In this episode, Jason and Doug bring up the new coined term for the group of people who lived through this experience, “Quarantennials.” They discuss that this group of people have been at home making money without work, whether still being paid by employers or on unemployment and other adjustments like a lot of people have fallen out of their work habits and have to relearn a new normal. These new experiences might alter the mindset of people when they must return to work and are expected to work, good or bad. Listen in to hear other adjustments Doug and his team have dealt with once they opened up their salon, in Florida.
Key Takeaways:
1:25 Doug discusses “What is a Quarantennial?”
5:33 Viewer comments on her experiences coming back into the salon with the new rule of having to wear a mask while in the building.
9:19 Doug discusses that this time away is a great period to reset the culture of your salon, if need be.
11:25 Jason speaks on “How much are you giving your staff from a managerial perspective?”
15:47 Doug talks about changes they have made to prepare clients for the new experience inside the salon
20:04 Jason talks about being aware of what your clients really want, when deciding if you are taking away services, such as blow drying, from your guests.
Quotes
“There are real anxiety and real stress things that are happening and the question becomes how much are you giving your staff from a management perspective of what do they say to themselves when things start to get a little sideways, when they start to get a little bit messy?” (11:25) (Jason)
Intro:
Some of the most amazing people on planet earth. The only problem is sometimes their hearts are so big and they give so much of themselves to their staff and guest that it creates unintended consequences. Our goal is to change the industry by elevating the way the rest of the world sees salons, spas, and barbershops and give it the credibility that it truly deserves. This is the Salon Owner Evo Revo show.
Jason Everett:
Not only is this the Salon Owner Evo Revo show but on today's show, we're talking about the all new "Quarantennials," and if you are not familiar with what a quarantennial is, Doug and I are going to share with you all about quarantennials today, and do me a favor, wherever you are on the line from, do me a favor and comment in the comment section live if you're with us and tell me what part of the country you're in and I also want to know, is your salon open or are you still closed, because as we know, all over the US and internationally, salons are opening and closing and there's a lot of people that are trying to figure out what's going on and we're here to help you guys through that and support you and talk about raising quarantennials. Is That a good way to say that, Doug?
Doug Campbell:
Yeah. It's a kind of a new term, it popped up, but it makes a lot of sense, right? It's like from the millennials and now we got the quarantinneal because it's going to be a whole class of people, and what's going to be interesting is it's not going to be age related as much as it's going to be experience related. You're not going to be able to say an age group or quarantinneal, it'll be people that went through this, so five years down the road, 10 years down the road, you'll be talking about people that if you're a quarantinneal, meaning you had gone through this experience of quarantine and how did you come out of it?
Jason Everett:
I like you said quarantinneal, I'm going to say quarantennial and not to correct you on, I just think it's fun because we don't know, we just made up a word, so these are the things, right? These quarantennials, as we go forward, what we're really talking about is there are people who have been in lockdown for whatever length of time. For a lot of people, like we're just saying here in California, we've been at least 60 days on lockdown, we're kind of in our 60 plus day of lockdown, and Doug, you guys were only in lockdown for, how many weeks were you guys locked down in Florida?
Doug Campbell:
Six weeks.
Jason Everett:
Six weeks, so a little bit different for you, and some places are going to be in lockdown longer. We talked about New York and California still struggling to open. I was on the phone earlier or on a chat just like this with Matt Beck earlier today and he said in Pennsylvania they're still closed, so I know there's some really good resources if I could find it. I'll find the map of who's opening and by when, I'll see if I can pull it up today as a part of what we're doing, but Doug, what are you finding? Because you reopened this last week and you said you just had been slammed, like the business has been going super good, but you guys have been doing a ton to prepare obviously since we do this, like you've been preparing a lot for this. What are you finding about people that are coming back? What type of attitude shifts are you seeing? What type of things are you noticing? Are there surprises? Tell me about that for a second.
