Ronan Perceval on the Story of Phorest

Profit is not cash, I'm not saying I'm going to watch a Facebook ad today. I feel like we need to stop putting ourselves in restrictions. What do you actually want out of your business? You're listening to Forest FM, the salon business share with your host Zoe the Lil Springer. For your industry, buy your industry. At Forest, we don't have a job, we have a purpose. It's to help salon spa and clinic owners just like you to succeed. Nearly 20 years ago, our founder and CEO Ronan Percival was working as a receptionist in a busy salon in Dublin when he had a career defining realization. On today's episode, we're sharing the story of Forest Salon software. And to do this, there was only one guest site could bring back on, Ronan himself. I always pleasure. Ronan, the way you start telling the story of Forest is that you had worked prior customer service jobs, but you soon discovered that nothing compared to the atmosphere of being in a salon. What did you realize working there? What was so different about it? Yeah, this is something that really, it just, in a stage with me, my whole life, because it's nearly 20 years ago now, unbelievably, that I worked in a salon for the first time. But basically, I had, when I went to university, I always had to do about 20, 25 hours a week working in takeaways, fast food, joints, shops, like grocery stores. That kind of thing, just to help pay my rent or whatever in college. So I had a lot of jobs like that. I was a waiter for a couple of years, I was a barmer for a year. So I've done a lot, I must have done about, you know, 10 or 11 of those jobs for significant period of time, you know, at least a couple of months each one. So I've done a lot of, you know, client-facing jobs. I like client-facing jobs, like talking to people, helping them, all that kind of stuff. So I enjoyed that, but, but those jobs, you know, they also can get a bit monotonous. I'm trying, depending on the job and things like that. So what was really interesting when I worked in a salon for the first time as a receptionist was, in theory, I was standing behind a desk serving customers, which isn't that different to nearly all those other jobs. But, but it was totally different. And I remember, like, just that the day just flew by in a way that it didn't in some of those other jobs. And some of them were good, like, being a barmer and stuff. The time didn't go quite quickly in that kind of job. But, but I found that working in a corner store, it's called a spa here. And I found that job incredibly boring. Like, you know, I'd be within five minutes of clocking in. I was checking my watch to see how long time I had left. It was incredibly boring. And the day would really drag. And that just never happened. From the minute I started work, people would be coming in the door. They'd be in great form coming in. They'd be really looking forward to their appointment in the salon. And then, you know, you take their coach and have them wait, whatever it is you were going to do. And then they would, you know, they'd have their stylist or therapist come along. They'd go off, have their treatment or a service or a haircut, whatever it was, because it was a hair and beauty salon. When they came back to the desk, like an hour later or 90 minutes later, you know, depending on what they'd had done, they were like, they were even feeling even better than they were when they, when they arrived. And what was amazing about that is that it's basically if people are really, like if everybody that you're meeting is in really good form, like there's a positive energy from that that is really hard to describe unless you've experienced it, but it puts you in good form. Or it's really hard for you if you're in bad form to stay in bad form, whenever one new chat is in good form. You felt like you were really making difference for them, like there's different stories you hear over time, you know, people might have had a rough week, you might have issues at home, issues at work. They come in, this is a place where they're pampered, not just pampered but they're meant to feel special, it's all about them, you know, they look feel great, whatever it is, but like you just, you know, they just feel great leaving. Nearly everyone felt great leaving and you just got fed off that energy. And it's just a different energy in that environment than it is in all those other businesses. And I never knew that before I'd worked in this lot, I just never knew that. But then having been there for a week, I was like, wow, I just fell in love with it. And I was just like, this is somewhere I could work for rest of my life. I didn't know why I do there, but I was just, there was definitely, and I care I am, you know, nearly 20 years later. And yeah, I've been working industry nearly two decades and I'm going to be working for at least another two decades, I would say, you know. So, and I think people are very lucky, I think people who work in it are really lucky to work in it. I think a lot of people know that, but there's, you know, people who aren't in the industry, they don't understand what a great industry it is that way. And actually, whenever they do job satisfaction surveys, to know if you've ever seen this survey, but this industry, both hairdressing, beauty therapy, they always score in the top five careers in terms of job satisfaction. And way more than other jobs that have way higher earning potential, let's say. You know what I mean? Because obviously, the pay isn't as good. There is ways to earn more money, you know, by becoming a salon owner and building a good business and all that kind of stuff. So there's obviously opportunities in the industry. But the base pay is a lot less than other jobs, but the job satisfaction is way higher. So you get, you know, you're getting other benefits from it that sometimes people aren't aware of. And I think