Maintain Control & Visibility of Your Business Locations

If you’re trying to manage a multi-location or enterprise business, you no doubt grapple with one hard fact each day: You physically cannot be in several places at once. Vagaro can’t defy the laws of physics, but it does give business owners a constant & immediate line of access to all their locations so they can deliver a seamless brand experience, manage multiple teams, address operational inconsistencies, mitigate security & compliance issues, and generally manage from anywhere. Let's explore how you can get this level of visibility to make your leadership felt at every location—even when you’re not there.

Implement The Right Management System

Consistent control and clear visibility of your multi-location business rests on the shoulders of its technological infrastructure—i.e., its booking and management system.

Your management system should be:

Centralized

A centralized management system involves using a single, integrated platform or software—like, you may have guessed, Vagaro—to oversee and control various aspects of business operations across multiple locations. This system should minimally include such features as:

• Inventory Management: Enables you to monitor and manage inventory levels across locations, enabling better control over stock, reducing the risk of stockouts or overstocking, and facilitating efficient supply chain management.
• Sales Tracking: Lets you track sales data and performance metrics from each location in real time. This allows business owners to identify top-performing products or services, analyze sales trends, and implement strategies to boost overall revenue.
• Employee Scheduling & Management: Allows for streamlined employee scheduling, time tracking, and performance management through a centralized system. This ensures consistency in workforce management practices and helps optimize staffing levels based on demand.
• Financial Reporting: Enables you to combine financial data from all locations to generate comprehensive reports. This provides business owners with a holistic view of your business’s financial health, facilitates budgeting, and aids in making strategic financial decisions (more on this below).
• Customer Management: Lets you centralize client data and interactions. This helps in understanding customer preferences, managing customer relationships effectively, and implementing targeted marketing strategies. In Vagaro, client profiles contain contact information, personal preferences, their spending habits, membership status, and more.
• Payroll: Enables you to quickly process payroll and offer benefits to your team, all in one place. Your payroll software should, ideally, issue direct deposit, assign multiple pay rates, allow for customizable commission, calculate automatic tax deductions, and manage PTO policies, to name a few.
• Payment Processing: A centralized point-of-sale (POS) system can help track sales, manage inventory & process transactions consistently across all locations. Moreover, fully integrated payment processing makes it easier to streamline payments safely & securely across all locations.

Cloud-Based

Cloud-based software allows you to store and access data and applications over the internet instead of via local servers or computers. This offers several advantages for businesses with multiple locations:

• Remote Accessibility: Cloud-based systems enable you and your authorized employees to access data & applications from any location with an Internet connection. This is particularly beneficial for remote management and quick decision-making. Of course, not everyone should have the same access levels, which you can customize if you’re a Vagaro business.
• Real-Time Updates: Changes made at one location are reflected instantly across the entire system, if you choose. This ensures that everyone has access to the most up-to-date information, promoting accuracy and consistency in decision-making.
• Scalability: Cloud-based software is often scalable, allowing businesses to easily adjust their storage and computing resources based on changing needs. This is crucial for business growth.
• Cost-Efficiency: Cloud-based solutions typically operate on a subscription model, reducing the need for significant upfront investment. This can be cost-effective for businesses with multiple locations, especially smaller or growing enterprises.
• Data Security & Backup: Cloud-based software typically offers robust security measures and regular data backups, reducing the risk of data loss due to hardware issues or other unforeseen events.

Scalable

Technology that is scalable means it can expand and adapt to accommodate the changing needs of your business locations. It complements centralized management systems and cloud-based solutions by providing the foundation for sustained growth, flexibility, and adaptability.

Key components of scalable technology include:

• Robust IT Systems: Implementing reliable and robust IT systems that can handle increased users and additional functionalities as the business expands is a necessity. You’ll thank yourself later!
• Scalable Hardware: Hardware components such as servers or POS systems, that can be easily scaled up or down to meet the evolving demands of the business will save a lot of headache, time & money down the line.
• Flexible Software Solutions: Software applications and platforms that are scalable allow for the addition of new features or users without compromising performance. Cloud-based software, as mentioned above, often provides scalability advantages.
• Data Integration: Ensures that data from multiple locations can be seamlessly integrated into the overall technology infrastructure and shared between locations.
• Security Measures: Scalable security measures can adapt to new threats and vulnerabilities. This includes robust cybersecurity protocols, compliance measures and access controls.
• Mobile Accessibility: Having a technology infrastructure that supports mobile accessibility enables you and your employees to stay connected and productive regardless of your location.

