Setting goals and seeing them through is a challenge for most people. In fact, a whole industry of life coaches and business gurus make a living off teaching people how to set goals and take the actions to reach them. Their #1 advice is to take things one day at a time and make short-term attainable goals to reach your overall big goal.

Nail techs, of course, are no exception. They know what they want—to make more money, sell more retail, see more clients—but have trouble executing their vision. And owners get frustrated after they’ve educated their stylists on what to do, but still don’t see any action.

Part of the problem is the frequency in which owners are conducting reviews of goals. If you’re doing it annually, quarterly or monthly, you’re missing the mark. Goals should be checked daily.

Action = Results
The answer to daily goal tracking lies in software like STX Cloud. Big goals are broken down into daily, achievable increments that stylists can view. To get where you want to be, you need to know where you want to go. Because if you don’t know the end goal, chances are you won’t reach it.

Stylists are notoriously not fond of numbers. So if you tell them they need to increase sales by 10 percent one month, it’s probably going to go in one ear and out the other. But if you use software to break down the numbers, and the software instantly provides realistic, achievable daily goals — voila, you have success!

If you have a stylist averaging $400 per month in retail, bump them up by just 10 percent to $440. Setting a goal of $1,000 per month is too intimidating and will end in frustration.

Once the goal is set, the software assesses how many days per month the stylist works and breaks the goal down into daily targets. So if the stylist works 20 days, they may need $22 in sales per day to achieve that $440. And all of a sudden, it’s realistic and attainable.

If a nail tech misses a day, the software adjusts the daily goal, keeping it within reach, and displays the goals in a way that’s friendly to the creative mind with fun encouragements such as, “Rawr! Go get ‘em tiger!” and “Deep breath, you've got this! Take 2 mins and brainstorm how to do better with your next guest.”

STX Cloud took their software a step further by implementing easy-to-read graphs so stylists can see their progress at a glance. The goals feature shows stylists their goal tracking in colors to identify their success. If you’re in the green, you’ve hit your numbers, if you drop below, you’re in the red and the software will adjust your goals daily so you still hit them by the end of the month. There’s also an orange and yellow status for all the areas in between.

It’s all about awareness and the ability to see where you’re at daily to hit a long-term goal.

A Driving Force
If you choose not to set goals, you run the risk of not knowing what you don’t know, and not knowing the areas where you need to educate your staff. Goals should become the driving force of your entire business, and daily tracking is the direct path to growth.

Measuring goals and success doesn’t just apply to retail. Owners and nail techs can use their software to track services, retail and company goals to measure success.

Set-and-forget capabilities make goals extremely simple to start with in STX Cloud.  Simply select an option to automatically increase the goal by a percent every month or apply a flat rate that does not increase. If you’re tracking service sales, that should increase every month. However, your salon may have a standard rebooking goal of 50 percent, or three retail units per ticket, which is where the flat rate comes in handy.

The next stop is to set goals and run promotions to help achieve them. Do you want clients to come in an average of six times per year instead of five? Want to do more men’s business? When you know what you want to achieve, you can use your software to put a plan together for the business, the team and individual stylists.

Goals in a Competitive Environment
Setting goals also empowers stylists and provides transparency for a healthier salon culture. The whole team can clearly understand what leadership is trying to accomplish—it eliminates uncertainty.

Often times the exposure of each other’s values can cause tension, which is why STX Cloud only shows a percentage of the goal achieved. The true numbers are available in advanced reporting and payroll reporting.

For example, let’s say Jennifer’s goal is to do $5,000 in services this month and she works five days a week. Kristen's goal is $4,000 and she works three days a week. If mid-month Jennifer has done about $2,500 in service sales and Kristen has done $2,000, they both only see that they have hit 50 percent of their goal. By only seeing a goal percentage as opposed to a monetary figure, it inspires healthy competition amongst the team. Both Jennifer and Kristen can privately see a breakdown in what is needed to achieve their daily individual goals.

Across the globe, every salon is different with the type of information that is displayed to management versus workers. STX Cloud offers permission settings and role settings that would limit access to other workers’ goals. Whether you want everyone to see everything or a worker to only see their individual information, with a simple check of a box you can add or remove that visibility.