Delegation for Salon Owners (Part One)

Hello and welcome. And today we're going to explore what I think should be an essential tool in your salon owner's toolkit. We're going to be talking about delegation. Now, I'm sure I'm not the first person that you've heard speak about delegation. I hope I can bring something new to the conversation. But why is it that you think coaches love telling you about delegation? Well, that's because most people come to a business coach because they're overwhelmed. Basically, they want to either see better work-life balance or they want better business results without having to put any extra hours in. And if that's the case for you, then actually, when you think about it, there's only a few options that are open to you. The first is you could increase your prices, which usually I encounter some resistance when we talk about price increases over and above an inflationary price increase. But basically what that means is that we can generate more income in the same number of working hours. Or the second option is we can look at growing your team, which may or may not appeal to you. Maybe you don't ever want a team. But even if you are an employer, taking on an extra team member can feel like a big step. It can feel like a big deal. Well, the third option is to make more room in your working hours for revenue generating activities. So basically what that means is delegating some of your other work so that you can either have more time off, which makes coaches look really good because your work-life balance gets better, or you have more room in your week for clients or revenue generating activity, which again makes the coach look good because your takings start off. Start to increase.

I don't have a team because straight away you'll start saying, well, I don't have a team to delegate anything to. So when I talk about delegation, we're not just talking about delegation internally in the salon business. We can also be talking about external delegation or actually what will be more accurate would be to label that as outsourcing. So I want to talk about delegation and outsourcing in the same conversation. Now this is quite a long conversation. It's not something we're going to deal in one. One audio. What we're going to do is split this across two. So today, all I want to do is get to the bottom of why it is that you're resisting delegation and to start to touch on some of the things that we could get other people to do for you. And then in a future audio, what we will do is start to unpack exactly how it is that we can go about delegating and outsourcing. So why do I meet resistance? Why is it salon owners seem unwilling to delegate? Why is it, do you think, that you want to do it all yourself? And honestly, I think this is really worth looking at in quite some detail. If it were me, I'd be grabbing a new page in your journal. And at the top of the page, put, why do I want to do it all myself? It's worth unpacking this and getting rid of some of these barriers, because it really is holding you back, firstly, in terms of business growth, but definitely in terms of work-life balance. There is no dignity in being busy. It seems to be the default state. Anytime you start a conversation with someone and greet somebody and they say, how are you? You say, oh, busy. And there's a huge amount of dignity that goes with it. And it's like we almost feel like we have to be busy in order to be successful. And that's because we've made a faulty link. There's a faulty connection in our brains between being busy and being successful. And it's just not always the case. I'm sure you can think of lots of examples of people who are really, really busy, but they're not successful. And equally, I can think of a few examples of people who are hugely successful, but actually have the work-life balance thing down to pat. They don't spend an awful lot of time working on or in their business at all. So let's get away from this feeling that we have to be working lots of hours and be really, really busy in order to succeed. Or maybe you don't want to delegate because you've had a bad experience with delegation in the past. And that's very common. Very often I will see people take control of a task or take control of a set of tasks because they've tried to delegate.

