4 Ways to Streamline Your Salon Business

As an independent salon owner, you wear many hats, and sometimes it may feel challenging to juggle all of your day-to-day tasks, stay organized and maintain a healthy work-life balance. But we've got you covered... because, with Sola, you can have it all.

Check out these 4 ways you can streamline your business and stay organized this summer!

Manage Your Business with SolaGenius 

Now is the perfect time to transition your salon management to SolaGenius - the booking system made specifically to fit the needs of independents.  Designed to streamline your independent salon business, the SolaGenius app offers 24/7 booking, client management, text and email marketing, reporting and so much more. 

SolaGenius combines all the needs of salon management into one app to completely revolutionize the way you do business. With SolaGenius, you can manage clients, automate communications, track client history, schedule around your personal calendar (hello, summer vacay 👋), accept payments and track your business analytics. 

Face of Sola Ashley White's favorite feature is online booking. "This feature gives me the freedom to enjoy my time at the studio, my time at home and while I'm on the go, all while staying in total control. No more back and forth text messages or phone calls." With SolaGenius confirming or denying appointments is easy! "A click of a button is all it takes!”

With SolaGenius, you create an attractive, user-friendly booking website in minutes, eliminating the need for cumbersome website development. With just a few clicks, you can customize a user-friendly online booking page to fit your brand aesthetic, feature your work and give your clientele a hands-off approach to scheduling an appointment that fits your schedule and theirs.

SolaGenius also provides the beauty industry’s lowest credit card processing rate. From booking clients to checking them out, SolaGenius makes the salon experience a more organized and streamlined process, keeping everything in one place for both you and your guests. Click here to try SolaGenius free for 30 days. 

Once you have your online booking up and running, make sure to put your booking link everywhere so new and existing clients can start filling your books!

Stock Your Backbar with BeautyHive

Trying to save time and money? We can all relate. With BeautyHive, an online distributor made exclusively for independents, keeping your backbar and retail shelves stocked year-round is a breeze. With most orders shipping out the same day and real-time inventory checks, you never have to play the guessing game of when (or if!) you'll get your supplies in time for your upcoming appointments.

Ordering online through BeautyHive saves you time and trips to the supply store. If you continually struggle with those “kid in a candy store” moments... you know, going in for 4 tubes of color and leaving $200 later... BeautyHive has got your back with easy reordering. Plus, BeautyHive offers the industry's most popular brands, like Redken, Kenra, Pravana, Pulp Riot, Olaplex, Ouidad and more.

Sola pro Tahesa Nelson describes BeautyHive as "a game-changer for busy beauty professionals. Their website is very user-friendly, making it fast and easy to place my orders. Plus, I love that I can use my points for discounts on future purchases."

Sign up and experience the beauty of BeautyHive!

Create and Schedule Social Media Content

This is a great time of year to get creative. We love Canva and Later App for making social media management easier, so that you can focus on what you do best - your craft - and show it off to the world. Using social media management apps can help you take your social media management from overwhelming to influential. 

​Canva.com for Creating Content

Social media requires constant upkeep, which means lots of content. We love Canva, a free online design platform catered to everyday users without design experience. This is a great tool for creating a stockpile of on-brand, professional marketing materials and social media content. 

With Canva, you can set your brand's colors, logo and fonts and plug and play into their easy-to-use templates to create beautiful branded posts and announcements in no time. 

With Canva, you do not have to be a professional designer to create beautifully branded collateral for your salon. Canva offers hundreds of templates of customizable social media posts, Stories, videos, emails and web graphics, so you can make top-notch designs with little to no experience.

We recommend making social media templates for your salon so that you have more content to share over time. You can make versions of your templates that share wisdom, tricks of the trade, quotes, lifestyle inspiration, promotions, or anything else you may want to communicate with your audience. Keep the aesthetic of your social media accounts consistent by sprinkling your branded templates in between photography of your work, clients and inspiration. 

You can Canva for free - yes completely free, or have the option to upgrade to unlock additional content and features.

Later.com for Scheduling Content

Later is an all-in-one social marketing platform that allows you to visually plan, analyze, and publish your content. Imagine spending 1-2 hours per month planning, writing and scheduling posts, and seeing them post automatically for the next 30 days. The next month - rinse and repeat. 

Batching social media posting as one task per month rather than a daily chore is a major time saver, so you do not have to focus every morning on perfecting your next social media post. Scheduling a month’s worth of posts is as simple as dragging and dropping. Select your photos and videos, drop them onto the calendar with your posting times, and they are ready to publish. 

Using focused time to organize content all at once offers a way to not only post with a consistent rhythm, but also to vary the content, craft the aesthetic, and pre-plan the way your social media storytelling unfolds over time. The focused effort on a month’s worth of posts also breeds greater creativity. 

Pre-planning and post automation is how the pros create those envy-worthy Instagram pages that feel so organized and premeditated. They feel that way because they are! Harness your own creative prowess by using Later’s simple calendar-based post automation. Play with the overall aesthetic by dragging and dropping the order of your posts. Move posts around and insert content from Canva to create the feed of your dreams.

Later is free forever, as long as you are only posting 30 automated posts per month. Try it out!

By leaning into these tools, you should have a good idea of how to make the most of summertime as an independent salon owner. You go, #SolaBoss 👏