140: Salon Reports Made Easy

Are you the type of owner who hates to look at their reports? 

You probably paid for a POS system that is wonderful at keeping track of your appointments, but usually they come with some pretty powerful reporting capabilities too. Today we talk with Jules Reese, a Customer Success Manager at Boulevard. He’s going to break down the top five reports that owners need to be aware of and give us some examples of how they are used in the salon for growth. 

Jules Reese is an Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform purpose-built for appointment-based, self-care businesses. At Boulevard, Jules works directly with customers to help them maximize their technology investments, deliver the best possible experience to their clients, and amplify their growth potential. 

Prior to joining Boulevard, Jules spent 10 years in the salon industry, working as a stylist while also managing business administration for multi-location hair salons and barbershops in Ohio, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. 

Passionate about the industry, Jules is dedicated to helping salon owners and managers grow, expand, and franchise their businesses.

Connect with Jules on LinkedIn:  Jules Reese

@joinblvd

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Transcript

1:31

Are you the type of owner who hates to look at their reports, you probably paid for a POS system that is wonderful at keeping track of your appointments. But usually they come with some pretty powerful recording capabilities to Today we talk with Jules Reese, a customer success manager at Boulevard. He's going to break down the top five reports that owners need to be aware of, and give us some examples of how they're used in the salon for growth. It's a good one. Stay tuned. Well, hey there. This is Danise. And this is the salon ownership Made Easy podcast for salon owners who are searching for simple solutions to their everyday challenges. I've owned several six and seven figure award winning salons in my 30 year career. With so many changes happening in our industry these days, it seems like salon owners need a shoulder a hug and a big dose of reality. Think about it. We didn't learn how to be successful salon owners in beauty school. So why don't you let me share what has worked and what hasn't worked for me over the years, you do have what it takes to be amazingly successful. So let's do this. I'm excited you're here. Today we have a guest with us, Jules Reese. He is from Boulevard and that's a program is your POS system for salons and med spas and basically any service industry that makes appointments, am I right? Sure, exactly. We like to pose ourselves as a beauty and wellness brand, who happens to create technology to support those businesses. Fabulous. Yeah. And Jules supports the business owners by helping that him or her read reports. Use technology to their to their advantage, things like that. So before I slaughter it, I'm gonna have Jules introduce himself. And let us know a little bit more about him how he got to this position, and a little history from just being in the beauty industry. Sure. Thank you so much, Denise. Absolutely. First, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm glad you're here. I think I'm about 20 episodes deep. And I've really enjoyed listening to the different topics that you speak about on here. Thank you. So a little bit about me. So currently, I am a customer success manager at Boulevard beauty and wellness brand that caters to these appointment based businesses by way of technology. We are a complete salon, or business management software, providing scheduling, point of sale reporting, inventory management, integrated marketing, and a lot of other features too. Um, a little bit of context about me and how I got to Boulevard. I started if we want to go far back. Growing up, I had a head full of curly hair, didn't know how to style it, therefore I hated it. And when I found out that you could style hair for a living, I knew that that's what I wanted to do because I didn't want anyone to feel self conscious or, or unsatisfied with the way that they looked and the way it affects their competence etc. So, I started my beauty industry journey by starting as a receptionist at a salon in Dayton, Ohio. I transferred to one of their locations in Columbus, Ohio and attended the Aveda Institute in Columbus. I went and became licensed got a year of experience under my belt before leaving Ohio. And from there on out I bopped around from New York, LA San Francisco back to LA back to New York. And depending on where I was, or what position I was hired for, I felt like I always had a hand being behind the chair and behind the scenes. So I was often managing and styling hair and those businesses ranged from local mom and pop shops to multilocation corporate salons, franchised businesses, between full service hair, skin and nails salon to barber shops to blow dry salons to luxury or Wow. Anyways. So basically, I wanted to kind of get a little bit of everything out of the industry just because it's a fascinating industry. It is. Over time I became more interested in the administrative side reporting, which we'll talk about today became a huge interest of mine. And besides the salon operations, how do you take that information back behind the scenes and what do you do with that information to encourage better client behavior? or encourage better staff behavior? Or what do you do with this information to get your business to the next level? Right? Yeah. So here at Boulevard, been here for about a year and a half. Now, as a customer success manager, I manage a book of businesses, some are facial studios, some hair salons, summer nail studios, lash studios, etc. But I am a point of contact for them to consult with what like how do they do X, Y, and Z? Or here's this platform that they're using. Here's all the amazing tools, but like, how do you apply it to your current business model? Where do you want to change your business model? And how can the platform help you do that? So more so I guess, software and business implementation, if you want a shorter one, wow. Well, the reason why we thank you for that. Seems like you have a lot of a lot of background, you could probably help a lot of owners do various things probably even get behind the chair a little bit. Yeah, I missed that. I have. Yeah. Yeah. So curly hair. So you just went and and if people can't see you go on our YouTube channel. Take a look. Watch the whole video. So you just shaved it off. He's just like, forget it. You know what is interesting. So it all fell out. Randomly when I was 22 years old. I'm 30. Now, but I this is actually a scalp micropigmentation. Really? Wow, it was a hair tattoo. So maybe this will boost the viewers for the videos, people want to see what it's like Microblading but a set of lines on your eyebrows. It's just dots, you know, kind of mimicking that hair follicle. That's amazing. That's really I've seen a lot of things. And it's amazing what our industry is, is going towards, right. So it's really innovative. So you would never know that by looking at you. It just kind of looks like a it's like, yeah, yeah. So what's up? Well, I was gonna say, when it came to curly hair. When I was I believe in seventh grade, and older brother of mine had a girlfriend who was in cosmetology school. And