Phorest FM Episode 196: Unleash The Power Of Staff Performance‪

Working in a super-engaged, high-performance environment can be one of the most rewarding goals for all salon teams today. Salon managers want to keep staff motivated, engaged and focused on their performance metrics. In turn, their team members want to be challenged, empowered and inspired to achieve their potential. Yet, one of this year's biggest challenges will be motivating staff and teams on furlough, part furlough, disengaged, bored, scared or struggling with their own mental health. The staff feedback process just got so much easier. Your team can now check on their key performance metrics, such as revenue and transactions for services, product retail and client booking numbers in their PhorestGo app — at any time, anywhere. Spend your time coaching and empowering your team instead of reading through long reports and big data tables. On this week's episode, we're joined by Phorest Product Lead Cillian Moloney to discuss the latest Staff Performance feature release. Are you ready to get your team to peak performance?

Guests

Cillian Moloney

Product Lead Cillian Moloney is just rounding out his third year leading product teams at Phorest. When you think of all the cool stuff Phorest did in 2020, like launching an online store or an updated roster screen, think of Cillian. He is certainly thinking of you, and the new features you want to see next in your salon software. When he’s not working, he loves being out and about in the countryside hiking, running or cycling if the Irish weather allows it. Otherwise, he loves cooking and reading (anything but fiction).

Transcript

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: On last week’s episode of Phorest FM, we were joined once again by Stefanie Fox to talk about leadership and what staff want from their salon. Stefanie had given a very similar talk at UpLift! by Phorest, where she compared motivation and leadership. What’s the difference, and which one does your team need to hit a goal? So we were questioning; is motivating your team sustainable enough to weather through a storm, or can you lead your team through it, or should you lead your team through it, I suppose? And aside from that, how much motivation can you give before it becomes too demanding?

So, as she mentioned, there’s been a shift from the age of motivating to leading. To lead is to take someone by the hand, help them while they move forward, bring them to their next step. And from a survey she conducted, 91% of 20,000 stylists and students said they want their manager to be their friend and give performance feedback. Essentially they want a relationship with their manager. They want trust, mutual respect, communication, connection.

So how can you deliver? Well, there are two components. There are willpower and waypower. We all know what willpower is, but now the question is, what’s waypower? And waypower is the extent to which your team sees a way to shape the future; it’s putting the tools in their hands to achieve that, which sets us up really nicely for this episode.

Introducing Cillian Moloney [01:47]

Killian Vigna: So before we jump straight into talking about the link between Stefanie Fox’s episode and this episode, I just wanted to give our guest a bit of an introduction. It’s someone that we’ve been chasing around for quite a while now, especially given the fact that he’s on his third year with Phorest, but who is he? Well, when you think of all the cool stuff that we released in 2020, things like the Online Store, the updated roster screens, you just have to think of Cillian because he’s certainly thinking of you and the new features you want to see next in your salon software.

So being a product leader doesn’t just mean coming up with new feature ideas and leading a team of highly skilled individuals. There’s so much more involved, and you’ve probably already spoken with him without knowing in some of our Phorest user groups — so whether that’s from our client focus groups or research sessions or our beta calls. Finally, without further ado, welcome to the show for the first time in three years and probably our biggest episode to date, Cillian Moloney. Welcome.

Cillian Moloney: Thanks very much. Thanks. Thanks for that introduction.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Thanks for joining us.

Cillian Moloney: No pressure there.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Yeah! No pressure at all, no pressure at all. You’ll nail it; you’ll be a pro.

Cillian Moloney: I don’t know about that, but Killian’s been chasing me down for quite some time, and up until now, I’ve been able to stay away, but he got me eventually.