Doug Campbell:
I think the biggest thing is is that you're going to open quicker than you think you're going to open, and what I mean by that is people have this out there and they've gotten used to being off work, and of course everybody's still making money but being off work, we were able to keep everybody on payroll, but even if people on unemployment, they're still making money and not working. So getting back to the mindset of actually having to show up and work, it was interesting because different people had different views. Somebody had all these home improvement projects going on that they were trying to wrap up, teaching their kids at home and doing all those sorts of things, and they kind of gotten comfortable in that setup, and now opening back up, we're just kind of a little bit of a "Oh gosh."
Doug Campbell:
When the reality of it hit, of course our governor did not give us very much notice. 3:00 on Friday, he announced it in a news conference that we could open on Monday.
Jason Everett:
So like "By the way, you got the weekend to prepare. Go."
Doug Campbell:
Right. Everybody's weekend plans pretty much got shot. So we ramped it up. We had a meeting on, we already had one scheduled for Saturday, so that was our get back in the game. It was interesting, and the first day, even the ones that were a little kind of like "Oh gosh, we're actually having to go back to work," once they got in it and started doing it and started feeling it again, they were all enjoying it. They were enjoying being back. They were enjoying me back in the community because even though we'd been meeting on Zoom and doing all those things, actually being there and physically being there with the rest of your team and connecting with your clients. One of the interesting things, you're going to have a hard time recognizing people, because when you got this much of your face covered and just their eyes-
Jason Everett:
It's very different.
Doug Campbell:
Just be ready for that and let your staff know to be ready because sometimes a client will be walking up towards them and they're like "Who is this person walking toward me?"
Jason Everett:
They're like, "It's me, it's Sharon," right? I think that's a big deal. When I was talking with earlier today is the other thing that I think people are dealing with right now that at least I'm hearing, Doug, is like talking through masks is next level, right? So you got blow dryers going, you have conversations happening in the salon and you're like "I'd like to get a haircut today," right? I've been around and watching people wear mask and trying to figure this out, like there's a lot of these unknown complications that are happening, and again, people are really like, I was reading this list, and I'll mention it for just a second here, is that I was reading this thing from this gal who said, I just lost it here, let's see if I can pull it up.
Jason Everett:
This is from Rebecca. I will omit her last name because I didn't get permission to run this, but she said, "My second 10 hour day in a mask. Yeah, I'm complaining. My throat hurts, I can barely swallow, my chest is sore for me to talk or to work through the mask, my ears sting like hell, my nose is chap." I want you to hear that people are really coming back to the salon in a different mode, and especially when they've been on kind of like vacation mode. There's a stylist that she lives across the street from me and she's been able to like workout like five hours a day because she's a super guru, right? She loves fitness, but going back to working out five hours a day to like working 10 plus hour days with mask on all these different things, it's going to be a very different environment for these stylists to come back to work, right?
Doug Campbell:
The mask is a challenge if you're wearing a mask all day long. All our staffs have the ones that tie for them because that thing behind your ear-
Jason Everett:
Tie in the back versus behind the ears, right? It's super important. It's such a small detail but like your ears get all fired up if you're not tied behind for your staff. It's such a small detail, it makes a huge difference, yeah?
Doug Campbell:
Yeah. I've found that another thing. Obviously, I like the water and fishing, boating, all that good stuff. There's these sunscreen gaiters that you can put on and you can pull it up over your face. It's to keep you from getting too much sun when you're out on the boat, but that works very good right now as a massive face covering because you can pull it down easily, pull it up easily. It's very light weight. It doesn't feel like you're suffocating like some of the heavier cloth mask do, so some of you that haven't opened yet, you may want to think about that. I think a lot of our staff is going to go to that because that's been the biggest complaint over the last two days-
Jason Everett:
It's been masks.
Doug Campbell:
... is having that mask on your face. They walk out of the building and pull it off like they just came out a smoking building. It's like "I can breathe."
