Are you planning to start a hair, nail, or beauty salon & spa, or a barbershop business? You may already have started operations. But, did you know how important is to develop a hair beauty and nail salon business plan?
How to Write a Business Plan for a Hair & Beauty Salon Business
Drafting a business plan is not a formality, but an important step for the success of your beauty/hair/nail salon/spa business. No matter how amazing small business ideas you have, you’ll need a business plan for each step of progress, let it be the growth of a single outlet or you plan to sell franchises. The business plan will also serve the purpose if you are looking for investment from private investors, banks, or any other lending institutions or public grants.
However, drawing up a business plan for your beauty salon business may seem challenging.
To help you with salon business plan writing, this article will discuss the details to be included in the business plan, examples of useful business plan content, and guidelines to use samples and templates.
Key Questions Answered in The Article:
- How to write a quick business plan for a beauty salon & spa?
- How to write a business plan for a salon startup?
- How to start a hair salon business plan?
- How to develop a beauty salon business plan with a readymade template?
- How to write a business plan for a hair salon?
- How to develop a business plan for a barbershop?
- How to write a nail salon business plan?
To answer all these questions, here’s the step by step process to write a business plan for a beauty salon. The same process can be replicated for a nail salon, a spa, hair salon, a barbershop, or just any other business falling in the same category.
Follow the steps below and by the time, you finish the last step, you should be ready with a business plan.
1- Start Writing the Introduction First:
Start with a few good lines about how the business is focusing on customer satisfaction, i.e. by rendering excellent service, using quality products, offering a hygienic and enjoyable atmosphere, packaging in the best pricing, and having the best people.
Add your Mission, and support it with a Motto or a Tagline!
Now add interest for potential investors; Explain how well you are growing and so you need finances to meet the anticipated growth.
Remember, when you are attracting the attention of investors, you must tell them clearly how will you pay back, i.e. from the cash flow from the business, collateralized by the assets of the company, etc.
And not to mention the guarantees, i.e. the character, experience, and personal guarantees of the owners.
To support your pitch, add keys to success, i.e. a range of services, clientele, reputation, etc.
2- Next Comes the Startup Summary:
Start with the details like where the salon will be located, the area, the strategic importance of the location, etc.
Now, organize all the numbers; the start-up capital that will be used for the design, leasehold improvements, even a barbershop booking app if you plan to use one, and the equipment of the salon. How much of the capital is invested by the owner, borrowings, and so on.
Support your document with tables and graphs. It will also make it easier for the reader to understand more in less time.
3- Adding Products and Services:
Better is to fill this section with your menu. However, to make it more attractive develop various packages and make sure you are offering the best value packages.
Let’s take this beauty salon as an example, they offer different eyebrows methods to provide their customers, with the most natural-looking brows. They also have an online brochure where clients can choose among their product and service bundles.
4- Researching & Writing Down the Competitive Edge:
This section should include a strategy and implementation summary, i.e. what skill you/your team has, what type of customer service you will provide and how will you work on client satisfaction.
Do study your competitors and add up all the points that are missing in their business and give your startup a competitive advantage, i.e. by offering the best rates, advance packages, more flexible hours, weekend services, midday offers, ease of access (something like home service etc).
To develop good business strategies, perform a SWOT analysis of your business.
5- Compiling & Adding the Marketing Plan:
Marketing is the key to acquiring more customers, and you must know all that works for your industry. Let it be the local promotion via pamphlet distribution or entertaining prospects on Facebook & Twitter, you need a foolproof marketing plan for everything to be done rightly.
Follow these detailed guides and develop a marketing plan specific to your salon/spa.
- 25 Free Marketing Options Every Startup Must Use
- 15 Ideas to Get Huge PR in $100 or Less
- 29 Essentials to Boost Sales & Revenues
And yes, the marketing plan must not be just a collection of strategies but should be an action plan with deadlines for every task. And each task must be assigned to a specific person!
You can use Marketing plan templates and edit them according to your needs. For the action plan template, here’s a simple yet highly effective sample and you can use the same heads to develop your own action plan template.
Having this action plan in Excel makes it easier for you to sort the plan according to an upcoming deadline, check who’s assigned with what and when to do what, and so on!
6- Including the Financial Plan:
Remember, that the Financial Plan is a document that saves the life of your salon or spa business. Not having a proper financial plan means, no clear picture of budget and spendings and you may end up bankrupt. To start with Financial Plan you need to know how to calculate the costs first. Here’s a detailed read on how to calculate startup costs.
You may not need a separate document for a salon or spa, rather a section included within the business plan will suffice. Take help from tables, graphs, and charts to make things easier for you and for others.
Using a financial plan template can work great, but as there’re too many samples and templates available online, you must not use just everything. Only take account of the documents that you need at this stage, i.e. balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and so on. Do not go into too many details of the stuff that you are not familiar with.
While developing the financial plan section, make sure you pay attention to emergency business funding options as well, i.e. funding a business with a personal credit card, funding with the vehicle as collateral, online installment loans, merchant cash advance, funding from friends, and family, etc.
7- Setting Forecasts & Milestones:
Everything, from expected sales revenues to expenditures go under this head; and you have a clear picture of the gross profit and the net profit as a milestone by the end of a specific period. Using graphs and tables makes it more attractive and easier to understand.
Milestones are just the smaller parts of bigger goals; you want to have 100k revenue in one year, so set quarterly milestones. Reviewing milestones will boost up the performance and you can tackle an issue right there rather than waiting for one whole year to identify what’s working and what’s not!
8- Summing up All the Human Resources:
Adding the details about the people behind the business is always a great idea to make your business plan stand out.
Ideally, add the details about the owner(s)/management people first and then the experts you have. In case if you have not hired specific experts, for now, write in detail about the expert profile you plan to hire.
Moreover, you can enhance this section by adding a brief about the startup hiring process, i.e.
9- Rechecking Everything:
Just like we do the proofreading for any business document; a recheck of facts, figures, information, and the structure for your spa/salon business plan is required. You must make sure that your business plan covers everything mentioned above and is ready in the same order.
10- The Business Plan Summary:
Well, the business plan summary is the first page of the document when it is presented to a reader. But, for the creator of the plan, this is the last part as it summarizes steps 1 to 8 in one or two pages.
While writing the business plan summary for your spa, beauty/hair/nail salon make sure to summarize each section in not more than four sentences/one paragraph. Since all the detailed information is provided in the respective sections, the summary should only present the crux of each.
The Bottom Line
Once you’re done with summarizing the one/two page(s) summary of your salon/spa business plan, the next step is to organize all the pages in Table of Content with proper page numbering and also add the appendix if required.
Remember, you can use samples for ideas, while templates can be used where replacing content works great like in the Marketing and Financial plans. However, you cannot rely on a whole business plan sample or template. A business plan represents the soul of your business and it must be unique as your business.