way, targeting key performance indicators becomes a part of the culture and lets your whole brand know where you’re headed—together.

2. Set goals

Insights gives you the ability to establish and track daily, weekly, quarterly, or annual goals at the organization, location, and individual level. Managers can see employee performance and coach them to success. Plus, when staff logs into the Insights app, the first thing they see is their goal progress, keeping the entire company focused.

Incentivizing your team to hit their numbers is easier with Insights, too. If you have bonus plans based on achieving certain goals, you can use the tool to track those goals.

3. Host a contest to hit results (and drive revenue)

Create excitement throughout the company and engage your employees with the built-in contest management tool. Using Insights, you can readily set up a contest for a given time period and automatically display and track the results. 

Make the contest extra rewarding (and effective) with digital “lottery tickets.” Each day that a staff member hits a goal, they receive a lottery ticket. For example, for every $25 in retail they sell, they can receive a lottery ticket—the more they sell, the better chance they have at winning. At the end of the contest period, Insights randomly draws the winner(s). Your staff will thrive through healthy competition, all while increasing sales and creating the habit of leveraging Insights to boost performance.

4. Recognize top performers

Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool in a salon, spa, or wellness franchise. With Insights, you have visibility into all your locations and staff. You can see which locations have served the most customers so far that day and even which individual stylist or service provider served the most customers. Savvy franchises leverage this information and make sure good behavior is recognized and rewarded.

With Insights, leaders can instantly send top performers a text message congratulating them for how well they’re doing–all within the app. Even a busy CEO can quickly pull up Insights to spot stellar performers and send a quick congrats. It's a small gesture that can mean big results (and increased job satisfaction for your top employees).

Instant (or near-instant) recognition is one of the most effective tools for improving employee engagement. Use Insights to let your staff know you “see them and appreciate them” and foster a positive, thriving culture.

5. Take advantage of benchmarking

Benchmarking is important within a franchise because it identifies how each location is performing compared to others. It's easy to see how your locations are performing with Insights. Even better? Use the tool to see how your franchise stacks up against similar brands in your industry. Insights anonymizes the data so you can’t see the specifics of the other locations, but you can see how you’re doing and what’s possible compared to other salon, spa, or wellness businesses.

For example, one of our customers has a location that sells over $250,000 a year in beauty retail product. That number alone puts that location in the top quartile of their peer group for beauty retail sales. This brand often celebrated its incredible performance. However, Insights revealed the brand's retail sales per client was near the bottom quartile. The brand saw a weakness in product mix and client consultation process, and the company was missing out on nearly $100,000 a year in additional retail sales. The team went to work in response.

With Insights, salon, spa, and wellness franchise organizations have a powerful platform for providing clarity while engaging the most important asset they have—their team members. Providing clear direction, setting goals, creating excitement and competition, and communicating directly with individual contributors of the organization has never been more important. Insights makes it all possible—no matter where you are and in real time.