Alan Forrest Smith – författare

I''m not sure why you''d want to read this book.

I can''t make any great claims of taking over the hairdressing world or winning endless hairdressing awards. I never had fifty stylists breaking endless records and I never had a salon that turned over millions in pounds in haircuts or hairdressing services.

Yet looking back at my 17-years as a salon owner I feel did do something pretty amazing in my own little world of hairdressing that you as a salon owner can look at and feel inspired by.

Before I did that amazing little thing I had to accept this one thing about my life as a hairdresser and salon owner. It was this.

Being a great hairdresser was and will never enough to create a successful hairdressing business. It just isn''t. Your great and successful salon business only arrives when you begin letting the public know you are a great hairdresser with a great salon.

It''s about knowing; managing, aiming, pushing, directing and marketing your salon in ways that could cost you nothing and give you everything. It''s also about finding and using systems that are actually proven to work and work fast in a salon like yours.

And I know that because I''ve done that for many salons as a mentor and also done that for my own salons between 1989 and 2003.

I know for an absolute certainty that there are powerful things that must be done daily to make sure you have a hair salon business that is a success and that in turn gives you a much happier life. Happiness comes from doing the things in life you really feel the need to do. Your salon business either supports that or might actually be preventing that because of the lack of results.

If you are not making enough money or unable to cover your bills or pay your stylists or even unable to pay yourself - you''ll have a huge problem and that huge problem will make you unhappy with your life. A lack of money when you''re working hard can be a real killer. Yet it is fixable and can be fixed fast.

I had to slowly and sometimes painfully learn the art of turning my salon into a real business. A business that could give me the kind of life I wanted. The life I wanted then was really a life built around a young family that needed to be fed, looked after and nourished. I had to create a business that would do just that. That''s exactly what I eventually did. I could not afford for it to fail. Failure for me really meant no food on the table that really was my personal bottom line.

Eventual success in my salons gave me the ability to build my own stunning five-bedroomed converted barn on a farm, have around a one acre plot of garden with it''s own orchard and space for my kids to play around and have the time and money to be able to live a more enhanced life as a hairdresser.  

I made mistakes, plenty of them. Some mistakes were huge and almost cost me my salon and salons on more than one occasion. I will share those stories with you as you read along.

Yet, after 17-years with my salons and the hairdressing business I discovered, learned, uncovered, and found some of the most incredible ways to make sure not only did we all stay busy but the phone rang constantly, the appointment book was packed and we even had a long list of clients waiting for a last minute appointment. This was an incredible achievement for a school dropout, ex-landscape gardener, and punk rocker to hit the top slot in a town of 35 very established salons.

Anyway, be sure of this. Whatever you are going through in your salon right now is pretty normal. Even the salon stars of this world have troubles and issues that would leave you jaw-dropped in total disbelief if you knew them. I know, I''ve worked with some of these guys and seen it firsthand in the biggest to the smallest of salons. It is normal. It is fixable and can be fixed faster than you will know right now. 

Today''s date is November 16th, 2021. I am writing to you at exactly 21:51 pm. It''s

pitch black outside. The only thing I have heard is two large foxes that play and fight

outside almost every night. It feels the same, but the reality is right now life isn''t the

same.

The thoughts in this book are expanded thoughts I had written over the period of

the pandemic. There are also some fictional stories based on real events. There are also

a rambling or two of words some will call poetry, but I simply call them some thoughts

I am having so I write them as I think them.

It''s just a few months short of two years since this pandemic began. Even as I write

this to you the politicians can change their thinking on a daily basis. Mostly their

thinking has been specifically designed to add human fear to push compliance. If this

was ever a pandemic of health that ended a long time ago. This is now a pandemic of

power where career and salvationist politicians feel they have almost touched death,

and appear to feel they have the gift of life in their hands. They don''t.

