Studio team planning for several locations: availability, roles and direct booking

In a studio with three people in one room, organisation runs on calling across to each other. As soon as people work on different days, in different rooms or in different towns, that layer disappears with nothing in its place, and with it the shared picture of who can do what and when. What used to be informal and fast becomes vague and slow.

This article describes what takes the place of calling across the room: an assignment of services to people and locations, a workable way of handling moves between sites, a public address of its own for each location, and a deliberate decision about what stays central and what each site settles for itself.

The changeover rarely arrives with the second location; it arrives earlier. It arrives with the third person taking their own appointments, or with the first team member who is not there every day. From then on nobody reliably answers the simple question of whether a particular appointment next week is workable.

You recognise the point by three signs. Appointments get promised and then withdrawn because somebody turns out not to be available. The calendar is kept in several places and no single place is complete. And questions inside the team pile up, because information sits with individual people only.

So the first step is not software but a stocktake: who works when and where, which services does this person actually offer, and who is allowed to book appointments for them? In practice, two or three answers surface during that exercise that the team held different ideas about, and those are precisely what has been causing the mis-bookings.

The core of any multi-person, multi-site planning is a single table: which service can be delivered by which person at which location? Only from that does it follow what is bookable online. Without the mapping, two typical errors appear: appointments with people who do not offer the service, and appointments at sites where it is not possible.

Three constraints turn up almost every time:

• qualifications, because not everyone may carry out every treatment;
• equipment, because one location has a particular device and another does not;
• personal boundaries that are meant to hold, because someone does not take on certain work, and that is a legitimate decision rather than a gap.

Maintain this mapping in one place and name one person responsible for it. It goes stale faster than you think: after every period of training, every new service and every change of equipment it no longer holds. An out-of-date mapping is more dangerous than none at all, because everyone trusts it.

As soon as somebody works at two sites, a source of error appears that a single studio never meets: the journey in between. A calendar that only knows about attendance will happily allow an appointment at one o'clock at one address and half past one at the other, and both are booked before anyone does the arithmetic.

Travel time therefore belongs in the day as an entry of its own that cannot be booked over, not in the realm of hope. In practice it is better still not to let the change happen in the middle of the day: someone working one site in the morning and the other in the afternoon loses less time than someone who switches twice. Whole days are the rule, half days the exception.

For clients there is one simple rule: the place comes before the time. Anyone booking online picks the location first and then sees only what is genuinely possible there. Anything else produces appointments in the wrong town, and that is a particularly infuriating mistake because it only comes to light in front of a locked door.

Businesses with several locations often treat them online as a choice on one shared page. For issuing appointments that is enough; for being found it is not. People search for a studio in their own neighbourhood, and a picker list does not answer that search.

Each location therefore needs its own permanent address with its own street address, its own opening hours, its own team, its own pictures and a booking path that has that site pre-selected. Add a business profile of its own in the map listings, again per location, carrying the same details. The fact that services and styling are identical everywhere is no argument against it: what differs is place, team and hours, and those are exactly what people search by. The practical side of running several sites is covered in more depth under software for several locations.

Make sure the details agree between your own page and the map profile, particularly opening hours and phone numbers. Divergence almost always starts at the second location, because that is where changes made long ago at the first site get copied across late.

The last and most uncomfortable question is a question of leadership: how much may a location decide on its own? Keep everything central and you block the working day, because every small thing triggers a query. Release everything and after a year you have two businesses with different services, different durations and different rules.

A clear split has proved itself. Central: the service range with its durations, the rules for cancellation and commitment, the outward appearance, and the client data. Decided locally: rotas, holidays, short-notice rescheduling and the question of who uses which room when. Who holds which role belongs in writing too. Not everybody who takes appointments needs to be able to change services or see the figures.

A shared client history is the real prize of growing together: someone standing in at the second location sees the same record as the person who normally works there. If you have not yet put those notes on a common footing, digital client records are the place to start. A system such as Salon Wizard represents locations, team, roles, services, appointments and client history in one structure and gives each location a public page of its own. Payroll, stock control, till operation and the recording of cash takings sit apart from this and are not covered here.