Reflecting on 2020, from a product standpoint [03:07]

Killian Vigna: To be fair, he’s great at dodging the bullet. But yeah, this time, I think to be fair, this is probably the right episode for you because we’ve already said you’re the man behind so many features that we released in 2020. A lot of people would think of 2020 as the year of COVID. We actually refer to it as the year of Cillian because it’s just the go-to name that we’ve always gone to for every single thing pretty much in the last year. So Cillian, you’ve been the driving force behind many of our biggest releases, most of which were pretty much done on an insanely short timeline. But what would you say from everything you’ve released last year — 2020 alone —what would you say was your biggest achievement?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, it’s funny, there’s been a few things that I’ve been involved in, but obviously, the product and engineering teams that we have and the team and Phorest are just amazing to work with. So a lot of the time, I just lean on people to help me out and pull all that stuff together. But often, maybe from your side and particularly you hear me the most, but there’s a lot of other people behind that stuff, so it’s very much not just me.

But I guess on reflection of 2020, the year that it was, it was a long year, and I guess I worked on two things that stand out, and they’re both very different. One may not sound like the most exciting feature in the world; it’s the staff rosters. When we built that, and we knew that the rosters we had needed to be refreshed. We did that, but what I really liked about it was the first time I got an opportunity to build something from the very, very start with salons, talking to salons from the very, very start of this. And the feature itself is really cool. We built very salon-specific stuff, like just making sure that people can see if somebody in the same type of role is working or have the same day off. That’s something that’s very salon specific, and we wanted to address that. So we built-in little filters just to point that out. We made it very colourful, very easy to read and stuff. So that was great.

But from my side, I learned so much about how a salon operates. They have to use a roster on a daily, weekly basis. But the more I spoke to salons, the more I learned about staff management, the management of the salon, making sure that if staff aren’t rostered, then that can have a big effect on everything else to do with the salon and the running of the salon. And having those conversations and having conversations actually away from the solution itself was really refreshing. It gave me a chance to learn a lot about the industry and the salon, and the people who use it.

But having said that, I guess my biggest achievement or the thing I’m going to reflect best on from 2020 was probably, as you mentioned, at the start of this, is the Online Store, the e-commerce. And the reason that was is because it was around this time last year, COVID hit. And I remember we, as a company, got together, and we pretty much said, “Right, here’s our roadmap that we’d planned for 2020, take it and put it to the side. We have two new initiatives.” And the initiatives, one was to help salons while they’re closed and the other was to help salons while they’re open. So that was our only focus. It was just to help the salons. So the e-commerce and the Online Store was very much part of the helping them while they are closed.

So I remember just getting, we got salons on a zoom call, and about 25 of us were on a call. And we just started asking questions and just brainstorming as quickly as we could. But what was really nice about that… the principles and the processes that we have as a product and a company in Phorest is making sure that we ask the right questions relevant to our salons. And what was really nice about this was because that was ingrained in us, it complimented the velocity that we had to go at to deliver this feature. We knew we had to build something really, really quickly. And we just asked straightaway questions like, “If you did have an e-comm shop today, what would you do?”

And straight away, the most common theme that we got from the e-comm was salons wanted to communicate with their clients to make sure that they know that there are products that they can sell that’s right for them, not to go off and buy cheap alternatives and maybe do damage to your hair or skin or something like that. And that completely changed the way we thought about the e-comm store. It wasn’t like we were trying to build a new Amazon or the same as Amazon or Shopify or anything like that. It’s like we’re trying to build a store that salons can use to connect with their clients. That was the big thing. It’s probably a no brainer that e-comm was probably one of the highlights of 2020 for me for sure.

Reflecting on 2020, continued [8:05]

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Would you say it was the most rewarding one given that you’ve been working on Staff Performance for the last couple of months? We mentioned staff rosters, e-comm, Staff Performance… In terms of how it’s impacted the salons and how close you are with the salon owners themselves through the beta testing and the groups and stuff. Which one would you say felt the most rewarding, I suppose, to release?

Cillian Moloney: That’s tricky. I guess I answered the Online Store from the perspective of 2020. I’ll put Staff Performance into 2021. The e-comm store, I think it was just because there’s a lot in it, COVID was a tricky time for everybody. And it was nice for me from a perspective that it kept me really busy when the world around me was changing. So it was nice to be able to get up and focus on delivering something for people who needed it, so that was rewarding. And then, just to see, people emailed us very shortly after we released the e-comm store and said that they were able to pay rent or that they needed that money and that they got it from the e-comm store and stuff. When you hear that, you built something really quickly and rushed, and you have a team of people that were all trying to make really quick decisions for the right reason, but they can conflict, and you’re trying to get this out, and then you see that stuff coming in, it does make it worthwhile. So definitely, it was a highlight.