But this book isn''t really about those people in control. It is about something much

bigger, something more powerful and something that directly affects you and me. That

something is an idea and how that idea like the smallest seeds can become the biggest

of trees.

I also wanted to mention that it is so easy for us all to accept what is going on, accept

the changes and go with the flow. That is appearing to be a mistake that could cost you,

me, us all dearly. These are not times to let go of what humans fought over for

millenniums. That thing is freedom to do the things we need to do to be happy free

people. Freedoms to travel the world, the freedom of choice and something as simple

as sitting in a coffee shop. Incredibly as I write to you today Austria have decided to

divide their nation into two parts. They now have two ''legal'' classes of citizens. The

clean and the unclean, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. As I edit this book Austria

have also announced that the unvaccinated will face jail if they refuse to get vaccinated

by February 1st. Can they really throw over two million citizens into jail? It looks as

though Germany is heading the same perverse way. Police can be seen everywhere

checking the papers of everyone on the streets or any location outside a private home.

This is not a time for lovers of truth and freedom to relax. If this shocking change can

happen in countries like those it might be coming to you.

I used to be a hairdresser. Now I make my money writing.

It’s a coffee shop sized read. It reveals my whole journey into the world of writing great copy (accidentally).

If you want more response with your copy, you should probably read it.

If you want to become a copywriter. You should definitely read it.

If you are a copywriter and want to go into another level, just grab the book and stop playing around.

I walked out of school at 15-years old with no grades of any sort and no options so I dug holes in the ground for three or so years and put trees into those holes. 

I eventually became a hairdresser with a salon in a working-class mining town in Lancashire, England. At some point in my life, I ended up speaking on stages with Jay Abraham, Jay Conrad Levinson, and many other super-stars of the world of business, copywriting and marketing. Yeah, really!

I’ve been flown around the planet at least half a dozen times to teach strategic business (something I have never been taught.) 

I’ve even sat with the rich and famous including well-known Hollywood stars and British TV stars. I even spent two weeks in the middle of the Amazonian jungle because of my writing adventures. I wrote some stuff that raised around $100k. I gave it away to an Amazonian fundraiser. They, in turn, insisted I fly to Ecuador and then into the heart of the jungle to see how this was being spent. I went, I loved it, it was crazy!

I’ve even sat in with some of the U.K.s biggest corporate companies and have been asked to give advice, tear down internal marketing teams and rebuild them into small power-houses. Crazy stuff!

And I started doing that whilst I was still a full-time working hairdresser.

I’ve had no formal copywriting training or ever taken a course in my life. I’ve had no paid living mentors to guide me. I never paid more than I should for any book on the subject. I never once read a book from start to end on copy. I just read what I needed to know to get the job done. That’s never changed.

I want you to know this. I’m not the incredible John Caples. I truly wish I was David Ogilvy. I am nowhere near as good as copywriters like the brilliant self-styled antagonist copywriter Clayton Makepeace or the gentle Michel Fortin.

I’m just an accidental copywriter. I fell into the whole thing. I had no idea what is was or what I was doing. I just write stuff. And I suppose I took the time to think about what I wanted to say and then wrote down what I was thinking. Sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does make sense every word can carry some kind of weird hypnotic power that gets readers to react or respond. 

I’m still not sure how I do it, but I do it.

And at heart, I’m an old punk finding his way in life but seems to have found his way so many times it can read pretty hard to believe.

And one more little fact. I started writing Ads for my businesses in 1985. I had never heard of the term ‘copywriting’ until the late 90s at the earliest.

All I knew was that little punk track got my attention with its title and cover. That’s what I had to do with my ads. Get attention and encourage the reader to act.

For a self-employed guy like myself, I had no option - it had to work despite what little I knew; it just had to work. I wanted out of hairdressing at some point and this was just one option that worked.

So here are a handful of tales and stories as I remember them. I hope you enjoy and feel inspired at some level.

Are you ready to read my ridiculous and sometimes outrageous but true stories of the accidental copywriter?