AI for Salons: 5 Time-Wasters to Ditch This Week

What exactly are you afraid of? AI isn't here to replace you. It's the best thing about being in the salon industry right now. But it is here to take the boring, soul-sapping jobs off your plate. So this week I'm giving you five things you can stop wasting time on right now. If you're brave enough to give it a go, that is. Hello, hello, hello, my salon owner friends. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons with another dose of wise owl wisdom. Welcome to a brand new month, the last month of Q2 of 2025. How's it working out for you? Are you doing foul and speakable things to your goals and absolutely working your business? Or is this year kicking your ass a bit? Why not reach out and let me know? Phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends anyway. So what are we talking about this week? Well, in fact, this month we are going all in on AI. Yes, I'm going to let the robots take over. Don't worry. Don't panic. Your uncle Phil's here to guide you through this. I'm going to give you some real world right now stuff that can make your salon business life smoother, calmer and more predictable. Sounds nice, doesn't it? So today I'm going to give you five things that you can stop wasting your time on this week just by letting AI take a bit of the load. These are practical, doable, juicy things. And if you're anything like me, you'll wonder why you didn't start sooner. But you know that I'm a complete nerd and a complete geek. And I love this stuff so much. So I'm going to give you a few details about a brand new program that I have coming up to help you navigate your way through AI. So let's get stuck in, shall we, with task number one. And I'm going to start with something that actually those of you that are using AI, this seems to be where you've started. And that's writing captions and posts for social media. And I've been saying for a long time that I think social media is a bit of a waste of time in most of your businesses. I know it's controversial to say, darlings, but I'm not going to give you permission to be scrolling endlessly on Facebook and Instagram because I don't think it does us very much good at all. I don't think it's great at getting us new clients. I do think there is a role for social media in deepening the connections that we have with existing clients, but I don't think it's great for marketing. Sorry, Phil said it. But if we're going to be doing stuff and we do need a presence on social media,

we also know that writing for Instagram and Facebook can eat up a big chunk of your time. You stare at a blank screen, try to sound clever or inspiring or witty and end up posting absolutely nothing. So this is where AI can help you by giving you a draft to start working from. So I'm a big fan of ChatGPT. I use it for almost everything AI, but I'm going to give you a few examples of some different bits that we can use later on in the episode. But I use ChatGPT to, for example, take a client testimonial and turn it into a caption or to help me craft a weekly promo that's going to capture my tone of voice and feed into my business goals or to take. And this is one of my favorite instances, actually, is to take a longer piece of content. So to take a transcript from a video or a blog post that you've written or even just a web page and turn it into fresh social media posts. The wonderful thing is that you get to stay in control, but you're not starting from scratch. We're not staring at that empty screen. Now, here's the little pro tip that I'm going to give you because I know lots of you are doing this stuff already and getting a bit frustrated. Maybe that you're not getting the results that you want. You've got to give the content back to ChatGPT. So ChatGPT isn't going to give you a finished, polished post every single time in your brand voice. It will get better over time if you train it. But instantly it's going to give you a post that's going to need a little bit of work. Once you've done that bit of work, copy, paste and give it back to ChatGPT. Tell it what it got wrong. Tell it what you changed and why. Because guess what's going to happen next time? It's going to get just a little bit closer to the mark. And then my pro, pro, pro, pro, pro tip. After you've been doing this for a little while, why not ask ChatGPT to write your brand voice guide? It will come up with a document that you can then give to all sorts of AI platforms so that they can capture the essence and tone of the conversation with you without you even having to train them in the first place. Task number two, and this is one that I actually use quite a lot, is around rewriting responses. And I'm going to use an example of handling complaints. Now, I'm very lucky I don't get very many complaints. In fact, I don't get any at all. I get a few about the podcast, but frankly, my darlings, you know where the unsubscribe and block buttons are. But when emotions are high, it's hard to stay professional.

You want to defend your work. You want to protect your business. You want to defend your team. And it's all too easy when we're feeling hurt to fire off something reactive or to ignore a complaint and say nothing at all. And AI can really take the sting out of this. Now, I used to have a training program called Handling Customer Complaints. In fact, we might re-film it one day. It was terribly popular. And one of the things that people loved was that they were replying to a customer complaint with my voice, not their own voice. So it took some of the sting out of it because they were basically just following a script. And that didn't hurt as much as coming up with something themselves. Well, why not pop all the facts of the complaint into something like ChatGPT, tell it what happened, tell it what you want to say, tell it your tone, and it will give you a first draft of an email or an SMS reply that feels calm and clear and professional and saves you that emotional spiral. And I did this the other day, actually. I've got it to rewrite an email for me. So somebody had booked a call with me and it was somebody from, it was an international audience member who wanted to do a discovery call to see whether we will be a good fit for one-to-one coaching. And the only time that we could find was five o'clock in the morning. Now, I'm an early riser, but I don't usually speak to anybody that early. Normally, I don't start talking to anyone until I'm three cappuccinos in and we're talking about half eight in the morning. But anyway, I got up early, made sure I was ready and presentable for my Zoom call. And then, of course, the person didn't turn up. And I wanted a reply that was going to be very firm, very polite, but also make it really clear that actually booking another call was not going to be an option. And you can imagine that at five o'clock in the morning, my reply was not polite. It was not very professional either. In fact, I was absolutely raging, darlings. I know, fuming, but chucked all the facts into ChatGPT and it came up with something not only much more professional, but actually it came up with a suggestion on why don't you take a deposit against a future call if she particularly wants to rebook. And I thought it was a great idea too. So why not get ChatGPT rewriting your responses? Speaking of rewriting, what about task number three? So many of you struggling with recruitment

