Opening A Hair Salon
When opening your hair salon, you probably already have ideas about the services your customers will want from what other salons are doing
. However, simply basing your services on competitors can make you into an imitation and ignore opportunities to look deeper. Here are some ways to back up your intuition with research that readers of your business plan will pay attention to.Creating a Survey
Creating and administering a survey used to be a much more costly and time-intensive affair. Now, online survey providers like surveymonkey.com make it cheaper to publish a survey and tabulate the results. The same time must go into carefully designing questions that will get the most truthful and relevant answers from customers and to entice a wide variety of your potential customers to take the survey. Generally, some gift or the possibility of getting a prize must be offered to those who participate, increasing the cost of this method.
Direct Observation
Visiting competitor salons and doing a little snooping can give a lot of data about what services are being purchased and how often. You will have to observe long enough to get a decent sample from which to draw conclusions (at different times of week and times of day) and you may not want to do the snooping yourself, for fear of being recognized later by your competitors as a spy.
Focus Groups
Another primary research method is to hold focus group discussions. Focus groups can be lead through open-ended discussions about their needs, wants, and values when it comes to hair salons. Find people who would be your ideal customers and entice them with some sort of compensation for their time. An hour to a few hours should be enough to generate useful feedback. Try to use an experienced focus group leader and to record the discussion.
Specific Interviews
Targeting and speaking to specific potential customers as they leave a competitor, for example, can also yield some information. This can be time-intensive for the interviewer and perhaps not welcomed by the interviewee, so it can become costly to gather a significant sample. However, this may be a way to get some choice quotes about the services your customers would like and what the competitors offer.
Secondary Research
When other methods are too costly or will be too time-consuming, you may need to fall back on using existing studies and surveys on the needs of customers. You can look to industry associations like the Professional Beauty Association and the International Chain Salon Association to find these sources. When citing them in your business plan, make sure to comment on how relevant the numbers given are to your target market, how you feel they may be different and why. This will show plan readers that you can think critically about the specific challenges and opportunities you will face.
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