Jason Everett:
Let's talk about managing staff, Doug. You've always kind of had this arrangement where you have huddles and you have shift huddles and you have all these things, but I think so many salons that I'm seeing that we're talking to inside our High Performance Salon Academy and just publicly that we're talking to, I'm hearing a lot of people are shifting, well shifting, they are moving towards having huddles at the end of every shift and that they've just over and over again said that communication is massive. I want to know from you guys. If you are open and you're paying attention to the show, and by the way, a lot of salons are probably not watching the show right now because they are freaking open and slammed, but if you are paying attention to this and you are open, I'd love to know what are some things that were unexpected for you about managing quarantennials you want to know. Do me a favor and comment in the comment section, but Doug, going back to this, what are the adjustments, how has communication changed, what are you doing?
Jason Everett:
We were just on a call earlier today and you had mentioned some of the things that have come from quarantine time will then be woven into normal business operations now. What have you been adjusting inside your salon?
Doug Campbell:
I think it is just the way that we communicate with each other. Obviously, we were using Zoom a lot more. We've got the channels between how, and we actually instituted some new things. We changed some of our business model while we were closed. We were curious how that was going to go, changing some of that and coming back, wearing mask and all that stuff, and it really is going surprisingly smooth. It's a ton of communication, so we've got several channels of communication between, we've got the three locations, we got two salons and a barbershop, and we just make sure that everybody's in full communication and really trying to set up expectations, especially the week before we opened, we really worked hard on expectations, what could go wrong, how would we handle that, what's the process for handling that.
Doug Campbell:
It also goes back to the culture that you ended with. It is a great opportunity to reset your culture. We operate from a code of honor, we have a leadership team, all those things. If we didn't have those things, it would probably be much, much more difficult because now we find that people are leaning into those resources more. Being able to come in and working as a team, everybody's figuring it out together, but it is interesting how the mindsets have changed now. They've been going for a day or two, they're back in it, and they're back in it, they're making gobs of money.
Jason Everett:
It's a good day.
Doug Campbell:
People are busy, their books are full.
Jason Everett:
I know Sean, because again, we'll have to have Sean up, but Sean was like, "Man, I am slammed." He's like, "I've never had my book this full in my entire life," and I think that's one of the things that's going to happen is books are going to be full, all this are going to happen if you listened to our previous podcast, go back, and by the way, if you want information on the podcast, comment "Podcast." You can go check out all our previous episodes. We talked earlier about, on other episodes, about like what you can do to make sure that your team doesn't get worn out, but I think to this point on talking about people that are in a spot where they're like they're totally slammed, this is more important than ever before to really have a mental toughness game plan for your staff, right?
Jason Everett:
It's like what are you doing to make sure that your staff is handling the things that they're dealing with. We teach a whole book called Little Voice Mastery which was written by a mutual friend and mentor of both Doug and myself. His name is Blair Singer, and even in my staff, we talked about this and I say, our staff in our California office for what we do with the High Performance Salon Academy, I really had to sit down and have a conversation and just go "Guys, it's time for us to go back through Little Voice Mastery and look at these things" because they have so many people in their heads, right? They have so many people in their heads talking to them. They have the news media, they have their friends, they have their parents. We had a staff member, and this is real stuff here, right?
Jason Everett:
We had a staff member that their roommate came in contact with somebody who had COVID and they're trying to figure out what does that mean, how does it work? There are real anxiety and real stress things that are happening and the question becomes how much are you giving your staff from a management perspective of what do they say to themselves when things start to get a little sideways, when they start to get a little bit messy? When all of a sudden, they're like, "Look, I don't know what I need to be thinking right now but I'm thinking in terms of panic or I'm thinking in terms of what's wrong," that's where I think communication with quarantennials is one of the most important things you can do, and the same things that, Doug, we've been talking about forever, having an established set of rules, a written a set of rules like a code of honor in place that you can ground your staff to.
Jason Everett:
I do want to know, Doug, with your code of honor, did you guys add any or did you amend your code of honor at all before you opened? Did you refresh on it? Talk to me about that for a second and how that maybe has played out for you.
