MetrOasis® News Letter

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Great inexpensive place

by MichelleH

March 18, 2009

From the time the phone is answered to the time you are finished with your appointment, everything and everybody is porfessional and courteous! The facials are awesome! Ashley, a student stylist, is a natural and I have been using her ever since!

• Pros: Fantastic students!
• Cons: Not open on Monday

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Excited

by Turnergirl

March 10, 2009

I haven't been there yet but, when I called they were very nice on the phone and very helpful, I can't wait to go next week!!!!

• Cons: None

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Best prices in town!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

by heatherinak

February 06, 2009

They have the best prices in town!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The staff is friendly and takes the time to listen and get things right.

Let me guess....

Now somebody will complain because they don't like looking at all of these stars or they don't like the number "5".

Yes, we really are the best beauty school in Alaska.

Hey... somebody had to be! ;-)

PARIS

We’re off to Paris. Boy are we ready too! We really need a break. We almost finished our remodeling, but it looks like a couple of things will have to wait until we get back. That’s OK too because we may be able to use some of the inspiration of our trip for some new ideas. 

PARIS BEAUTY TOURS

We also need to develop some more contacts so that we can get one of our new projects finished. We have started parisbeautytours.com and hope to make our first tour in Paris early next year. We are putting together a fashion/beauty industry tour which will include - 

a one day makeup training, 

a one day hair training, 

half day waxing, 

a tour of 3 different salons, 

a group dinner, 

flowers and a bottle of wine in your room when you arrive, 

a fashion show at Printemps, 

a fashion show at Galleries Lafayette,

a half day training on “going international”,

a day of shopping at secret Paris boutiques,

a tour in the fabric district of Paris,

two independent days,

round trip airfare from the US to Paris,

all airport taxes and fees,

7 nights hotel & taxes,

orientation and travel guide,

for $3,995. We will only be taking 12 people on each trip, and we are planning an average of 3 trips each year.

If THIS trip doesn’t recharge your battery and inspire you to more creative international beauty art, then you’re probably already dead!

If you want to check out some of the things we’re going to be doing on this trip you can check out our MindMeister page here - http://www.mindmeister.com/13884606

CLASS START DATES

We are booking up fast for classes this year which means that we only have openings for class starts several months out. If you know someone who is interested in attending our school, tell them to get their online entrance exam and their interview done soon so that they can get on the master student calendar otherwise they’ll probably have to attend next year or go to another school and miss out on our great training!

THE ECONOMY

It is interesting to see how the economy is changing our industry. Some of the fluffy, no-content salons and spas are struggling to stay open but the places that offer good value for money spent, are doing quite well. In fact, last year was our best year ever. We will be expanding our service menu in several places this year. We realize that this is not a go-or-don’t-go issue as much as it is a where-you-go issue. That is, people are going to be going to salons and spas this year. They’re not just going to stay home and stop getting their hair cut, colored, or stop getting facials. People are going to just be a bit pickier about where they go, so our focus this year is making MetrOasis® THE place to go since you’re going to be going anyway. If you are going to go to a salon anyway, shouldn’t you get the absolute best value you can for your hard earned and scarce dollars? We think so! We are being effected in some relatively minor ways already by suppliers in the lower 48 or in other countries that are struggling with the economy. 

SOLICITATION OF OUR CLIENTS BY STUDENTS

On a different note, we have had some problems this year with students actively soliciting our clients while they’re standing right in the middle of my business. We’ve had really minor issues with this in the past, but this year we even had a student stand not further than 10 feet from me and tell a client that “We’re updating our files and I need you to put your name, address, and phone number down on this paper for us.” I asked who was updating our files (since they're MY files and I knew that I wasn't updating them), and they explained that they were sending thank you notes to “their” clients for allowing this student to work on them. The salon that they are going to be working in, you know... the one they’re stealing my clients from me and sending to..., this salon would fire them on the spot for illegally soliciting clients from them. These salons, if found to be encouraging this kind of unethical behavior, will be eliminated from our “mixers” list and will not be invited to participate in any upcoming mixers. Oh, mixers are where we invite salon and spa owners to come into our business to a breakfast meeting to meet our students and to talk about their individual salons or spas. It gives our students a good idea of what different salons and spas have to offer them as employees. Most of our students know where they will be working by the time they graduate from our programs. 

The students that enroll into our program enroll so that they can get real salon experience on real clients instead of spending all their time working on manikins like so many state programs do, or doing self-study from the text like so many schools in Alaska do. The only reason our students have real clients to work on is because we have steadily built our clientele year after year since 1995. Then, after sending our clients to these very few unethical students, clients of ours who have seen student after student for over a decade, and when these unethical students get their requirements from us, and the education from us, and get their hours from us with these same clients, to then sacrifice both our future success and the future success of the students that will be working in their station after they graduate... it just boggles the mind how self-centered, selfish, unethical, and clueless some of these students can be. We spend over $20,000 each year on advertising. So, after spending over a quarter of a million dollars to get clients for these students to work on, it just floors me that a student that pays less than half of the tuition rates of the lower 48 states, while we pay shipping rates that makes all of our products cost three time more... to then have the attitude "I've got MY stuff now so go ungh ungh ungh yourself...??? I don't even know what to say. It actually embarrasses me to have accepted these students into our program and then to expose our really great students to this kind of behavior and it really un-nerves me! I hope that the salons that hire these kind of students without talking to me first know what they're getting into! If they do call... I have some amazing, talented students I'd love to send them, and then they won't be having this same problem a year from now when the student they encouraged to steal my clients is standing on their salon floor stealing their clients. 

