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Your salon business plan.
A place to start.
Use this free salon business plan template to work through your clients, services, team, marketing, operations, and money. Answer eight sets of practical prompts, then download a draft you can keep editing.
Your working draft
0 of 8 sections have notes
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SECTION 01
Your salon in a few sentences
Make the idea specific enough that someone else can explain it back to you.
- What kind of salon, spa, or studio are you opening or improving, and in which area?
- Who is it for, what will they come to you for, and why would they choose you?
- Are you starting from scratch, taking a chair or suite, buying a business, or expanding? What is your target opening date?
Check: proposed location, ownership, opening timeline, and the assumptions still to test.
SECTION 02
Your clients and local market
Start with people who could actually book, and the choices they already have nearby.
- Describe your target clients, their service needs, visit frequency, budget, and travel radius.
- Name nearby alternatives. Compare their services, booking experience, availability, and published prices using dated sources.
- What have conversations with potential clients taught you? Separate observed demand from your hopes for it.
Collect: local research, competitor URLs and dates, and anonymized customer-interview notes.
SECTION 03
Services, time, and capacity
A service menu needs to fit both your clients and the time, people, and equipment available.
- List your core services, planned customer prices, appointment lengths, cleanup time, and consumable costs.
- How many providers, chairs, stations, or rooms can work at once? Which services share a scarce resource?
- Set realistic working hours and attended appointments. Allow for breaks, cancellations, training, and quieter opening months. Keep retail sales separate.
Collect: a draft service menu, supplier quotes, staffing availability, and a weekly capacity schedule.
SECTION 04
Ownership, people, and responsibilities
Decide who owns the business, who delivers the services, and who takes care of the rest.
- Who owns and manages the business? Which skills do you already have, and which roles still need filling?
- Describe the proposed employee, commission, or chair-rental arrangements and how they affect revenue and expenses. Verify the appropriate local requirements.
- Who owns scheduling, stock counts, client follow-up, daily reconciliation, and decisions that need an owner?
Collect: role descriptions, adviser questions, proposed agreements, and verified local licensing requirements.
SECTION 05
How clients find you and return
Choose a first route to clients that you can execute and measure.
- Where will your first clients come from? Name a channel, a concrete action, its owner, and a budget you can afford.
- How does someone move from discovering you to choosing a service and booking? What information must your website and business listings show?
- Plan rebooking, client follow-up, and review requests with appropriate consent. Which weekly measures will show actual visits and repeat clients?
Collect: a launch checklist, channel budgets, booking journey, and a baseline for repeat visits.
SECTION 06
The working day and the systems behind it
Plan the routines that keep services running, including the work nobody sees from the chair.
- Map opening, appointments, payments, cleaning, stock use, and closing. Include purchasing and handling unexpected absences.
- Which system is the source of truth for clients, bookings, stock, team hours, and money? What must connect, and what access is actually supported?
- Choose one routine to automate first. Name its data, owner approval, exception process, and success measure. Keep sensitive and clinical decisions with qualified people.
Collect: operating checklists, supplier lead times, existing-tool details, and an automation test plan.
SECTION 07
Startup costs, cash, and financial assumptions
Use your own quotes and clearly labeled assumptions. A revenue target is not a profit forecast.
- List one-time startup costs and recurring monthly payments separately. Include fit-out, equipment, deposits, stock, rent, wages, insurance, software, and professional fees where applicable.
- Build a monthly cash plan: opening cash, cash received, cash paid out, and closing cash. Include tax payments, loan repayments, and owner withdrawals where relevant; timing matters.
- For service revenue, use attended visits multiplied by average service revenue per visit. Deduct the applicable costs separately to estimate profit. Chair-rental income belongs to the landlord's plan; renters' service sales are not automatically the salon's revenue.
- Compare a quieter case with your main assumptions. If you need funding, state how much, what it pays for, and the supporting evidence a lender or investor requests.
Attach: supplier quotes, lease terms, a separate cash-flow spreadsheet, and adviser-reviewed projections when seeking funding.
SECTION 08
The next 90 days
Turn the plan into a short sequence of decisions and actions.
- For the next 30, 60, and 90 days, name an outcome, one responsible person, a deadline, and the evidence that proves it happened.
- What could delay opening or disrupt trading? List the highest-impact risks and a practical fallback for each.
- Which assumptions must be validated before signing, hiring, purchasing, or switching tools? Set a date to review this plan against actual results.
Keep: an action list, unresolved decisions, and the date of your next review.
You can download a partial draft. Blank sections stay marked so you know what still needs work.
Before you call it a plan
Replace assumptions with evidence.
A promising idea still needs local demand, a workable schedule, and enough cash. Date your research, identify the numbers you have verified, and list what you still need to learn. Review those unknowns before making a commitment.
The U.S. Small Business Administration’s planning guidance covers business-plan formats, market research, startup costs, and financial projections. This workbook adds original salon-specific questions to help you organize your first draft. It is not an SBA form or endorsement.
Compare work arrangements with the commission versus booth-rent calculator. For a wider view of the work behind the chair, explore salon AI capabilities.
For funding, legal structure, licensing, and tax assumptions, verify requirements with the relevant local authority, lender, or adviser. This worksheet does not determine those requirements for you.
Using your salon business plan
What should a salon business plan include?
Is this a business plan for a bank loan?
Can I use it for a nail salon, barbershop, or salon suite?
How do I download and edit the template?
Does this generate a forecast or activate salon AI?
From a business plan to a working operation
Decide what to take off your plate.
Use your operations notes to choose what comes next. The salon AI planner turns your priorities into workflows, owner controls, and success measures for a Founden build brief.
Plan my salon AIDownload your draft first. Your workbook answers do not transfer automatically.