Phorest Software with Luke Doohan, Paddy Monahan and Candice – Hair Life with Nathan Plumridge (Part 2)

In this episode, Nathan is joined for the second of two episodes by Luke Doolan and Paddy Monahan, manager and head of product at Phorest Software respectively, as well as Nathan’s head of operations, Candice, to talk about Phorest Software (that Gavin has worked with for a long time) and what they do. KEY TAKEAWAYS In order for you to say your average ticket is £120 or whatever, to look at that and say “why is that?”, at a business or a staff member level, within the new Phorest Reports you just click the number and it drills you in showing you day-by-day service rev, average retail ticket, total ticket, is it up or down and week-to-week comparison. We tell you straight away if it’s up or down and automatically run a drill report for you. That’s why we had to rebuild the reporting from the ground up because it’s no longer about running a report, it’s about whatever direction it takes you. We have to be able to have that data to you within seconds. From a staff member point of view, management can’t be quarterly any more, you can’t be sitting down with them at the end of the month going over what they should have done three weeks ago, that’s useless. In the new reporting suite, on any number there’s an alert bell, if you don’t want a staff member’s service level to drop below 12% you can set it to send you a message if it drops below 12% and it will check on it every hour. Even though you’re working with them in a coaching capacity, you’re able to address the issues at the time that they happen. The industry is amazing at building these long term relationships, at Phorest, what we try to do is cut out all the day-to-day things that salon owners need to do. If we can get better at that and free up the time for salon owners to go and do what they really enjoy doing, that’s the part where we’ll win.  We’ve launched a new ecommerce store recently, the idea behind that was it can be set up to be click and collect only, you can set up one product on it, we’ll host it for you, you don’t even need to put it on your website, and you can run a campaign just off people who’ve bought that product in the past but haven’t bought it in the last three months. When we get feedback  on ecommerce, sometimes it’s logistics, sometimes they want to try it but aren’t sure if it would take up too much time. The next piece of challenging  feedback we’ve had is that staff aren’t all that enamoured with ecommerce because they want the commission. We’re now working on bringing staff members into this so that they get the reward. BEST MOMENTS ‘Phorest is there to make booking as convenient and not-time-consuming as possible, we don’t want someone standing there rescheduling appointments on the phone, we want someone standing there having conversations and building relationships.’‘For us, it’s about making the relationship last outside of the salon, that’s where we’ve been more successful in retaining clients. Our re-booking rate has improved since we’ve had Phorest.’ ‘Retail conversations came across so sales-y, that was a problem we really wanted to fix. So, we’ve enabled the software – through ecommerce – to actually do the selling for the stylist. Not to replace, but to be additional to what they’re doing.’‘You’re giving bad service if you’re not talking to your clients about retail, especially if they’ve said they want to talk about products.’ ABOUT THE GUESTS Website: https://www.phorest.com/gb/  ABOUT THE HOST Welcome and thank you for reading this, I’m Nathan Plumridge salon owner and Hair Stylist. I’ve been in the industry for nearly 30 years and have been a salon owner for 23 of them. I have been fortunate enough to work and learn with some of the biggest names in the industry and this has given me the experience and drive to now be here with you sharing my experiences. CONTACT DETAILS  www.hairlifeshow.com Instagram is @nathan.hairlife  Email me at [email protected] show was brought to you by Progressive Media