Beyond Vision Boards: Practical Goal Setting for Your Salon in 2026

As we head into 2026, everyone's going to be thinking about New Year's resolutions and setting goals. Where people go wrong is they get bogged down with manifesting their dreams and the vision board fluff. What you need is a practical strategy that ties the big goals with what you actually do on a Tuesday morning. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the internet with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. How was it for you? This episode being released on Boxing Day. And by now you should be stuffed full of turkey, mince pies, and Christmas cheer, I hope. Or perhaps it's one of those times a year that you find a little bit stressful. And perhaps you're looking forward to a few days in between Christmas and New Year where we get some normality. And how do you feel about 2026? How do you feel about the New Year? Myself, historically, I'm not a big New Year's fan. I've always felt it's far easier for me at New Year's to look back rather than look forward and I can get a bit maudlin. Your Uncle Phil can get a little bit sad and a bit low. But and also I don't drink, which always makes staying up till midnight an absolute chore. And because without booze, you don't get that second wind, do you? And I'm ready for bed at half nine. And also there's nothing worse than sitting around watching other people get drunk. Trust me, my darlings, when you're drunk, you are so dull to the rest of us. As soon as people start repeating themselves, I just want to leave the room. But the bit in between I quite like. It's a good time for me to regroup, catch up, catch my breath, get my goals nailed down. Actually, I've done my goal setting for 2026, but there'll be lots of my coaching clients drifting around, asking questions, getting clarity, figuring out strategy. And where people go wrong is they start picking goals that feel a bit arbitrary. They're kind of plucking things out of thin air. And I'm hoping that by going through the process that we went through on the last episode, where we actually figure out what you want your business to deliver for you. I'm hoping that your goals are going to be grounded in actually what you want your business to look like. The other thing that people would do wrong is they set too many goals. And I don't think that's particularly healthy. Or they start getting very granular about what those goals are going to mean every day of the year.

And I think that's a mistake. It can get very overwhelming, particularly if you set too many goals. But if you're trying to strategize for an entire year on a huge number of goals, that gets very overwhelming, very confusing. What we want is a few goals connected to your values, which we went through in the last episode. And in fact, we talked about values in the episode before that too. And then we reverse engineer them into actual actions. And that should give us a set of goals that are actually tied to what we want our business to deliver, which is also tied to what we want our lives to look like. You see, there is a method, darling. Your Uncle Phil's not just winging it. There's, oh, minutes of preparation have gone into all this, my darlings. And what we're ultimately aiming for, and my mantra as far as goal setting, tasks, to-do lists, is we want our goals to be challenging but achievable. If you set things that are too much of a stretch, your little brain can't deal with it. And it just feels so unrealistic. And you've got no frame of reference. So there's no point in me setting, let's say, a goal to have a billion-dollar empire by the end of 2026, because I don't know what that looks like. I haven't got a frame of reference for it. There's nobody in my world who lives that way. I wouldn't even know where to start with something like that. So it's okay to dream big, but we need that achievable strand to what we're doing as well. So what do I suggest we do? Well, once you've figured out what you want life to look like, and I'm stealing this framework from a program that I have called Crystal Clear Goal Setting, which I'm going to shamelessly plug throughout this episode. But essentially, the process we go through is to take that big picture of what we want life to look like and turn that into a five-year plan. Now, you don't have to get everything on your dreams, on your ambitions, or what you want life to be into the next five years. Just choose the bit that you need to get done in the next five years in order for you to have the life of your dreams. So we're not concerned with the stuff that's going to be happening 10, 15, 20 years down the line. Though I have to say, I've noticed as I get older, is the next five years, you kind of go, well, assuming I'm still here, I'd quite like life to look this way. Gosh, the perils of aging. But once we've got that five-year picture, things get a lot easier. Now, your goals don't have to appear in every year. You might have a goal, which you're going to get done in years one and two. Or you might have a goal that you're not even going to start looking at until year three or year four.

So the way that I run it is I have a quick sheet that I put together, goals down the left-hand side, years one, two, three, four, five along the top. And then literally, it's just a tick-in-a-box exercise. What am I going to be working on in what year on that five-year plan? Now, the bit that makes it less overwhelming in the long run is the next stage is we just look at what we've ticked for year one. Everything else we can push to one side. Keep that piece of paper because it's going to make your goal setting for 2027 even easier because then we can start looking at what we had on year two column. But we only take those year one goals across to the next sheet. And what I would do then is do exactly the same goals down the left-hand side. But this time, we're going to put Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 along the top. And then we can basically tick in the different boxes what we're going to be working on in the different quarters. And then guess what we do then? We take Q1 and Q2, Q3, and Q4, we push to one side. So where people go wrong is they get stuck into figuring out what they're going to be posting on Instagram in November next year. It's too much. It's too far ahead. It's too disconnected. So we don't let those things fall off the radar. We know what we want to achieve overall in the quarter next year. But at the moment, in that granular detail, we're only concerned with Q1. And then guess what? Another piece of paper where we put our goals down the left-hand side. Now, there's going to be some other stuff making it onto the list at each of these stages because those big-picture goals, yes, we might be working on those in year one, but there's going to be some day-to-day goals that we want as well. So maybe this is time to bring in our revenue targets or our profit targets. Maybe there's some business changes. Perhaps we're going to be recruiting people or even terminating team members. Perhaps there's some new services we're going to be adding. They wouldn't make it onto your big-picture goals, but my goodness, they're going to make it onto your goal sheets. So that list of goals is going to be a bit longer as we get into year one, a bit longer again as we get into Q1, and then it might even be a very long list when we get into breaking things down into our month. Now, what I don't do is break it then down into weeks. Basically, once it's broken down into what I'm going to achieve over the next month, it's time to get the calendar out and just block out time to achieve these goals. And I should be able to look at your calendar and look at your work calendar in particular