that's kind of where I started connecting all the dots. She brought me here one time, and I was so thrilled. That's when I was like, I have to tell everybody about this flat iron that it No it's not. I remember my first my first encounter with a flat iron. I grew up in Kansas, and I have very curly hair myself. And but I'm a lot older than you and so we did hot rollers. And so I blow dry my hair, and then I put it in hot rollers. And so I knew I had curly fuzzy hair, but I didn't know what else to do with it until I went over to my friend's house. And I thought she had straight hair. I always did. I always thought she had straight hair and she had a a flat iron. Now this is in the 80s Okay, so she was probably frying her hair. But I always thought she had straight hair. I was just so amazed that anything like that was even possible. Right? Yeah. Like, Oh, that's funny that you remember your experience your first experience of one because I feel like a lot of us probably can, especially for a hair stylist has hair stylists and like having that light bulb moment, the first time you ever use one, oh, I still get those. But I'm so glad that curly hair is making a comeback. You know, everybody's embracing their texture. And I love that. And it's opening up a whole new avenue for businesses. So okay, we are we invited Jules on the podcast today, because we wanted to talk about numbers and reports. And I know a lot of salon owners that I speak with, you know, they, they became hairstylist first. And then somebody said, Hey, you make a great, a salon owner, you'd been successful. And so they become a salon owner, but they don't really know how to read all the reports that get the software in, it's a POS system it runs and they have all these hidden reports in the background. And they've either one never I don't even know what they they are. Never open them because they don't know what they are. And then how to utilize them to grow their salons. You know, I'm a numbers geek, we were discussing that before. I love every single report. And I've used a lot of different systems. And I love using those reports to grow my team, you know and what? And so maybe that's even something you know, we'd look at reports, what do you even look at what are the numbers you need to know so I'm going to leave that in your court because you know your system. I've never actually used Bulevar I heard myself, but I researched a lot online, looked at the website and you know, things like that. And I like what I see it's very current, the images, the texting the marketing reports. So of course, we'll put that link in our show notes. So in case if anybody else wants to, to go there as well, but I will leave it in your court. So we're going to just talk about what's important to know and, and what salon owners need to know. Sure thing. So I'm going to be talking about some metrics and some format, when it comes to reporting to demonstrate how understanding the data in your reporting is the best way to actually leverage it and take actionable steps to grow your business. Okay. And I'll preface this by letting our listeners know, this is not intended to be a complete Boulevard plug. We're not telling you to go run and sign up for this software, you can if you like, however, we're just speaking from experience and Boulevard is the tool that I use to help my customers. So most of these systems have reports on them. If they are using a system, they like this can still help them. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, this should be a pretty pretty universal, I would say. Okay, so um, the first one that I'd like to discuss is utilization percentage. So first of all, what is it? So utilization percentage on most platforms is going to indicate how busy or helpful a service providers schedule is, in Boulevard, the actual calculation or logic behind the metric is booked divided by our schedule. So in most cases, the busier you are, the more revenue you're generating. And high level stats will show the location utilization. So you can understand what location is the busiest or even higher level, you can see how how utilized your business is overall, whether that's staff or resource utilization. Oh, you can break it all the way down to each individual. Like, if you have somebody that needs to grow, you can actually see how busy they are compared to the whole salon. Right? Exactly. Yes. And with the segmenting, that Boulevard hasn't reporting, we can get this high level on a business level location level, staff role level, if you want to see a particular level of stylist or if you are if you want to see which department is being the most utilized, whether that's color, cut versus style. And, and yeah, you can drill down into each staff member. And you can get really granular as to the day of the week or the time of day. That will day of week and time of day will be a format that we talked about here in a few minutes. But I'll first kind of lay out I guess, the basics of utilization percentage, okay. Um, so besides how that's measured hours booked divided by our scheduled, there is also like time blocks to be taken into consideration. So depending on your platform, all of your time blocks might count towards your utilization or they might count against the utilization, or perhaps they don't have any effect. So ask your whether that's your customer success manager or the support team, the platform's support articles, etc, understand how that metric is being calculated. But in Boulevard, we have the option to block out schedules as either personal or business. Some examples of personal blocks might be if the staff member is requesting to come in late or leave earlier. Whereas an example of a business block might be for continued education if you're blocking them off for a class or for one on ones catch up time for late clients, etc. An exception to a business block being completely business centric, might be a seasoning, scheduled lunches, where I'm not trying to make this all about talking about lunches, but I only bring that up because that seems to be a topic I speak with my customers a lot is how do I mark out lunches, like that's not doing anything for business. But if you count their lunchbox as personal then they're never going to hit 100% You utilization percentage, which can be discouraging to the staff member if if their schedule on paper says that it's not being fully utilized. And in states like California who might have state mandated lunch breaks, it's not the staffs fault that they have to take a break. So I wouldn't want to count that time against them. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So if you're blocking off a personal one hour lunch break, then they're only and they're completely full the rest of the time that goes against him. And so they're only 90 90% utilized, because exactly out of they're saying that they're taking a break. Exactly. Right. So that can be discouraging, especially if you if your KPIs for self promotion, if they are centered around if utilization percentage is one of those metrics you consider. That's not going to be a pleasant conversation with your stuff. Yeah, yeah. And it should be one of the benchmarks. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's good to know. See, right there, you just taught me something. Oh, thank you. Well, yeah, so some tips like if your utilization percentage is low, um, quick fixes are, of course, like bundling services, offering product discounts, like offering some type of incentive to get clients in the door during those times of low utilization. Of course, quick fixes are not always sustainable. So instead, maybe consider using a marketing tool to boost your brand visibility, and encourage clients to come in like more frequently to boost that utilization percentage. In Boulevard, we have an integrated marketing suite. And two of the campaigns are based solely on utilization percentage, it's, it's the metric that you can heighten or lower the threshold, that you can choose to determine when emails are going to be sent to your clientele. If you want to say, I only want these emails to go out, if they have to D percent or more availability, then set back if you want to send more emails, then you can lower that threshold. Or if you want to send less emails, then you can heighten that threshold. And so these emails, assuming there's some back end stuff you have to do to set it up, but they just automatically go out if they see a stylist is 50% or below or whatever you set it at, they just automatically go out. Exactly. And actually, there's hardly any downtime for a setup because our engineers have built in logic into these campaigns. So they're not going to send to clients who already have an upcoming appointment. Oh, not sent any clients with who have been in within the last 30 days, and no clients who haven't visited within the last year. And that's automatic. So you don't have to set those levers up yourself? Nope. Is that when you want that threshold? What you want the threshold to be? So don't forget it? And then every day like clockwork, it'll send out based on the criteria? Yeah. Wow. That's, that's pretty cool. That's awesome. Um, what are some of the examples Perhaps you've seen in your businesses in the past? Has the utilization percentage always been like a hot topic as far as like KPIs are concerned? Or is that something that you've paid a particular attention to? Oh, absolutely did. Yeah, it was part of our our benchmark for promotions, things like that. My Salon, we didn't actually have a problem with utilization because we were so busy. So busy, we know but we worked hard at getting busy. You know, we did all the marketing and things like that. We were in a great location, and we'd been there for a long time. So people knew about us so utilization actually. Nobody worried about even our newest stylists. They just didn't worry. In fact, most people came there to build their clientele and then they took off but that's a whole other story. Another episode topic. Better. No. One thing I will say though, about that. i There's a saying that I love it goes the only thing worse than training your staff and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. I've heard that too. And that's how you get over that. Yes, I tell my my salon owners who reach out to me too with that kind of, you know, because it aches it it hurts when somebody leaves your salon as a salon owner, you put everything into them. You feel like you do, you know and you build their career and they're you know, and it really hurts when when you feel like you don't have have what they need anymore, you know, for whatever reason. And so I've had salon owners reach out to me a lot about that, like, what do I do? You know, and I was like you let it go, and you congratulate them. And you and and if they leave on good terms, guess what, you leave that door open, because that happened to people would go go away thinking the grass is greener. And then they ended up coming back. Because it wasn't, you know, they didn't know what they had because we were the first place that they worked. They had nothing to compare it to. And then they come back and Oh, I love that, you know, as long as they're leaving on good terms, you know, agreed. And for, for the listeners, Denise's episodes on firing stuff. Great. Listen, I was I was clutching my pearls because there were some very relatable points. Yeah, I've been there. Oh, my gosh, after 1112. I mean, I've owned four salons. But this my last one would my last two were my most successful, of course, keep learning. And I had it for almost 12 years. And oh, my goodness. You know, the last time I did my report for my payroll when I was shutting it down, and it shows you how many people have filtered through your system. It's like, it's terrible. But that's what it takes you find you find the you find people when they don't want to click around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So oh, by the way, I just wanted to note, I tried sharing my screen, although Lewis says host disabled participant screen sharing. So we'll just hold on a sec. Let me see. Who can share, you can share, who can start sharing when someone else's sharing. Okay. Here we go. Amazing. Thank you, Denise. Yeah, we go, Oh, awesome. Look at this, are you able to see my screen I am. Okay, wonderful. So just to kind of give you some context of like, where we are like in boulevards platform, we are in reports. And we have two sections, which personally I love. The first section, which we're not going to stick in, I'll still just touch on it, though. This is what we call our classic reports, it's a little bit more visually appealing, we have a little bit more graphics here. But this is a a collection of reports made by our team for appointment based businesses. And for instance, we'll just say like month to date for this date range. So this is a staff performance report, we're about to dive into the other version of this. But this is an example of one of our classic reports. I like this section, because it's pre made, it's pretty. And I kind of call these the Type B reports, the artists who may have become business owners who like they don't want to worry about putting together a huge report, they don't know what metrics to pull in, like, this is done for you. Yeah, so tonight, is going to pop in and see the information you need. And in some reports, such as this one, for staff performance, you know, we're looking at that utilization percentage, we can see service revenue, we can scroll over and see additional metrics. But if we select the staff members name, we can see a detailed line item view of all of the transactions, whether they're products, services, etc. that make up the numbers, we're saying, gotcha, that looks, that's easy to read, too. Yeah, and you can actually even email it straight to the staff member from the dashboard, it'll populate their email address from their staff profile. So you just collect the email button and it sends it off to them. That's nice. Yeah, good for goal setting one on ones, etc. But I'm in the beta report section. So this is a more customizable, that's the, that's the benefit of using this version. Because we can see, um, you know, our date ranges just this last week, I don't want to pull too much data in here. But by default, this report is going to by staff roll into the staff. But if we want to see a higher level view, we can customize it. We customize what our reporting data is how the rows are grouped. Our columns, what they're grouped by, we want to do week over week, month over month, and then we have all of the columns that we're measuring down here. And if we select into this, there's additional metrics that we can add. So chance is our if you want to measure it, we can, wow, I could totally geek out on this. Okay, that kind of stuff. But I'm here we can do. If we wanted to sort this by patient, then we'll get a wide view of all of our stats at the top, then it'll break it out per location. And then the staff members underneath. We could do month over month or quarter over quarter, etc. But this gives you that that high level view of the busyness of your business, okay, I'm in each level of granularity, right. Okay. That's great. That's nice. And, um, we'll come back to some more reports here in just a moment. I'm actually one more piece of granularity I suppose I can show is we can group we can have our reporting data be staff name, rows grouped by client name, then how long it goes, give us each staff member along with each of the service that makes up those numbers. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, that's nice. So we'll come back to screen sharing in a minute. Yeah. Any other last questions or comments about utilization before diving into the next? No, that kind of leads us to the next because the next thing that I have on my list is tags. And that was what those things you were showing us, right, those blue tags. Um, so for the tags? Well, so in Boulevard, you can create a tag, and you can apply it to appointments, clients, or orders, aka ticket Oh, okay. And, oh, you can create this tag to mean anything, give them any meaning. Choose an emoji to associate it with if you like you don't have to, but benefit of using one of the emojis which I feel so silly talking about emojis when discussing business and reporting. But the benefit of assigning it is that you can quickly glance at an appointment and glance at a client profile, etc. And see that emoji, like see that tag and instantly know a bit of information about that person. Oh, like a VIP, maybe you have a heart emoji. And so there's a heart next to any VIP client, whatever the VIP means, okay. And you can pull these tags into reporting. So if you want to measure our particular group of people, whether that's like, you know, your VIPs, or your influencers, or if you think your your late clients, you're chronically late clients, or if you want to, you know, pull in a membership reporting, so you use a membership tag, you can really get insights to how much revenue they're generating for your business. So I'll kind of go through each type of tag and give you a couple of examples of each. Okay. When it comes to appointment tags, like those are going to be temporary attached to a single appointment. It's not going to display on future bookings, and it won't show up in the client profile. It's intended for that appointment specifically, like maybe they have to bring their kid to the appointment or exactly, or maybe they're bringing a pet in, ya know that like in case anyone's allergic. But like, a couple examples would be like the client or the staff member running late. Do you tag that appointment than anyone else? Who might be like, No, the break room computer waiting for the client can see, oh, this client called and said they were going to be late. Great. Ah, okay. One that I wish I would have used when I was using Boulevard as a customer because I was managing a salon on the customer side using Boulevard for two years before joining the boulevard team. But an appointment tag I wish I would have used would have been like, requested an earlier time or an earlier date, or perhaps request at a later time or a later day. And that's only because like when scheduling, whether it's over the phone or in the notes section of online bookings, clients oftentimes are asking for earlier or later appointments than what they actually booked for. So if you have a cancellation, you can easily glance at your books, see if there was someone else that day that wanted to move up to an earlier time or on a future date wanting to get in on a sooner a day. So you can quickly look at your schedule, see who those candidates are and start contacting them to get that spot filled. I love that yeah, that Wow. Yeah. And even if they don't take the appointment like clients are usually so appreciative and over the moon that you would think or that you quote unquote, remembered that they did want to come in earlier and you know, try to accommodate them that way right? Magic. Another appointment tag that I wish I would have used would be like an example like appointment sentiment. So this could be positive, neutral or poor. And while tagging each appointment as sentiment, it could seem excessive depending on what your client volume is. However, the benefit of this is, it can be an indicator of either a staff member who may need to polish up their customer service skills or their technical skills based on like what that service is. But if something's also tagged as neutral or poor, that also allows you to have that visibility and then reach out to the client and say, like, Hey, thank you for coming in, how was your appointment with us? And it opens up that conversation to get feedback from the client, maybe they weren't planning on coming back, or maybe they were planning on leaving a poor review, because maybe they thought the customer service was subpar. Or maybe they didn't like the way their hair turned out. And you can usually tell that when they're checking out just that energy that you know, most Exactly. So if a staff member or your receptionist that tags the appointment, that's just a little flag for you to like, check in and dig a little deeper and make sure that it's the type of experience you want a client to be having. Yeah, even if it was the salon owner who went through that even weekly and saw the neutral or the negative ones. And they reached out. Could you imagine if the salon owner actually reached out to these guests and said, Hey, I mean, but nobody does that. I used to Yeah, every once in a blue moon, I would do it. But I mean, it's a lot. But it's so important to your business, if you want to keep your guests, right, exactly. Because we're in the business of making people feel good, whether it's about the way they look, right? Yeah, yeah. So I love that. And then last example of an appointment tag, I don't have as many examples for the clients in order. So this tag section I'm not going to make but for called and left message. Or excuse me, an example name of attack could be called enough message texted and left message or confirmed, confirmed appointment move. And the use case I'm attaching that to is like we've all been there, a staff member calls out, they have a book full of appointments, and you are then playing phone tag with all of their clients all day long, because you can't get them on the phone. Maybe your platform has two way texting, maybe it doesn't, I hope it does, because that makes it so much easier. But I'm also considering how many people you're working with at the desk, or how many people you're working with at the desk. You can be like tag teaming and working your way down the client list. Try to move appointments. But if you have a tag that you can quickly just call it enough message texted and left method. Oh, yeah. Better. Just to keep your own organization in line. But that way, you're not double calling clients. Right? That's, that's happened to me in the moment. Oh, yeah. I happen to everybody, right? You've got Yeah, two or