Achieve Your Salon Goals with Effective Project Planning

Sit down and see what's going on with the Queen of Salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon. Hello, hello, hello, my salon lovely. How on earth are you, darling? Achingly well, I hope. Phil Jackson, Queen of Salons, here coming in your ears with another glorious episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I hope life is treating you well. Here we are, hovering on the very edge of April, and March always catches me unawares. I always think March is spring, and of course, there's so much of winter left in March, isn't there? But clocks have changed here, and that means a small shift in my behaviour, actually. I'm an early riser, and I've tried to rage against it over the years and be a party animal in the evenings, but sadly it hasn't worked for me, darling. And I wasn't gifted with the rhythm of life, so I've never been much of a clubber. I'd much rather get up early in the morning, and that, of course, means that I'm in bed early in the evening, too. So for months and months and months now, I've been getting up at 5.30, or starting work at 5.30 every morning. And that means that I need to be tucked up in my bed with my cocoa and my hot water bottle by 9.30 in the evening. But I'm taking advantage, you see, of the clocks changing, because everything's up in the air anyway. There's everything to play for. So I'm shifting my behaviour a little bit to getting up slightly earlier. I want to start work at 5, and then I don't want to get any earlier than that. So I'm using the fact that my body clock is a little bit out of sync anyway to start nudging myself towards a better pattern of work. We will talk about the topic in hand this week, by the way. I'm just filling in what's going on with me, darling, and I'd love it if you could do the same. Drop me an email, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to hear what's going on in your life and your business. Anyway, so what I'm doing is gradually nudging my work start time a little earlier. So we're 10 minutes. It's 20 past five we started today. So I've managed to manage to gain 10 minutes. And I'll keep nudging it, you know, five minutes every two or three days. And I tend to find that that works really well for me. Not to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater and do these massive shifts in behaviour. But gentle progress in the right direction on a consistent basis, I think, actually, is the key to longer term success without overwhelm. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. And why do I start so early in the morning? Everyone says to me, why are you up so early? Why do you start work so early?

It's because I have a busy life and I've got two wonderful, glorious children who are the very definition of a blessing, but also the very definition sometimes of a pain in my ass. And what I get in the morning at five o'clock is or five thirty is some peace and quiet where I can get things like this done. So I'm recording this when it's barely daylight, to be honest with you. But there's no disturbance. Nobody's around. I can just put my head down and get on with some work. And I get a good hour and a half to two hours of work done before there's any stirrings from any of the other people that live in my house. So I take myself down to build your salon towers and do some recording or some or some paperwork, some admin, and then head back and get the kids up for breakfast and school and all those good things, too, before the day runs ahead of me. And then my day is done usually by late lunchtime. So I very, very rarely work past half past one in the afternoon. Occasionally I'll have an evening call to do, but you can guarantee if I've got an evening call, I'd have had a nap in the afternoon. And that works really well for me. Anyway, it's about finding a pattern that works for you. Gentle progress towards your goals. And I feel like I'm wrapping this episode up. We haven't started yet. What we're talking about today, Phil, stop dribbling on with your absolute nonsense and tell us something glorious we can bring back into our business. Well, today I'm talking about project planning or project planning, depending on where on earth you are. And in the context of our salon businesses, a project is basically a temporary endeavor that's designed to achieve one of those beautiful goals that we set ourselves way back in January. So a project I don't think is something that's kind of ongoing forever. It's usually a set of tasks or activities that are managed in order to deliver an outcome, a measurable outcome within a timeframe that we've decided and hopefully a budget that we've decided to. So basically, this is coming from your goal setting when we've done your goal setting. And please, gosh, please tell me that you've done your goal setting properly for this year. Dust off those goals. Now blow the dust off your commitments that you made yourself in January. We've got, oh, gosh, more than three, four days left of March to achieve our Q1 goals. We can get lots done in four days. Trust me. And basically what I want you to do is identify how we're going to turn those goals into things that are actually done. So the project planning bit, the bit that I'm going to be talking to you about today is how we take a goal or a dream or an ambition and then we break it down into things that we can actually get done.