that's something I'd love to share more because we could get so many more people coming into the industry, particularly at a time right now, where, you know, the industry is really struggling for people like every industry is struggling to get good people. Our industry is massively struggling. If we were aware that the job satisfaction you get, you know, I think we could attract a lot of good people away from other areas where they might, you know, get paid the same or more, but she's not feel as good about their life, you know what I mean? So that whole thing just, I'm fascinated with it. Not long after work in the reception desk, Ronan noticed the owner was struggling with the same primary issues. First, the salon was consistently dealing with at least one or two no-shows a week. And over time, this was adding up to a fairly significant loss in revenue. I was the receptionist, so I realized fairly early on that, you know, salons have trouble with no-shows. And like lots of businesses that take appointments, but like basically, you know, if you put his worth 50 euros or $80 for an hour or $100 for an hour, whatever, if somebody doesn't turn up, that hour is gone. But as the owner, I still have to pay some sort of wage, I have to pay my rent, I have to pay my costs on that hour, but it's gone. You know, I can't get it back. The customer might come back, but it's coming back in the future. That's a big problem for a salon. Like, you know, if you just have, like in the case, this salon, like it was losing maybe two appointments a day. Like it was fairly busy place, you know, I might have had 30 or 40 appointments a day, you know, obviously more some days a week, but like two, three appointments out of 30 or 40 doesn't sound like a lot. Like when you're there as a receptionist, that start, like it's like, okay, so someone doesn't turn up, whatever, you don't think about it for two seconds and you move on. Because you're fairly busy, but you add that up, like it adds up to thousands of dollars every month, and maybe 30 or 40,000 dollars in last appointments in a year in one salon. And it, like it was a decent size salon, but it wasn't like the biggest one ever either, you know, sort of really big salon and probably two or three times that smaller one might be half that, but half of that still a lot of money, like $10,000, $20,000 a year. So a lot of money from a small thing that you don't even realize, and if you listen to this, are a salon owner, 20 or 30,000, you know, an extra revenue in a year is life changing because that can, you know, that can. Well, A, you can maybe take that out as cash for yourself or you can reinvest it in your business, like in improving the premises, doing more marketing to get more customers, maybe hiring another staff member or paying a pay rise to the number to make sure they stay. Like there's so much you could do with $20,000, $30,000, like it's a huge amount of money to improve your business or your life, whatever way you want to do it. So, and that's the way that it has every year, you know, with no shows, it's not like that's just this year, it's every year, it's every month. So it was like, wow, could we solve this by sending a text message, which at the time was really a new idea, like text messages, people just started sending each other text messages on their phone only a year or two before. Like it was really new area, text messages was like, cutting edge, you know, it's kind of hard to explain that to people now because it feels so kind of just part of your life. So, you know, all school almost, but like at the time it was cutting edge. So this begs the question, how was forest actually born? Yeah, like it was born over a period of time, it was like a series of like bulb moments over the course of probably two years. Always wanted to have my own business, like even when I was in college, like I was saying earlier and I was working in all these jobs. I was also trying to start companies and businesses all the time as well, none of them went anywhere. You know, so I was always wanted to do that. I just didn't know what it would be. And it was actually working in the salon that I got some ideas of that industry, which I liked. It was like, here's some things we could do. And I had a co-founder guy called Jamie, you know, between us, we got another guy to write the software that would send these appointment reminders. And I was working in the salon, so I was able to send them out, you know, each night by clicking the buttons that, you know, I was writing down the appointments and paper, but also be able to send them messages through the internet, up on dialogue, all that stuff you can imagine. So it was, it was a fast, but it was, it was great because within a month of us doing these reminders every day, cut down her noses by 70%. So instead of having it two to three a day, she was sometimes only having one a day, if that. And like, that was the, the impact that it had. And at the time, if you, if you think about it this way, nobody was really getting text messages. So if you got a message, you took it really seriously. So it was, it was such a good way of doing that, you know, now they still work even today, but they don't work as effectively. And you have other things like deposits and things like that to try and reduce noses, but at the time that worked really well. So, so that was kind of really how far is this born. Now when we were doing that, we didn't, we weren't really thinking, oh, wow, we're going to have, for us today is a salon software product that does, you know, all a salon's business on their appointments to their, you know, the CLI, CRM, the CLI management, their point of sale, their payments. The reporting, their marketing, like, like it's obviously this huge product now. But like, at the time, we didn't see that, I didn't see that we didn't take, oh, wow, we've done these point reminders. It's