But maybe on the Staff Performance side, I think it’s a little bit different because it wasn’t at such a high pace, and we were able to take our learnings from all the stuff we’ve done before, even from COVID, and really just start to address the problems that we needed to solve. So it was a little bit different, but yeah, so I’d very much say Staff Performance is 2021 and a highlight for that at the moment. And then 2020 was e-comm.

Killian Vigna: With the Online Store, because you’re so heavily involved in it from the ground up, the research stage right through to beta and releasing it, but then do you almost park the project and move on to a new one yourself? Are you always looking for new features, or would you still be quite involved in an Online Store? I suppose what I’m getting at is what feature would you have liked to have spent more time on? Because I assume you don’t just keep adding stuff to your list, you do have to move past projects away, right?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah. You do, definitely. We have or had a small product team, and we’re getting more people onto the team quite soon. And that’s, I guess, one thing is that I did start the e-comm project, I was one of the people on the team, but naturally enough, I’ve had to go onto features like Staff Performance. The e-commerce one is maybe a little bit of an outlier because of the COVID thing. So obviously, as I said, at the start of the year, we had a particular roadmap that I knew what I was going to be working on. Then I got e-commerce, and we built it just for that situation. Then, because we built it and were able to make something that was sustainable, we knew that this was something we would continue and actually create a completely new product for. But with that comes having to build the team around that to deliver this.

So yes, I would’ve loved to spend more of 2020, the latter part of it, on e-commerce, but we had to get our current, our old roadmap back on track because there were quite important things that we have to get to. And if another product manager takes e-commerce, it’d be great because then I could be on something else and whatever. But all the learnings and all the opportunities and everything we learned from e-comm, everybody knows it. You guys have heard us talk about it a million times; Ronan knows it, it’s just instilled in the business, so anybody could come in and probably be like, “This is what salons want from an e-comm store now because we just, we lived it for a year.”

Introducing Phorest's Staff Performance feature [12:07]

Killian Vigna: Yeah. So then, Cillian, what is it you’re actually working on at the moment? What have we brought you on the show for today?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, I guess the Staff Performance as we’ve mentioned. So Staff Performance is probably the project I’ve been working the most on over the last couple of months. For anybody who doesn’t know, this is a feature we’re just about to release, and this is going to be in the Phorest Go mobile app. So we were the mobile team at Phorest, and we decided to build a feature that would allow staff members in the salon to track their KPIs, their numbers that are important for their performance in the salon. So that’s what I’ve been mainly working on.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: That was actually one of the most requested features ever, wasn’t it, in UserVoice?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah. It had, I think, around 400 requests. So it’s funny; actually, there’s no one path to why you should build a product, lots of stuff comes into why we should build it. And I mentioned the rosters at the start, so when we started to talk about rosters at the first part of when we started doing our initial research into it, all the main problems surfaced very quickly. They needed a new view; they needed to manage holidays, etcetera, etcetera. But as we started to solve, we have these closed groups of betas or whatever users, beta users; those problems started to dissolve because we’ve solved them.

So, very much towards the latter part of the roster project, we started hearing things about reporting. I need my staff to get the reports; I need to print out reports for my staff. It kept coming up in the roster stuff, but I didn’t really want to solve it into rosters because it would make it just too complicated. It was a different problem. So then, from there, we said, “Right, there is something around Staff Performance.” And UserVoice had 400+ requests. We had known salons who were using third parties, and we wanted to make sure that we got rid of that. So we took those, what we knew, and we just sent out some surveys and got a little bit more data on it just to see: “Is this something worth building?”