It hasn't gone terribly well. And then rather than try and work on making that system work, what they will do is take it back into the fold and carry out those tasks themselves. So a bad experience can actually burn your fingers. And maybe you've even endured some damage to your business because you've tried to delegate. But I do think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater a little bit. I think there's still a lot of mileage in exploring this in a really open-minded way. Maybe you class yourself as a control freak. And I have lots and lots of salon owners who I've spoken to in the past who wear the badge of control freak with pride. They say, oh, I couldn't possibly delegate. I'm a control freak. Almost like it's a great thing. And by accepting it and owning it, we no longer need to do any work in that direction. And of course, everyone likes to feel that they're in control. But we can feel in control and delegate too. We're not talking about abdication. We're talking about controlled delegation. And I hope by the end of this audio, and certainly the follow-up audio that's going to come in the future, I hope you feel a lot more comfortable around starting to delegate some tasks. Or maybe you feel that you can't afford to delegate just yet. Perhaps you feel like there isn't enough spare money in the business. And we're going to be touching on that too. But I've got a couple of things that might help you start to realise that delegation is not quite as scary as you may think. Firstly, I want you to appreciate, even if you're a solopreneur, even if you're a sole trader, that you already have a team. You may not have a team that you employ, but you certainly have a team that surrounds the business and helps you with tasks that you wouldn't want to carry out yourself. I'm assuming that you don't keep your takings in a biscuit tin underneath your bed. You will have a bank manager. There will be a bank which forms part of your salon team. You may also have a bookkeeper or an accountant. Maybe you've got a web guy who takes care of all those techie bits for you. We already have this team that we've put in place, even though they're not necessarily directly on the payroll. And I'll bet, if you think about it, you can also think of examples of places where you already delegate. Maybe you asked Tesco or Sainsbury's to bring your shopping to you.

Maybe you've delegated that task of walking around a supermarket to somebody else. Maybe you've got pets and you've delegated the task of walking your dog or grooming your pets to somebody else. Maybe you delegate some aspect of your housekeeping. Maybe you have a cleaner or maybe you delegate some aspect of your parenting. Perhaps you have some kind of childcare help. So you're already delegating tasks in other areas of your life. And now we need to find examples of how that can support you in your business growth as well. And I have to say, I'm a big fan of delegating at home. Honestly, the best money that I spend every month is having somebody launder and iron my shirts for me. And I don't get through a huge number of shirts. I don't work in an office where we have a dress code. I work from home and my boss is actually really lovely. But the lady that comes to pick up the shirts is just worth her weight in gold. So she picks up, I think it's 12 shirts at a time, and I pay her a whole pound per shirt. And she takes them away, washes them, dries them, irons them, and brings them all back on hangers for me every couple of weeks. And honestly, I would have to be at the stage where the children were starting to go hungry, I think, before I would start cutting back on my ironing lady. So why should we even look at delegation? What are the gains, what is it that we can hope to achieve through asking for help with certain tasks? Well, I've already touched on one in our introduction. It's a really quick way to start to reduce overwhelm in the business. By definition, if you have lots and lots of tasks, you're already putting yourself on a path to overwhelm. Just reducing the number of things that you actually have to master, the number of tasks that you have for the business can start to reduce that feeling of fear, that lack of control, and that feeling of overwhelm. Because don't kid yourself by being a control freak that you're keeping in control of everything. The people who are most out of control are those that are completely overwhelmed by the running of their business. Maybe we can start to reduce the hours that you're working. What an amazing thing that would be for most of us. Or, actually, I'm not even suggesting that we look at reducing your hours, but I would love to get to the stage where you're not taking work home. If we can keep the number of hours that you're working steady, but actually get all of your work-related tasks done inside those working hours, I think that would be a really big win for lots of people. To not bring the bookkeeping, the accounting, the social media, the marketing planning, the manpower planning even.

Not to bring all that home and have it on your laptop, balanced on your knee in bed. That's just a wonderful win for lots and lots of business owners. And by delegating, by outsourcing, we can shift your focus onto revenue-generating activities. And for most salon owners and managers, it's the bit of the job that we're actually really good at and we really enjoy as well. Now, when I talk about revenue-generating activities, that doesn't necessarily have to mean carrying out service on customers yourself. A revenue-generating activity could also include supporting your team, your employed team, setting them targets, coaching them towards better results. So, basically, by delegating in that salon management role, it means that you can focus on getting better results from your team members. So, how do we know whether it's actually time to delegate? And this is the problem that I have with lots of salon business coaches. They just push people on this process far too fast. They get people uncomfortable with delegation in terms of the finance side of it. They push people towards delegation before they really feel that they can afford to do it. And actually, rather than keeping control and getting work-life balance in a clearer head and reducing overwhelm, if you push people into delegation too quickly, the opposite is true and people feel out of control. And they're throwing money in directions that they don't really understand. So, I want you to take a very considered approach to delegation. And it's not something I want you to rush into immediately. But first of all, let's take a little, let's take the temperature of your life at the moment. And I want you to look at how many hours you work now. So, I want you to add up in a normal week. I want you to add up how many hours you will be in the salon carrying out service or managing your team. And then also add on how many hours of work you think you take home with you to carry out in the evenings and at weekends. And then let's look at how many hours you actually want to work. Maybe you're okay with that work-life balance where it is at the moment. Or maybe, actually, you'd be okay with that for the next 10 years. And that's okay. I'm not here to judge you. I'm not here to tell you what your salon goals ought to be. But if there's a difference between the number of hours you're working and the number of hours you want to work, well, delegation could be a really useful place to start.

