TIPS FOR BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL COLOUR COLUMN By Kristie Kesic
Colour. The money maker! Yes, some would argue, apart from wages most businesses probably spend more on their colour orders than their rent, BUT whether you’re a business owner, employee, free-lancer or rent a chair, there’s no secret in knowing that having a successful colour column and colour business brings in big bucks. I mean these tips and tricks can be used just in general to build a successful fully booked column regardless of colour or cut, but as this is a colour blog, I’m going to keep it specific to colour. Now I write these tips as specialist colourists with 14 years’ experience, building up my own column within the business and now also as a successful business owner.
CHARGE YOUR WORTH.
This one is very important to all hairdressers and something I am so passionate about. BUT to me there’s also a line between charging what your worth and ripping people off.
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Hair Biz Year 16 Issue 4
The secret to finding this balance and knowing what you should be charging is in the word YOUR! What’s YOUR skill level, what’s YOUR experience, what’s YOUR speciality, what do YOU invest into YOUR career to then justify YOUR prices. It’s because people don’t know how to price themselves that we’ve ended up with two situations. Firstly, under skilled and overpriced colourists. These colourists aren’t giving clients value for money, they are giving unrealistic expectations. The number of times I have had people come in for colours to be fixed up and they’ve finished
with the words, and they charged me this amount, I expected them to be good if they charge that much. Truth is I would absolutely expect the same. These overpriced negative experiences are then resulting in consumers having the perception colourists charge too much. NO! Unskilled colourists charging $400 for a colour is too much. $400 plus for a highly trained specialist colourist is what should be expected and be the normality. Secondly, we’ve got highly skilled colourists, under charging because they think consumers won’t pay the price they deserve to be charging.