The Staff Performance feature benefits [14:20]

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: So in terms of how it’s built right now — because it’s built into the Phorest Go app — what’s the benefit for salon owners? What are they seeing as the first reason they’re going to use this for their team?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah. There are quite a few things. One of the main things is that… There are a few things. It’s which one to start with, I guess, is the most important thing. At the moment, we have a reporting system in Phorest, so you can generate reports as an owner or a manager. From at a staff level, having to go and request those numbers when you wanted to see it was quite tedious, and then the manager would have to find those specific numbers for you and get them for you. Whereas for us, what we wanted to do was bend something, and this was the key thing that we had to decide very early, if we’re building this in Phorest Go for staff, then we almost have to break the mold of this being a reporting thing even though the data will be similar. We want to make sure that we build this for the staff, that the staff are going to get used to this.

Because we often talk in Phorest, in particular, around problems and outcomes. So if we talk about the solution, we’ll start talking about reporting because it’s their numbers that we’re working off of, but that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to say, “Right, let’s say we have something. What happens after this?” And when the feature is released, what we want is to see if staff would check their numbers and if they can check those numbers, can they compare them to last week, last month, last year and see if they’re doing better? And that’s where it really benefits the actual owner of the salon. Because our theory is, well, if you’re doing better than what you were last year and staff can regularly check these numbers, then hopefully, the salon business will do better.

The second important thing is around this concept of one-to-ones and peer reviews. This is huge in salons. So we spoke to maybe 30 or 40 salons, and the big thing was that the numbers were the starting point of a lot of these conversations. The thing that we discovered very early was that nearly all the time, the staff were surprised about their numbers because they weren’t tracking them. Sometimes it was good, and they were like, “Oh, I didn’t think I was doing that well on services, but actually I am.” More often than not, they were surprised that they thought they were doing better than they were.

Killian Vigna: You dread going into a one-to-one not knowing what your numbers were, wouldn’t you?

Cillian Moloney: [crosstalk 00:17:00]-

Killian Vigna: Could you imagine once a month, going into a meeting to discuss numbers that you have no idea about? That’s daunting!

Cillian Moloney: That’s definitely the thing. This is the really nice thing about the project that we worked on is that we learned about this stuff, and we learned that people coming in and these numbers were so important, and there was an emotion linked to this as well. But if we could eliminate the surprise aspect of it beforehand, by giving them this information… It’s not a report; it just tells you the numbers you need to know, and then when you go into your one-to-one and your peer review, at least then your conversations are a lot more constructive. So it’s very kind of like, what you want to talk about, and then they’re shifting the conversation and understanding why those numbers are bad. It’s more of a conversation about how we can make these numbers better. And I think that’s where the owners will see a big benefit; is those conversations will hopefully be easier.

Trackable metrics within the feature [18:07]

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Yeah, 100%, and while we’re on the topic, I mean, could you give us just a bit of an insight into what those performance metrics are that staff can access now through the Staff Performance feature?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, sure, sure. We started with… There are loads of numbers that salons track as a business, and what we wanted to make sure was to surface the right ones for the staff member to make sure that they can improve their performance. Very early on, we were able to find a common denominator because we’re in lots of different regions and lots of different parts of the world and stuff, so we have to find a common denominator for this at the start. And there were three things that surfaced very quickly, services, products, and clients — that was the key thing. If we could get those three numbers on a screen, get them tested and then see what the next iteration of each of those numbers would be…

So total revenue for your services, total revenue for your products, and clients were the key things. And then if you break them down, you get re-booking rates, percentage of average services and average products, and there’s another one that’s skipped my mind, but they’re generally the numbers down there. So I think there are about eight or nine numbers there now. And tips are in the US employment as well, so that’s an important one as well.

Further opportunities [19:29]

Killian Vigna: So for all our keen listeners there, now you’re starting to realise the segue between Stefanie Fox’s episode and this episode where she discussed being a leader there’s willpower, and there’s waypower. And with the waypower, it’s about giving your staff the tools to be able to see their own future.