But I also, and this is the step that I think a lot of coaches miss out on, I also want you to look at the hours that you're spending in the salon. And I want you to figure out as a percentage how many of those are actually utilised. How many of those are actually committed to revenue-generating activity. And it's a very simple formula. All we need to do is add up the number of hours that are actually spent generating revenue. Divide that by the number of hours that are available to you in the salon and multiply by 100. And that will give you a percentage. And we call this your utilisation percentage. It's a really useful target for you as an individual. But it's also a brilliant one to break down on individual team members. And we can tie certain indicators, certain processes to that percentage utilised. And I would suggest that if you are less than 80% utilised on an average week, then it's probably not time for you to be delegating just yet. Because actually you've got the time in your week to carry out the tasks that I'm going to perhaps take you through delegating in that future audio. If you're over 80% utilised though, I think it may well be time to delegate. Now of course, it would be wonderful to think that you are 100% utilised. But actually 100% utilised is not a particularly healthy place to be. And I would suggest that if you're 100% utilised, you certainly need to go back and look at your pricing strategy. Because I think we could probably artificially suppress demand for your services by increasing prices slightly. But actually 100% is an exhausting place to be. And it's exhausting for your team members as well. So normally somewhere between 80% and 90% utilised is a really healthy place for us to be. It allows us a little buffer. Just in case people are running late or somebody has that absolute desperate appointment that they need to squeeze in. Or maybe if you've got team members, we need to work a couple of extra hours to cover some sickness. We need that little buffer built into our week. So what is it that we should look at delegating? What kinds of things do you think we ought to look at outsourcing or passing on to other team members? Well, there's a very blunt way of looking at it. Basically what I want you to do is take your most popular service and let's say in a skin salon, let's say it's your kind of everyday facial. Let's say your everyday facial takes an hour and for the sake of convenience, let's say that you charge £60 for that everyday facial.

Well, in a very blunt way, anything that you could outsource or delegate for less than £60 an hour really should be outsourced or delegated. Because basically you'd be better off by doing one or two extra facials and then using the money that you've earned in that one or two hours to pay somebody else to carry out those lower value tasks. And I see lots of salon owners going wrong in this way. So they could be spending their time doing £60 an hour facials when actually what they're doing is spending time, let's say, planning social media, which they could easily outsource for less than half of what they could earn doing that facial. So you're basically swapping a £60 an hour task and doing a £7 or £10 an hour task. So if it's something that could be outsourced cheaper than your most popular service, then that would be a really good start. But don't just worry about the big stuff. It's not always the huge tasks like social media management or marketing. It's not usually those big titles where we can start making wins. We can start on delegation and outsourcing in a much smaller way. And it tends to be a lot more comfortable for salon owners as well. Everything is up for grabs. For example, I have a virtual assistant. And I'm not suggesting you go down the path of having a virtual assistant. But one of her tasks is to look at my email inbox. So she has access to all of my email inboxes. And all she does is go through every morning before I wake up because she's in a different time zone. And she just deletes all of the emails which are obvious rubbish. So all of the spam that we've accumulated over the years, all of the stupid things that aren't relevant to me, aren't interesting to me, all of the advertising material that comes from people that I don't particularly want to hear of. She just quietly deletes it and I never get to see it. And it probably takes her about an hour, I would suggest, to go through three or four email accounts. And honestly, the time that it saves me is absolutely phenomenal. So they don't have to be huge tasks to streamline and help you manage your day much more effectively. I also only think that you should delegate tasks that you understand.

