Life After CORONAVIRUS You Must Do This

April 20, 2020 • Tamara Forrest-Smith

Today, I just want to send you some food for thought. I will follow up with more.

Here it is ….

Right now there isn’t a lot you can do about the lockdown. Early on we created a call to try and help but the help offered on there was quickly over-ridden by the government’s rules.

But NOW you must start preparing for business to re-open.

Why?

This is the perfect time for your salon to take things into another level.

And a few things will happen.

Some salons WILL NOT reopen.

Some will struggle to get momentum after they reopen and probably fail long-term.

The few and very smart salon will take the lead at all levels as long as they are smart.

After a COVID19 or CORONAVIRUS salon lockdown, I feel the biggest mistake you can make in your salon is to believe that your customers will be automatically coming back to you. If you are thinking that you are making a huge mistake. Some will and some won’t. The ones that won’t could be enough to tip your business over the edge.

There is a reason some salons won’t and it is this.

The mind of your client has been through a powerful shift.
That mind shift has created an evolution process in thinking they are now thinking different – aren’t you?).
That thinking process is based on what is now best for the family or individual (not for you or your business).
What was important before is less important now.
But they still want their hair done.

Salon clients easily soon forget and they might have forgotten about you.

Unique issues you will face and they are facing will make it tougher to come back but easy to decide where to go.

Cash will be tight for expensive haircuts especially if they have been fourlonged.
They will look for a similar quality of haircut at a lower rate.
They will still be worried about contamination in a warm damp salon atmosphere.
They will be desperate but cautious about getting back to normal (they might wait a few weeks after lockdown to visit).

The fact is we just don’t know yet we can guess based on how people behave.

And you need to take this into account NOW before the lockdown ends so you can plan for a truly successful and fast comeback.

What are you doing about the future success of your salon?

Fundamentally people don’t or society won’t change because of the pandemic. The way the country will run won’t change. Humans are humans. They need to be social, make contact and carry on each day as a normal day.

This is part of what being a human is.

Life didn’t change after these viruses and plagues

The Bubonic Plague
The Spanish Flu
Asian Flu
AIDS
Swine Flu (as recent as 2009)

So stay at peace and just know it’ll all be fine.

But your salon business...

If you really want to hit the road running when the lockdown ceases you will need to be more aware of how to remind and get your customers to come back to you.

I WOULD DO THIS …

Treat the end of lockdown like it is the first day/week/month of being in new business.

Create massive amounts of marketing materials to let customers know you are open (screening and social isn’t enough).

CRITICALLY IMPORTANT: You should treat the comeback like a NEW SALON OPENING
Don’t reply on posting on social media.
Go offline with your messages to customers.
Flyers.
Posters.
PR stunts.
Pop-ups.
Special deals.
2-for-1s.
Group prices.
Family prices.
Phone them.
Knock on their doors.
Use letters (paper and stamps) to let your customers know.
Scream from the rooftops.
Do something that everyone will see and remember.
Everything you can think of – list it out and make sure it gets done fast, I would write a list of things you WILL commit to doing to let your customers know you are back.
SX-21 GIVES YOU 600 PAGES OF TOOLS
More soon …

You need to do everything you can do to get your clients back into your salon.

This will be critically important if you want to come back in with a bang rather than a slow burn.

If you want to pack out your columns

If you want to pack out the salon

If you want the first week back to be your best ever week

You need to hit this absolutely full-on and be relentlessly doing this.

If you are assuming clients will flood back … you are in a danger zone.

Most salons will be sitting and just waiting. Moaning and groaning about how bad things are.

But I can share with you most of my salon’s owners complain they never have enough time. This break has been a true gift of time. This is your time to shine and enhance your business. Will you rise to that challenge?

If you are planning and doing everything you can to make sure the clients come back to you – you will be in a safer zone.

And finally …

As you know I am no fan of discounting anything. But this is a special time and it will take special action.

You must create value-added or value layered offers to do anything to get the customer back into your business. (and I mean anything)

You must give them a zero option when it comes to choosing you again.

And your customers will be looking for a favour of sorts.

Create a powerful Life After Corona Celebration Special Offer … and get your business packed.

This will help you but you MUST help yourself at this time.

Are you ready to do that?

CORONAVIRUS has created what can be described by some as strange times.

It’s interesting to observe.

The health and the life of each individual should always come first.

Please look after yourself.

But it is worth saying.

Although we don’t know enough about this new strain of coronavirus we do know that the effect on human is relatively small in comparison to a lot of other things.

As we don’t know everything yet about the fuller outcome you should stay cautious and look after yourself.