at the moment, why not get AI to help you with your job ad? Instead of rewriting the same tired old nonsense that isn't actually working, why not give it the role title, give it the salon vibe and the values for your business, which I hope you thrashed out and the kind of person that you're looking for and ask it for a compelling values led job post that sounds just like you. And then after we've recruited, of course, it could even help with things like onboarding documents, interview questions, even staff handbooks. You give it the flavour and it does the heavy lifting. Now, of course, all of these things are going to need checking and particularly with recruitment, do bear in mind that people that are applying for jobs already have some legal rights. At least they do here in the UK. So you're going to want to fact check everything too. But what an amazing resource for, again, just not staring at that blank screen. Running a small business is hard enough. You shouldn't need a tech degree just to keep up. AI DIY is your monthly shortcut to earning more, working less and finally feeling in control with the power of AI on your side. Each month, you'll get fresh tutorials on marketing, money and mindset, plus step-by-step prompts and support that makes this feel easy. No jargon, no overwhelm, just smart tools that fit your business and your life. Join AI DIY now at philjackson.coach. Look clever, sound brilliant, work less. How about, for example, number four, we switch things up and change platforms. What about using AI in your team meetings? Now, I know how difficult it is, particularly if you've got a team of any size or if you've got people working very different shifts. I know how difficult it can be to get everybody in the same room at the same time. Why not use AI to record your team meetings? And then if you use a platform, which I use an awful lot called Otter, otter.ai, don't get anything for you signing up. It's just a recommendation, my loves. But Otter will transcribe the meeting for you, summarize the key points and even email a nice, neat recap of your team meeting to anyone who missed the meeting. In fact, it will even send it over to the people that were in the team meeting if you wanted it to. And it also makes a really neat summary of who said they were going to do what. So it will give you the actions that came out of that meeting too. So there's no more scribbling in a notebook, no more guessing what we agreed on again, just clear, even searchable notes.

It's brilliant for accountability. And the great thing is at the time of recording, I've just done a quick check. You can get five hours of recording on Otter AI absolutely free. I use it to record and transcribe and make notes on all of my coaching calls. So it can join a Zoom meeting for you and make notes on that. But you can also use it. Obviously, you'd have to be careful about making sure you've got everyone's permission to record them and making sure that the phone or whatever you're recording on is positioned properly so it can hear. But it's also brilliant for in-person meetings. So check out otter.ai and let's make those team meetings just that bit more useful and productive. And finally, we're going to stay away from ChatGPT for a second. What about using AI to help you manage your stock? Now, tracking stock is one of those jobs that gets pushed to the bottom of the list because it's bloody boring. Let's face it, darlings, until you run out of your favourite toner, your favourite developer, your favourite skincare items. So why not start tracking your stock on a Google Sheet? And I'm suggesting this because, to be blunt, my loves, and it shouldn't be the case, but stock control is something that most of the salon software platforms do a really shit job of. I mean, they really do balls it up and make it very complicated. So how about this? Why not create a Google Sheet, list your products, do a stock check. So throw in the current levels of stock. You could even put in there, if you want to, your desired stock level. And then Google have their own version of AI called Gemini. And Gemini is integrated into Google Sheets. This is why we're going to use Google Sheets for it, rather than Excel or something similar. And you can ask Gemini to scan the sheet and list all of the products that are short on stock. And then because it's Google, you can even ask it to draft an email to your supplier to reorder the products that you need. Of course, you're going to still check it, then you're still going to have to send it yourself. But instead of spending 30 minutes hunting through bottles, typing it all out, and then having to place an order, you've got a ready to go email draft all in one step. And that's what AI is for. It's not doing your thinking. It's not doing stuff that you couldn't do. It's doing the boring bits and saving you time. So there we have it. How are you using AI in your business? I would love to hear your input on this one. Please reach out and let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. Also, I just want to point out, you don't need to be a technical whiz. You just need to get started. And that's why I've built my brand new AI DIY program for small business owners,

just like you. I'm going to pack it with the tools, the prompts, the walkthroughs so that you can get started using AI in your business straight away. No jargon, no overwhelm, just a little pinch of sass because darlings, you'd be disappointed if there wasn't. Head over to philjackson.coach for details and to sign up now on our brand new founder member deal. So if you're ready to get your time back, run your salon business like the pro I know you are, check out the link philjackson.coach and I will put that in the show notes too. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. And until then, go forth, delegate to the robots and please 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.