How we manage our time, manage our resources, what tasks need to be done in order to deliver on that goal. So some of those projects could be very simple and some of them could be much more complicated and rely on other things happening first. So perhaps you've decided you're going to hold a customer event. That would be a wonderful project or a marketing campaign, another short term project. Or perhaps it's something much bigger like the refurb of your salon or doubling your turnover through increasing your team numbers. And the projects might involve other people. But essentially what I want to talk about is the process that you're going to go through as far as planning those projects is concerned, because the planning of your projects is vital to achieving those goals. And the first thing we need to do is define what success in that project looks like. What's it actually going to deliver for you? And if you've done your goal setting properly way back in January, you should have a goal or a project outcome which has a definite measurable result. So we will definitely know when this thing is done. And I see lots and lots of people really struggling with goal setting and beating themselves up, in fact, sometimes because they've set a goal and they don't know when it's done and when it's not. Or they know it actually deep down. They know that it's done and they talk themselves out of it being a complete project to say it needs more work. It needs more work. They never get that little ego boost that we all get when we have completed a project. So let's choose a goal. Let's choose something that we're going to work on. Go back through your goal setting now and choose something that we can break down as a project together and see if your old Uncle Phil, the wise old crone of the salon industry, can't help you get something crossed off for 2023. My Salon Owners Retreat is a unique event where you get to create the agenda. This isn't a retreat of boring presentations in conference rooms without windows. The entire program is a mix of group coaching, mastermind sessions and one to one coaching with me, your favorite salon coach. There's also time built in for implementation. Yes, you're going to leave the retreat having actually got some important work done on your business with our support. Our spring 2023 retreat is now sold out, but you can be the first to hear about the next Salon Owners Retreat and get the very best early bird pricing by heading to buildyoursalon.com and joining our wait list.

I can't wait to see you on Salon Owners Retreat. Don't forget your speedos. So help us, Uncle Phil. How do we go about planning out our projects? Well, I want you to take a piece of paper and I want you to put it on its side. So we're working in landscape, a four piece of paper, and I want you to divide that piece of paper into five columns and five rows. Why five rows? Because I don't want you working on more than five projects at a time. Ideally, I'd like you to be working on two or three projects in a quarter at most. If you've got more than two or three projects, you've probably broken them down a bit too far already, but that's okay. It doesn't matter. We can still work with it. And I'm allowing you five rows on that piece of paper because some of those projects might be very long term projects that are going to take months or years to complete. In which case we can be working on other shorter term projects in between, but definitely no more than five on a piece of paper. So down the left hand side, I want you to list the projects that you're going to be working on. And as we go through this little demonstration, as we go through the way that I break my projects down, I'm going to be using the example of writing a book. I keep talking about it, don't I? Perhaps I will write a book this year. I don't know. I'm kind of up in the air. I love the achievement of writing a book and I love bringing ideas together. And it really does crystallize your thinking around a topic. There's a lot of clarity that you gain by just the process of writing a book. But God, it is a lot of work. And I'll tell you, the biggest bit that I hate is the editing process. Firstly, because you're taking out huge chunks of things that might have taken you days to write. But secondly, gosh, you get bored of reading the same thing again and again and again. And then you forget whether you have already read this section or not or whether this section should have been edited. Oh, gosh, it does get confusing. I can see why people outsource the editing process. But until somebody comes along and offers me a book deal, I'm afraid I shall have to do it myself. Anyway, we're going to use the example of me writing a book. And the first thing that we need is a deadline. And I'm going to give myself 12 weeks to write a book, one quarter. And that doesn't sound like an awful lot of time, does it, for writing a book? But it is possible. In fact, I've written books in less time than that, believe it or not. I think really it depends on how well you know your subject matter. If you know your subject matter inside and out and you've done other programs and courses or perhaps even written smaller pieces of work about it in blogs or even a small book or contributed to somebody else's book with that topic, you tend to whiz through. You know what you're talking about. If you've got lots of research to do, then, of course, it's going to take a lot longer.

And basically what we're going to do is use those five columns to break that project down. So no more than five major moves to getting that project achieved. So I've broken writing a book down into five major moves. And these are, well, basically a little bit of context. My first couple of books I used to interview people. And I think, honestly, I think it was a bit of imposter syndrome. I think I didn't I don't think I felt that I had the gravitas to carry an entire book on my own. Yes, even coaches have insecurities, my darling. We all need a little bit of support and propping up sometimes. And when the way that I managed to get a book together was to interview other people, get their thoughts in there as well. And so my first move in writing a book in my example is to write out my interview questions. And then the second move is going to be to carry out five interviews. Then the third move would be to put the structure and the chapter headings together. Fourth move is going to actually be to write the book. And then the fifth move would be the getting it on sale on Amazon and Kindle. So the five moves to write the questions, carry out the interviews, get my structure together, write the book and get it on Amazon. OK, and that last one, I'm making the making a public commitment right now, getting it on Kindle. I'm going to outsource. God, what a pain in the ass that is. Anyway, the first thing wrong with those five major moves is that each move needs to be measurable. So I've put as number four out of those five major moves. I'm going to write the book. Well, how do I know when the book is written? How do I know when it's finished? How do I know when it's complete? And this needs to be the case with your projects, too. How do you know when each of those major moves has actually been achieved? So I'm going to set myself a minimum word target of 35,000 words. And generally 30 to 35,000 words is the minimum number of words for a decent nonfiction book. One thing you'll notice, though, is that each major move does not have to be equal. What we're not doing is taking, let's say, a 12-week project and dividing it into five neat, equally measured chunks. They don't have to be equal at all. And neither do they have to be consecutive. So, for example, I could write the interview questions and send out the emails to try and find people to interview. And then while I'm waiting for their reply, I can be getting on with the structure and the chapter heading.

