Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
10.31.07

Here we go again…another busy season fast approaching. Time to get geared up for the revolving door of retail traffic in the salon and the bitter sweet joy of seeing the cash till filling up again! Of course the money is GREAT, but trying to juggle the time requirements of another job, children, social events and your salon can quickly taint the shear joy of rolling in the dough! It’s a tough job, but then again someone has to do it so you mite as well do it from the comfort of you own home?

While the time demands on salon owners continues to be in an upward swing the market share for the tanning dollar is also getting increasingly more competitive. Market consolidation is definitely having its affect on the tanning industry as evidenced by the number of attendees at last month’s ITA show in Nashville. Half the salon owners that I spoke to attribute the lower attendance directly to what they felt was this same trend.

Having the ability to remotely access your data in order to keep you in touch with every aspect of your business is of paramount importance these days. You should not just assume that you have to constantly spend more hours at the salon than you absolutely have to, especially before or after the “Open” sign is illuminated.

Furthermore, if you are like most salon owners you have probably been at home or on vacation and needed to run a report for payroll purposes, wanted to see how sales have been for that holiday special you are running or on a more crucial note, needed to ensure that your staff was doing your daily backup of your salon data. Unfortunately, like most salon owners you had no way of getting that information without driving into the salon or interrupting your staff with a phone call.

Some people use PC Anywhere, VNC, Logmein or other remote accessing programs in order to “dial into” their local PC at the salon. This is better than nothing, but does come with limitations and functionality issues that interfere with what should be a seamless and fully transparent integration to the operation of the computer at the salon. If your employees can not process a sale because you have taken over control of the computer to run a report then you have the wrong software solution. Another disadvantage of these remote access programs is that when you want to print something you will be printing to your local printer at the salon and not the one where you are working.

The most disturbing call our technical support department receives is from the salon owner who just had a hard drive crash and was not backing up their data or their employee “forgot” to do it for the last few months. Unfortunately there are no words we can offer them that will fix their problem so we try to educate them on the options that are available to them to prevent this from happening again. The bottom line is that this critical function needs to be taken out of the salon and set up on an automated, remote routine.

Your software should offer you the ability to retrieve, modify and enter data in your computer without you having to physically be in the salon. Even more critical than these conveniences, a scheduled automatic backup task that transmits your data to an off site computer needs to be a standard feature in your software solution. I recommend that you call your provider today and see if you can do this and if so, how.

Happy Thanksgiving and PEACE!