Want to learn how to have your best Christmas ever?

Want to learn how to have your best Christmas ever? How to create the best ads you’ve ever seen? How to inspire your team? Increase your homecare sales? Use the local press? Survive the recession and control your costs?

If you do, I bet you think it would take you longer than two days to learn all of that, and cost a lot of money. But we’re giving you the chance to learn all of that in just two days and totally for free at Professional Beauty Manchester at Manchester Central this weekend (October 11–12).

This year’s seminar programme has been put together by Professional Beauty magazine for the first time ever. The same great content you expect in your market-leading title and the aficionados we bring to you every month in our issues will present their opinions and expertise in a live format. They’ll present on the topics that you’ve told us our closest to your heart – marketing, the male grooming revolution, staffing concerns and retail sales – and you’ll get a chance to interrogate them after their presentations.

We’ve put together a panel on Sunday at 3pm that will explain how to have a merry Christmas 2009. Tina Bailey from Urban Retreat, Jarrod Abbott-Davids of Ultimate Spa, Belinda Price of Nailspa and Sara Shoemark from Glow beauty salons will coach you in ensuring this is your best Christmas ever. They’ll show you how to market your salon or spa in the run-up to the festive season, when to promote your gift offers, how to manage the staff roster and motivation and what to do to make your place a haven from stress for your customers this yuletide. Plus we’ll be giving you the chance to win a few gifts to get you in the festive mood. You’ll be jingling all the way back to your business after this seminar.

On Monday, our panel of experts from television, radio and the internet will reveal how you can raise your profile using your local media. At the Professional Beauty Magazine Live stage at 10.30am, they’ll talk you through writing a press release, cultivating a relationship with journalists and coming up with creative hooks that are sure to get you noticed.

Later that day, experts from the male grooming world – intimate male waxing guru Andy Rouillard of Axiom Bodyworks, entrepreneur and salon owner Jason Shankey, and male grooming salon owners Adele Lock of the Gentry Grooming Company and Bogdan Turczaniswkyi of St James Gent Salon – will take to the Professional Beauty Magazine Live stage at 2.15pm. They will discuss how to engineer a treatment menu to appeal to a male audience and how to market your services.

You always learn more from people who do what you do. Besides enjoying nosing over the garden fence at other people in your situation and seeing what they do differently, they will empathise with your workload and your challenges, all of which makes them easy to relate to. And in the time that I have been editor of Professional Beauty, I realise that salon and spa owners always want to talk to each other at every event I organise. They have an insatiable thirst to talk, learn, share and analyse their businesses with each other. So, we’ve arranged one session especially to get the talk flowing.
Our Professional Beauty Speed Networking event at 3.15pm on the Professional Beauty Interactive Stage will enable you to learn how to resolve the issues that most trouble you about your business. Hosted by me and my team, we promise to make it fun, and we’ll show you how to make the most of the contacts you meet, become more confident at using the resources open to you and learn from your peers in the industry. And if that isn’t enough to entice you to come and share your experiences, we’re offering you free drinks at this session, courtesy of Professional Beauty magazine. Cheers…

And, with all of these four sessions, there is a chance to win some lovely goodie bags for those asking our panellists the best questions.

So get thee to Manchester if you are serious about improving your business. I look forward to meeting you there this weekend.

Jenni Middleton
Editor, Professional Beauty