Case study – Nola Nails

Nail and beauty salon – acrylic and gel nails, manicures, pedicures, waxing

Waxing – higher returns because of faster service and price margins

Clientele – Regulars, young career women who like fast appointments that fit around work and social
activity

370 regular customers with 200 visiting on fortnightly basis – 90 clients in 4 days with half hourly
appointments

Long for additional staff so that she can focus on promoting business. Last year she hired a part time
vibrant technician, Jacqui; Left to have her second child.

Nola has trained at least one technician each year and those have gone to compete with her.

Believes in excellence of products and services. Wants to expand and maintain her women clientele and
enter into waxing and grooming needs of males

Idea to expand – how to staff business? Male technicians are successful and respected overseas and
suitable for male clientele.

Risk of losing female clients because presence of male technician might inhibit their conversation and
ruin the social gathering

Two options

1 – expand; hire staff, run a team of specialized technicians and move to a larger location

2 – hire part time technicians for existing Nola nails, maintain current facility and setup new entity for
men salon in adjacent rooms that are available in next quarter, with part time technicians working for
both ventures
1 – Strategic choices.

Nola has 2 options to choose from

i – She can focus on expanding her current business that provides waxing and grooming facilities to
females. This would call for hiring new and permanent technicians probably 3 or 4 over the next year,
train them in the process and build a team that offers excellence with products and services. This would
result in expansion of her clientele and thus would require a bigger workplace to accommodate the
increasing number of customers.

ii – She can hire a part time technician for Nola nails and maintain her current facility. This will result in
maintenance of current women clientele but will not accelerate the expansion process. Whereas to fuel
her desire of expanding business capacity, she can setup a new entity for male services in rooms that are
adjacent to her current business location. The personnel that she would hire for the new entity would
work part time in the existing Nola Nails and the new entity.

Nola Nails should be structured on the basis of customers. Such an organization focuses on output such
as customer satisfaction and retention, profit rather than on input. In such an organization, customer
needs and problems are met by specialist. No advertising is better that satisfied customer experiences
and the resultant good word of mouth. Also, Nola Nails is an established name in Nail art and grooming
services. Nola can use her business’s established goodwill as a brand and enter into male service niche.
This will reinforce confidence into her prospective male customers.

2 – An organic organization is the one in which decision making is decentralized, there are few rules and
regulations and contains both hierarchical and lateral communication channels. These characteristics are
essential for any organization which alters the range of products and services it offers because

Variety in products and services demands the operational management level to make real time
decisions in order to be responsive to the changing demands of its customers.

Fewer rules and regulations encourage a culture of accepting change and innovation, openness to new
ideas and foster an environment that rewards creativity and unconventional ways of handling problems.

A hierarchical and lateral channel operating simultaneously ensures that work and efforts are
coordinated through communication and problem solving takes place with peers at similar level without
referring matters of routine nature up the hierarchy within the confines defined by the hierarchical
structure.

3 – Nola can achieve vertical coordination by adopting following steps:

i – Strike the balance between formalization and informal organization. For example setting out policies
to give technician general guidelines for activities and specifying rules. However, the degree of
formalization should be limited so that it does not stifle and discourage creativity and innovation.

Ii -