three people at the desk, and they don't know what's going on? Oh, no, that's, that's lovely. I could see where that would come in handy. Big time, then that way, you're not writing all your notes down on a pad of paper, and trying to keep up with that. Or typing an individual note for every Yeah, which, right, you don't have time. And not everybody sees that because they don't click on it. I don't know how, Oh, your card works. But, you know, you usually have to click on it to see the note. And exactly, or at least hover over it. Something if you're using an iPad hovering doesn't really exist on life. True. And a lot of people are, yeah, I'm for client tags. So those are going to be permanent tags until you remove them of course, but those will be attached to the client profile. And those will appear anywhere that client doesn't in the platform. So whether it's on your front desk page for check ins, whether you're on your Calendar tab, viewing the entire schedule, you will be able to see with just a glance like who that client is or, or what group that they might be a part of. Okay. So example tags could be like consistently tardy, spicy. Yeah. Or no phone calls. Or maybe this is a no charge client. Perhaps like creating allergies tag. If, if you need if you should be noting a client's allergies if you're doing skin services. Sure. There was a regular client in my past who was allergic to lilies. So when we saw when she came in, we had to make sure we didn't have lilies on this alarm. There you go. If someone lets you know that they have an allergy, you know, it doesn't hurt just to pin that tag on them. Oh, yeah. But then also a popular one during COVID reopening was creating a I can't tag for proof of vaccination, or prefers masks for their services. So you, they have a lot of flexibility. You can get creative with these you can use them for for whatever you like, really. But, um, but then yeah, I'd say, when it comes to actually like reporting on these tags, the the most popular one that we see is for businesses with memberships marking a ership tag on a client, you could have like a generalized membership tag, or if you want to create a tag for each type of membership, that way, you can get even more granular with what each membership is bringing in. And then, along with reporting, you can use these tags to create audiences in the marketing suite. Oh, yes. And just email to those people. Exactly. So depending on like for that membership tag example, if you want to send a generalized campaign to all your members, great. But if you want to send a campaign to a particular membership audience, you can do that. If you're trying to promote one membership, and you want to send to the clients who may have a membership, but not that one. You can do that, right? No, I get that. Yeah, that's cool. Now, now, if you create a, an emoji for all of these different things, doesn't that kind of get like, crazy? Are you talking like emojis? Like when you're texting? You know, smiley faces, arrows, you know, that all those kind of emojis. So, okay. You just don't want to go overboard? I would, I would assume. Sure. And, and that's why I kind of liked the flexibility of like, you don't have to choose an emoji if you don't want to, if you want something to live in the client profile for you to report on. But you don't want to clutter up your view, per se. Yeah, then you can do that. This is an example. Like, if we hover over this, my cursor is kind of large, but I like it. We see loyal client, or member. Okay, so those are examples of client tags. Okay, so those will always live with the client. Whereas here, we can add an appointment tag, perhaps, perhaps this client shouldn't always be a no charge. So we don't need this on their client profile. But perhaps for this particular appointment, it should be no charged. So then we can assign that, and we can see easily by looking at the books that Yeah. So okay, yeah, we've also got our front desk screen, which is the same information as the calendar but in a little bit more legible form, because depending on how many staff members a client, or excuse me, and business has, it can start getting a little squished the columns, so this is a much easier way to read it, and you still have access to information. Okay, I see. That's nice. Yeah, and then and reporting. Um, this would be an example, I didn't test this first, I'm not sure if at this point of me, clients in this set of data, but we will be able to filter down to what we want. If we only want to see stats for our members. Oh, okay. Yeah. See? So, a little example of the filtering you can do. Yeah, that's nice. So, um, as far as the importance of tags, I mean, chances are like, as a, as most beauty businesses, do, you have unique names, and they're not, and not every report is going to give you all the metrics that you want, based on like, your interests, so that's where tags come in. And like I said, you can even create audiences. So they've got some versatility to where you can use Yeah, and I'm sure that when you go into your businesses that are assigned to you, or even probably setting up new ones, you can go over this kind of thing with them. Because that, you know, that's a lot to remember, you know, but it can be really powerful if you use it right. I could, I could tell. So I mean, even on yours. Your example that you showed on screen, it said tourist, you know, that means, you know, don't send them like a repeat like, hey, you know, it's time for another haircut if they don't even live in the area, right? Or you can choose to exclude those tags. You don't if you don't want that lack of retention to affect their overall retention because your staff can't help if that no, they're not. And they shouldn't be realized if they can't bring that tourists back in the chair. Right? Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah, and you don't want to keep bothering them if they live across the country. We're in a touristy town, we, my old salon was too. So. Okay. Yeah. So like that, like tags, same same tag user. So the next point that I wanted to touch on which we touched on with the first topic, but the format of being able to measure something by the day a week, or the hour and or the hour of day. So this format can really be used, whether you're trying to determine like when your highest or lowest service sales are, when your highest or lowest retail sales are, or in our use case that we're going to be talking about is utilization percentage. And you might want to find out what your high and low volume times are. Maybe because you're trying to reconfigure your stores open hours, maybe you're trying to slim down, or maybe you're trying to gauge if you should expand your hours, like see what that demand is. Or perhaps you are finding yourself almost too busy. If every staff is at 100% utilization, maybe there's literally not enough room in your space for all these clients. Or maybe you're running out of shampoo bowls, maybe you're running out of room on the coat rack, or maybe you're having someone process and an awkward chair over in the corner because you don't have anywhere else. Like I think we've all seen Yes, yes, I've been to all those get the show, right. So I'm here, I'm going to share my screen again. And we're going to just take a look at a detailed line item report that's going to give us that granularity