going to end up with that. But if you look back, you go, like, that's where it started, because we had a bit of software and we're sending these reminders. And so, so I said, that is the point, you know, if you take back, that's the point where far is to really, really started to be born, let's say. Setting up a business takes courage, and it's not always easy. So I asked Ronan, was there any particular struggles he faced getting started? And whether he could describe the moment he knew it was all worth it. Yeah, like, you know, there's a lot of struggles at the start. I mean, we did. So I, like what happened was I left working in that salon fairly soon after, because I knew we, you know, it was clear that other salons wanted to, or what, some version of it. But it was just, like, that sounds like, wow, we did this thing, and then, you know, we wanted it. But it was a slog, like, we, I think we got like 20 salons, or it was 12 or 20 in the first 12 months. So it's not very many. And it's not enough to really pay everyone, you know, three or four people's wages, even. So like, it was, it was tight. Like, I didn't get paid for the first year or two. I was still getting the doll, you know, and stuff like that. And so, like, in so we could pay people to work for us instead, you know, rather than us taking the money. And there's a couple of times we didn't have enough money for payroll. Even though we weren't even paying ourselves, like, and we had to go down to the bank, I remember really clearly me and Jamie go down to the bank to get a 5,000 euros was there, you know, overdraft. So we could pay two people. They were monthly salary. And we had to take a loan out between us to do it. Like, and, you know, you're just like, I don't even know how we got along and have any money, you know what I mean? So it's like, so it's not cut. You know, somehow we convinced the bank to do that. And we, you know, I think we had a sale coming through and we were able to show stuff to try and convince the bank and thank God we did because the whole thing would have folded then there. So we had things like that, you know, and it was stressful. Like, it's funny looking back at it. You're kind of like, oh, well, we did that in that cool. At the time, I was, you know, shitting myself like, you know, so I was just really stressful. You know, weren't sleeping that well, you know, just really, really, like, really affecting you. And in a way, it was lucky that I was kind of young. So I was so young that I didn't really, I didn't have a family or, you know, I don't think I even had a girlfriend or anything. So I didn't, you know, I didn't have like responsibilities, you know, it's just to myself. So I was able to deal with the stress really like I couldn't even imagine having that stress because a lot of people launch businesses later in life, you know, I think the most common age is like 30 or something to launch a business. A lot more in the line, you know, like the mortgages and all that kind of stuff. And you, you have a lot more life experience as well. So you probably make last mistakes, but you, yeah, you don't. So anyway, those things were tough. Like, when did I know it was worth it? I'm not sure I knew it at the time, you know, I knew enough to keep going because each year went by, we'd have more customers than we had the year before. So we were getting somewhere, you know, we knew there was always, the future always looked brighter than the present. So that kind of keeps you going. In 2011, we raised money from investors for the first time. And we hadn't done that for like six, seven years. We just existed hand to mouth for the first six, seven years, which like most businesses, with little bits of a grant from here or there, or, you know, you get the bank, give you a bit of an overview, whatever it was just, we just survived. But then the business is big enough at that point. We probably had five or six hundred clients and we launched in the UK and we, you know, we had 20 people. I think we're working 20, 25 people working for us at that point. And we had a real business, you know, I mean, like each month, we had revenue coming in from all those customers. So you just, you know, like whatever happened, even if you had a bad month, you'd still hit payroll. Like, or you'd be close to it and payroll. So you, you know, you had a real business. And I remember thinking, you know, I real business that other people were prepared to invest in as well. And so it was just like, yeah, I remember just smiling at some point around that time. I go, yeah, this is definitely worth it. Boris Salon software is used by hair, beauty, and clinic professionals worldwide, freeing teams up to focus on their passion and business success, more creativity, less admin. And non globally for providing the best salon marketing tools, Boris now touches every point of the salon experience from custom salon apps, online bookings and stock control through to e-commerce and payments. It's like a series of light bulb moments of like, say, the first one was, wow, we can use technology to solve the problem with the point of reminders, which is fantastic. But the next light bulb moment, which is a story I can tell you now is really where you'd say, that's forest because like after this, we pretty much it's still doing this today in some form. And it's to do with marketing basically what happened was we got all the phone numbers from people to do these important reminders. So we were building up this database of like 1000 phone numbers. But we weren't thinking of it that way, but that's effectively what was happening by taking someone's number sending them a reminder. We had their name and their number in a database. And so as everyone knows, pre-COVID, at least, you know, used to be really basically coming up to the holidays or Christmas time or that time, you know, in December, because everybody, you know, goes