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Listen To Your Market

 Listen to your market

If there’s one thing that holds promising entrepreneurs back from launching their grooming

business, it’s this: a lack of confidence in their skills- beyond grooming. Sure, you think that you can make more grooming for yourself, but how do you know if people will walk in the door?

Imagine spending weeks, months, even years of time—plus the cost of a salon build out (or grooming van), marketing materials, grooming supplies and all the other pieces that go along with it—only to discover it’s not what your soul mate client wants or needs. How frustrating would that be?

You don’t have to leave it to chance, though. There are plenty of ways to test your idea

before spending the time, energy and money going out on your own.

Ask, and Listen

This is the simplest way to get a feel for what your market needs and wants. Simply ask them in casual conversation.  Depending on where you work and who you work for this may be difficult… Don’t do this if you don’t have permission to! 

Do this in a respectful way or make sure that you are asking questions that are cumulative over time.
For best results, keep it short, but do ask:

  • Why they chose this salon (location, reputation, atmosphere, etc.)
  • Their preferred way of being contacted
    • Do they prefer to be texted? Do they prefer emails? Do they prefer to have one on one conversations in person? How do they like to be communicated with?
  • Do they feel they receive good value for money
    • Now this is a loaded question because most people that are getting a service do feel like they’re getting a value. So another question could always be: How could we have added more value? Or what is your perceived value? Now that may not come up in a natural conversation. That may be an awkward thing to ask. You could ask: What do you value? What do you think is the most valuable part of the service that you’re currently getting?

These three pieces will give you insights of your soul mate client.

Unfulfilled Requests

If you have a community (or are part of one) of ideal clients, pay attention to what

they’re asking about the most. These are the things the market is searching for. For example, if you’re a groomer who enjoys grooming cats and your salon gets calls all day long for cat grooming, clearly there is a need for a cat groomer in that area.

The same thing goes for Doodles. If you’re getting calls all day for Doodles, ask yourself: Do you want to specialize in Doodles? Now, for some of us, that’s not something we want to do. Maybe you’re like, even though there’s a market for it, there’s lots of people calling for cat grooming and doodle grooming but I don’t want that to be what I do. So make sure that these unfulfilled requests are also in line with what makes you happy. Don’t just pick something because there’s a need for it. Pick something that you value and there’s a need for it. 

Study Your Competition

Hopefully you have a list of competitors and you’re following them on facebook, and paying attention to their salon’s reviews. Or their Instagram. This is a great way to gain insight into what they’re doing—not to copy them, but to discover what’s working and what’s not.  Learn what they may like to do and what they seem to avoid.

Consider reaching out to them. Again, you should never copy them, but you may want to create potential professional relationships.  Always attempt to have a community over competition mindset, rarely are groomers competing over the same clients...  Encouraging clients to stick with one groomer is easier when everyone knows everyone and everyone is on friendly terms.

And I understand not everyone is going to be willing to be your friend. I understand not everyone is going to be willing to reach out and create that. But it’s nice if you’re the first person. You can always leave that lifeline open in case they ever change their mind. There are a lot of old school groomers who are afraid to share and the more we create this community the better it’s going to be. The other thing I want to notice is, is your competition fulfilling those unfulfilled requests? Or do you notice that they’re getting a lot of bad reviews from those requests that you’re noticing? For instance, again, if you have cat grooming or if you’re interested in cat grooming and you’re noticing that your competition/community is getting a lot of negative reviews for their cat grooming. This may be an even bigger indicator that you could fulfill that request for your community.  

Of course, take that with a grain of salt because, as we know, there are certain clientele that are far more likely to leave negative Yelp reviews. So take that with a grain of salt.

Set the Bar on “Minimum” Services

Creating services in a vacuum is a great way to waste a lot of time and money on services that don’t actually make money. Instead, pay attention to what your market is asking for, find

out what they’re willing to pay, and break down per hour what you need to charge.  If you need to charge $50/hour to run your shop but you charge $10 for a 15 minute nail trim it’s time to charge more or stop offering these standalone services.  The same goes for large breed dogs who aren’t being charged the same hourly rate as small dogs.  If a shih tzu takes me 1 hour and is charged $50, it’s good to charge a minimum of $100 for a husky de-shed that takes 2 hours.

You may say, like, okay, those are comparable. But we’re not taking into account the extra effort, the extra cleanup, the possible need for having a second person for a larger dog. This is also where we like to teach the point system. Because straight hourly is not an effective way for you to go ahead and charge all of these things. It’s going to be really important for you to go ahead and make sure that you are charging based upon the time, care and attention each pet requires. 


The information you gain from these activities alone will give you incredible insight

into your market and what you need and what they want, before you consider going out on your own!