Do I sound a little bent over this? I guess being betrayed by someone I'm working so hard to make successful kind of bends me out of shape a little. I'm reminded of some of the quips between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill, where Lady Astor walked up to Winston Churchill and said "I perceive that YOU sir, are drunk!" For which Winston Churchill responded "And I perceive, MAM, that YOU are ugly, but tomorrow I shall be sober!". I may get a little bent over situations like this, but tomorrow I shall leave for Paris, while the very few unethical students that I am subjected to will still be here in Anchorage remaining as unethical as ever. I have a feeling that I will be a lot less bent over this when I return. I think that in the long run that the true nature of these few bad apples will be found out and that this kind of behavior is more damaging to them than to me.

NON-SOLICATION POLICY

SO... I can’t imagine that a grown up, a thinking, living person can’t see that this is grossly unethical behavior, but apparently I have to deal with this now, on top of several other unethical behaviors that we already face. So, we rewrote the catalog, we rewrote our policies, and we rewrote our student enrollment contract to deal with this problem. We also contacted PostSecondary and explained what was going on. Our new changes have already been approved. So if ANY student approaches you to induce you to leave our business to go to theirs, please let us know. This problem has been addressed legally and administratively and we have a process in place now to address this gross breach of ethics within our school and we’d appreciate you letting us know if this happens to you. We have one of the most difficult marketing jobs on the planet because we are attracting clients that could go to any salon or spa in the state, but that are willing to have students work on them because they are trying to support the future success of those students. We also do our upmost to make our students successful in their future careers so we get truly offended, offended to the bone, that after sharing trade secrets, client information, advanced techniques, business strategies, marketing concepts, that these same students would then completely abandon OUR future success to promote THEIR future success only. We operate our business in a symbiotic manner so that both the students and MetrOasis® benefit. But when a student changes our business structure from a symbiotic structure to a parasitic structure, where ONLY the student benefits and MetrOasis® suffers, then the student clearly has to go. MetrOasis® is the ONLY business of its kind in the United States and we work very hard to protect our investment.

EXPANSION... BYE BYE TANNING

As for future changes, we will be getting rid of the espresso cart in the back of the salon (you may not have even noticed it there) and we are putting Sigel & Sue’s station there which will make room for one more student station where Sigel and Sue are working now. We will also be getting rid of the tanning bed to make room for another esthetics room, and then later we will be getting rid of the HEX tanning room to make room for another esthetics room. But the bed will be the first to go in near future. This will give us 5 esthetics rooms, with the HEX making the 6th. This means that each esthetics student will be assigned to a specific room and won’t have to be dragging their equipment from their station or from room to room in the future. This also means that I won’t have to stop what I’m doing several times each day to track down a specific machine that was moved from one location to another. Each machine will be bolted to the wall or floor and it won’t move. Not without moving the wall too!

NEW EQUIPMENT / NEW SERVICES

We are looking at cellulite massaging machines and an RF machine (radio frequency) for cellulite and firming treatments which we will be including sometime this year. We are also going to expand our light therapy services. So watch for these new body service additions to our service menu. After I return from Paris I'll post a few photos of this new equipment so that you can check them out while we're making space for them.

ADVERTISING... YEAH INTERNET!

We have fired the Anchorage Daily News as one of our advertisers and we have changed our ads in the Yellow Pages this year and have shifted a certain amount of focus to Internet advertising and marketing. If you are interested in saving some money on your next visit, click on the “specials” button at metroasis.com and follow the directions and you can help us in our efforts.

MISSING VIDEOS

I guess along with the great newsletter I wrote a couple of day ago, that most of the videos on this site also disappeared. I don't know why, they just did. SO... I'll rewrite those pages when I get back. 

BROCHURES

We also printed a lot of brochures, I mean a LOT of them! So don’t feel shy about taking a few with you and handing them out to your friends. If you write your name on them and your friends bring them in, we’ll do a nice secret little something for you. 

Well, better run now, I only have 36 hours before we leave for Paris and I still have a ton of things to do! Au revoir!

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One of the best new things we've done is that we've replaced most of our traditional retail stands with some great European antiques. We're working on the finishing touches in our facial rooms also.

We went from this -

to this -
 

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And this -
 

to this -

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and this -

to this -

Wait until we're done with this project!
Sigel, Sue, & Aly Shroy at MetrOasis®