As a business owner, you’re focused on the big picture. You have so much on your plate that it’s easy to overlook some of the details that can make or break perceptions of your business. So, when it comes to the little things that can make a big difference, you can’t do it alone. You need your staff to be your eyes and ears in the salon.

Consistent small victories – tackling cleaning projects one day at a time and ensuring your team is presenting the right image with every interaction – are how you preserve your reputation as a professional, high-quality establishment. Alternatively, if you start to let your standards slip, you’ll continually be playing catchup and risking letting your staff, and even yourself, fall into bad habits.

One of the most important things you do to control the perceptions of professionalism and quality is ensure the salon environment is in tip-top shape. Keeping equipment spotless is a given, but everything else in (and outside) of the salon effects appearances, too. The goal should be to keep the entire salon pristine.

You certainly can’t do it all yourself, or even expect to keep an eye on everything all the time. If staff isn’t holding up their end of the deal, you’re in trouble, but at the end of the day, the responsibility falls back to the owners and managers. By setting expectations from the start and continuing to reinforce them, you greatly enhance the likelihood of staff members thriving in a clean-freak environment. When you set the tone with new staff members from the start and demand accountability moving forward, their attention to detail will more naturally pass down to future generations of employees.

While taking a tactful managerial approach, being supportive and constructive, is key, perhaps a more impactful form of accountability is peer to peer. If you can a strong and committed enough base of employees, you’ll develop a positive company culture, and the right new team members will be easier to train because they’ll take cues from the rest of the team. Even if you have a good relationship with an employee, they want to do well mainly because they need to in order to keep their job or get a raise or promotion. But when they feel accountable to their fellow team members, they do their part because they don’t want to let them down. The good thing about cleaning is it’s easy enough to demand accountability and verify that everything is being done properly.

In the case of a multi-location business, the owner of GM or owner will hopefully spend some time keeping an eye on each location, but they’re going to rely mostly on the leadership and reporting of their store managers. Like entry-level employees, the success of managers still depends on setting expectations and effective communication. Beyond the need for quality assurance, multi-location business owners and leaders must also remain focused on maintaining consistency between locations.

Also keep in mind that cleanliness won’t do you a lot of good if the salon is in disrepair otherwise. Chipped paint or frayed carpet will create similar connotations. Unlike cleaning, these things aren’t so much the duties of your front-line employees, so you have to demand accountability to yourself in this regard. Deal with any signs of wear and tear promptly – you’re going to have to do it sometime, and you might as well do it before too many clients see it. Whether with maintenance and repairs or cleaning, the task is much less daunting when you stay ahead of it rather than letting your to-do list build.