Standardize Your Processes!

We’re really going to hammer this one home until you’re sick of hearing it (and we’ll keep reminding you until you’ve done it). Once you’ve got the technological infrastructure described above in place, all usage and processes should be standardized (made uniform) across every location. This includes best practices for booking, client intake, payment processing, customer service, client management, employee onboarding, payroll, and everything in between.

These processes should be set, and employees trained on them before even opening a new location. What better way to assert control over your business and ensure that things run smoothly in your absence than to have a set list of standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place? We aren’t suggesting that standardization gives you an excuse to be inactive and disengaged with your locations. It should instead ease the anxiety of running a multi-location business and the need to micromanage.

Set Tiered Access Levels

Multi-location visibility and control rest on setting certain boundaries, or, if you like, clearance levels. Siloing, or alienating locations from each other, prevents you from seeing the big picture of your business, and we don’t suggest that. However, allowing universal access to everything—client profiles, employee tax information, inventory levels, administrative functions—can also lead to a different set of problems. For example, what if an employee accidentally deleted certain information, or mistakenly replenished the wrong location’s inventory?

The above examples can be fixed easily, but others can’t. As the boss, you need to set access levels to certain functions and information to prevent serious issues. There should be things only you can view and change, and others that you share with managers or certain flagship employees. That's why Vagaro enables you to easily create, assign and modify access level permissions for just about everything, from calendar control and checking out clients to managing waitlists and creating email marketing campaigns.

Look at the Data Often

Real-time data and insights may not be a literal mirror into your other locations, but they do help you make informed decisions about marketing strategies, staffing and inventory management. Data enables you to respond quickly to market changes, client habits, and trends—a reflection more meaningful and telling than any magic mirror could ever provide.

Whether it’s two locations or twenty, Vagaro lets businesses run clear multi-location reports anytime and anywhere.

When using business data to make decisions, remember to set—and track—KPIs (key performance indicators) for each location. While it's important to consider your business’s numbers overall, segmenting performance data between locations does more than help you spot over- or underperformers; it can alert you to why they are performing this way, i.e., reveals market anomalies.

Depending on where your other business locations are, things like revenue, customer satisfaction or inventory turnover can be different due to demographic and market variations (age, income levels, etc.). As such, you must strategize and set your goals accordingly.

Remember, also, to consider consumer data, which can tell you how to improve the client experience and effectively expand your offerings. Once again, this can be collected through surveys and polls, which can be created easily using Vagaro’s Forms feature.

Gather Feedback

Establish a reliable way to collect feedback from clients, employees, and team leaders at each of your locations. This information can provide insights into customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and potential areas for improvement.

Vagaro’s Forms feature is an effective and easy-to-use tool for gathering all kinds of feedback, as it can be used to create surveys, polls and similar documents. More importantly, the effectiveness of these forms can be measured—like just about everything else—by the software’s Reports feature.

Perform Regular Site Audits

Regular audits and inspections contribute to risk management, quality assurance, and continuous improvement, and give you a reason for a nice visit, which managing multiple locations requires anyway.

What does an internal audit look like, exactly? Well...

• Compliance Audits: Compliance audits ensure that each location adheres to company policies, industry regulations (HIPAA compliance, for example), and legal requirements. This helps mitigate the risk of legal issues.
• Quality Inspections: Inspect products, services, and operational processes to maintain a consistent level of quality across all locations. Identify areas for improvement and implement necessary solutions.
• Security Audits: Assess the security at each location to safeguard against theft, data breaches, and other security threats. This includes physical security measures as well as cybersecurity audits.
• Operational Efficiency: No system is without flaws. Evaluate the efficiency of operational processes at each location. Find bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and implement new best practices where needed.

Maintaining control and visibility of multiple business locations is essential for maintaining consistent quality of all your services & products. It ensures uniformity, efficiency, and adaptability in the face of sudden shifts in market trends. Vagaro gives multi-location business owners the tools—and the vision—they need to lead from anywhere. Start your 30-day FREE trial and experience a clearer, better view of your enterprise business.