Lumière Nail Bar Business Plan — Management and Team

The management structure, therapist and technician establishment, and why retention decides whether the capacity can be sold.

Management and Team

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Role

Number at maturity

Responsibility

Timing

Owner or managing director

1

Strategy, funding, lease, supplier and product house relationships

From inception

Salon manager

1

Diary and utilisation, membership conversion, team performance, standards

Month 1 — the hire that determines whether capacity gets filled

Senior beauty therapist

1

Advanced treatments, training, quality standards, treatment protocols

Month 3

Nail technicians

11

Nail services across all systems offered

Phased with station commissioning

Beauty therapists

8

Facials, massage, waxing, lashes and brows

Phased with room commissioning

Front of house

3

Bookings, arrivals, retail, membership administration

From opening

Bookkeeper, part-time

1

Debit order runs, reconciliations, statutory returns

From Month 1

Gross profit against overhead — the operating leverage
Figure 14. Gross profit against overhead — the operating leverage.

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Overhead, R

2 250 000

2 600 000

2 875 000

3 305 000

3 530 000

Overhead as a share of revenue

53.3%

34.1%

30.9%

26.1%

25.9%

Gross profit, R

1 407 000

3 308 000

4 242 000

6 212 000

6 789 000

Gross profit as a multiple of overhead

0.63x

1.27x

1.48x

1.88x

1.92x

Overhead falls from 53 per cent of revenue in Year 1 to 26 per cent by Year 5, and gross profit moves from 0.63 times overhead to 1.92 times. That is the operating leverage the whole plan depends on, and it comes from filling capacity against a cost base — rent, management, systems, front of house — that was already carried at six stations.

Four numbers govern this business and should be reported weekly: utilisation by station and by hour of day, membership joins and churn, retail attachment as a percentage of service revenue, and rebooking rate at the point of departure. The rebooking rate is the leading indicator of every other number, because a client who leaves without a next appointment is a client the salon has to win again.

8.1 Retention and the client book

Control

How it works

What it protects against

Membership contracts held by the business

Debit order mandate, client record and treatment history in the salon’s own system

A departing therapist takes a skill, not a contracted member

Team-based servicing

No client is tied to a single therapist; the second and third visit are deliberately rotated

The relationship attaches to the salon rather than to an individual

Restraint and non-solicitation provisions

Written into employment contracts at appointment, not renegotiated at resignation

Direct solicitation of the client book on departure

Client data on business systems only

POPIA consent framework; no client contact details on personal devices

Both the compliance exposure and the asset walking out at the same moment

Commission and development

Retention structured around productivity and progression rather than base pay alone

The turnover itself, which is the highest-likelihood risk in the register

Next section9. Financial Plan