122: How Estheticians Can Stay Busy During Slow Season Without Discounting Everything

In this episode of The Esthetician Podcast, Kari Jo breaks down why so many estheticians feel stressed every fall and winter — even when summer felt busy. Learn how to use promotions, referrals, add-ons, and numbers tracking to create a repeatable esthetician business system that helps you make money, stay booked, and stop guessing what to fix. If you’re an esthetician trying to get clients, increase revenue, and prepare for slow season before it happens, this episode is for you.

If you’re booked but not making money, you need to start with your numbers.
Download my FREE  “Diagnose Your Business” tracker in the show notes and I’ll show you exactly what to track.

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Transcript

A Listener Win And Thanks

Speaker 0:01

Hi, Kari Jo. I just want to say thank you. Your cause helped me so much. You made everything simple and clear. I feel more confident and excited about my business. You teeth with love and I can feel it. I'm so happy enjoying your cause. Thank you for everything.

The Seasonal Slump Every Esthetician Knows

Kari Jo 0:20

Listen, this episode is going to hit you today because I know across the board, every esthetician. It doesn't matter if you're completely booked, it doesn't matter if you're a little booked. It's like the same for every esthetician. Your business feels good in the summer. And then comes fall and winter, and you feel like you're starting all over again. I literally just had a coaching call recently where I have this esthetician who is doing phenomenally. And of course, it's December and she's like worried. And I'm like, let's look at your numbers. Guys, this is something across the board that every esthetician, I feel like no matter what stage you're in, this is a normal feeling. Today we are going to fix that. So today's episode, it's going to be about add-ons. But before I get into that, this is what I want to say. Right now, I know that like we're gearing up for the busy season. You know, your summer's gonna be popping, and most of you guys are gonna be so busy. Your schedules are going to be packed, things are gonna be feeling good. Do you need this episode right now? No, you probably don't. But that's exactly why I'm going to talk about it right now. Because I see it happening over and over again, and nobody is planning ahead. Nobody is planning for those slowdown times in your business. And then when the slow season comes, you're stressed out, you're like trying to fix it on the spot, and you just keep throwing things out, hoping that something will work. And you feel like, I don't know what I'm doing. I feel like I'm behind. I feel like I have to start over and go get a whole bunch of new clients. And that feeling, that is what I want to try to fix. Because I was once there. I did not have a system for running promotions, for getting clients or anything like that. In fact, like I used to run promotions so randomly through the year, like no plan at all, no strategy, no reasoning behind it. I would be like, oh yeah, let's um let's run something for Easter. Or let's run something for Mother's Day really quick or Valentine's Day. Oh, here comes Christmas. You know what I mean? And it was just so random. And it was like, okay, what am I gonna do this month? This is what we're gonna do. How would I do it? I literally would just pick random things. Like I might have seen someone else doing a special and be like, oh, that's a good idea. I'll do something like that. You know what I mean? Not in my town, of course, but on the internet. I might have saved something snapped because I do like to do that. I like to snap like people's specials just because I even still to this day, I like follow a bunch of different med spas, and I'm always snapping, you know, their specials because I want to see what people are doing. But I'm telling you, I was completely making up random numbers. I didn't know if it was profitable or not. I was just like, this sounds good. There's no thought whatsoever behind it. I was completely guessing. And guess what? When you guess them business, it's funny, but you always end up stuck because nothing is consistent and nothing is repeatable. And then you don't even know why some things work and some things don't. One year I had for Black Friday, I had people lined around the block. Like I'm not even kidding you. There was a line outside my bit business. I don't know what I did to market that. But the next year I ran the same thing, but I don't think I marketed it the same way, and the results were not as good. Wouldn't it have been great if I would have kept my marketing notes on how I did that? Okay, so what I'm gonna give you today is not just a promotion, but I'm gonna give you an actual system. This is something that you can use every single year. This is something I used, this is something I used in my business every single year. It was incorporated. You can use this to fill your slow season, you can use this to increase your revenue, you can use this to try to get more clients, you can just stop feeling like you're starting over. So, first things first, here's the system.

Build A Promotion Plan Three Months Ahead

Kari Jo 4:48

When it comes to promotions, you have to plan in advance. I literally mean plan in advance. Okay, so in my business, I always worked three months ahead. So if you're sitting here right now and you don't have anything planned, let's say Mother's Day is coming up and you don't have anything planned for Mother's Day. I'm telling you, I wouldn't start planning at Mother's Day. I wouldn't. You're probably not gonna run it well, you're not gonna promote it well, it's not going to hit. You're just gonna end up giving discounts to probably the people who would have paid full price for whatever it is that you're discounting, anyways. What I want you to do is I want you to plan three months ahead. So right now, let's say that this episode gets released and it's June. Then you are starting planning promotions in September. And then you just continue staying three months ahead because what happens when you do that is you are always caught up instead of being in the oh crap mode. Now you're working ahead instead of behind, and so you're gonna be way more intentional and things are gonna pull off. It's the same thing when you're running promotions and you're planning ahead, right? We want to be in that full max capacity moment. We don't want to be trying to catch up and doing things half-assed. All right, so step one, you

