How to fill Tuesdays and early mornings in a barbershop

Saturdays are full. Friday afternoon too. And on Tuesday at ten in the morning you’re watching the door. That’s the calendar in almost every barbershop: demand piles into four or five bands and the rest of the week runs half empty, with the same rent, the same electricity and the same wages.

The usual reaction is a discount: “Tuesdays, cuts £12”. It works a bit, it pulls in people who only come for the price, and it teaches your regulars that if they wait until Tuesday they pay less. By the end of the year you’ve filled Tuesdays by lowering what every cut brings in, and Saturdays are just as full as before.

There’s a better way, and it doesn’t cost money: move the clients you already have.

First, count the gaps

Before moving anything, look at four weeks of calendar and write down, band by band, how many hours were empty. It’s almost always the same picture: Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, and the first hour of every day.

Say a barbershop with two chairs, open 10 to 8. Tuesday: 6 empty hours across the two. Wednesday: 4. First hour on the other days: 3 more. That’s 13 hours a week. At a £15 cut every half hour, £30 an hour, that’s £390 a week the shop is open and nothing comes in. That’s the number we’re going to bring down, and the one to check again in a month.

The main lever: your regulars

A barbershop client comes every three or four weeks. Many of them come on Saturday because that’s the day they asked for the first time, not because they can’t do another day. They’re retired, they work shifts, they have flexible hours, or they walk past every Tuesday on the way somewhere. Nobody has asked them.

The question gets asked at the front desk, at the till, and always the same way:

“Shall I put you down for three weeks from now? If a weekday morning suits you, I’ve got more room and you’ll get seen quicker.”

Three things happen here. One: the next appointment is booked, which on its own raises the repeat rate. Two: the slow band is offered before the busy one, and some people say yes. Three: they’re given a real reason (less waiting, a quieter shop), not a discount.

Not everyone has to say yes. If out of 40 regulars a week, 8 move to Tuesday or first thing, that’s 4 hours filled that used to be empty. And it’s 4 hours on Saturday freed up for someone new, which is where the barbershop actually grows.

The reminder does the same job

The client who books from home isn’t in front of you. But the reminder for their appointment does reach them, and from that message they go into their client area and back to your page to book the next one.

That’s where the trick is: on the page they see real availability. If Saturday is full, they see it, and they see that Tuesday at 10 is free. Some people pick Tuesday without anyone telling them to, simply because that’s what’s there. That doesn’t happen over the phone: they ask for Saturday, you say no, they hang up. With the booking page they see the whole week at a glance.

If you want to push a little further, one line in the profile description is enough: “Weekday mornings, no waiting”. Nothing more.

Online booking, for the slow bands

Some barbershops still run Saturday by phone and on paper, and it works because Saturday fills itself. But online booking is what fills the rest, for a simple reason: the client who remembers he needs a cut remembers on a Sunday night or a Monday at seven in the morning, when you’re not answering the phone. If he can book at that moment, he takes Tuesday because it’s the first thing free. If he has to wait to call you, he calls on Thursday, and by then he wants Saturday.

Two settings that help:

• A short minimum notice. If someone looks at the page on Tuesday at 9 and sees a slot at 10, let them take it. A minimum notice of an hour, not a day.
• A 30-minute grid if that’s how long your cut takes. The fewer odd leftovers between appointments, the fewer useless 15-minute gaps.

And the QR at the front desk, so the client who came on Saturday and didn’t want to book the next one can do it himself when he remembers. There’s more on this on the barbershops page.

Saturday: a waitlist, not more chairs

Saturday has the opposite problem: too many people. And with the ones who don’t fit, one of two things happens: either they go to another barbershop, or they call you three times to see if anyone’s dropped out.

With a waitlist the client puts himself on it from your page when he sees Saturday is full. He picks morning or afternoon and, if he wants, who with. When someone cancels, the alert goes out on its own to the first three in order, and if nobody takes it within half an hour, to the next three. The Saturday slot gets filled without anyone at the desk picking up the phone.

And this is where the loop closes: anyone on the Saturday waitlist can be offered a Tuesday at 10, and some of them take it. The waitlist is the best list of candidates for the slow bands you’ll ever have. We go into more detail in how to reduce cancellations with a waitlist.

Measuring whether it works

A month in, do the same count of empty hours per band. Three possible outcomes:

• Tuesday gaps go down and the number of distinct clients in the month goes up. It’s working: you’ve moved regulars and Saturday has absorbed new people.
• Tuesday gaps go down, but Saturday starts to have gaps. You’ve moved people and no new ones have come in. Not bad, but the total isn’t growing. Time for the QR, Instagram and Google reviews.
• Nothing changes. Most likely the front-desk line isn’t being said. Ask the team how many times they said it this week. That’s usually the answer.

If you use Calendace, appointments by day and by week are in the statistics on the Premium plan; if not, the notebook works just as well. We cover what to look at each week in five numbers your salon should check.

What not to do

A one-off discount is no sin. A “student Tuesday” can make sense if the shop is next to a college. What doesn’t work is price being the only tool, because every pound you knock off Tuesday is a pound that doesn’t come back, and the client who came for the price leaves for the price.

Move the regulars, let the page show what’s free, and let the waitlist work Saturday. With that, in a month, the two-chair barbershop in the example goes from 13 empty hours to 8 or 9, without touching the price list.