Well, this is exactly what Cillian and his team have done here. They’ve created Staff Performance on Phorest Go and puts… There’s a couple… The total amount of services and series performed, the total amount of units and products sold, client visits by new and returning, the number of clients with future appointments, and the averages of service and retail. For a staff member to be able to physically see that on their phone, log in at any time of the day, 24/7 to check that, it’s almost… I don’t know; you haven’t gamified it yet, have you? But it’s like when you’ve got the red and the green, so it tells you, “Right, you’re up this week, or you’re low this week, you need to push another product here or there.”

Cillian Moloney: Yeah. There’s loads and loads of opportunity. As I said, even with the staff rosters, or the e-comm, the same with Staff Performance and any other features that you see out there like our Email Editor or our Pay stuff and all that. We want to make sure that, first of all, are these the right numbers and are people engaging with it? And the gamification side of it and improving those numbers is definitely an opportunity for us to look at.

The comparison one where the red and green is actually quite important because we heard from a number of salons, and it was something that we kept feeding back to the team as much as we possibly could was: “Numbers are numbers until they’re compared to something, and then they become valuable.” So unless [inaudible 00:21:20] the numbers that was fine, it was good, you could see the numbers, but if you can compare those numbers to something that’s then when it starts to become a little bit more powerful. And it’s funny, the red-green, most salons that worked off this who are used to tracking metrics and stuff, that’s what they kept saying to us, “Just tell us red-green. Just tell us if it’s on or off. Tell us when we’re off.” It was amazing to see that come true, and our feedback form tells us that they love that feature, so it’s brilliant. It’s something I could’ve potentially just not seen if I didn’t hear it in that kind of way from the salons when we spoke to them.

Killian Vigna: Do you expect to add more metrics or more numbers onto that list, or do you think probably right now is a good number?

Cillian Moloney: It’s a tricky one. First of all, I’d never say never. There’s definitely feedback coming back at the moment that there are other numbers that people would like to see. There are a few things… Obviously, it’s a mobile device at the moment that it’s in, and I want to make sure that I keep it as succinct as possible, and it doesn’t get too busy, but at the end of the day, if there are numbers that are really important to our staff, we have to take them into account. So we have a feedback form in this feature, and that’s been getting loads and loads of input recently.

And there are loads of opportunities for us to take this feature and to take this, I wouldn’t even say feature, just this product or this problem domain. Because I could add more and more numbers, but do we want to take it maybe a step further and actually ask a question about how could we improve these numbers? Because that to me is more valuable. I can give you another number, but is there an opportunity for us to improve the numbers that we have and see what we can do there? But what I need to do is first of all, and this might be a good opportunity to encourage everybody to use this feature, but the more people that use it and the more people that engage with it then-

Killian Vigna: This is your sales pitch now, Cillian.

Cillian Moloney: Yeah. That worked out well. But it’s definitely then for us that we can say, “Well, salons engage with this. It’s making a positive impact. Well, then what other problem can we solve?” So I wouldn’t focus too much on the numbers right now. What’s the next problem that we can solve that we can really help our salons, help their business?

Getting started with the Staff Performance feature [23:41]

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Yeah. So concretely, how does it work for setting it up for a salon owner who takes it on and decides to use it for their staff? Is it accessible for multi-locations? How do you give staff access? How much access do you give them? Can you just give us a bit of insight into that?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, sure. No problem. Yeah. It’s a very simple feature to set up and use, so that’s the most important thing. So if you’re an owner and you want to control if this feature’s on or off on the staff’s device, the mobile device, you can go into the Phorest settings, and there’s going to be a Phorest Go tab there, and you can just switch the feature on and off if you’d like.

Then if you want to control the level of access to this feature, so at the moment, what we have is an access level where you control all your accesses in the access level. We have a new one for Staff Performance and where I see people probably switching data off, for example, is maybe there are people, in particular, front of house or somebody who’s part of the salon, who won’t be tracking these numbers. They just don’t want to see it. Then you can just switch it off for them if you’d like to. But other than that, you can just control it by your access tab; it’ll control it by your main switch and then everybody should be able to use it with no problems.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: That’s brilliant.

