What a great post, Jill. I love that you plant seeds for the services you offer for each department during your tour. And I am definitely going to use what you say about husbands and the privacy of the pedicure room. I had never thought of that when showing our guests our pedicure area. We will be able to use that to help market our pedicure services to our male clientele.

When Kristi Valenzuela was here she also talked about the tour and how integral it can be to your success as a service provider and the salon as a whole. She helped our salon to come up with a script to use for our grand tour. In this script she told us to tell our guests the things that make you different from your competition, i.e., special accolades and master training that staff members may have. She also told us to be sure to mention things like specials and promotions for the month.

Some of the differences from the salon down the street that we now talk about during our tour are the fact that we were voted “best of the best” by our local paper every year since we opened by community ballot.  We also talk about the brand of our salon and its connection to another local business. Our owner and her husband are beekeepers and we sell their honey. Our logo even has a bee in it. This has been a neat little treat for many of our guests because they have never tried locally produced honey.

The tour we now offer our guests is worlds different from the one that we offered just a year ago and it shows. We have happier guests and are continually growing our business. Thanks in part to this we stand out from the rest of the salons in our area and are becoming the best!

— Sandy