In a previous post, I shared a few takeaways from attending this year’s Great Clips Convention. For three days in late September, I was among hundreds—actually, thousands—of franchisees, salon teams, home-office colleagues, vendors and contractors as we celebrated our accomplishments of the past year and challenged each other to be even greater in the year ahead.
During Convention, business specialists from the Great Clips home office and nationally recognized industry experts from across that country present from the main stage or in breakout sessions. Here are just some of the topics covered in breakouts: Performance Coaching and Counseling, Connecting Through Multi-Channel Marketing, In-Salon Recruiting, and Strategies for Succeeding in a Tight Real Estate Marketplace.
The content is rich, relevant and accessible so that franchisees and salon managers can easily translate what they’ve learned at Convention to what’s happening with their staff and customers.
With each Convention I attend, I walk away with an even stronger belief that our brand culture is focused on helping franchisees be successful, and you can see in action with the personal and professional connections being made between franchisor and franchisee, and among the franchisees themselves—connections that will last well beyond these energizing few days at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
At a breakout session that I helped moderate, I witnessed these connections among the attendees (primarily salon general managers). We had several round-table discussions on a gamut of topics: recruiting and retaining staff, how to keep brand metrics top of mind, guerrilla marketing and more.
We gave each table a topic and it was energizing to see people eagerly talking, listening and taking notes. One phrase I heard again and again was, “Here’s what works for me…” A few times I’d call out, “Time’s up!” on a topic, only to be told, “Oh, no, we’re not finished with this one!”
After the session, I heard from one of the participants about the value of participating in this breakout:
I am going to take away several ideas and implement them in our organization. One relates to training: A general manager mentioned they had a training team who trained all their new stylists. It was separated into three different categories related to delivering a great customer experience [so that the trainer could be a specialist in one area]. I thought that was an excellent idea and I’m going to adapt it to our system.
Other ideas we discussed in the roundtables are things our salons already have in place so it was a great reinforcement. It was fun to share ideas. I always enjoy networking with other general managers. Thank you!
Support you didn’t know you needed
There were several other breakouts that gave me additional perspective on how Great Clips supports franchisees and general managers with information that’s critical to their success—information that sometimes they don’t even know they need.
Two specific breakouts that I found especially interesting were legacy planning and crisis communications. Both presenters—Sarah Rowley of the Barnes and Thornton Law Firm and Paul Omodt of Omodt and Associates Critical Communications—offered great content and I’ll invite each of them to share their tips in a future blog.
As you can tell, I love working for a company that not only celebrates how great we are together but also actually allows us to be great together.
Are you interested in knowing more about what it’s like to be a Great Clips franchisee? Send me a note or give me a call. I’d love to talk with you!