with seeing something by day, or by hour. Okay, so our report data, we're just going to look at staff names. We're not going to grip the will group the rows by hour of day. And we'll group our columns by day of the week. And I'm going to slim down some of the metrics that we're measuring, just so that it's easier to see the like each column side by side. Okay, so we're going to be measuring, let's say utilization, net service sales, net retail product sales, and perhaps negative card sales. So we'll just use these form. But what it's going to show us is okay, so this imaginary environment that we're in there, Sunday and Monday, which is, you know, typical salon hours, yes. As we move into Thursday, we can see, actually, let's arrange this by our day, then staff made. Gotcha. So, if so, now, we're looking at the hours of the day on the left, broken out into staff name to see which staff was that our and then our alums, as we hope will see each day of the week. So we can see what their utilization percentage is for Wednesday, or what they're not service sales would be we can expand our date range to do last month so maybe we have a little bit better to play with here. But this is going to be good for if you want to like find your store hours or maybe redistributes like the the high utilization you're seeing with staff and reduced over to junior staff. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen here for a second. But some examples of reasons why you might want to identify low appointment volume, identifying slow times is going to help you determine like your hours of operation but also if you have hourly stuff and you're and you have a lot on staff that you're paying for you know servicing no clients like you know, this can help reduce your labor costs, so you can consider reducing your hours. Alternatively, if instead of reducing your brother combat slow times, then instead of fawning you can consider like offering a promo code for discounted services or products, right? Bundle something or and make those codes only applicable to particular days of the week or times of day, you know, between these and these hours to help promote business during that time. Yeah, we used to do that, you know, like, Tuesdays was a weird day, you know, we were open seven days a week. But Tuesdays were was really weird. And so we would, we would have surprise things not all the time, because we didn't want people to wait till we did that we would have to size. But we didn't. I don't remember doing it like this we just did on social media. Yeah, well, and some examples of like high appointment volume considerations would be if you have too much utilization happening at one time, and it's too busy, then perhaps you can rearrange your staff schedules with their consideration, of course, by all senior staff on a particular day, and then all junior staff on a particular day, chances are your senior staff is going to have higher utilization, and that can lead to congested spaces. Yeah, no, you're right. But it could also tell you to if you need to hire somebody new, right? So maybe you're not at capacity. But yet, you don't really know when you're supposed to hire your next person. This, this report would probably tell you that. Exactly. Yes. Like considering resource utilization, you can see if all of your chairs are actually always busy, or if you're not utilizing all. I like that. Okay. Our next topic I wanted to address was like time and attendance tracking. Yeah. And with a lot of people. Well, in California, you have to clock in and out. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Some states don't have to do that. You know, they do commission. But I think that's changing. I think it has to, I'd say that the culture definitely used to be, we don't schedule lunch breaks, you eat when you have a gap in your schedule or in between clients. Yeah, that's how we used to operate. Yeah, saying, like those in California with those us stricter employee laws, you know, clock out by your fifth hour, if you're working more than six hours in a day. I think there are a lot of like to 10 or 15 minute breaks. For hours. They there's a lot of layers and complexity there is and it's it's kind of ridiculous. I mean, I'm sorry, but because you we don't operate like that you you're not, Oh, I gotta go clock out. And I gotta reach on somebody's head. You can't do that. You know? Exactly. Yeah, it is a unique industry for many reasons. But that's definitely one of them. Yeah. But when it comes to time, and attendance, tracking, a lot of I see a lot of customers, a boulevard who integrate with external platforms, and they don't have all the data that they need, or that they want to have access to directly from the platform. So a creative way of how I've seen my customers use our time clock feature is yes, like clock in and out. But then you can also log a reason for that clock in or clock out. And that reason, a basic list would be like on time, late, excused, late, unexcused, vacation, sick, or sick, paid or sick, unpaid, etc. Especially if you're offering benefits to your staff, and you allot them a particular amount of paid time off, or a certain amount of sick days until they have to start requiring doctor's notes, etc. But also, having data on their attendance and punctuality, it can also help you confidently confidently promote them, or give bonuses, or if they come to you saying hey, I want to raise or Hey, like, I want more XYZ, you have the data that you can refer back to and have that plan to your decision. Right. Yeah. And if they're always late, you know, if you're making everyone clock in, and they're always late. Yeah, exactly. That's a coaching moment. Exactly a coaching moment. I'm here, sharing my screen now. This is our time clock Summary Report. And right now, we just have this segmented by location, name, and then the date. Alternatively, we could list our reporting data as staff name, rows, groups by date, we'll keep that but then we're going to add a reason into one of the metrics that we measure. So when we run this, we'll see each staff member all of their time punches, how many hours they clocked, and what that reason would be. So we can see how much vacation was used. How many Same as they really were, perhaps how many times they were on time, etc. But we can filter this down. So if we are trying to configure how much vacation and sick time we may have allotted someone, then filter our reason to excuse me, like sick, excused, sick, unexcused, and vacation. I see. Or we can change our report data to reason. And then staff name. So if we want to say like, Okay, for our vacation hours, like how many employees and who use vacation during this time period? I see how many were say, I have a question. So say you have somebody who's taking vacation and it's on their calendar and on their books, and you've marked them off for vacation, does it automatically come to this report? Or do you have to clock in and out? That is an enhancement that I would love to see in our software. For now, that is something that if someone is blocked out for look for, excuse me for vacation, you would also make a separate timecard for them with the reason vacation and log how many hours their shift would have been? I see. Okay. But still a great way to compile all of this data. Absolutely. Absolutely. Keep track of what's being used, what's not being used? Yes. Or how many times someone was late? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And then, let's see, I'm looking back at my notes. The last thing that I wanted to cover is marketing. Yes, fun. And do we do we have time to still cover marketing? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, would you have time? Yes, they did. So, um, when it comes to marketing, I feel like that's such a hot topic for everyone these days. I remember 10 years ago from now, or 10 years ago, from today, I feel like a lot of businesses were relying on, say, like a Facebook page to reach their audience. And then after that, then Instagram, then the algorithms started changing. So that I feel like it kind of took that power away from the business, again, from being able to connect with that audience. So a lot of business owners these days are turning to actual marketing platforms to get the job done. Yeah. So when it comes to Boulevard is marketing suite, we have five campaigns that are automated, and then the ability to send one time blasts. And for one time blasts, you can filter and segment your audiences based on whether that's a certain provider that they've seen or a particular service they've received. You can segment based on tags, like we mentioned earlier. So you can get really granular with the audience that you want to send to them. But we can kind of go into some like brief examples of each campaign, just I guess, to get some box going on perhaps something that someone who's listening might want to have in their marketing suite, or their marketing platform, whatever they choose to go with. Yeah. So one of our campaigns is going to be filled slow days, another being last minute opening. Those are the two that I mentioned at the beginning of this call that are based off of utilization percentage. Now, are those emails going out? Or how does that work? Is it a social media post? Because, you know, you see on social media, I see a lot of stylists post, like in their stories, hey, last minute appointment. Does it do that? Or is it an email? This will be an email and and hopefully later on this year, a text as well. So great, but it won't be linked directly to social media. Okay, okay. But um, but this this will go out automatically so that you don't have to. Yeah, that's great. You don't have to think about it. So and, and like you said before it goes out and it finds the people who haven't been here for 30 days doesn't have an appointment for two weeks or whatever you've said I can't remember exactly but so it doesn't, doesn't make redundant emails like nobody's gonna get an email that says, Wait a minute, I got an appointment at three days. Why am I getting this email? Exactly Okay, and if a client happens to fall within the criteria of two campaigns, or more, within seven days, they're not going there on the campaign every step of the criteria for so we're not spamming. Yeah, that's great. Because then they then they mark everything junk. Exactly. I mean, you're getting so much. Yeah, yeah. So um, with those slow days, that's looking seven days in advance, and descending out based on the threshold that you put on how much availability you want a staff member to have before emails are sent out. But, um, an example is for, if you're trying to fill your slow days, you know, seven days in advance, like no matter what, get all of those appointments filled, set a low threshold, so that no matter what availability, you have emails are being blasted to get those bucks film. Alternatively, if you'd rather have a less aggressive approach, set that threshold higher so that less emails are being sent. Right. And, and that can also save that availability, for those who call in or for those who are on the waitlist or for for staff members who have, you know, one on one conversations on Instagram, you know, with their clients, maybe you don't want to fill those books too quickly, because your staff members already working with clients who are trying to get Yeah, that's true. And then, last minute opening, that's looking to two days in advance, the same logic, okay. The two other campaigns that we have are going to be a reminder to book and rescue last clients, reminder to book is going to be 30, or more days since someone's last appointment that you want them to receive another email. But I don't even really like considering it. Reminder to book, I'd like to think of it as a retention builder. Because with any marketing, what we're trying to do is encourage better client behavior. Absolutely. Yes. I remember, we used to do this, like if we hadn't seen somebody and like, I don't even remember, but two months, maybe, then we would send out something and they would automatically do it. And you'd be surprised how many? How many people go? Oh, yeah, I totally meant to do that. Exactly. I mean, we're all human, we do it, too. So yeah, or even like, if someone should be coming in like every eight weeks, maybe you don't set the criteria to be sent eight weeks out, maybe send it six or seven weeks out so that you are planting that seed for them to then call and actually get an A get a time that they want in the amount of time that you recommend for them. So, so these emails, do they have like links on there for like online booking? Yes. Can you set it up like that? So there is online booking? Okay, yes. So our marketing suite comes complete with merge tags. So it'll auto populate the clients name, the location, address, the location, number, their book, now information to link to online booking. But we've got a pretty a pretty comprehensive marketing suite. As far as like customization goes, no matter what you want to link to, or inserting pictures or columns or rows, like you can really start from scratch or use one of our pre built templates, but you can have basically as much customization as you want to design. That's nice. Yeah, and then the last campaign that we have is birthday message, which is self explanatory. It'll go out for your birthday. But whether you want to send that like on the day of week, prior month prior, etc, I always recommend sending that out sooner than later. That way they can come in and get services before their trip or before their party, or whatever it is that they have planned. Yeah, it's amazing to me. How many people don't take advantage of something like that? Because they don't have an intake form that asks for their birthday. Have you ran into that? I mean, maybe not. Because you You're, you're supporting people who are using this platform, but it surprises me that how many salons at least in the area I'm in now. They don't have a hey, you know, nothing, not a paper, not an iPad. No intake, they just have name number cell phone number. Yeah. That is crazy to me. I agree. And I think that it in the defense of those businesses, I bet that it's because they don't want to come off as intrusive to their clientele. So I'm sure that's the intention behind it, but I mean, it's what the clients benefit, like. Absolutely. I mean, I know that I used to have a whole intake form piece of paper, and it asked about their hair concerns what their best best experience with their worst experience all, you know, what's the regime look like at home? What do they need help with all these things that actually made us look like we were more serious about doing hair, you know, that there