Jenna: Hey guys it's Jenna from Elevate Beauty Education, Supply & Studio.

So I'm getting asked a lot right now it's obviously sick season and so lots of students are asking about cancellation policies and sick policies. So this is a very relevant topic and things I think have changed a lot after the last two years, and no one can deny that P word has shifted our businesses a lot. And after the last two years, we're all trying to adapt to the new reality of what's happening. And it's awesome now that people don't come to the appointments when they're sick. But the flip side of that is it leads a lot of rescheduling. And so we do have to adapt our businesses to be able to survive in this new market place. And be able to be competitive, but not really that profitable, so that our businesses can be sustainable. And we actually want to keep doing that because let's be realistic, the worst thing that could happen is to not set policies and have your business be completely not profitable and for you not to be able to continue to serve your clientele, because let's be real we all have to make some sort of a paycheck to be able to provide for our families to be able to be continuing to provide top notch service. So as you get more busy too, you are definitely going to have to do implement these policies and be a little bit more firm about implementing these policies as well and no one likes to implement these policies.

But the truth is that if you don't, it's chaos in your studio, your clients aren't going to like it. There's gonna be no open appointments in your schedule. You are going to be grouchy.

You are going to be working super long days with big holes in the middle. If you are thinking about ever having staff let me tell you, no staff is gonna stay with you through this either that or you're gonna have to pay them for the hours and the gaps in their schedule and all the calculations and shifting around and that gets really expensive. The reality is that if any person went to the job and their boss said, Okay, you're going to just sit down or go do whatever for like two hours on notice that job would suck really quickly. And same thing if you didn't know what your hours were in what you could expect to be making or working or committing to your work and your family in like weeks. How do you plan for work life balance? How do your employees plan for it either? It's just not possible, especially if your employees are coming from farther away like if they don't live right near the studio, some of them are going half an hour to and from so that's an hour each time they're coming back and forth the studio. If they have a big gap in the middle of the day, they're not likely going to want to be keeping them to work for you. And it's also if it's you, it's making your day a lot longer. That's the time you could be spending with your family or researching make your business better or something like anything more than that. So yeah, as you do get more experienced you do want to be on top of this because if you want to provide an elevated experience and more luxurious experience, you do have to love what you are doing. You have to be passionate about it. You have to also be respecting the time of other clients in the schedule and yourself to make sure that you don't get burnt out. But also that not one client is in there rescheduling and bumping everything around for everyone else or taking up all the booking times when other people are left without times that they really need. So this is my suggestion and you can take it or leave it if you want to DM me at Elevate lash let's see I can also talk it out with you but the busier you are and the more experienced you are typically the longer you need for cancellations. So if you are inexperienced artists, I would recommend setting it at 24 hours because honestly you don't probably have an established clientele and you can handle cancellations a lot easier. than someone who does have a very established clientele and likely they're not booking in a lot of new bookings in that instance, those will be holes in their schedule. So the more experience you are when someone is rescheduling it that means that you have to add them into overtime and the next week and then when you have to do that with a bunch of people because when you don't make that policy a lot of different people will probably take advantage of that you're just going to end up working so much crazy hours that you can't predict and having no work life balance. So I did this for a long time until it became completely unsustainable. I literally did not work in my studio come home and eat dinner at like nine o'clock with my husband and have absolutely no life and it just something had to give and so even though now I went to a five day cancellation policy, it really doesn't work for everyone's schedule. I will say that and you absolutely will have people that can't stay with you and that's really sad.