Doug Campbell:
Actually, we have. The one that we did, the staff did, because when you said code of honor, they come up with it. The owner just facilitates it. We did tweak it right after it's done because we do what's called a code of honor scenario meeting where we do the scenarios and split them up in groups and have them handle it according to the code. So if you find something that can't be handled, then you have to adjust your code, but fortunately, ours has held up to the test of time so far and the test of this pandemicm, so that's worked out really well. I think the thing is it's getting people... The communication part is keeping them in the know, because it's the unknown that makes people nervous. What are the regulations going to be? We don't know. These are the ones we're going to start with until we know, right? So not like "We're just going to have to wait," and it's like... Because they didn't actually come out with Florida's until Monday when we actually opened.
Jason Everett:
Which is crazy, right?
Doug Campbell:
Right. We went with what we knew from other states. We said, "These are things we think are going to be reasonable," and it turns out some of those things we didn't have to do.
Jason Everett:
Just out of curiosity because I know Atlanta, they had some requirements, what didn't you have to do? Because I know that there's some questions in here?
Doug Campbell:
We did not have to do the temperature check.
Jason Everett:
Interesting.
Doug Campbell:
They actually said that the client-
Jason Everett:
That's because it's already 100 plus degrees in Florida already, they would be able to tell. Bad corona virus joke, sorry.
Doug Campbell:
They actually said that the guest are not required to wear a mask. We are still requiring the guest to wear a mask because in my opinion, that's just silly. If only one half of the equation is wearing the mask, that whole concept doesn't really work.
Jason Everett:
Interesting. So salons in Florida, not required for a guest to wear a mask, just the service provider.
Doug Campbell:
Service providers have to wear a mask, and they want you to limit the number of people in the waiting room. Somebody asked about the waiver earlier too.
Jason Everett:
Yeah, I see. Tanya asked the question and said "Curious if you have a client waiver for people entering or is that something you guys decided to do or were required to?"
Doug Campbell:
We're going to do a signed one and then the more we talked about, it's like, "I'm not going to keep up with all that paper and all that stuff." People worry about the liability of it. If this was the only place you were going and you can say that that's where I caught it, but I mean if you're going to Walmart and Home Depot and Lowe's where people are just acting like it's Christmas. So no, we didn't do that, and we were going to ask them the questions that that's not required, so we didn't, just trying to speed up the process. What we are doing is everyone wears a mask, we are doing sanitation in between appointments. They did put a random thing in there, you're supposed to have 15 minutes in between appointments, but you know, that's built into our appointment time.
Jason Everett:
That's interesting, like somehow in 15 minutes, the world is going to change or you sanitize everything.
Doug Campbell:
Someone that has no idea about the industry penciled that one in there, but we are very sure that we do clean between each one, clean all the implements. We got a bottle of alcohol in a spray bottle that we spray all the instruments down, wipe them down. We got the designated front desk person that goes down, sprays all the chairs with Lysol wipes, everything. Anything people could touch or someone going through every 10 to 15 minutes and wiping things down, because we want to operate in a safe environment but we also want things to flow. Making the client sign a waiver and ask them all these questions and take their temperature at the front is not good for flow. We put also out on Facebook, we put out there what they could expect when they came into our space. There's also signage on the front door. We have four different entries, public entries into our building. We put signs on all the doors, "Please come in the front door," so that we can control the environment.
Doug Campbell:
I think that's helped our staff a lot. Like I said, for them to know as much, speaking genuinely and authentically with your staff and getting them as comfortable with the knowledge that you've got is the best thing that you can do to make them feel safe, because that's what they want. They want to feel safe and they want to feel comfortable in what they're doing.
Jason Everett:
I would say going back to this managing quarantennials idea is that bringing people back to the salon is safety and security is now paramount, and understanding your why is more important than it's ever been before. I want you guys to hear this. I see some questions in here about doing blowouts. We'll get to that in just a second, but I just want to say like we're talking about managing quarantennials. If you just say "Do it like this because I said so, dammit" is not going to fly, right, Doug? We teach from this and we have since the beginning and I think it's really coming out that you can't just manage by fear anymore, you have to have open dialogues. You can't just say "Do this or else" because people really are paying attention to their safety and security, and frankly, that's why all these questions are coming in.
