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Don't Rely on Only Friends to Keep Your Salon Afloat

When I decided to open my own salon and spa, I had so many friends excited to try my services that I didn't think I needed to invest in marketing. Those friends did come in frequently, but their business turned out to just not be enough to keep my bills paid. I then remembered that before I began as a hairdresser, I drove many miles to see my favorite hair-stylist that I loved. That made me realize that I needed to advertise not just locally, but throughout the entire region. I drove an hour to my favorite hair-stylist, so why wouldn't my customers? I held a great "new customer discount", and soon those new customers from neighboring cities became regular customers once they realized how much they loved my technique. I created this blog to help other struggling business owners. I hope you can learn from my experiences!

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Don't Rely on Only Friends to Keep Your Salon Afloat

Ways To Make Your Small Business Employee Training More Effective

by Denise Watkins

When you run a small business, there are many issues you have to deal with throughout the course of the day. If you are in the process of growing and hiring new employees, one of those issues you will need to face is how you will go about training those new employees.

Most small business owners have a fairly lax way of training new employees with informal instruction from the business owner and other employees about the way things are done. However, if you are expanding and planning to have a larger number of employees on staff or if you want to make sure everyone gets the same basic training, you may want to develop a more uniform training process. Get to know some of the ways that you can make your employee training program more effective, so you can get started right away. 

Mix Hands-On Training in with Other Training Methods

Oftentimes, businesses will break training up into intellectual learning and hands-on training. A person will need to complete all of the "book learning" about their job before they move into the real world of how the business operates. This can create a large disconnect for employees that are trying integrate the information the learned on the computer or in a workbook, and the information they are getting from the actual work. 

To make your employee training more effective for your new hires, try to mix up hands-on training with the book training. For example, you could do a few hours of going over the rules and policies of the company and their specific job. Then, you can have the new hires shadow an existing employee as they do their job. This gives them that initial introduction into the real world applications of what they are learning. 

Mixing these two types of training together will also keep your new hires engaged in the training process. Hours upon hours of nothing but reading and watching videos can get tedious and attention can wander. Breaking things up will help employees to stay focused and really learn the information in training. 

Try Making Whiteboard Videos

One of the best ways to design training videos for your small business is to use a small business animated whiteboard video maker. These software programs help you to create whiteboard-style videos that are unique to your company and training needs. Most people really enjoy the hand-drawn images and written text in the videos and can relate to the information being presented in a real way. 

Whiteboard videos are especially great for showing employees possible scenarios they will face on the job. For example, one video can go over the right and wrong way to deal with an angry customer. Another could go over the return policies and process. These short videos will help to keep your employees interested and will give you unique and professional training materials to utilize for years to come. 

Now that you know a few of the ways to make your small business employee training more effective, you can start implementing these training changes immediately.  

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