So we don't have to wait for numbers one and two to be complete before we jump in on number three. This is just to bring some clarity around exactly what needs to be achieved in order for us to deliver that project to a high standard and in time. Are you feeling like you're stuck in a rut? Like you're just going through the motions or that whatever you do, the next level in your business stays just out of reach? Well, it's time to shake things up. With one to one coaching, you'll have buckets of support, inspiration and accountability to help you bring the buzz back to your salon business. Whether you're looking to achieve a specific goal or just feeling that things are lonely at the top and you want someone to coach you to be the best version of yourself, I am here to support you. And don't worry, even though it's called coaching, I won't make you join a gym and I will never suggest you give up your Toblerone habit. What's the alternative? More of the same? Come on, you can do better than that. Ping me an email at phil at buildyoursalon.com with the subject line coaching and I will send you all the details. I can't wait to help you on your journey to salon success. So we've broken our project down into the five major moves. Now, where do people go wrong? Well, the first place they go wrong is here, actually. They get really bogged down into how that major move is going to be achieved. They get really bogged down in the detail. And that's not really necessary at this level of our project planning. Yes, of course, at some stage we've got to figure out how to do it. And if you've got no clue at all, then what I would do is make major move number one a research exercise to discover how it is that we're going to achieve everything that we need to in order to deliver the project. But don't get bogged into how something's going to be done just yet. All we're doing at the moment is breaking it down, getting some clarity around the process of delivering that project. And by the way, there do not have to be five major moves. If you've got less than three, you've probably not broken it down quite enough. But certainly we don't want more than five major moves. You've gone too far in the other direction, my darling. You've peaked too soon and broken things down into too many stages. And then the next step is to estimate how long each stage is going to take. OK, so my five major moves were to write my interview questions, carry out the interviews, structure and chapters, write the book and get it on sale on Amazon and Kindle. So I'm going to estimate that writing my interview questions should take about two hours to do a good job to carry out five interviews.

I'm going to give myself five hours to do the structure and chapter headings. That's a couple of hours work to actually write the book is going to be 50 hours. And then to get it on Amazon and Kindle is going to be five hours of my time. So this really emphasises that each stage does not have to be equal at all. We've got 25 times longer being written on writing the book than actually writing those interview questions in the beginning. Now, you will have, as you start to tick some of these things off, you will have a natural tendency to either over or underestimate how long a task takes. We all do. All I want you to do is just notice. So, for example, if I'm going to say that it's going to take me a couple of hours to write my interview questions, and then it turns out I get it done in an hour, just notice. And that process of noticing the inaccuracy will mean that over time your estimates become more accurate. Just keep noticing each time you over or underestimate something. Now, we're nearly at the end of our overall project planning exercise. And the next stage is to take a reality check. So basically what we're doing now is looking at how long we estimate that entire project is going to take and figuring out whether that's realistic. So I've put together estimates which add up to 64 hours. I've also given myself a deadline of 12 weeks. So the reality check is, do I have 64 hours over the next 12 weeks to actually get this project done? If I don't have 64 hours, one of two things has got to happen. Either the scope of the project has to change. We need to change the goal, basically. Or the timeline needs to change and we need to realize that 12 weeks is not realistic. Now, letting go of the project brief, letting go of the scope of the project should hurt. This has come from your goal setting. These are the things that you've told me you need to achieve in order for 2023 to feel like an amazing year. We should not be letting go of goals at this project planning exercise. Or maybe there's something we need to do around the way that we organize our days or weeks. Perhaps we need to get up 30 minutes earlier just for that 12 weeks to make sure we've got enough time to deliver on each stage of this project. So this is the reality check. And then the final stage, because I know how salons work. I know how salon owners work.

I know how our minds work. And we work really well with an appointment system. So what I want you to do then is take those time slots and book them as appointments with yourself. See them as appointments with your project. Appointments with success, damn it. Appointments on achieving your goals, your ambitions and your dreams. So the first thing I would do is say, okay, write the interview questions. It's going to take me two hours. I need a two hour time slot or two one hour time slots. And book them into your calendar. Book them into your diary. Guard that time with your life. Because if you allow last minute bookings from clients or somebody saying, can I just pick your brains for five minutes? I love it when they say, can they just pick my brains for five minutes? It's never going to take five minutes. And it would take me 20 minutes to get back into whatever the hell it was that I was doing before they came along. All of those distractions, all of those interruptions need to be kept at arm's length if we're going to achieve this product at all. So turn each of these tasks or each of these major moves into appointments with yourself, appointments with success. If this has been at all useful to you, if you use this way of breaking projects down, please reach out. Let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I love the idea of having a positive impact on someone I've never met. I love the idea of someone taking a little bit of what I've been talking about today and turning it into something really useful in their salon businesses. So Phil at buildyoursalon.com or indeed, if you've got anything that you would like my thoughts on, I'd love to have some suggestions of topics for future broadcasts for you as well. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. Until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty and more successful tips for business owners. All on, build your salon.