That said, if you are currently in business, and you don’t have a ton of soulmate clients, or if you’re on the journey of doing that - you are on the journey of finding your soulmate clients. Ask your current clients these questions. Go ahead and ask them why they choose your salon, you can always send this out as an email survey. Ask them to rank them potentially from a scale of 1-5, what is the most important thing: location, reputation, atmosphere, style of grooming, or price. Price is really important too. Because if all of your clients are picking you because of your pricing, I hate to say it this way, but you’re doing it wrong. And that is the worst case scenario. If the only reason people choose you is because of your price, that leads itself to a problem when you have to eventually increase your prices. Because everyone has to raise their prices between inflation, real estate prices going up. It costs more money to live.

You might ask them what is their preferred way to be contacted. If you find out that most of your clientele prefer to have a phone call and your goal is to really streamline your business and take that pressure off of you, you may not have your soulmate clients. And again, ask them, what they really value or what they feel like is the best value that they get from your business. If it’s just the haircut, then you want to consider am I pricing appropriately for the haircut I’m giving. And I don’t believe, The Savvy Groomer as a whole, does not believe that a better haircut is the way we make the most money. I think it’s honestly, for better or worse, is one of the last things that clients want. Of course they want an adequate haircut. But if your clients want the best haircut that’s a very vain client and most of us don’t have the emotional energy to train our new groomers to get our groomers to the same level if we have a particular style or a particular skillset. Something that could have taken us 10 years, now we’ve got to train somebody to also have that same level of skill, or hire somebody with that same level of skill. 

Start paying attention to unfulfilled requests in your shop. Or things that you’re being called for. Maybe start tracking what people are calling for. Are they calling for last minute appointments? Are they calling for Saturday appointments? What are these things that they’re calling for, that either you can’t accommodate right now, but you’re noticing an increase of? 

Of course, look at your local community, and reach out to them. Ask them, what do you love to do? What do you specialize in? It might be something you don’t like doing. If you don’t like grooming cats and don’t like grooming doodles, find somebody who will take them. And on the flipside, maybe you don’t like doing shih tzus and yorkies. Maybe they don’t like doing Cocker Spaniels. I had this one groomer that loved grooming cocker spaniels, and she loved grooming Goldens. Or maybe you love grooming Wheatens. You’d rather groom a Wheaten than a doodle. Creating this community is going to allow you to do this. Also if you had to consider increasing your prices on things like those doodles, it may be a great time to call them and say, Hey, I’m going to be doubling or tripling my prices of doodles, just so you know you’re going to get a call from a lot of them. This is my current price. And you’re going to allow them to make their own decisions. But if they’re currently charging $80 to $100 for a doodle, and you’re going to be charging $200 minimum. Maybe they won’t go all the way up to $200 but they may consider going up to $150. And, again, that’s up to them to what they choose to do.

And setting these minimum services. Look through your services and ask yourself, am I really making any money? I really discourage walk in services. I don’t think that they’re good for our industry. I don’t think that most of us have the staff to accommodate these things. We used to have more groomers that would consider working for us. It’s getting harder and harder to find people that are competent and able to do these services, things like being available to do a walk in nail trim. Well, that means that I have to have a bather on staff who is not bathing and otherwise not preoccupied and otherwise not fully booked. You can do same day appointments if you want to have that availability. But really consider getting rid of those walk in services. And really ask yourself if these cheaper services really do an overall good, if they’re going to attract your soulmate client. I find that a lot of these services, like walk in nail trims, or these standalone face, feet, sannies, brush out services, they’re actually encouraging the opposite of your soulmate client. If your soulmate client wants a bath, blow dry, and a groom, every 4 weeks, why would they need a walk in or a standalone nail clip. If they’re getting groomed every 4 weeks, why would they need a brush out service? For better or worse, you guys know my feelings on face, feet, sannies. I think we are talking them out of getting an all over haircut. If you are getting a haircut service and you are using a groomer, I can’t give you a discount on my groomer’s services. Why? Because I’m taking money out of my pocket and their pocket and doing basically all of the same work, to save a customer a little bit of money. It’s just not good for groomer morale and it makes us work harder than we really need to. 

So consider all of these things if you are considering opening a business or if you currently own a business. Consider what are the best options for your market and what is your market trying to tell you and in retrospect what are you listening to. Stop paying attention to these fling clients. Start listening to what your soulmate clients want and start speaking back to them in a language that they will understand. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to increase your prices and be able to find those soulmate clients, and charge what you’re worth, consider purchasing my Price Increase Masterclass. Go to savvygroomer.com/pimc. That’s going to allow you to check out what we’re currently offering and we would love to see you there.