The competitive nature of the barbering business has made it a lucrative industry. As a result of this competition, some barbers now have six-figure income, and some barbers need help to keep their business running. It doesn’t matter if you have just started your career as a barber or have been doing it for several years; these five tips help you change your mentality to survive in this industry, thrive in it, and beat your competition. As a small business owner, you can apply for business grants too.
Learn how to compete to get more customers
Regardless of the artistic aspects of working as a barber, if you are in a competition, you have to learn how to compete with your rival and beat the competition. Please don’t take the beating of your competition literally! When facing competition, many people sabotage their rivals by spreading rumors and badmouthing them behind their backs. You must be careful because strategies such as sabotaging the competition are morally wrong and will backfire and hurt your business.
Instead, you can analyze your colleagues to learn from their mistakes and identify the strategies that made them successful. Remember that if a strategy worked for another barber, it doesn’t necessarily mean it can work for you, too. By learning others’ proven successful strategies, you should develop a unique strategy that suits your goals.
Create a social media persona
Even if you don’t have your shop, you are still a business owner because you are a barber. Your product is the service you provide for people, so just like any other product, branding plays a crucial role in your attempt to become successful as a business owner. Everyone knows that competing with others today is impossible without being constantly active on social media apps. Now, if you want to stand out among your competition, you should create an online persona that attracts customers.
Many barbers try to gain attention on social media by creating luxury content, collaborating with people who have a lot of followers, or posting weird haircuts of their customers. You can get a lot of views on Instagram, but only a few attract more customers for their business. If you want to attract customers, your focus should be on your artistic side. Still, you must show people that you are a complex character with a lot of different attributes and features. When you showcase yourself as a charismatic person, customers don’t choose your shop because you are an excellent barber; they select your shop because they want to meet you and spend time with you by getting a haircut.
Every customer is a loyal customer
If you have just started your business, you are not aware of the wonders that a loyal customer can do for your business. To keep your customers loyal, you must give them special treatment, make them feel they are more critical than others for you, and their experience in your shop is different from others. Now by having the mentality to make people’s experience so special for them that they think they have a special place among your customers, every customer can be loyal customer. It is hard to deny that treating all customers like loyal customers is an ideal you may not reach, but it is an excellent mentality for yourself that can make your job a rewarding experience.
Reach for the stars but don’t fall off the roof
When you first start your business, having high expectations or even dreams is natural. At night, you may dream about the long line of customers waiting for a haircut in front of your shop. It is okay to have goals and dreams, but first, you have to learn not to mix your emotions and longing for success with those goals. Mixing emotions and goals creates unrealistic expectations and dreams.
Thinking about your dreams can give you a very good feeling, almost a euphoric feeling. Because you want your dream to come true as soon as possible, you act out of haste. When you don’t make your decisions based on logic, you could severely damage your business, so remember to make long-term plans and commit to them, and then you will see real progress.
Use Artificial intelligence as a tool to communicate with your customer
By diversifying your skills, I mean your conversational skills. You must have at least one friend who always complains about their barbers talking too much. Having communicational skills has its benefits, but talking too much does not mean you are good at communicating with your customers. Good communication skills mean you understand when a customer does not want to have a conversation or listen to you talking for an hour. You should also be able to identify what topics to discuss with your client. You must gain much general knowledge about different topics to achieve these objectives. You might think you have just started your business and don’t have time to read and learn new topics. With the help of the latest advancements like artificial intelligence (AI), you can access resources that provide concise and helpful information. For example, you can ask chat GPT to write a short script about an exciting topic and ask another AI to create a video. Even if you don’t like AI, you can always watch a video on YouTube. Remember that by watching a 10-minute video on YouTube can gain a loyal customer, which can attract more customers.
Identify new trends and provide extra services
Men used to go to barber shops only for haircuts, today that’s not the case anymore. It is a simple demand and supply situation; men want skin care, hair care, and other services related to skin and hair beauty. So if you are in barber school or still a beginner barber, you can start learning skin treatment because not only you can charge money for the service you are providing, but you can also sell hair and skin products to your customers.
There is a risk that your customers may not like the extra services or products because when you offer them a new shampoo, for example, they think you are trying to take more money by selling unnecessary expensive products. To avoid misleading your customers, you should first analyze the current trends in skincare and hair care. By understanding trends first, you show your customers that you know what you are doing, so they begin to trust and even praise you for your attempt. After a while, when customers have seen your abilities, you can start selling products without fearing sending the wrong message.
Why just a barber shop?
If you want to stay competitive in the barbering industry, you have to offer something extra; now, extra treatments and products were mentioned, but are they the only options for a barber shop? Depending on the space of your shop, you can add additional services; if you have a big shop with a lot of space, you can even add spa treatments but keep in mind that it takes a lot of time and money, so you should calculate your budget carefully and act according to the budget you have.
If you don’t have a lot of space in your shop and money is tight, you can start with something that doesn’t need a lot of resources. The best option is to offer tattoo services; you can either become a tattoo artist, which still takes time and a lot of money, or start collaborating with a tattoo artist. Collaborating with other artists can quickly increase the number of your customers, especially if they work in a different area. Remember that hiring a tattoo artist to work in your shop totally changes your shop atmosphere, so you have to be careful before making such a big decision. offering baked goods and Coffee is also useful so you need to learn marketing strategies for a cafe as well.
