Soul Day Spa and Salon in Washington, D.C – Cut Backs means Improved Business
A New Soul
Some of the most valuable insights can come from painstaking decisions, as Nicole Cober Blake learned when she laid off her assistant at Soul Day Spa and Salon in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the year. Faced with a stifled credit line and 2008 sales of $489,000, Blake decided to funnel the equivalent of her assistant’s salary, or about $35,000, back into the business.
Before the recession, Blake says she never felt the need to interact face-to-face with customers. But without her “right hand” to answer phones, check in guests and help run the day-to-day operations, Blake was now at the salon all day, every day. Little did she know how much she had been missed by her 10-employee staff and her customers.
“For whatever reason, we were missing a great deal of calls. Now I’m better able to monitor timeliness and quality of service,” says Blake, noting a 20 percent drop in customer complaints within a month of her daily presence. “I feel so much more connected to the business and I’m a lot happier, ironically, then I was before.” Revenues also rose 10 percent in January, compared with the same month last year.