is a purpose for their visit, and we're not going to waste their time. And we actually have solutions for them, which lead into retail, which is a whole other whole other conversation. But it's all about the whole experience of an intake form. But how can you do that? If, if you're looking at your client list later on, and all you have is a name and a phone number? That doesn't tell you anything about them? You know? It's sad, actually, it's, it is sad. Now that, write that down, we need to we need a coaching, a coaching podcast just on intake forms? Yeah, well, it's kind of a consultation, but instead of for a service, like if their consultation for the experience, they're gonna have it your business. Yeah, you wouldn't go to your doctor and not fill out some kind of history. Right? Exactly. You would think how they're going to take care of me. I would think the same, I think the same as hair, you know, myself, I mean, for that experience. It just makes it more personable. So I know, I'm getting off the subject of that. Does Boulevard have an intake form, like a digital intake form? Or is it? Yeah, yes. Yes, that's one of the add ons that you can add to your Boulevard subscription. So we actually just revamped our forms. So our forms have, up until about, I think it was just a couple of weeks ago, we had a great format that would extend out whether it was for every appointment or only for new clients, whether it was for clients, or whether it was for internal purposes, such as like recording your own notes for a visit? Yeah, yeah. But we just revamped our forms, so they're way easier to design and build. Oh, so you can design your own? Exactly. Multiple choice or long answer, you can add a spot for clients to digitally sign their signature. And so it's comprehensive, it lives in the client profile. And I'd say, that's gonna be like your best bet. As far as like collecting data on do those questions you have? I know, this was in our notes, but I'm just curious myself. Do those go out? Like with the confirmation emails? Exactly. So they would click on a button and fill out their form if it wasn't already filled out? Exactly. Yeah, they'll receive a confirmation email and it'll also be available for them to, to fill out in the reminder email a couple days. And then also on either self check in on the iPad, if a business chooses to use self check in. Or it will also be sent one more time on the day of their appointment if they haven't filled it out. From their confirmation or the reminder email. So how do the stylists see it? Like if they're, they're talking? I know, I'm going rogue here. Sorry, Jules. How did the How did the stylus look at the consultation form? And go through a console? You know, how do they do that? Do they have it on an iPad? Is it printed out like with a canopy printed out? Like with it? Or? Yes, so um, it can be viewed like either on a computer on an iPad or, or as you said, printed out? We are going to be revamping our Boulevard professional app. And we are going to incorporate form viewing actually on a mobile device. That way staff members can't I feel like we're using our phones so often, especially like stylus with like pulling up pictures from Instagram or what have you. So we want to try to create as seamless of a mobile experience as possible. That way no matter what the business setup is whether they rely heavily on computers, iPads or mobile devices, that that client information is easily accessible however you need. Okay. Me and we could go down a wormhole here. So now you're going to have salon owners going wait a minute, I don't want my stylists to have all my my information on my client base. I mean, you know what I mean, like, what if that stylus is leaving? They have all the information that how do you lock that down? Or do you, um, well, our forms are encrypted, are encrypted to be HIPAA compliant. But we also have a lot of privilege settings on the back end, you can create as many privileged groups as you want, with as many different variations to privileges as you want. It's fully customizable, as is the ability to view forms as well as modify them. So you could set it on the back end, as the owner of your business who can see what, and maybe turn it off if they if they leave real fast are exactly, exactly super easy to do. But also the if you would rather have the privilege only for your users that are signed in to computers, and perhaps a communal iPad. That was to have access to the forums and not give staff access to pull it up on the mobile app, then you would have that granularity to do so. Okay. Well, and you know, if somebody leaves your salon, the clients are going to find them. Hello, it's social media. You know, in this day and age, I remember a long time ago, we'd lock that down tight, right? And oh, yeah. And this day and age, man, I feel like there's no wedding. I feel like no matter how hard you try, it's no and it's, yeah, it's okay. Yeah, you just kill kill them with kindness. You make the experience so wonderful at your salon, that they'll want to come back to your salon doesn't matter. Exactly, servicing them. That's the win. That's what you want. Yeah, hey, I love this. I mean, I could talk reports all day long. I am, I'm a numbers nerd. I loved it. When you shared your screen, and we got to see all those numbers. I could look at that all day long. I felt like I was, I felt like he was just talking to me. And I was just like, Okay, let's do. So I loved it. So hopefully, to our listeners on our podcast, hopefully, they get a chance to go to our YouTube channel and actually see the screenshots that you've shared, because I think that's important. You know, and if they like what they see, maybe they could reach out to you or you can, which leads me to how do people find you? If they wanted to talk to you a little bit more about this? Or maybe about reports? How do they find you? Sure, um, I'm on LinkedIn, Jules Reese, ju L A s, r e s, e, feel free to reach out with me there. But they can I am going to put a link on and because I was sharing with Jules, I just read an article he just wrote for salon today. And I'm going to put that link in our show notes, too. It's very, it's about the recession right now. And I really liked some of the information that you had in there. So if they can find you there too. And I'm sure that that has links on connecting them to Boulevard and well, I would love to I love this conversation. I loved everything about it. I think it's super, super important that salon owners know their numbers. Know where the reports are know how to gain access and why it's so important. You know, that's what we're here for. Right? Exactly. Help other salon owners out. So appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on today. I love talking. So I loved it. Loved it, as well. Yeah. Yeah, he'll have to come back to and I'm sure we could talk about other subjects as well. So yeah, sure. I would love to him. All right. Hey, there. Thanks so much for listening to the salon ownership Made Easy podcast today. Would you do us a favor? If you got value out of this week's episode? Will you share it with your friends? And while you're at it, go ahead and leave us a review. That way more business owners like yourself will find us and we can help them with the challenges they may be facing to. Thanks again, and we'll see you next week. Take care