But are these truly what we could call STRANGE TIMES?

Are they, are they really strange times?

Not really.

I would these times are expected and overdue.

What is strange is the way mankind has accepted strange things like they are normal things.

What is strange is how life is measured on unpredictable stock and share values and annual economic numbers.

What is strange is that we dig massive craters into the heart of our planet to pull out what we see as high-value minerals for profits and despite the destruction, it’s largely ignored.

What is strange is how we can see with our own eyes, feel with our skin and mind and even scientifically understand moment by moment the negative effect on the planet through global warming. Yet we accept it when a government says we have set a reduction targets for 2050 despite the warnings of shortness of years.

It is strange when we have to listen to world leaders constantly, endlessly, continuously lie and conspire on open platforms and make the insane sound sane whilst the trusting public accept.

It is a strange thing when we see and watch people abandoned in their own country as people of no value. They get shot at, killed, rejected and even held in prisons to rot because they speak another language. All they want is help to live their life.

It is a strange thing that we have been convinced that all migrants equal criminals.

It is a strange thing when the most obscene of human behaviour can be explained in a way that normal has now become abnormal.

There are many strange things taking place but CoronaVirus really isn’t one of them.

But this is a strange moment and reaction.

Shutdowns, walls, fences, soldiers, armies, fines, isolations will not and can never stop a virus. That is just a ridiculous concept.

Then again we are being run and lorded over by ridiculous types humans with ridiculous ideas that have made the world strange but a strange world normal.

Over the next couple of weeks, I want to keep my side of my own conversation as optimistic and positive as I usually feel in my own life.

This CoronaVirus drama (crisis) will pass. Greater moments have come … and gone.

When I woke up today the birds were so loud outside it was deafening. They are getting ready for the warmer weather and new young.

The sky is also very blue today and the clouds are brilliant white. Trees are flourishing, flowers are out everywhere and I can really feel summer heading our way.

Life is a wonderful thing.

But I do wonder with this CoronaVirus.

Has Earth had enough of man’s stupidity?

I have never believed for one second that man has the ability to completely destroy Earth or even himself.

Man forgets that we came from this ground, we are made from this stuff. This stuff is powerful beyond what we understand.

On a micro-scale, there are miracles taking place every second in our bodies. The human body is without a doubt the most unexplainable and wondrous thing.

Earth is greater than man.

I did wonder.

I did have a thought.

Climate change has been chasing our tails for decades, generations before the GRETA effect.

Leaders have had chances to change and flatly refused to change based on their annual measures of the good life. Longterm vision is a rare commodity amongst fools.

Is Earth now taking control where mankind has refused to care?

I was thinking about all of those hidden cities they found in the rainforest jungle when the trees were butchered and removed. They found cities under what they thought was virgin rainforest. No one knows what happened to the people or the cities. What did happen? The fact is they were there and now they had gone.

We have been overrun and over consumed for decades. How much consumption can a consumer consume? How many cars and phones can we as human digest and then dump? The march of the idiocracy continues. The philosophies of life coming from blogs run by bloggers in search if clicks before service.

Humans are over-managed. We are mismanaged. We are over cleaned and disinfected. We have spent years removing the goodness from foods and replacing that goodness with a laboratory chemical known only as a code number.

We have become nations of allergy sufferers. Don’t eat this, don’t touch that and everything is dangerous.

In the life of humankind that is strange behaviour.

It’s not new. Worse has been before.

We have lost the art of stop. We forgot how to sit, think and do nothing.

We are being forced by nature to be human.

I said BE HUMAN.

We lost that and are now being asked to return to our humanity.

The lords are fighting it.

The leaders are leading that fight against Earth.

But they don’t know why or what because they don’t truly understand humanity. They only understand the rules. The rules they made not the rules that are created.

It would be a stranger even if this didn’t take place.

The reality is a CoronaVirus is here right now and you should do your very best to stay clean and healthy. Perspective is a good thing right now. It really doesn’t appear to be as dangerous as we are told.

Some words to ponder.

Hysteria. Paranoia. Mass thought. Mind manipulation. Pack mentality.

Let go, stop the chatter. Focus only on what we can control

Protecting your mind
Eating healthy
Exercising daily
Protecting your mind
Avoiding indoors with other people
Spending more time at home
Protecting your mind
And of course washing our hands to the bone

Be calm, this CoronaVirus will pass but it will leave a scar. That is a scar we are being asked to wear with pride.

Fear is the expectation of something that hasn’t yet materialised and may never materialise.

These aren’t really strange times.

