My target for Operation Get Profitable is to visit 80 salons in 8 days, which works out to 10 a day, 4 days a week. (Most salons are closed on Mondays.)

Yesterday I visited just one salon, but it was a good one. Back in July I had a salon owner find Snip online and sign up for a free trial. By total coincidence, her salon in Fraser, Michigan (outside of Detroit) was about 2.5 hours from Grand Rapids where I live. Since July I’ve been visiting her salon and doing the whole sales dance thing and yesterday was supposed to be the day I come in and train her 16 stylists.

Well, after driving two and a half hours to the salon, the salon owner had forgotten I was coming, and most of the 16 stylists were absent. I guess I should have thought to call. We decided we could at least train her on Snip, though, so she set up her old desktop computer. Unfortunately the computer was unworkably slow and had a tiny monitor. I could have spent some time fiddling with this ancient Windows XP machine but by this point I frankly wasn’t sure whether this prospect was totally serious, and if not it certainly didn’t make sense for me to drag myself through the misery (I assume) of cleaning up a slow Windows XP machine. So I offered a deal: if this salon owner were to show me a commitment and start her Snip subscription today, i.e. hand me her credit card so I can put it in the system, then I would go to the store for her, buy her a computer, and then she could reimburse me when I got back. To my surprise, she was good with that, and so that’s exactly what we did. I set the computer up for her and stuck around for a few hours to train the stylists who were there. I didn’t expect it to happen yesterday, but I got a new customer.

Even though I’m now halfway to my goal of getting two new customers, I still plan to shoot for visiting 79 more salons over the next two weeks. If I visit 13 salons today, tomorrow and Friday, I can get 40 for the week, so that’s what I’m going to try to do.