33. Could YOU be the reason your salon isn't more successful?

Hi everyone, this is the weekly Build Your Salon podcast with me, Phil Jackson. I'm here with the tools you need to generate the profits you deserve so that you can lead a fuller life. Hello and welcome and today I want to talk to you about how your own brain might be restricting your success and the bit of our brain that's to blame is very, very ancient and its role in prehistoric times was to keep us safe. So it's the bit of the brain that fired off every time it heard a very loud bang that was unexplained, or every time it came across a saber-toothed tiger, or every time you looked in the back of your cave and realised that winter is coming and that you've only got two stakes left from that lovely pig that you found in the forest. So this bit of your brain was there to protect you, to keep you safe. The problem is, what's happened over time is that bit of our brain is still there, but it doesn't really relate to modern life anymore. There aren't many of us that are threatened with saber-toothed tigers on a regular basis, so this bit of the brain still has a use, but what it's done is latched on to the anxieties and the pressures and the worries of modern life. Now, that's fine, and it still keeps us safe in a lot of instances, but there aren't many of us that are that far from hunger. For most of us, two or three clicks on the internet and our hunger problems are taken care of, so this bit of our brain is firing off when it doesn't really need to. In a business sense, what it's doing is occasionally restricting your success by stopping you taking opportunities that are outside what we now refer to as our comfort zone. Let me tell you a little story about a customer of mine who was a coaching client for a little while, and we had a conversation online last week about recruitment, because I've just put the finishing touches to a recruitment product, and I'm sure I will sneak in a link to that somewhere in the description. And I asked my friend to go through the product for me and just check all the videos and the downloads and make sure the links were working correctly, which she did. And then we entered into a conversation about recruitment in her own salon. She's got a fantastic business and it's quite a new business. And she's just finished a recruitment process in her own salon, but she'd been approached ad hoc by two stylists that were looking for work. And my friend was going to pass up this opportunity to take on two more staff. Now I know from our coaching conversations previously that growth is very important to my friend. As part of her long-term and medium-term success, she's got a lot of growing to do.

And she wants to get into multiple salons over a number of years. So there was a bit of an alarm bell that went off in my head and I called her on it. I said that I don't think the reasons she was giving for not recruiting were quite as genuine as they could have been. She was saying that she was worried that she couldn't get this new member of the team busy. So I said, well, I don't really think that's the case. Yours is quite a new salon and you've got lots of new clients coming in. She's very lucky in that way. I said, I think there's one of three things going on here. Either you're afraid that you can't get her busy, which I doubt because we've got all these new customers coming through the door. Or you're worried about the money side of things, which again, didn't quite ring true for me because I know that my friend knows how to recruit very carefully and that she will also set very clear targets for her team. So it's not actually a big financial risk if she takes on an extra stylist. Or the third fear I think that might be at play is this stylist who'd approached her was very experienced and very accomplished. And I said, I think there might be a bit of fear that you don't quite know how to manage talent like that because the rest of my friend's team is very young. And we stopped the conversation about that because she's not paying me as a mentor anymore. So it wasn't really my job to dig any deeper. But what I want you to do is have a look at your business situations and the alarm bell should start ringing for you. If there is a disconnect between the goals that you've set for yourself and the goals that you've set for your business and the decision that you're making, have a look at that situation a lot closer and figure out whether it's your comfort zone that is at play. Now there is a very simple technique that I've learnt to overcome problems with comfort zone. So what I want you to do is this. And actually it's a really worthwhile exercise even if you don't feel like you've got a problem. So as soon as we finish this video I want you to go away and do this quick exercise. Take a piece of paper and at the top of it write down your salon's turnover for the last 12 months. Now what I want you to do is add 10% to that figure. If you're already on target to hit more than 10% because your business is new or you've just suddenly undergone quite rapid expansion then go for 20% instead. And I want you to mind map in quite some detail what it would take for you to hit that extra 10% turnover target.

Now I'm not necessarily suggesting we're going to put any of these strategies in place. This is just a mental exercise because the brain isn't very good at differentiating between what's actually happening in the world around us and what we can conceptualise. So what we're doing, we're taking that little bit of paranoid brain, that very ancient part of our brain, and we're stretching its boundaries slightly so that it doesn't find things that we haven't encountered already quite so overwhelming. Once you've done that mind map in quite, and I mean quite some detail, so that you really know what you would have to do to hit that 10 or 20% target, I want you to repeat the exercise. This time we're going to repeat it with a 50% increase. Go through the process again. What would you have to do? I'm not saying that you want to, but what would you have to do in your life and in your business to increase your turnover by 50%? And guess what? Once we've done that, I want you to double it. What would you have to do to double your turnover in the next 12 months? If you're finding this all too easy, go for 10 times. What would you have to do to do 10 times turnover? Now, at some stage, you will start to hit some resistance. You will start to go beyond the realms of your understanding and comprehension, and you will start to shrug and go, actually, I just don't know how we would get there. What you've done there is started to measure the boundary of your comfort zone as far as your business is concerned. Go through the exercise. It can be really powerful. Now, if you've got a growth target of, say, 5% or 10% next year, once you've mind mapped what you need to do for 50%, suddenly those decisions that you need to make for 10% seem a lot less scary. What we've done is started to tame some of those voices that are feeding into our paranoia and restricting our potential success. I hope that's been useful to you. If it has, please subscribe now. I put content like this out every single Monday, and I would hate you to miss out on the things that I'm sharing. In the meantime, please also keep in touch with me, phil at buildyoursalon.uk, or head over to the Build Your Salon Facebook page. Until next week, take care. Hey everyone, it's Phil again. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, please subscribe and be sure to tell your friends. For more help and information on running your salon and your life, head over to buildyoursalon.com. I'll see you there.