Now, when I say that you need to understand them, you don't necessarily need to understand how to do that task yourself. But you need to understand the outcome. And I think this is where lots of people go wrong when they're delegating and outsourcing, is they're asking someone to do a task and they don't really have a defined outcome. Let me give you an example. I delegate my tax returns to an accountant. I don't get involved in that preparation of my tax returns and filing with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. I don't get involved in that process at all. I don't actually understand what that process involves. I know that there's a certain amount of form filling and something that has to be done online, but I don't actually know step by step what that process involves. But I'm very, very clear on what the outcome is. I expect my tax returns and my estimate of tax owed to be delivered to me on time. So it's a really good example of something that can be delegated without me understanding the process, but with me understanding what the defined outcome is. If you don't understand what the outcome is, then I don't honestly think you should look at delegating. And social media is a huge one for this. I have lots of people that don't really know what they want from a social media manager, but they're still quite happy to sign over their Facebook and Instagram accounts to sometimes a relative stranger. And they're disappointed in the results, but actually they didn't really understand what they wanted the result to be. So when you've got a defined outcome, that's when it's time to perhaps look at delegation. Anything that you're doing at the moment that is essential for your business, but you're not very good at, I would suggest is ripe for delegation as well. I actually think it will be worth taking another page in your journal and maybe writing a new job description. If you had to replace yourself in the business, what would you be advertising for? Because usually we will fill that job description with the stuff that's essential for our businesses to move forward. And we will probably leave all of the dross outside that job description. So give yourself a new page in your journal and perhaps pretend you were advertising to replace yourself. And then I want you to take a quick look over perhaps a week or maybe two weeks at where you're spending your time at the moment.

Now, technology, as you know, is my friend. I love an app. I'm a geek. I'm a nerd. I love the excuse to install something new on my phone. And of course, I have a piece of technology that can help you. And there's a piece of software called Toggle, which is T-O-G-G-L. Have a search on Uncle Google for Toggle. And it's a time tracking piece of software. It's free at the level that we're going to be using it. But what I want you to do is to start looking at exactly where you spend the time in your business, whether that be on revenue generating activity, whether that be on marketing, team management, financial management, bookkeeping, all of those tasks. I want you to keep track on exactly what it is that you're doing at the moment. Now, this is going to take some discipline. I appreciate. So what I suggest you do is at each meal time, you log on Toggle the last period. OK, so when you get to lunchtime, I want you to try and have a really good think about where you've spent your time across the morning and log that on Toggle. I think there's going to be some really interesting surprises in there for you. I'd love it if you could share any revelations, anything that you didn't realise was taking so much of your week. You know I love hearing from you guys anyway. So please share those thoughts when you've started to map out your week. I want you to kind of think of this as a bit of a diet for your diary. OK, when we first start a new eating plan, trust me, I've been on lots of diets. When we first start our eating plan, a really good place to start is a diary of the meals and the food and drinks that we've consumed. So think of it in those terms. This is the beginning of your diary diet. So the first thing we're going to do is log exactly where you're spending your time at the moment. I hope that's been useful to you. I hope it's at least whet your appetite as far as delegation is concerned. If it has, of course, reach out to me. And you have by now, I'm sure, got my contact details. If not, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I love hearing from my salon owners and managers. In a future episode, we'll start to look at how we can go through that process of delegation and outsourcing. I'll give you a few tips, of course, on some geeky stuff, on some software to help delegation and outsourcing go without a hitch. Until we speak again, please take care.