Every call rang in his pocket
The owner had built a five-star barbershop one chair at a time, and the reputation made the phone ring. The problem was where it rang. The number on the listing was his cell. So every call, from a new customer who had just found the shop to a regular trying to move an appointment, rang in his pocket while he had someone in the chair, or after hours when he was done for the day. He could not pick up mid-haircut. Most of the people who got no answer did not call back. They called the next listing.
The website did not help him. It was a generic landing page with a phone number on it, and it could not take a booking. That mattered more than it usually does, because the back office already ran on Square. The calendar and the pricing existed. The tool a customer could have booked into was sitting there, and the one page a customer found did not use it.
He told me the plain version himself: he had no idea how much revenue was walking out the door. I did not pretend to know either. What I could see was the shape of it. The busier the shop got, the more calls he missed, because the same hands that earned the stars were the hands that could not reach the phone. That is a design that punishes success.
The people in this one are simple to name. The owner, who is the product; the barbers on the floor with him; the customers, who had already decided they wanted this shop and were being asked to fight the phone to get in; and Common Ground's brand team, who did the brand work that sits on top of everything we built.
Book without calling
The obvious move was a better website. A cleaner page, a nicer logo, a bigger phone number. It would have looked like progress and changed nothing, because the page was never the problem. The only way into the shop ran through one man's pocket. So I asked what the shop was actually selling a customer at the moment they found it, and the answer was a chair at a time they could count on. A phone call is a bad way to sell that. A calendar is a good one. The offer was booking without calling, and the site was only the place the offer lived.
The second question was what to build the booking into. Every agency has a booking product it likes, and a shop that already runs on Square does not need a second calendar that has to be reconciled with the first. Square held the services, the prices and the schedule. The site had to book into that, not beside it, or we would have replaced one problem with two.
How I came at this one
The first question was what the shop was actually selling at the moment a customer found it, and the answer was a chair at a time they could count on, which a phone call sells badly and a calendar sells well. The second question was what system already held the truth, and it was Square, so the site had to book into it rather than beside it. When the school came up, the same habit applied to the owner's premises: each one went to a primary source before it entered a model.
Then the phone. Taking the calls off his cell sounds technical and it is a business decision. The shop's number had to be the shop's, on a line of its own, so that a call reached the business and let the man keep cutting. That is what the phone architecture is for.