out to have their holiday party and work or in whatever, you know, school or whatever it is. It's all that. So people go out to the, everyone goes out, goes and goes to the salon and that run up to the end of December. And so every salon is really, really busy. But then in January, you know, it's the hangover after the holidays and obviously it's traditionally anyway. It's the quietest period of the year because everybody's got no money left and also there's no parties and everyone's been depressed and nobody's going out. And then like it's obviously picks starts to pick up again towards the end of February, going into March and the weather's getting better and you know, things like that. So this is my first experience working in salon. So like I was learning all of this, you know, at the time, but I came back from Christmas, the Christmas holidays here and came into salon and, you know, like the appointment book was empty, like it was hardly anything in it. You know, it's kind of like a bit of a panic for a salon owner because they're looking at it and they're kind of going, oh my god, do you know what I mean? I feel appointments and what are we going to do? You know, everyone knows that nobody wants to really go out and think so, you know, it's kind of hard to think what would happen. And she basically, you know, gave me the task, you know, as the reset, you know, person to the band in the front desk and all like to come up with something. What we did was we get Jamie and co-founder help with this as well, like we came up with this idea is basically we've got all these phone numbers. Why don't we send out a marketing text or like to those numbers? And how we worked it was that we would do a promotion and like in a nutshell, basically there was a new product range coming out. I mean, we were able to get travel sizes of the products. And so, the shampoo is the dishes. And so basically what we did was we sent out this message saying, if you book an appointment this month will give you a complimentary shampoo and conditioner. So we didn't even discount it. And that's really important because first, a whole thing around marketing for salons is not to discount to do added value. And so that was the first time we ever did that. So we sent out this text. And like I'll always remember it because like we sent out the text message and, you know, it went out a couple of minutes later, nothing had happened. And then the phone rang and I answered the phone. And as they were saying, I've just got this text and those sort of booking them in. And as I was doing that, the phone was ringing. I can hear it. Like, you know, there was another line called trying to get in. So it seems I put it down and picked it up again. And I can hear another one in the background. And literally I was just like, I didn't stop talking for five hours as just booking an appointment. And so we only had one phone. So like it all came through there. And it was just like crazy. Over the course of the whole promotion, we sent out one text message. And we basically she was booked out for the entire month of January and going into February. Even though it was only meant to be for the month of January. So it was an amazing result. And people were like, like people were like, well, you only sent out five messages. Like, what happened was people were just forwarding the message to each other. Like to friends, you've never been to the salon because it's just such a new novel taking to get. But like, that was where far is born. And that's like your light bulb moment when the phones not stop ringing. And after you've brought caught your breath for a second to go to the bathroom or something, you know, just to have a break. You're like, this is amazing. That's far as like that's using technology in the salon to get them busier using, you know, the numbers that we're collecting anyway. So you're collecting the numbers from the day today, making an appointment. You're using that information to do marketing to them. That's far as like, we have salons get the clients back in more often spending more like that's basically what every salon owner in the world wants, you know, you want to have your customers spending more money with you. So it's less like, it does that. And that's everything we've done. Like, we've loyalty programs, you know, we make branded apps, we do huge email campaign systems that people can do, you know, AI that's sort of coming up with slots that are available for different people. And on and on and online rep change, make sure they rank higher on Google and all the things that forest does now from a marketing point of view, using the information that we've collected in the system to market their business and help make sure they're busier. So in a way, what we did that day is, you know, but it's not 20 years yet, the 17 years, whatever it is, we're still doing the same things. And in some way, and the idea is any smaller, like, you know, we were there to help provide these marketing help, marketing tools in a basic simple form for any salon owner can start getting up and running, get our launch program going, get our newsletter is going out, like sure she's ranking higher on Google, make sure she's got better online booking systems, like just do all that stuff. And you will have a better business, like, you know, so that's kind of where the, the drive comes from, from them. Amazing. Well, you hinted at a few milestones there. My next question is what have been the key milestones for forest from setting up all the way through to what it has become today? Yeah, so you're right. I have kind of mentioned a few there. So yeah, I would say the first two milestones are what I've done doing the appointment reminders and that SMS campaign in that January of the salon. That's forest came from those two things. So they're the two milestones. And then it was about even when we went out, we just had