They are perfect times for humanity to look at itself and answer the unanswered questions of the strange reality we have created.

A Gift from CoronaVirus – Gift of Time

Stop, rest and enjoy the gift of time.

We have been handed a gift from the coronavirus.

That gift is time.

Time we do not usually have.

This Christmas went I gave someone I love a gift. They told me later in a text they didn’t like it. I felt upset. Kids can have an unthinking side to them like that. It’s fine. I changed it. All was fine.

Now and then we are handed a gift we feel we don’t want because it interferes with our daily life.

But sometimes a gift isn’t about us. It is also about respecting the giver. By accepting gifts we don’t want we are showing the giver how much we appreciate them. It also shows that they think about us enough to hand this gift to us.

We have been given a gift from coronavirus and that gift sounded very much like, “You CANNOT leave your home for at least a month. If you do and we catch you we will find you and punish you.”

The gift we have been given from coronavirus can look like one of two things.

The first, it can look like is a huge restriction and intrusion on our routine and busy life. No one likes or wants that. If we resist the gift the resistance within us creates unease, unhappiness that can make us unwell, sick and miserable.

The second way we can look at the gift is that we have just been told we can take a month or so paid leave. It might have a few restrictions but these are for your better good and everyone’s health. This is a gift. This is something that could enhance our life for the better.

For example; I am sitting in my room writing to you. The sound of the birds is always so loud. I can see an endless line of squirrels running back and forth along the top of the red brick wall chasing, playing and trying to take food from each other. Just on the large Oak tree in the corner, there are two fat but friendly pigeons that sit and peck each other all day long. Then, of course, we have Mr Robin. This guy actually taps on my glass window for me to open and feed him. Once I open the window he comes in. It isn’t uncommon for him to sit on my keyboard and stare at me until I feed him. At some point I stop and head for a coffee. That has now stopped.

This is a daily ritual for me but what about you?

If you are like most people that have to rush out of your home early, jump in a car, drop off kids, race to your place of work, wait for the workday to end, go grab the kids, drive back home and then sit and watch TV until your eyes close this enforced period is your gift.

Right coronavirus has given you have a unique opportunity in human history.

Let me explain.

We are born into a very busy society. Busier and more distracted than ever. The reality is life is a short period of time. Regardless of what we do with our life, build empires, have families, buy and consume things the reality of life is life passes very fast.

A friend said the other day “It feels surreal that I am celebrating my 65 birthday today” For me, it is less than real that my father is now 84-years of age.

Either way, time is short and time passes faster than we can imagine when we are younger and busier. The other problem is that not only does time pass fast it can be almost like eating a meal without tasting the food. We just open our mouth, swallow and carry on what we were doing.

Life is like that.

So from today, you have a gift of time handed to you from coronavirus. That gift (if) it is a month is a gift of 30-days. Let’s say it is 30-days. What can you do in that time?

I am personally creating a series of coronavirus driven challenges.

Restructuring parts of my home life to protect my family and self from future lockdowns and enforcements
Restructuring parts of my businesses accordingly
Creating a plan of action to get things done before things go back to normal
My blog has been slow as I have been writing books so I am going to blog daily.
I need to complete at least two books I have started and never really gotten back to.
This is a good time for me to review my health and fitness.
This is a good time to sit and review our daily habits and performance.
This is also a good time to do nothing at all and I mean absolutely nothing.

Did you realise?

30-days is 720 hours
240 are for sleeping
60 to eat and drink
30 to relax and other things

That means you have been gifted from this damned coronavirus a huge 390 hours to make a change to your life.

So the real question is how will you accept this gift?

Will you resent and fight it or will you be grateful to the giver and use that time to make a change in your life?

Peace to you, your guide and mentor,

In 2010 I made a conscious decision to self-isolate.

Of course, this was before it became an enforced trend it was called ‘getting away from everything’ (now self-isolation)

I had passed through a very personal storm. That storm started with a brutal divorce and concluded with an end-all bankruptcy. It was also horrible a million voices firing at me on what was going to be best for me. They all knew best yet never asked what would be best. The noise was deafening.

I had become anxious, lost my confidence and felt weak.

It was hard to take more than I was going through.

So I booked a flight to self-isolation.

Here’s what happened.

I told my kids I was going to go away for two weeks to a friend’s home for some peace.

It wasn’t really peace I needed it was silence, solitude and calm.

Divorce can be horrible. Fights and opinions and threats and battles that can last for hours, days, months and even years. I felt mentally exhausted. At one point I thought I was going to die.

My friends were concerned whilst most of my family were on the full attack towards me during this period. For the first time in my life, I did truly feel alone.

