I have a home salon so my door is locked and I don’t have a waiting area. I also feel strongly that my clients shouldn’t ever feel rushed so I leave 30 mins between bookings which gives me time to do a thorough consultation, give clients time to get dressed, for us to have a little chat after, make further bookings/retail products and of course gives me time to clean and set up. I do also get some clients turning up early so think I’d really struggle to reduce the time - although I do sometimes have to ask clients to wait in their car when I still have the previous client in.
I only do facials/peels/massage/waxing now so all require quite a bit of tidying/set up in between but when I did nails and worked in high street salons/spas we often used to work back to back. This was ok for nails as not much to sort out but was a nightmare for other treatments. You constantly felt under pressure and always ran late as you couldn’t possibly do consultation, get client on and off the bed, out and paid/rebooked whilst giving the client the full treatment time! Some salons I’ve worked in we used to leave 15 mins between massage/facial bookings which was a big help.
I don’t have a limit on number of clients a day except for massage - I wouldn’t do more than 4 hours in a day.
I would definitely aim to give a higher quality service by not rushing clients and set your prices so you can afford to do this.