an appointment software at the start. So we just sold the appointment software with reminders on it. We didn't have anything else. It didn't become a full salon software until 2005. It was about like a year later after going full-time on it. And that and basically what that was was like, we had a point to sail and appointments combined. I mean, it was very basic to what, you know, salon software is today, but it was like, we had a thing that a salon could run their business on effectively at the front desk around 2005. So that was kind of big, you know, and then we, that's what we were selling from then on. You know, we weren't selling the parts anymore. We're just selling that to salons. And we did pretty well over about four years, you know, got good few hundred salons doing it. And then we launched in the UK 2009. So like milestone, because like Ireland, it's a smaller country, you know, you're never going to have an international, you know, if you just stay in Ireland, the potential for a business like this is quite limited. And so obviously launching the UK, certainly it's like 10 times as big a market, but also like 10 times as many competitors and, you know, lots of other challenges. That's a big milestone. And like once we did that, forest grew a lot because even though the Irish market was declining at the time, because there was a huge recession on. We were more than making up for it with the UK, so it's just suddenly like where we're in the UK, then it's you start to think where we can go beyond the UK, there's such a huge opportunity out there. In 2010, we launched online booking for the first time, and that's obviously such a big part of the industry. And you need to have someone suffer if you're going to do online booking and obviously at the time, no one really booked online, but it's become, you know, it's not even a debate now, obviously. And then 2011, what I mentioned earlier, when we raised money for the first time from investors and that allowed us to really build a much brighter version of our product and invest in hiring some more people into the company. And with I just living hand to my full time, where we could only hire someone who read made enough money the previous one. We could never go like, well, next year we want to do X, here's the money, you know, it wasn't a huge amount of money, but it was like compared to what we'd had at that point, it was huge. So that was a big mind shift because when you start thinking more long term, unless in the short term, you're working on the business as opposed to in it, you've heard the cliche, everyone's heard it, like, but just your business really does start to take off when you do that. But I'm really glad that I didn't do that from the start, like, you know, part of me is like some people said, like if you just raised money like seven years earlier, you could have moved much faster. It's true. And like this competitors of ours, like in every industry who've raised money from the start, and they've gone way faster than us in the early days. But what I learned in those early days is I learned a lot about myself. We are a team. We, you know, we learned a huge amount about the industry, like I, apart from just working in the salon, I was like meeting salon owners every day. So by the time we'd raised money, I'd probably visited 2,000 salons, like, I had incredible like knowledge, like, you know, about the industry and an empathy towards it and connection and things like that, which is really important. And gives you a kind of purpose. Using that money, we raised that, we launched Forest Cloud. So we moved into the cloud in 2012 and then the product was just much better than it was before. We had all these social media marketing things and we had a Facebook thing where you can get more Facebook likes. It doesn't really work for a few years at the time, but it was huge because Facebook was just taking off as a market too for salons. And so we kind of plugged into that. And then we launched in Finland in 2013 and the US in 2014, which obviously what's become our biggest market now. You know, we weren't there weren't big launches or whatever, but the quicker you get in and over a few years, you start to get going. We held our first summit in 2015, so we said that was like, that's six years ago, seven years ago now, whoa. It's a long time. I mean, I think we only had five, but we obviously missed because of the COVID, but that was a huge because like that first one, we only had like 150 people in the room, but it was just really lovely. We had all these clients that been with us for years, loads of people I'd met going around selling forest 10 years earlier, all in the room. And they kind of, they'd kind of been on the journey with us. And we just felt a huge debt, a gratitude to them, but also like, you know, proud of having helped them as well. And it was just a really nice feeling for everyone. That's, you know, the first summit and all the summit then thereafter. Obviously they got bigger and people started coming from all around the world and stuff. But just, it was a real milestone, you know. So we definitely want to get back to that. You know, we're going to, you know, next year again. And then we launched in Germany and Australia in 2017, two markets that are flying for far. I mean, we've nearly 2000 customers now in both in those two markets, which is amazing. I mean, it took us 15 years to get to 2000 customers, like in total. And we've done it in just those two markets alone, just amazing. And then launching forest pay in the US in 2018. So that would have been, you know, payment terminals where the credit card processing is linked to the software, which we're now in the process of rolling out everywhere around the world. And like just the way that's all gone where payments become such a huge thing for the customer experience in the salon, you know, where they can just use a