To provide a behind-the-scenes view into the Meevo 2 conversion process, we sat down with Co-Owner of the award-winning Mango Salons, Patrick Heaney. Pat has been an MSI client for nearly 20 years, using our Millennium salon software until converting to Meevo 2 in 2018.
Check out our Q&A with Pat to get his insights into what it’s like to upgrade from Millennium to Meevo 2, his long-time relationship with John Harms and MSI, and how Meevo 2 has exceeded his expectations to help his business grow.
1) What has your relationship with MSI meant to you and your business over the years?
Pat: I’m very grateful, and our whole team is very grateful. My wife and I own Mango Salons, and the times we’ve been able to work with John Harms, Bob Maconi, and Andy Clark have been very gratifying because we’ve been a Millennium user for, gosh, over 16 years. I met John at a Salon Strategies conference many, many years ago, when only several people worked for Millennium.
But what makes your company so great are the support people. I could go through a list of people that have helped us out over the years and that kind of support you don’t often see. That’s why the relationship for us works so well because our team members at Mango have gotten to know your people when we call in for help and support.
Meevo 2 is just so important to our operation in the way we deliver our services to our clients and our guests. Having people behind the software to help us with these things is really important to us.
The service mentality runs throughout your culture. And I know it starts with John and Andy and Bob and all the other great people in your organization. You folks have a service-oriented mentality, just like we do in our companies. So, for us, the cultures match up really well.
Also, I’m always talking about the great job that you folks did to help our company survive through two things. First, opening three salons in about two and a half years. We could never have done it without Meevo 2.
And secondly, surviving during COVID-19. We could not have done it if we didn’t have the software that you folks provide us. There is no way we could have operated without Meevo 2 and your support during COVID-19.
I guess the keyword for us is we’re very grateful for our relationship.
2) Why did you decide to make the move from Millennium to Meevo 2?
Pat: Oh, yeah, that’s an easy question. The reason why we wanted to migrate to Meevo 2 is that we were planning our future, we had used Millennium for quite a few years, and we operate multiple salons. Because of the required software and hardware maintenance, operating costs were increasing every year, especially when it came to the hardware.
So we wanted to move into the cloud world. We felt like the cloud path was where we needed to go as a business. That really drove our decision as our company was growing, and cloud solutions are more future-proof than traditional software like Millennium, where you had the enterprise solution sitting on servers.
And of course, we had a lot of confidence in your team because of your years of experience in the salon industry. We didn’t want to purchase another cloud enterprise solution in the salon industry because we knew that John Harms, Bob Maconi, Andy Clark, and the whole team at Millennium had so much salon expertise. We knew you could support us with cloud-based software.
Meevo 2 has turned out to be so, so superior to Millennium. It has been a really nice transition for us.
3) What stood out about your conversion experience that helped ease concerns about transitioning to Meevo 2?
Pat: I never really had serious concerns, and here’s why. We were under the gun to open new salons, and we had to migrate our whole Millennium enterprise solution and all the data over to the Meevo 2 platform. So for us, it wasn’t about should we do it? We knew we had to do it for the future of our salons.
We had a great deal of confidence in the Project Team that Millennium assigned to us, who helped us make the transition to Meevo 2.
We had about four or five people in our company that worked closely with people like Mike Del Vecchio and others at MSI who are amazing and did a great job. So, any of the concerns I might have had were resolved by working together with the project team.
Of course, for anyone migrating software, the big concern is pulling all the data over. Since we were one of the early users of Meevo 2, we had to manually enter some data. What was good about that is we knew our data was getting old, as over 15 years your data ages and errors arise in your database. So, there was an opportunity for us to clean it all up.
Since we have converted to Meevo 2, your team has done a great job of improving the process and how you help transfer the data from Millennium over to Meevo 2.
But it takes a lot of time to make sure your data is cleaned up properly. Because when you make the transfer over to using Meevo 2, you want to ensure your database is accurate and clean, especially your client database, your employee database, your services, your products – all of that data that comes over to Meevo 2. You want to make sure it’s accurate and clean, and it’s working well before you go live.
4) What improvements has your multi-location business seen since going live with Meevo 2?
Pat: I think Meevo 2 is always improving with all the new product releases. And I knew when we were migrating that there would be some hurdles, some options in Millennium that wouldn’t quite work the same way in Meevo 2. But what we’ve discovered is a lot of the capabilities of Meevo 2 are far superior to Millennium.
For example, the appointment booking capabilities are far superior in Meevo 2 than they were in Millennium, especially for multi-location businesses.
Another significant difference, which is I think a major enhancement, are the Smart Center tiles. You can customize Smart Center tiles to different groups in your company, which really helps save time and improve the spa booking software.
We had confidence that the capabilities of Meevo 2 would surpass what we had with Millennium, and I know we have exceeded all the different things that a salon needs to do thanks to moving to the cloud with Meevo 2.