Most salon owners think about hiring cost in terms of the obvious line items: the time spent posting the job, the hours of interviews, the training period. Those costs are real, but they are the smallest part of what a bad hire actually costs you. The full bill is much larger, and once you see it clearly, your hiring process tends to change.

Start with the math. Say your front-desk lead earns fifteen dollars an hour. A bad hire who lasts six months has cost you, in straight wages, around fifteen thousand dollars. That’s just the starting line. Add the cost of training: every hour your manager spent showing them the POS, walking them through membership scripts, correcting mistakes. Conservatively, fifty to a hundred hours of management time, much of it pulled away from revenue-generating work. Then add the cost of the mistakes a struggling new hire makes—a botched membership cancellation, an upgrade they forgot to ring through, a confused customer who didn’t come back. Each of those costs is small individually and invisible on your P&L, but together they add up to thousands over a few months.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.