I hope that all of our readers had a wonderful holiday both personally and professionally, and that you were all as busy as you could be. My wish for all of you is that you all have an extremely profitable, busy, and successful new year. Many of the topics we have written about over the last year will be the perfect tools to help you to become the best you can be.

The holiday open house sounds like a great idea, Jill. I’m sure it was as successful as you had hoped it would be. It was well planned out, even though you stated that you were putting it together in less than a week. It is really great that you and your team were able to accomplish it in such a short amount of time. It is also a great way to get everyone excited about the holidays and build new business for after the start of the new year.

We spent the last couple of weeks running our end-of-the-year product sale. The sale prepares us to clear away the old and start with the new. It also prepares us for our year-end inventory of all of the retail products and back bar supplies. It is the time of year that we clean out our stations of the things we haven’t used in months, and really take a look at what has been working for us over the course of the last year. We are able to plan ahead the types of products we are going to continue to offer and reevaluate any that have not been either used or selling well. It’s time to reorganize everything in our drawers and cabinets so that we can start the new year as we intend it to go.

We have brought on new branded merchandise that we can use to promote the salon. We have some of the usual things as well as a couple of unique ones: tumblers, shirts, hoodies, pens, our own honey (the owner’s family’s bees provide that for us) and we also are trying a new approach this year. We had coasters made with our salon logo and information, with really fun photos on them. We then took them to restaurants around the area to ask if they would let us leave them there and use them on the tables. It is allowing us to reach out to local businesses and make connections that we can use throughout the year for mutual benefit. Partnering with other small businesses in your area is a very good way to increase your word-of-mouth referrals. We are hoping that this will allow us to not only be able to partner with them for events but that it will help us build a relationship.

We are starting the new year off well stocked, organized, and with a plan to be as successful as we can be. I can’t wait to see what it brings.

— Sandy