How Solo can help you build your mobile beauty business
Solo is the all-new online booking system for professionals in hair, beauty, and wellness services.
Our mission is to make it easier for professionals to build a standalone business. Whether you’re an expert facialist or a lash technician to the stars, it can be hard – and stressful – to secure and maintain clients without a seamless booking platform.
It can be overwhelming making the switch from working in a salon to running your own beauty business. Many people starting out on their own for the first time feel anxious about the sheer volume of admin tasks they may not have encountered when working as a salon employee.
That’s where Solo comes in. Find out about how Solo can empower you to manage your own clients, bookings, payments and more with our innovative all-in-one solution.
What is Solo?
Solo is an online booking and scheduling platform for mobile beauty therapists offering payment processing, diary management, travel planning, customer relationship management and business intelligence; and of course a seamless booking experience for clients.
The all-in-one app enables independent professionals to manage every aspect of their mobile business – from advertising their services and setting their prices, to tracking their income trends.
What does Solo offer mobile beauty professionals?
Solo offers mobile beauty professionals a wealth of features to make the experience of being an independent beauty therapist easier. By using Solo, professionals can advertise and grow
their business using just one app, helping them to take back control of their mobile beauty business.
Client booking
Managing client bookings in the past has been time-consuming and difficult – sharing treatment menus and prices, checking diary availability, capturing a client's address, parking information, and managing multiple channels.
Beauty professionals often use platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Email and SMS to manage their client bookings, sometimes resulting in confusion and double bookings.
With Solo, professionals have the ability to seamlessly input all client booking details in one place, with customers providing all relevant address and parking details for their booking.
Travel planning
Many mobile beauty professionals struggle with unpredictable travel times , as well as the down time between appointments. Many professionals also face limited and expensive parking at client’s homes.
By using Secret Spa’s scheduling app, hair and beauty professionals can access pre-calculated travel times between bookings. On top of this, the booking availability of mobile beauty therapists is updated with their previous booking location on the innovative app. This can prevent users from making bookings that will result in long travel times, and can cluster bookings near to each other to minimise downtime.
Payments
All mobile beauty therapists worry about cancellations and the impact on their income. Chasing customers for overdue payments, high payment processing fees, and accounting challenges are also concerns.
With the Solo platform, mobile beauty professionals can set up their own cancellation policies, preventing lost income due to late cancellations. On top of this, Solo gives beauty therapists the option of taking payment upfront.
Solo offers a booking portal that allows customers to input card details, which can be saved for future bookings via a central card management system. Professionals can also easily export booking transactions for their annual accounts, while customers can easily leave tips through the app which is important as we move to a more cashless society.
Diary management
In the past, mobile beauty therapists have had to grapple with managing schedules with pen and paper, and through apps such as Google Calendar and Notes. And as there are so many ways that therapists take bookings – SMS, Email, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. – bookings are jotted down wherever is most convenient at the time. All these channels and ways of recording appointments can lead to mistakes being made.
Some mobile hair and beauty therapists struggle to plan where they will be working at any given time, and as such, how to utilise the spare time they have. On top of this, some find it difficult to understand how much they will be earning on any given day, week or month.
Secret Spa’s SaaS booking platform enables professionals to see all the information they need about their bookings in one place. Solo offers a seamless overview of bookings on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis with status indicators to show whether bookings have been paid. Travel times and postcode information are clearly visible in the app. Plus, professionals have the ability to reserve leisure time and location.
Customer relationship management
Many independent beauty therapists find the administration tasks of running a mobile beauty business to be time-consuming and difficult. Such tasks include tracking customer details, completing and storing paper consultation forms, managing each customers’ consultation and preference history, and offering discounts.
When beauty therapists utilise Solo for their mobile business, they will have access to a central database of their customers’ bookings, address, payments and preferences, as well as industry-approved digital consultation forms. Solo also gives mobile beauty professionals the ability to send discounts to customers based on a number of factors, including birthdays, off-peak trading periods, and proximity to location.
Business intelligence
Using Solo allows beauty therapists to better understand income trends and customer segments, as well as customer feedback. This is achieved through income and trend tracking capabilities, with the ability to segment data by area and treatment.
Running your own mobile beauty business doesn’t have to be stressful or filled with admin. When you use Secret Spa’s Solo, you have access to a whole host of features and data to make your life as an independent beauty therapist easier, so you can focus on what you love and do best: delivering amazing customer service.
