Talking to… Karen Thompson

With four successful salons and a background in corporate business growth and management, the owner of Beauty Secrets tells Eve Oxberry about the structure salons need to scale up

With 40 staff working 36 treatment rooms across four salons, Beauty Secrets owner Karen Thompson has a lot to manage, and although she may not have come to the role via the usual beauty therapy route, her background in business and management has been key to Beauty Secrets’ success.

Leaving her corporate career 24 years ago, after the birth of her first child, Thompson joined her Cidesco-trained mum’s existing beauty salon business, creating a partnership that would be the envy of most salons.

“I had 15 years of corporate life; with about 12 running the Department for Trade and Industry. I’d specialised in management training and have a qualification in staff development training, so I actually had a really complementary set of skills to work alongside Mum,” says Thompson. “It meant she could stay in the treatment room and do advancedlevel treatments while I ran the business.”

Thompson recognises that this dual expertise is a rare combination, with the majority of salon owners trying to juggle both sides alone. “It’s one of the biggest controlling factors for people, because unless you can actually take the time out of your business to work on it and run it, you stay as you are – you struggle to grow,” she says.

So, when Thompson lost her mum just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, it was a huge blow. “Losing your mum is one thing, but losing your mum and business partner is something quite significant in life,” she says. “So, it’s taken time, but for me this year has been a real step forward.”

Pay it forward

Now, with four salons under her belt and plans for more, Thompson is also turning her attention to mentoring other salon owners in a bid to demystify some of the business processes. She’s even signed up for the Government’s mentorship programme to become certified to support small businesses to grow.

“During the pandemic, one thing I did to keep us going was to apply for all the grants and support available. But because of the form-filling, some people were quite panicked by that so I found myself helping other salon owners,” she says. “Because I’ve got that background within the civil service – I’m a form filler by trade, if you like – it doesn’t panic me.”

More recently, Thompson joined Susan Routledge’s Beauty Business Director’s Club, where she met more beauty professionals who wanted her advice.

“I sat down with one salon owner. We got out her accounts and I told her what a balance sheet was because she had no idea but hadn’t wanted to ask her bookkeeper because she felt silly,” says Thompson. “That’s quite a common scenario, and I think the reason I can help people is because I’m doing the job so I speak their language. I don’t want to take the place of any of these amazing business coaches out there but I’m still in the industry and understand the current challenges.”

Now, following her recent Round Table workshop at Professional Beauty London, and Beauty Secrets’ highly commended placement in Large Salon of the Year at the PB Awards, Thompson’s skills are in even higher demand.

Solid structures

Alongside personal growth as a mentor, Thompson is also planning growth for the business, which last year recorded its strongest revenue since the pre-pandemic levels of 2018, driven largely by massage and wellness treatments.

Thompson says that her plans for growth now are only possible now due to the processes and procedures that have been put in place over the last few years. “We used to be firefighting all the time. Issues would come up and we didn’t know how to deal with them,” she says. “We always managed but we didn’t plan. It’s only around eight years ago, we decided that after 30 years in business, we needed to get some processes in place.”

Now, each of Beauty Secrets’ four salons has an individual manager who is responsible for both staff and budget, looking after the whole premises. There are monthly management meetings at which notes are made then information fed down to the teams during team meetings. In addition, managers have fortnightly 20-minute one-to-ones with each team member. “That’s in work time marked out of the diary,” says Thompson “We actually invest the time taking therapists away from doing the clients because unless you do that, people don’t know what the expectation is.”

Thompson has also created an in-house training framework to teach business skills as well as the hands-on therapies. “A lot of people end up being managers just by organically growing or taking over a business and they kind of forget that actually management is a skill in itself,” says Thompson. “It’s not one that the colleges are picking up, although I am now seeing more college-leavers staying on to Level 4, which is when they do start to talk about management, but that’s late in the day and not many people actually do it.”

All on board

So, Thompson has packaged together all her management training and experience and now trains staff in those things herself. “It’s about giving people opportunity to be the best version of themselves. I’ve designed programmes that we use within our salons where we take people who are keen to progress,” says Thompson.

“They have one-to-one time with me and we talk about all those skills that are non-therapy based, but equally important, such as how to deal with staff, how to communicate and how to delegate.”

Although it’s taken her a long time to reach such a structured set-up, Thompson’s advice to other salon owners – whatever size their business – is to get the processes in place as early as possible.

“It’s really important that people know where you want to get to. You need to communicate your vision from day one if you can because if people are aware of where you are going, they know how it will impact them and they’ll feel involved,” she says. “My team tell me they now feel much more involved in the direction of the company and have the opportunity to have a dialogue as well.”

Of course, processes are only as good as the team behind them and for a multi-site operator like Thompson, being able to rely on the salon managers in particular is vital. “The reason I’m able to do this is because of my team. and the team that I have is incredible. The whole of my central management team were trained up by my mum and have been with us a long time,” she shares.

"Unless you can take the TIME OUT of your BUSINESS, to WORK ON IT, and run it, you STAY AS YOU ARE you struggle to GROW"

Thompson is now gearing up for growth and has been working with Glow Bright Marketing on a brand identity that can be easily replicated. “I’d like to be able to have a package that we could lift, and say, ‘we know this works so let’s go and make it work it in this organisation too’,” says Thompson. “I suppose it’s a bit like franchising, although I don’t want to go down that route, but having a business package that I know works, and a strong brand identity, means we should then be able to put that brand wherever we want to go next.”