card on files and things like that. And just making the online booking process and the visiting process so much slicker and easier, helps the salon collect more revenue. You know, it's just, it's sort of a win-win all around. So that's been a big milestone. And then I'd say the final big one would be being in the last year was that we've had someone called Paolo Burguti and someone else called Jana Renert joined our board in the last six months. And Paolo is the CEO of Daveness, which is a huge and comfort zone, which are two big premium brands, haircare and color and beauty product brands. And then Jana Renert is the founder and chairwoman of Image Skincare, which I think is pretty much the biggest professional skincare range in the world, or one of the top two or three. So two massive people in the industry really passionate about salons, been working in the industry for decades, and had achieved huge things. You know, if ethics is a really big part of what they do, you know, Daveness is a huge social and environmental constitution, or got its core as a business. You know, so people who have built businesses in a really nice way, in a good way, in a really long term way, have a huge foreset about the industry, and to have people like that on the board now, you know, we have conversations that are really, really high level. And when you think about where farce can go with that kind of expertise, it's really exciting. When you work at a company, there's always at least one moment in time that you hold really close to heart, some special memory, but as a founder, and I'm sure any owner listening to this can relate, there's so many of these moments. And when I asked Ronin what one moment in force history he'll always hold close to heart, this is what he said. So, you know, when you ask this question, what jumps into my head first, it's not really good, anything to do with the business, but it's about the team, and back it since 2014 or 2015, we, as a big activity for the team, I think there's about 30, 40 people in the team at the time. Rather than us go off and do a day's, offsite somewhere and do paintballing or something, we thought we'd do try and do something good, and so if there was a senior home, you might say in the States, not that far from the offsite, like a milder two from the office, and it's in the Phoenix Park, it's called St Mary's, it's really well known in Ireland. It's a slightly neglected place, they have loads of amazing grounds around it, but they're all kind of overgrown and stuff like that, or they were at the time. So, we said that we would go and take one of these fields basically, or rather, like an old garden and redo it over the course, and we did it over two days. The whole team just went out, it was in May or June, and it was like the weather was lovely, you know, it was like 20, 25 degrees, and we just worked all day for two days, laying all the lawns and the flowers and building the fences and painting everything and just make it really nice. At the end of that day, I just had the best feeling of ever heart. Everyone who's there, like, feel the same about that day, all the old folks came out and, you know, were enjoying the garden, and they'd been teasing us a bit when we were doing it as well. You know, like they're good crack, they're, you know, they're like, what are they doing or whatever, but then they, you know, they're preset as well. But they, you know, they came out and they enjoyed them, but we, like, it was for them, like, we're doing it for them, but we're also kind of, we got this incredibly good feeling ourselves, and then we're just, we're all sitting around, and we're having a beer in the lawn, and then we went down to a pub that you walked through Speaks Park and walked 20 minutes away, and we went to a pub there. And I'll just never forget it, like, I just, like, loads of people that were there, like, you know, Barry Quinn and Sarah Martin and all these people, you know, Rob Norton. Like, so many people are still here and for us, and they all, you know, we all kind of shared that. And just, I'm never, and then every year after we did another garden the next year, and then we did, and we organized a dance for some old folks in another time. And we've, we try to do something each year. We haven't been able to the last couple years now with COVID, but it's always, yeah, just, I'll always remember that for us in my life, just, it was great feeling. Alongside of that, forces always had a passion for environmental issues. We've a vision to leave the environment and industry in a better place for generations to come. Now, we know that even small changes have a big impact on our planet. So in 2019, forest made an official statement of intent to take action on the climate emergency by establishing the forest CSR team and focusing on four areas in which we drive our green initiatives. Yeah, so I would say there's the industry itself. There's our workplace like how we work in forest. There's kind of things we can volunteer on, and then there's things we can fundraise for. So that would be the four things. Everything about the industry, back in 2009, pre-COVID, we held the first sustainability event in the UK and Ireland called Conscious Hair and Beauty, which was like an event like the so much or whatever, smaller, obviously, but just where we had people talking about practical advice and how you could have an impact for salons that wanted to really take environment more seriously, which is increasing all the time. And we also work with different organisations now in different countries that do this similar thing. So this green circle salons in the US, which is basically they enable salons to collected this green circle fee from the clients, which then goes to making sure that all the waste in the salon is dealt with properly because there's a lot of chemicals, obviously, and hair care products and things like