How to Build an Unstoppable Salon Business
Nick Mirabella
1. Choose the Right Clients – or Watch Your Business Struggle
Here’s the hard truth: it’s not always your service that’s the issue—it’s the clients you’re serving. If your clientele is unreliable, short-term focused, or volatile, you’re always chasing stability that never comes.
Why “Small” Clients Often Cause Big Problems
- They’re financially unstable and prone to canceling.
- They operate in crisis mode—asking "What have you done for me lately?" every single month.
- You build a business on sand: high churn, low loyalty.
What to Do Instead:
- Target clients with higher spending power first—they bring lower stress, higher commitment, and allow you to build a solid foundation.
- Once established, develop tech-driven or low-overhead offers for smaller clients that are profitable and scalable.
- Niche down: one service for one client type equals higher pricing and less churn.
2. Stop Guessing—Let Feedback Shape Your Business
Your clients know what they want. Are you listening?
Ask your top performers: “If I had to delete everything but one part of this service, what’s the ONE thing you’d keep?”
Use This 4-Step Iteration Process:
- Survey the clients who get the best results.
- Find out what they did differently.
- Make every new client do the same things intentionally.
- Incentivize these behaviors in your guarantee or onboarding.
This is how you engineer better results, reduce churn, and grow a referral-worthy business.
3. Don’t Pretend to Be Something You’re Not
If you run a service-based business, you don’t need to call it “tech” to make it valuable. Value comes from the actual numbers: retention, margin, revenue per employee.
Focus on These Instead:
- High revenue retention
- Strong customer loyalty (logo retention)
- Scalable service delivery (one team member serving 50 clients instead of 5)
Don’t chase buzzwords—optimize what you already do. Real improvement comes from clarity and repetition, not reinvention.
4. Build with Long-Term Discipline
Being unstoppable doesn’t mean doing everything—it means doing the right thing long enough.
Stick to your model. Reinforce what’s working. Solve the next problem only when the current one is under control. Your business isn’t broken. It’s just early.
Final Thought:
“Success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time.” Let others pivot every month. You keep stacking wins.
Ready to Build an Unstoppable Salon Business?
Join the movement at The Level Up Academy and learn how to create a business that lasts—one strategic move at a time.