and know what's important to you in 2026. And I don't see people doing that anywhere near enough. They're not putting time aside for projects. They're not putting time aside to work on their business at all. They're squeezing it into their social lives. They're balancing their laptop on their knees while they're watching things on Netflix, pretending they're present with their family. And we call it double screening in my house. And it is banned. If I'm here and present with you, you're not allowed to be working at the same time on your laptop. So I want to be able to see in your calendar what's important to you. Also, take a bit of time, just a quick sanity check. You know, if you leave it to May to start booking your summer holidays, everything's going to be more expensive. You're going to have to be shuffling clients around. Let's get those locked in as well, shall we? Quick tip on your revenue goals. So what I would do is take your 12-month revenue goal. Don't just divide it by 12. Remember what we're talking about with challenging but achievable? The thing is, what's challenging but achievable in February is not what's challenging but achievable in September. So what I want you to do is have a look at 2025. And you should have done this off the back of the last podcast episode. And I want you to map the peaks and troughs that happen in your business. And this happens in every business. Every business has a season. Every business has a spring, summer, autumn, winter. Unfortunately, they don't line up with the calendar. So for some people, their summer or their autumn rather, their time for harvest is actually December. That's when they make the most money because they get that Christmas rush. In my business, that's the depths of winter. Nobody signs up for anything in December. Everybody signs up for something in January. So January, February is my autumn, if you like, my harvest season. So figure out when the cold, dark spells are in your business and when we can actually make hay while the sun shines. Because we want to maximize the potential in the busy periods. And we also want to make sure we're putting some money aside for the quieter times as well. And once we've mapped those peaks and troughs, then you can divide up your revenue target. So I don't want you to just take your revenue target, divide it by 12. It might be that some months can carry a lot more and have a lot more potential.

And some months we need to take our foot off the gas a little bit. And once we've broken that down, we can start looking at individual team targets. I'm going to be talking early in the year about how we approach making sure that our team is performing at maximum potential. Because, of course, January for so many is appraisal season. So I hope that's brought a little bit of clarity. Now, of course, there's a lot more to it. And, of course, your Uncle Phil has a program all about goal setting called Crystal Clear Goal Setting. I'm waiting until today to talk to you about it because today is when we launch my Boxing Day sale. Head over to buildyoursalon.com. You'll be able to see all the offers that I have. So I've got three delicious offers for you. I have, firstly, my Salon Spark accountability group. You can get your first month of Salon Spark for just £1 at the moment, which is an insane saving. But if you don't need more information, if you don't need more training, and so many of us don't need any more strategies, we just need someone to keep us on track, that's what Salon Spark is all about. You'll be joining the best, most delicious group of salon owners on earth with weekly accountability to help you achieve your goals in 2026. Next up, we have my Crystal Clear Goal Setting Program, which is two-thirds off just £100. That's the cheapest it's ever been. You will never see it at that price again. But I've got that on my Boxing Day sale at the moment. We go into this process in a lot more detail. And also, we have two tracks. So we have a full life track so that you can set your personal goals as well. We have a business-only track, which is a bit shorter, a bit simpler, just concerned with your business goals. And all the worksheets that I've been referencing are in there too. And then finally, I have an offer on my Seven Star Team Program. Seven Star Team has not been available on its own. It's only been part of my Salon Accelerator Program. That's available for $149. And that includes everything you need for recruitment, selection, but most importantly this time of year, performance management. So we talk about appraisals. We talk about weekly one-to-ones with your team, how to set targets too. And that's available for $149. So they're the three offers that I have for Boxing Day. Head over to buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to see you taking part in some of my programs in 2026. Just a few short days until I'm coming over the airwaves again. I've got no idea when the next episode's going to land.

And I've got no idea what I'm going to be talking about either. It'll be a surprise for both of us. If I don't speak to you before New Year's, please have a wonderful time. And I do hope 2026 brings you everything you deserve. As we head into a shiny new year. And until then, my darlings, please take care.