Killian Vigna: Cillian, what I really want to know is, this feature released just a couple of days ago? Am I right in saying pretty much the last week it’s gone to all regions, right?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, it’s starting to roll out now. We’re going to be going out to all regions over the next week or so.

Feedback from the salon industry [25:19]

Killian Vigna: Cool. Now, the reason I’m asking is that it was the most requested feature. It was 400 requests, as Zoé’s already said and 96% of that said it would add value to their team. I know we’re only in the rollout stages, but from the beta, is it safe to say the feature has provided value to those 96 people? Or is there still so much more to learn about it? How’s it looking so far?

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: We want all the good stories!

Killian Vigna: Yeah, how’s it looking so far?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, actually, one point just on Zoé’s question as well, just around the multi-branch I forgot to mention. If somebody works in a multi-branch location and works across both branches, we’ve catered for that. There’s a setting in the Phorest Go Staff Performance section, where you can switch multi-location on and off. So it’ll just combine the numbers if you work across multiple branches, or you can just look at them individually as well. So that was just one thing I forgot in the last question.

So we have a feedback form, and there are about a hundred salons that have it live at the moment, and that’s increasing from today on. We have an average of 4.7 ratings out of 5-star rating for users who’ve submitted requests. That’s the average, which is really, really high. And it’s brilliant for us. The engagement has been over three to five times a week, which is really, really impressive. Now, keeping in mind that salons are in and out of lockdowns and stuff like that, so it’s a bit difficult, but we can clearly see that people are using this, and we’re getting loads of positive feedback.

So we’re getting those positive comments and suggestions, which is really important because we look at this feedback every morning as a team. We have a standup every morning. Any new comments or any new ratings that come in is important we speak about because at the end of the day, if these numbers aren’t going the way we want them, and if people aren’t giving the right comments or they’re saying they don’t like this feature then we’ve done something wrong, and that’s really, really important. So we can’t continue onto anything else until we know that this is correct, but luckily the feedback that we’ve been getting has been really positive.

People just say they love it. Comparisons are getting a lot of feedback in that they love these new comparisons. It’s really flexible, the comparisons, you can just compare this day to whatever day you want last year or this week to any time last week or whatever, or a week in the past or whatever. And the reason we built it that way was that 2020 is going to be such a different year for stats. So we want to make this flexible that you don’t have to just rely on comparing these numbers to this time last year because that won’t really give you much information.

Killian Vigna: Have you had anyone, in any of those calls or research stage, that said they wouldn’t use the feature like this, or that said they wouldn’t want their staff to know these numbers?

Cillian Moloney: Not massively, but there have been a few conversations where we’ve had to explain its benefit to make sure that the benefits that we’re providing outweigh maybe some of the concerns. And the concerns are fairly reasonable. This will be in Phorest Go, and some people may not use Phorest Go, but what’s really important there is you can just switch on Staff Performance and switch everything else off in the access levels, and you’ll pretty much just see… The staff can’t even themselves; they can’t see anything, and then they just go into Staff Performance to see their numbers. If there are reservations around that, first of all, reach out to anybody in Phorest for more information on that, but just reduce all the access levels if you don’t want anybody to access anything else. And then it’s only Staff Performance.

So I think it wasn’t the feature itself; it was maybe some of the other things that they had concerns about. So yeah, I think that overall it’s a lot of these numbers… they know themselves anyway, or they get themselves anyway. So I don’t think there’s too much concern there. It’s just more around maybe access or something else that they might have a little bit of reservations on.

Killian Vigna: Is there anything you would recommend for someone that is just on that borderline of “I’m still not sure if I want my team knowing that”? What would you say to ease that hesitance, I suppose?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, I guess I’m not sure. I guess when we did have those conversations, we asked what the concerns were, and it wasn’t a massive about the numbers. So my thing would be because you can control this by access level, maybe just give it to maybe a particular staff in your salon, test it out with them first, see what it’s like there, and then gradually introduce it into your business. If you’re not used to tracking these numbers, it is quite a new way of working. Really, really beneficial way. And what I would say is, don’t feel that you have a new feature so you have to use this straight away and see the benefits of it straight away. That’s not really what we’d expect.