Jason Everett:
People asking about double bookings and blowouts, like really, if I bottomlined all of these questions, everybody wants to know what's safe. Can I just say that out loud? You just want to know what's safe, what do we have to do, and I'm just reading from how many stylists we're interacting with and they're having that conversation is I want you to hear quarantennials are now, and by the way, I've heard this on every phone call, Doug, I don't know how many random phone calls you've been making to people in different businesses, but like people say this. "Stay safe out there" like we're in this big giant don't know what's going on, and it is because we're in this quarantine mode, right? Is that people are using the "Stay safe out there" so people's number one, and quarantennials will see this over and over again, even though you might not say it out loud, their number one concern is safety. Safety for them, safety for their family, safety for their loved ones.
Jason Everett:
That's the world that we live in. In quarantennials, that's a really big deal. Doug, I want you to be able to answer these questions. Everyone's asking about blowouts. They want to know. Blow outs, blow outs, are you doing blowouts, and that's it. Are you doing blow drying? Is it safe? Is the blow dry safe? I saw it in a group.
Doug Campbell:
It goes back for, so there's two different schools of thought on this as far as why to or not to do, but one of them is a speed. People are saying-
Jason Everett:
Charlene just said this on here.
Doug Campbell:
... "We have so many clients trying to get in so we're just going to not blow them out, we're going to let them leave wet."
Jason Everett:
Charlene just said that.
Doug Campbell:
I don't like that one because I don't want to lessen the experience. I want them still to have the experience. From a safety standpoint, I don't see why it would cause a safety problem. Heat and humidity, both are two things that help kill the virus, so if you're blowing moisture into the air with heat, that seems like that would do nothing but help the situation. We're trying to for our guest and for our clients, create as normal of a circumstance as we can under the circumstances, because again, that's where people find comfort. If it's like we're not doing blow dries, then when are we going to do blow dries? So now they got this other whole thing out there and then you get the thing of like, "Well, I came in and I didn't get my blow dry so now I want a discount on-
Jason Everett:
Right. Why deal with that? I think you're better off raising the prices if you need to do it instead of like putting people through... Look, if you're not a chain salon and your goal is not to get people in and out of your salon in 10 minutes as fast as you possibly can, you're trying to figure out how to create that experience, remember what people want right now. Now, that all being said though is that if you are a salon, like we had one of our salons inside our High Performance Salon Academy, Mandy who did this in Kansas city, she did parking lot haircuts. It was like drive up and do this, and what she said through the whole process is they did parking lot cuts.
Jason Everett:
It was like if you need a quick speed cut, we're not doing all the other bells and whistles, we're just doing these different price, different everything and she said, "I learned a lot. Not exactly the clientele and customers that I was looking for inside my salon," but she took that on as a piece that she wanted to have just to try it out and they got lots of media and PR out of it and all these other things, but I think just be really tuned in to what your clients and customers want, and if you're deciding to remove that from fear or safety, are you doing it for speed, like what is that reason because there's not, and Doug and I don't have the right or wrong answer that works for your salon. We're not going to tell you what to do. We're just going to say "Look, here's what you can do." There's a big difference there.
Doug Campbell:
I think you look at it from the client's perspective. If you can do it safely, I don't necessarily see why it's not safe personally. No one's been able to show me why that would be unsafe. I do understand the timing thing, but there again, I want people to see value. Sometimes the blowout is the most valuable part for a person because it relaxes them. When you get a good blowout, you relax and you leave looking amazing, you feel amazing-
Jason Everett:
Look great, feel good.
Doug Campbell:
You haven't felt amazing in two months and now you feel amazing, and if she went in there and then say "Oh, by the way, we're not going to do blowouts," then it's like you just disappointed and say "Crap."
Jason Everett:
You left the experience on the table.
Doug Campbell:
As close as you can get to normal safely is the goal, and I think that's going to help your clients, that's going to help your staff, because then moving forward shifts back into what's going to be normal normal isn't going to be as big of a shift. They're not expecting another shift, so let's get as close to normal as we can function with and do it as safely as we can. So there again, looking at your regulations, what do I have to do then what do I want to do just like we're making our guest wear mask because we feel for our environment, for our staff. That's the safest thing is everybody wears mask, and we'll do that until further notice, but that's the biggest change.