By September 7th 2010 I was sitting on a Virgin Atlantic plane. The flight was taking me to San Francisco. After a long flight and one stop in New York, I was ready to get off and vanish into self-isolation.

This flight was the first time in years I had spoken to no one. It was the first time no one knew my personal history and treated me like a human being rather than a judged imperfect human. During the flight time, I had said hello, thank you and goodbye to the stewards when getting off. It was probably the quietest time I have ever spent in my 47 of life years at that point.

Once off the plane, I jumped in a cab and he drove all the way down the stunning pacific one highway until we were almost at Santa Cruz. Once at that point I had to look out for a left turn-off to a place named Bonny Doon.

Bonny Doon is a place located in the hills of California in the middle of a redwood forest. We saw the sign and we began to drive up the long and winding hill. Finally, we took a right turn and then one more right turn. This led up a dirt track around two miles long. At the very top, we arrived at a large wooden cabin.

This was to be my home for as long as I needed it. I was alone with only the most basic of things to keep me going. With the cabin also came to a car. I could drive down into the town of Sant Cruz if I wanted at any point.

Once in the cabin, I found a set of short notes. It basically explained that the garden was organic, no soaps were to be used and no toilet cleaning chemicals were to be used. Also, I had to look after the huge fat fluffy cat named ‘Cloud’.

And then began my self-isolation from my world.

At first, it was everything I had feared. That fear of loneliness. It was just me and me only. Once the dark arrived all I could hear were the sounds of the forest. Racoons were always trying to get into the cabin. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the howls of mountain wolves and lions. The first few nights I didn’t sleep.

The fact that there were no locks on any doors and anyone could walk in anytime made me feel very unsafe. I was totally outside of my comfort zone, to say the least.

The nights were blacker than black yet once the sun rose it was the most beautiful experience I had been through at that point. The only noise I could hear in the day was the deafening sound of huge woodpeckers hammering the trees with their unbreakable beaks.

After a week or so I decided to drive down into Santa Cruz. This was the first contact I’d had in a week with humans but only at the checkout still no conversation.

12-weeks later I merged from that experience a brand new person.

I will tell you why self-isolation was the best experience I had been through.

I now believe that the solutions to problems can only be found in the silence. The silence for me was no human contact. I would sit in front of the log fire alone with cloud the cat sitting across my feet. I had time to think to re-evaluate, to find my own solutions to my own problems.

This was a period in my life that changed everything.

Whilst there I decided to write a book. It was my first what I always call my real book. That book was eventually picked up and published by New York publisher named Morgan James.

The book is my experiences. It is what is going on in my mind, my thoughts my evaluations and my actions.

It is also an awakening moment where I realised certain things in life. The biggest thing I was to realise was I am responsible for my own life and that included past, present and future.

At the end of the isolation, I’d had enough and wanted to come home. I booked my flight and jumped on the plane and then returned home to England.

And I can tell you.

I never felt so alive in my life.

Self-imposed self-isolation isn’t new. It has been a meditation tool for millenniums where humans take time out to tap deeper into their minds to discover solutions for life. And it wasn’t always for the elite or self-proclaimed enlightened. The average human being was like this way before we become processed for modern life.

Today’s self-isolation is interesting. Rather than people using the time to evaluate and think we are being encouraged to watch more TV, not feel guilty about binge-watching, killing time, jumping up and down or while streets singing in unison. There isn’t anything wrong with this yet have you hear Dany officials say things.

The perfect time to read a new book and awaken our mind.

There perfect time to reevaluate your life.

The perfect opportunity to re-educate yourself.

The perfect time to approach life in a new way.

The perfect time to create a perfect new life.

Self-isolation is a time for thought, clarity and change.

I’m embracing the whole process. It doesn’t mean I don’t miss my daily coffee but it has made me ask the question do I really need to go and have a daily coffee?

If you like to know more about my whole 12-week self-isolation and the conclusions I came to everything is in my book,

Escape from Zoomanity.

Zoo-Man-Ity was a phrase I created to replace hu-man-ity

The book explains everything

You can order and read it here.

We can still deliver fast as the post office is working as normal.

Order my experiences of self-isolating here.

Or go to Amazon or most booksellers online and order the book ESCAPE FROM ZOOMANITY

Don’t worry everything will turn out just fine.

Peace.

Alan Forrest Smith

Peace to you, your guide and mentor,

Alan Forrest Smith.

Let me know what you plan to do, I would love to hear it.

The Salon Punk, Alan
www.SalonPunk.com
WhatsApp: +44 7793069486

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