What we’d expect is that definitely reach out to us in Phorest, be it your salon success managers or business advisors and speak to them or somebody in support and they can speak to you about any of those concerns and make sure that any of those questions that you have can be answered as well as have any of those conversations that we’ve had. We’ve tried to put them into the app. So any frequently asked questions and stuff, we’ve tried to put them in the app so that when you do go into the feature and setup the first time, you can read through these and get a little bit more of an understanding of what these numbers are and where they’re coming from and why it exists.

Reflections, upcoming events & final words [31:18]

Killian Vigna: And what about then for someone that does want to get set up on this? Is it available to all plans? Or how is this working?

Cillian Moloney: Yeah, so just in the US and Canada, the starter packages won’t have this, so they’ll have to speak to their Business Advisors on it because it’s not on that package. But for every other package and every other region, this will be included in all packages, yeah.

Killian Vigna: Perfect.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Well, Cillian, I’m so excited to see all the feedback rolling out from not only just the beta but the official launch. And I’m sure you’re very excited to see that too. It’s been brilliant to have you on the show, and we are down to the part where we ask you a mystery question, our thought-starter of the week. So here it goes—

Killian Vigna: Just think big, think big.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Yeah. If you were to pick something at random, out of all the lists, I’m sure of many, many salon owners’ wish lists of features to develop, what would you love to see Phorest work on in the next year or so?

Killian Vigna: Basically, if you were to give this task for some other product manager to deal with, what would you like to see?

Cillian Moloney: It’s a lot easier to give that question than answer it. Let me think…

Yeah, I think to be fair, the Staff Performance stuff for me, it’s probably just because I’ve been so involved in it over the last couple of months. But like I said, stepping away from the numbers… I would love to set a goal for myself and the team to see how we could improve those numbers. And when you talk about thinking big, there are loads of opportunities here to… We have an e-commerce solution; Phorest is an integrated system. So we have an e-commerce solution with a marketing suite, and we have some really, really good engineers and designers out there. I think if we could just focus on how we can make those numbers improve for the staff, I won’t give away any of my thoughts or ideas on it because people will probably say I’m stealing some of theirs on the team, but there are some amazing ideas in there that I think that once we get to it, it’ll be very, very impressive.

Killian Vigna: So it’s a stay tuned on the Staff Performance side, not so much the feature, but the bigger picture of Staff Performance.

Cillian Moloney: Yeah. Well, in general, we focus a lot of our energy, and we’re going to continue focusing a lot of our product energy on the owner of the salon and making sure that they can run their business, but if we can help them with staff and how the staff perform and how the staff interact with the software, that’s going to be a very exciting area. So hopefully, we get there soon.

Killian Vigna: Brilliant. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the next few months.

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Absolutely, yeah.

Cillian Moloney: Sure!

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: Cillian, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It’s been fantastic. And if anyone has any questions, don’t hesitate. You can reach out to your Business Advisors or Salon Success Managers if you’re in North America. And yeah, thanks so much once again, Cillian!

Killian Vigna: Thanks Cillian.

Cillian Moloney: Thanks. It was really, really enjoyable. Not as scary as I thought, so thanks for that. Cheers folks!

Zoé Bélisle-Springer: No worries. For all the information on upcoming webinars that we have and now available on-demand webinars that we have, you can check out the show notes, or you can also head over to phorest.com/fm where you can also subscribe to the show’s email newsletter and get all the updates and guests’ downloadable content delivered straight to your inbox on Wednesdays.

As always, if you want to share your thoughts on Phorest FM or this episode specifically, you can send us an email at phorestfm@phorest.com or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We’d love to hear from you. Otherwise, stay safe, and we’ll catch you next Monday.

Killian Vigna: All the best.

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This episode was edited and mixed by Audio Z: Montreal’s cutting-edge post-production studio for creative minds looking to have their vision professionally produced and mixed. Great music makes great moments. Tune in every Monday as Phorest FM brings you an inspirational mix of interviews with salon business leaders, marketing tips and salon growth insights. For your industry, by your industry.

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