Jason Everett:
I was watching a video, I wish I had it to just pop up and play for you, but I was seeing something with good old Fauci who's been waiting and all this stuff at the government level, but he was talking about just in a video is that masks in most cases, and again, I wish I had the video just play for you, but masks in most cases are designed to make the wearer feel more comfortable, not more than that because they said, "Look, unless you're wearing medical grade mask" and all these other things, it's just a comfort thing, and again, when we talk about quarantennials, this is the final thought I want to leave you guys with and then Doug, you can give your final thought on, is that it's not just the quarantennials that are working at your salon, because that's another breed of stylists that are now working inside of your space that they're paying attention to safety and security.
Jason Everett:
You now have guests that are also quarantennials, right? These are people who life after quarantine will always look different for them or at least for a time will look different for them. Remember their expectations are different. You need to over communicate, over discuss, over deliver on giving grace to people and understand. I heard this story, a mutual friend of ours, Doug, David Belforrd down in Australia, they just kind of released some level of quarantine inside Australia for the region that he's in and he said this 60-some-odd year old woman came into the salon, sat down in the chair, mask on, he put his hands on her shoulder and she broke down in tears and cried because she said "It has been 60 days since I've had physical contact with anyone, and this was the first time and it just feels so relaxing to be comforted by you touching me and putting your hands on my shoulders."
Jason Everett:
It was one of those stories that I was like, "Man, you guys got to remember," the quarantenials that are coming to you are not just your staff, they're not just you, but they're your guests that are sitting in your chair and understand that while she had a breakdown and cried, there might be other people who just like, "Oh my God, whatever you do, do not touch me except for what you have to." Just understand that there needs to be a lot of grace, a lot of sympathy and empathy, and a whole lot of just opportunity for us to be a little different. Doug, what's your closing thought on managing quarantennials as they come back to work, staff or guests?
Doug Campbell:
People are coming back into community, rather it's your guest or rather it's your employees. Appreciate that, allowing people to come in at their own space, own time, but let that start to happen. Part of who we are human beings and part of what we do in the hair business is therapy. It's as much of a therapy session as it is a hair session the way I look and feel about myself, and being able to connect with that one person that maybe I have connected with years, I haven't been able connect with. So appreciate that and being thankful that that's coming back into our space. I think gratitude is a huge thing. Be grateful for what you've got and hopefully, this time is giving you time to really be grateful for what you have, what you've been given, and what you have the opportunity to do inside this industry.
Jason Everett:
Love it, man. Use those tools. Hope today's podcast has been helpful. If it has been, do me a favor and comment "Podcast" or comment with the word "Helpful." We'll make sure that we get you more information about a future podcast so you can get access to actually subscribe to our podcast channel on iTunes, on Spotify, on Pandora, on whatever the heck you want to listen to, and if you really enjoyed today's episode, I would love for you to leave us a review. A review goes a long way and lets other people know that Doug and I occasionally have something valuable to share. Occasionally, right, Doug? That's the key word?
Doug Campbell:
Yeah, every now and then.
Jason Everett:
Every now and then, we share something really good, and we'll keep continuing to update you guys and if any of you guys are looking at, "Look, how do I get involved with the salon owner support community that's helpful?" Doug and I run High Performance Salon Academy support community for salon owners that have team based salons that have multiple people on their staff, they're team based or commission based salons that have people that are on their staff that want to learn and grow. We'd be happy to talk with you. We have an application process for you to do that and all you have to do is say the word "Apply" in the comment section of this video or go to highperformancesalon.com and you could find a way to apply to join our salon owner support community. It's been awesome to hang out with you. Thank you so much for being here, Doug. Looking forward to having you guys on another podcast with us really soon. Thanks, Doug.
Doug Campbell:
Take care everybody.
Jason Everett:
Thanks for listening to the Evo Revo podcast. If you like today's episode, please subscribe. Leave us a review and you can always get more information including show notes and the video episodes at evorevopodcast.com.