So you have worked really hard, got your hair & beauty qualification.  You've done endless models for free, who just so happen to be your friends and family and you are wondering why they are not booking in with you to pay you to get their nails or lashes done!!!

Maybe one or two of them moaned about the treatment you did and now you're starting to question if you are even any good at this hair and beauty game!!

I am here to tell you that you are amazing, I am also going to tell you that your family and friends are NOT Your Customers.  Not the paying supportive type anyway. Your family and friends will always expect freebies, they will always steal your time from working on actual paying customers. They will never value what you do to, to the extent that it needs to be valued. The will make comments unknown to themselves, that will hurt you and rock your confidence. So if there is one piece of advice I can give you, it's that Your family and friends are not your customers. Who are your customers then? I can hear you shouting at the screen!! And I will tell you, but I want to your read on and get an understanding for where I am coming from.

I grew up with a mother who owned her own restaurant, and her family came in their droves for free meals and she always accommodated them. I remember one time she even closed the restaurant down to host a party for one of her siblings kids. She paid staff to wait and cook for them, she paid for the food and wine, she paid for the electricity, rent, rates and so many other bills that came along with running a restaurant. And she didn't get paid by her family, in fact she didn't even really get a thank you at all, and neither did her staff.  You see people think that they are entitled to all that you have to offer.

If you want people to respect you and hold your business in high regard, you first need to do this for yourself.  You need to set boundaries, you need to have self belief. You need to believe that what you do is valuable, you need to believe that your time is valuable and you need to value your own time.

When you learn a trade you don't just learn it and go off and be the master of it, in fact it takes years of practice to master anything and even then there is so much more to learn.  And the more you learn and specialise in something the more you can charge.  If you set your prices low your customers will have an expectation that you don't know what you are doing and that is why you are so cheap.  If you attract customers who are chasing a bargain they will never be loyal, they will be customers who will go to the cheapest person all the time, so as soon as you raise your prices they will leave you and find someone else cheaper.  And that is ok, we don't want those types of customers.  WE want customers who are willing to value us, our time, our knowledge and our expertise.  But in order to attract this type of customer we need to believe it ourselves first.

So now we have the self belief down!! (this is ever evolving, you need to have an accountability partner that will convince you of this regularly, hit me up)

Now we get to work on attracting Loyal, Paying Customers.

Step One, get your branding right. Choose colours and a name that represents you. Mine is black and gold because I want it to say i'm sophisticated and I'm confident. You choose the branding that tells people who you are in a glance.  Download Canva.com and design a logo. Choose a name that says what you do, e.g. Lashes by Sarah, this tells your perspective clients that you do lashes and your name is Sarah.  I had a business before called Angel Hair and Makeup and the amount of people who presumed my name was Angel was too funny and I never had the heart to tell them it was Sarah.

Step Two, Create a marketing plan.  You now need to figure out what type of customer you want.  The more specific you are here the better. Write it down, like this.  My customer is Sarah she is 45 she has 2 kids she lives in Dublin 16, she gets her nails done every 4 weeks, she has enough money to pay €60 to get her nails done. She uses instagram, she likes to shop online, she cares about her appearance.

All of this information will paint a picture of how you are going to talk to me through your marketing and where you will need to market to attract me.

So in this customer type you can see I use instagram, so you will do up a campaign on instagram where you will educate and entertain me and eventually you will sell to me and I will become your customer. Posts like before and after photographs of your work, and how to care for my new manicure would be really great for me to see. In your bio you will need to have a button that I can press to make and appointment or find out more information. So setting up your highlights to have your price list and a video of how to find you would work really well.

Or maybe do up a leaflet and place it on the wall in Supervalue or Tesco as I often look at these notice boards for things.  An advertisement on the radio you would have to choose spin 1038 as I have two kids and I never get to choose what music is on in my car as they are in charge of this.

This is two of many steps you can do to attract paying customers into your Hair & Beauty Business. The most important thing is to be consistent. Don't think that one instagram post a week is going to be seen, it won't, don't think that one leaflet on the wall of Tesco is going to be seen, it won't.  You need to be targeted and consistent and you need to do it so often that your friends and family start saying to you I'm sick of seeing your posts on instagram, or I'm sick of seeing your flyers in Supervalue. Cause if they are sick of seeing them at least they've seen them and this means your prospective clients have too.

They say it takes 7 times for someone to see your advertisement for them even to consider booking you and another 4 or 5 times for them to actually make the booking. It won't happen over night, it will take around 6 months of you working consistently to build up a healthy clientele and then it's job to keep them happy and make their experience the best it can be so that they will tell Their Family and friends about you because at the end of the day WORD OF MOUTH IS GOLD