chair-and-room-utilization

name	chair-and-room-utilization
description	Read the salon/spa as a stack of perishable chair-hours and room-hours. Compute utilization (productive hours booked / available), test whether current capacity is full before adding a chair, room, or provider, and tie utilization to the staffing model and demand pattern.

Chair & Room Utilization

Utilization is the master metric of a service-chair business. The inventory is chair-hours (salon/barbershop) and treatment-room-hours (spa) — perishable, finite, and impossible to warehouse. This skill reads that inventory honestly.

The loop

1. Define the denominator. Productive hours available = chairs/rooms x staffed hours x days, net of realistic breaks and turnover time. Overstating availability flatters utilization and hides the gap.
2. Compute utilization. Utilization = productive hours booked / productive hours available. Read it by chair, by provider, by daypart, and by day of week — the average hides the empty Tuesday morning and the overbooked Saturday.
3. Diagnose the gap before spending. A half-full book is a demand or scheduling problem, not a capacity problem. Traverse toward the pricing tree in ../../knowledge/salon-spa-decision-trees.md — a demand-based menu fills the empty daypart. Treat benchmark utilization targets as [verify-at-use].
4. Only then size capacity. Add a chair, room, or provider when the existing inventory runs full at peak and demand overflows — with the staffing-model and payback implication named. See ../compensation-models-commission-vs-booth-rent/SKILL.md.

Metrics

Metric	Reads	Note
Chair / room utilization	booked productive hrs / available	The master metric; read by daypart, not just average
Revenue per available chair-hour	service revenue / available hrs	Catches the low-mix full book
Peak vs off-peak split	Saturday vs Tuesday-morning fill	Demand-based pricing target
Provider productivity	booked hrs / scheduled hrs per provider	Staffing-model input

Anti-patterns

• Reading only the average utilization and missing the empty daypart.
• Adding a chair or room to fix what is a fill-rate problem.
• Counting a full but low-margin book as "at capacity."
• Staffing to peak Saturday all week.

See also

• ../retail-attach-and-service-mix/SKILL.md — mix tilts revenue per chair-hour.
• Best practice: ../../best-practices/price-the-menu-on-time-and-demand.md.
• Template: ../../templates/salon-kpi-dashboard.md.