that, imagine. And that's a 10, 400 different things used. So just means the waste is collected properly and stuff like that. There's a green salon collective in the UK, which is something similar. I mean, they're all a little bit different from each other, but it's the same concept. It's all about disposing of the waste in a proper way. So that's, you know, there are kind of some of the things that we can do in the industry. There are sustainable practices that they introduce and help salons with. And then in 2009, we also invited sounds around the world to take part in the first paperless pledge, which is basically where you go paperless in the salon for a week and going to be working on that again as well. In our workplace, there's a lot of people are pretty passionate about this, so you know that. So, you know, like the year or two before COVID, we've been doing stuff for the ocean clean-up. And so we did things where like everyone had forest to go out, clean up a beach nearby, because we've people all around the world now. So we did beaches in the States. We did beaches in Finland and Australia and Ireland and England and everything. And that was cool. And then we, you know, raised money for the ocean clean-up project as well, which is to get rid of all the plastic in those huge garbage patches and the Pacific and stuff like that. I think we raised over 10, 2019 just from staff like just for that. And we've got the forest businesses running a really environmental way. We've got, we put a lot of solar panels up on the HQ. Obviously we weren't in the HQ last couple of years, but still all there. So we're carbon neutral at forest, because like not only the electricity usage of our main offices all provided by solar panels and things like that. But we work with this company that means that we have this forest in the center of Ireland, where we plant trees every year. And those trees obviously have produced our carbon footprint as well. And we're a planning member of Irish Tech goes carbon neutral, which is a bunch of tech companies in Ireland who do a lot of work around like planting trees and different things to help raise awareness for all that. So do loads of things like that. And then, you know, yeah, like I think we offset 615 tons of carbon in 2019 just from the trees that we planted. We're just pretty cool. And then the more trees we planted here, as they grow bigger as well, they soak in more carbon and stuff like that. You know, as the years go by, it gets more and more effective. Yeah, and then like obviously we were kind of moving more towards a hybrid remote working practice. I mean, so we used to work in the office in Dublin, you know, live in Montreal. So you're an example of that. So we've more and more, we were kind of going that way anyway, as you know. But like that's obviously accelerated over the last few years. And so we're not, you know, the office we have now can support a much bigger company because we're not really working in there. So, you know, people work from home, less driving around, you know, it's all, you know, that all helps as well. Regists are impacting the environment. And so, yeah, so I think that's like, there's more as well, but that's just the stuff that's on my head. But hoping to do a lot more around it, you know, I'm really into this, but like, you know, my wife works in environmental justice as well. I kind of big on to it in my eyes, but it's touching everyone now. And like in forest, like there's the more people that join the company, you know, on the hand. The ones that join you now are more into it than say the guys that joined five years ago. So it's just building the momentum around that. We say this all the time, but it's true. Forest is more than just a technology company. We're proud to be a life force for our industry. Our system helps businesses to manage market and grow, not just through innovation and technology, but through mentoring, education and unarrivaled support. I'm really proud of the industry, like I was, you know, I didn't know much about this industry working in it, but I'm really proud of all the clients we have. You know, they're really resilient bunch, like they really do a lot to set up a business, employ people, train people, help their clients, you know, give their clients feel special. We could talk all the way back to the beginning, the way people go into a salon or a spa, really looking forward to going in there. It's because, you know, the owner is built that up and the staff that work there, you know, make that true. You know, so I'm really proud of them. I'm just really proud that so many of them want to work with us. And I'm proud that we're able to obviously make a difference for them. I hope that the reason that we've so many of them using us, because they get value from forest, and that we help them grow their business, and we help them get their clients back in more often, which is really what it all started as. We empower and inspire salon spa and clinic owners to grow fantastic businesses, while attracting and delighting loyal clients, and talented staff. Born on the salon floor, bread to help you thrive. Thanks for listening to Forest FM. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. As always, you can head over to forest.com/fm to catch all the latest from the show, as well as check out all the links and resources mentioned throughout the episode. And if you've got any feedback, be sure to let us know. Send us an email at [email protected]. Brought to you by Forest Salon Software. Forest FM episodes air weekly, sharing inspiring stories from the salon floor and amplifying community voices all over the globe. In your salon, we're at the heart of it. This episode was edited and mixed by audio Z, Montreal's cutting-edge post-production studio for creative minds looking to have their vision professionally produced and mixed. Great music? Makes great moments!