But then there's this whole other side of people that are really appreciative because they do have the most available openings. And it's like you don't have a bunch of people in your schedule, constantly rescheduling and eating up a bunch of appointments because when they push their appointments, they're going into these other weeks where people need to like be booking in the regular fills or they have emergencies that come up and need to come in earlier and had to come in earlier because someone canceled last minute on that appointment and doesn't have enough time to reschedule Basically, most people know what they were doing within 24 hours and you're only gonna get walk ins who are coming in the next 24 hours. So if you have a bunch of people canceling on you last minute then that means that you are going to have a day where you have a bunch of hours that you just have to sit around for and then there's a day where you're going to have to tack them on to stay overtime and that's just not really fair for anyone because you are going to end up over work and getting grumpy and that doesn't serve anyone so when you have more control of your schedule and you teach your clients to prioritize their health care appointments and respect the time of the other clients in the studio as well as your time then everything goes a lot smoother. So my recommendation again for brand new artists set in a 24 hours because you are not fully booked and you are a lot more flexible. You're also trying to build your clientele as much as possible. When you are more experienced when your schedule is like probably 50% Full I would go for like three days and when you're 70 to like 100% Full I would do five days because once you get to the point where you are 100% doable. It's so much harder to implement that policy with a bigger clientele. And not only that, you are probably going to be in the place where you are looking for employees and so you want to shift before you hit the need to have that employee so you have established the clientele that this is like the new policy and they're going to be comfortable with it instead of doing it when you bring on someone and having a problem or not having it at all. And then you bring on this person and they have the holes in the schedule. And you have to either pay them for those holes out of pocket to be able to keep them on staff or you have to have them basically go take a walk legally you're supposed to pay people so it's very expensive, very fast. For you and save yourself the trouble and create those boundaries and it will go much smoother for both your client and for staff and for your future staff or your staff. It's just not possible to maintain work life balance and a profitable studio when you're getting last minute cancellations all the time. So when it comes to sick policy, we want to be flexible with these clinically wants to implement any of these policies. You're here. In a perfect world we wouldn't do this but it really is our job as studio owners to provide the best experience for everybody and that affecting work life balance that you can be passionate and well rested for every appointment it also means that you are respectful of other content. We're trying to book into your schedule. So it's it's really delicate balance but I have found through it all works best because you are not compliant and coming in when they're sick. You do have to prove that it's just what the new norm is key but you also don't want to encourage people to take advantage of it and so the and I think is still charging offer to credit it towards the Fill appointment and so I have in my studio done up to two months it was more so back in the days when you had to actually quarantine that I had done this policy just to make sure the client could get out of the quarantine and then get back to doing all the things they needed to do and they could like come back when they're ready. Now I would say you could probably short that myself. I'm still going to cute, just because it's generous gives them time to figure out what to do and get back onto their self care routine. But what you don't want to do is just straight up cancellation that leaves you in a very vulnerable position, especially if you're in the midst of taking on employees because if you do have collections last minute, and that absolutely means if you're following regulations of Canadian government, you are accepting those things to use and even seeing them on payroll and so you still have to collect that money not only based in studio expenses, and try times where you're hopefully I've seen it where a whole week is canceling.

We've heard it especially with permanent makeup studio happens really fast because these are like four hour appointments.. You are booking that schedule can be cleared I was dealing with those basic systems do and the truth of the matter is that you protect yourself no matter what your you what you want to call clientele, just a person, right? And so if you are putting yourself in a position where you're vulnerable and you're possibly having to be too extended for payroll and all your expenses, and you could be put in a position where you're having to shell out a big loss in order to just sustain the sickness and then also having to reschedule those appointments to take on the overtime. This policy is going to dampened down on that. It's going to make sure that you can continue to be there for your community no matter what it's still going to suck having to fit people in later but you will have a little bit of money to cover it over payroll even though you will have to absorb that later as well. It's a little bit of a safety just in my opinion, the best way to get through less than optimal situation while respecting all the other clients in the studio, the studio itself your responsibility to the community and your balance of work life so that you can continue doing what you're doing. Still give some some of the and empathy to that client often through the situation so they can still continue on with their self care routine, which is really important. And that's the status thing, right? Because once you're sick more than anything need your self care routines. So yeah, you want to help that client as much as possible. In addition to that, I will always try and work them into my schedule as soon as I can and then credit that 50% view back onto their account and give them a tiny bit of like extra time to to bump them up. You just want to make sure that you have a policy in place that works for you. And then again when you're newer you might consider doing no sick policy, but you can get yourself in a really big jam that way to some people will take advantage of you and not respect your time. So I would recommend just implementing it from the beginning. It is a very fair policy I think because if someone is sick and they are wanting to get back on their self care routine, it shows a commitment towards them to your studio and their continued self care.