NJ PRETTY FACE LTD

Hairdressing and beauty by appointment · diary and back-office work for other salons

Taking on a salonFive stages before a single call is diverted

One company, two jobs — choose which leads

Front of houseChairs, basins and the side room at Aylesham Back officeAnother salon diary, held from the same building

What has to exist before the diversion goes live

Owner to owner. None of this is onerous, but none of it can be skipped, and the one that gets skipped is always the service list.

A diary cannot be held on good intentions. It needs your service list with your minutes, a login, a recorded message and a named person for the decisions that are not ours to make. The five stages below are in the order they have to happen.

  1. A call, about thirty minutes Not a sales call — a working one. How your diary is actually kept: which column is which chair or room, what your abbreviations mean, which member of staff does what, and which of your regulars are always booked a particular way.
  2. The service list, in writing Every line you sell, the minutes it is booked at, the resource it uses, the processing window inside it if there is one, the turnaround you want left after it, and whether it may be overlapped. One page is usually enough. This is the document the whole arrangement stands on.
  3. A login you create Diary read and write in your own software. You make it, you can delete it, and nobody here has to ask you for a password. If the software only offers owner access, we agree in writing what we will not open.
  4. The message and the hours You record the out-of-hours line in your own voice, naming when the desk reopens, and your telephone provider points the daytime hours at us. Both are yours and both can be reversed without us.
  5. Two weeks running in parallel We take calls and you keep answering your own phone when it rings through to you. At the end of each day we compare what we did with what you would have done. The service list gets corrected in this fortnight — it always does — and then cover goes live properly and the first Monday reconciliation follows.

The escalation names

Three decisions are never made at the desk, so three names and numbers are needed: who settles a refund, who agrees extra time on an appointment already booked short, and who handles a complaint. One person can hold all three. What matters is that the log can say who it went to.

The jobs that stay in the salon, always

Still owner to owner here, but this column is the one to read if what you want to know is where the line falls.

The desk schedules. It does not run the business, and the list below is not a negotiating position:

  • Pricing, and every conversation about money.
  • Staff rotas, holidays and who is on which chair.
  • Stock, ordering and anything in a tube.
  • Complaints, from the first sentence onwards.
  • Anything at all about a person hair, skin or health. The desk has never seen the client and will not comment.
  • Payment. We are never given card details and do not want them.

Ending it

You delete the login and tell your provider to drop the diversion; that is the whole technical exit and it does not need our cooperation. We send the final handover for the last covered day and the full contact log for the period as one spreadsheet. Nothing is kept back and there is nothing to retrieve, because the diary was always inside your system.

To start, write to salon@njprettyface.info with the name of the salon and the software you use. The first thing back will be a time for stage one.

The service list, column by columnThe one document that cannot be approximated

Service, as you name it

Your wording, not a standardised version of it. If your clients ask for a half head by a name of your own, the diary should use that name and so should we.

Minutes booked

The honest length, including the talking at the start. A length set to flatter the price list is the single fastest way to make a Thursday collapse at four in the afternoon.

Resource used

Chair, basin or room. A room holds one person and cannot be overlapped; a chair can be held while colour develops. Getting this column wrong double-books a room.

Processing window

If the client sits for part of the appointment, say which part and how long. That window is the only place a second client can legitimately be fitted.

Turnaround after

Sweeping, gown, basin, two minutes at reception. Set it once, properly, and the diary stops lying to you about what is free.

May be overlapped

A plain yes or no per line, so that doubling up is your written rule rather than a judgement made by whoever is holding the phone.

Test required in front

Which lines cannot be booked until a test has been done, and how many hours clear it needs. This is the column that gets checked by hand every afternoon.