Beauty Salon Management Team

To demonstrate your beauty salon’s ability to succeed as a business, a strong management team is essential. Highlight your key players’ backgrounds, emphasizing those skills and experiences that prove their ability to grow a company.

Ideally you and/or your team members have direct experience in the beauty salon business. If so, highlight this experience and expertise. But also highlight any experience that you think will help your business succeed.

While you don’t need to include this in your business plan, you should take this opportunity to think about the management style you will use in operating your beauty salon. Generally, your personality and background will have a great part in determining what management style works for you. You have the following 3 choices:

Participatory Style

One management style is to open the floor to employee suggestions, allowing staff to feel they are partners in the creation of company strategy, methods, and success. To use this style successfully, employees must know that their suggestions are heard and that they are given latitude in how they fulfill their responsibilities. If they are held to a tight script in their interactions with clients and then asked for their suggestions, you are sending mixed messages about how much you trust your employees.

This model of management works best when you have more experienced and better trained employees. When these employees feel they have input into how the company is run, they will feel more invested in what you do and, hopefully, you will gain insight from the front lines.

Dogmatic Style

If you are experienced in the beauty salon industry and want to have a tight and consistent operation, you may choose a dogmatic style. In this model, employees are basically told to follow the company way or face disciplinary consequences. Because employee interactions with customers may be tightly scripted you will be able hire lower skills (and lower wage) employees. This may cut down your costs, but you can sacrifice some of the growth potential from partnering with employees.

Mentor Style

A third style is to consider yourself not so much a partner with your employees or their dictator, but their teacher or mentor. By considering where each staff position fits into the overall, ongoing career of an employee, you can offer sound advice on how they can take steps to do a better job and move up the ranks. This style is generally only useful if you have some ability to promote employees or give them raises for better performance. If you create tracks for employees (for example, so that assistants may become lead cosmetologists or even partners in the company someday) then your business and employees can reap the benefits of this mentoring.