Let Your Numbers Pick The Goal

Kari Jo 6:14

gotta plan ahead. Now, step two, this is gonna be a shocker. And I know you guys hear me say this all the time. Now, before you ever pick a promotion, I'm gonna ask you, what am I gonna say? If you if you guessed this next one right, then you've been listening to all my podcast episodes, and I'm so proud of you, and I'm thankful for you. Please go leave me a podcast review. And um, I really need that. I would appreciate it just because it just fills my my bucket, it will makes me keep wanting to keep going. Okay, but before you ever pick a promotion, I want you to ask yourself, what is the actual goal of this promotion? And this is where your numbers tell you a story. When people say read your numbers, this is what we mean by like I used to not know what read your numbers mean. This is what read your numbers mean. It means when you're stuck, you look at your numbers and they tell you a story. When I run promotions, we get so stuck on running a promotion to discount or something like that, or I want clients or whatever it is. But like the thing is you have to think of your business as like a big will. And there are spokes, you know, the little lines that go out from the center of the wheel that go out right, like a big think of it like a big wagon wheel. There is more to business than trying to get new clients, and so you have to look at all of those different areas to see where your business is lacking and fix each spoke. So, for example, if you are tracking your numbers, you can easily look up and be like, oh my gosh, like my retail drop or my retail is really low. You might be able to look at it and be like, oh, so I need a promotion on retail. You can look at it and be like, oh my gosh, my rebuild books really suck. So I'm going to fix my rebooks. Or you can look at it and be like, oh, my average service ticket sucks. Okay, well, then I'll do add-ons, right? So there's many things, many different promotions, and you got to figure out what by looking at your numbers because your numbers will always tell you. So you can look at them and you can see where the biggest bleed is. Where is my business bleeding the most? And that's the number, that's the promotion I'm going to run. So you never are picking a promotion just to pick one. What you are going to do is you're going to pick one to solve an actual problem. And so I'm going to give you this promotion. But this is also a promotion that's going to help you get more client, which also is going to help fill your downtime. So that's why I'm saying, like, do you need this promotion right now? No, but I want you to plan this promotion for in the future when you know your slow time is coming. Plan it for before and do all the work for it before. So when it comes, it actually works. Okay, so here's

Win A Year Of Services Giveaway

Kari Jo 9:17

the promotion. And I ran this every year, and you can call it whatever you want. That's going to be around the holiday or however you're running it. But basically, I ran it and it was win a year's worth of free services. Now listen, you get to actually control what this means. So maybe it's say twelve hundred dollars for the year. Maybe say it's $600 for the year. You get to decide the amount. So you're gonna put an amount on it. Here's how it's going to work. So let's say you're running it in the month of October. Any client that refers someone to your business automatically gets entered into this bucket. It does not matter what they book, right? It could be a $10 brow wax and they still get entered. You just promote like refer client and wit get a chance to win free services for an entire year. And then here comes November. November, you are going to draw the winner. Now, this is how you're gonna protect your money, right? This is the important part because this is where people mess this up. When they win, they don't get to just come in and use that money for whatever they want for free. We put structure around that. My favorite word, structure. Let's structure it, right? Fine print is it's $1,200 total. You can only use $100 per month and it expires after 12 months. So here's the key. They have to book a service. And also, let me back this up. Whatever dollar amount that you put on that, because you are saying you get a free service. I want you to actually make sure that they get a free service. So if you your facials are say like $120, then doing $100 isn't good, right? Like you got to be able to get a free service. So you might need to do 120. Now, this is why this is going to work. This is the important part of this entire episode. This does not work because of just the giveaway and them referring clients, which again, now you got new clients that refer to your company. Make sure you close them and have a good rebooks. But this works because you're also going to do add-ons.

Add-Ons That Make The Giveaway Profitable

Kari Jo 11:38

So your goal is every time that client that came in that wins the free service, your goal is to add on something. Because, like normally, when someone feels like they're getting something, they're usually going to be more willing to spend more. And here's why they're already there, they're already committed, they already trust you. So adding something small feels easy. So, like, I don't want you to overthink this, and I don't think you need some big script, right? I don't think you need a sound selsy. You just say something simple like, hey, while you're here today, do you want to add on a brow wax for $15? No, that's it. The reason it works is because it's simple, it's natural, and it feels really small. So, like, while that way you're not just doing a service for free for an entire hour, right? At least you made $15 for that hour. Now, one big tip going back really quick. When you are running this promotion, I want you to know you actually have to really run this promotion. Like, you cannot just say one, say like at one time, you have to promote the crap out of this for this to actually work. You need to feel like that entire month of October, you were so annoying that like you were tired of saying the same thing a hundred different ways. It's annoying. If you don't feel like you're you annoyed anyone, then I'm telling you, you're not being clear and you didn't run the promotion. Like you have to feel annoying in order to win. So you should be talking about this promotion and you have to run it. Think of all the different ways you can run it. Put it on the back of your door, change your voicemail to saying it. Run it every single day in your stories, somewhere in your stories. Run it everywhere. Now, listen, if you do nothing else this entire year, do this. Take this system, plan ahead, use it to fill your slow season before you're in your slow season, because that is the difference between guessing in your business and actually running a business

Numbers Tracker Invite And Wrap-Up

Kari Jo 13:39

on purpose. Now, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, dude, I don't even know what my numbers are. I want to invite you to download my esthetician weekly numbers tracker. The reason why I want you to do this is because it is going to help you diagnose your business in seven days. All you got to do is download the number tracker, fill out your week. You'll start learning how to actually track your numbers. And trust me, if you do this consistently and you don't give up, eventually you will be able to read your numbers. So download the number tracker and see what you need to fix first.

Announcer 14:23

Thank you for listening to the Esthetician podcast with Kari Jo Patterson. Each week, Kari brings you real-world lessons on how to grow your empire. To learn more about Kari's Fearless Prosperity Mastermind Group, one on one VIP coaching opportunities, and more, visit www.caryjopatterson.com. That's www.kar Ijo Patterson.com. See you next week for more insights and strategies on the Esthetician Podcast.