I think that every nail technician I know can relate to Jill’s last post. At times in my career I have been at both ends of this scale. Up until a few years ago I was really bad about operating on auto-pilot and just doing a plain fill with polish on my clients — never changing it up, or if we did it was to try a French application. I was very bored with my job and quite frankly I think my clients were too. I felt stuck and like there was nowhere to grow in my salon or in my area. I needed to get out of my rut.

So I took some classes to learn some new skills and then made a promise to myself that I would tell at least half of my clients about the new service using the skills that I had learned. I started with just half of my clients each day because I wanted to set a reachable goal since I hadn’t really ever tried to set goals for myself other than to have a full day. At first it was hard to remember to ask the client if they were interested in trying the new service (in this case it was colored acrylic and gel polish). We would slip pretty quickly into the old routine of “how are you/kids/spouse/pets?” And the conversation would never come back around to asking them if they wanted to do anything different until it was too late to actually add it. I spent a lot of time kicking myself for not following through in the beginning.

Eventually, though, I got to the point where I was asking all of my clients about the add-on. To my delight most of the clients took me up on them! I went from a point when I could have told you that on Monday at 2 p.m. I will be doing an acrylic fill on Jane until the end of time, to now being able to have a client sit down for a manicure or pedicure and offer them three different levels of the service as well as polish alternatives like Gelish. On the fly, in the middle of the service, add-ons were once impossible in my mind but now I can potentially upgrade my service ticket by $30 or more without adding any time to the service itself by just telling the guest what add-ons are available. Being able to do this has increased the satisfaction of myself and my guests as well as my income.

— Sandy