Feel like a cog in your salon machine? Build a business that serves YOU

If you ever feel that your business is running you, and you've become a cog in your own machine, listen on, this episode is for you. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your eyes and ears with a dose of wise old owl wisdom. How are you? How's December going? I've heard some very good reports after a patchy November, I think we'll call it. A few people having some mixed results through November, though I did get some triumphant results out of my one-to-one clients, particularly around Black Friday. How's December going? I'm hearing good things, hearing that we've started the month strong, the rest of the month looks paced but busy, which is good. That's what we want is that kind of steady flow of excellent income, rather than these massive peaks and troughs, which of course are so violent in terms of how it wipes us out emotionally and financially sometimes. That's why, of course, I'm a big advocate of salon memberships, getting some steady income month after month, taking the sting out of your goal setting. And goal setting is what the whole month of the Build Your Salon podcast is all about. So we have our regular Q&As, we've got a nice mixed bag for next week's podcast, but the rest of the month is going to be given over to goal setting for 2024. And I know you guys are busy, and I know you're probably not going to get around to listening to this properly until after the Christmas rush, but I'm hoping in that bit between Christmas and New Year, you're going to invest a little bit of time setting up an excellent year for next year. Myself, my goals are done and dusted, and I know for lots of my clients they are too. We had our goal setting event in November, so everyone is much clearer on what they need to achieve. But before we get stuck into goal setting, I want to almost take a step back. I want to take a bit more of a bird's eye view of how your business and your life is interlinked and meshes together. Because as small business owners, you can't really separate the two. There's no such thing as a work-life balance anymore, because everything's one big, glorious, beautiful, hot mess, hopefully with glitter on top. And I think a part of it is the way that business is these days. I think with social media, our work lives and our home lives have become interlinked. I think our clients over time become not quite friends, but certainly friendly, and sometimes we socialise with them a little bit. Similarly, team members, if you're part of a small team, then they can start to intrude on your personal life as well. And sometimes our friends come into the salon because they want to support the business.

So everything gets a little bit messy. So trying to separate those two things out, I think, is a mistake, particularly when it comes to your goal setting. I know lots of people who are starting to get pretty good at setting financial goals and turnover goals, utilisation goals for their businesses, but they're not actually feeling like they've got a business that serves them, because what they haven't done is tie those goals back to their personal goals. And that's what I want today to be about. I want you to start with setting your own personal goals. I'm not going to teach you how to set goals in this episode, but I want you to have that longer term view of what your business is going to look like. I even want you to think about the end game. And I know that might be decades away for some of you, some of us perhaps not quite so far away. But what do you want to do with your business at the end? Are you building it to sell? Are you building it so that it becomes almost like a passive income for you so that it's a team led manager run salon where you just go in and empty the safe once a month? Are you hoping to franchise it out and turn it into a bigger business? Are you hoping that a family member is going to take it over and it becomes a proper established family business? Because each of those will start to influence what the next few years need to look like. The way that we build a business to sell might look very different to a business where you're happy to just lock the doors on the last day, sell off your fixtures and fittings and swan off onto your next cruise. So it's really important that we know what the end game is going to look like. Now, it's OK for that vision to change. What's not OK in my book anyway is not to have a vision at all. So take a bit of time, figure out what the end game is for your business and figure out what the next few years is going to look like in terms of your life as well. And you might need this to be what I call the bottle of wine conversation. It's the conversation that me and my husband normally have when we're on holiday or when we've got some time off together and we crack open a bottle and we just dream. And we just talk about what our retirement is going to look like. And that starts to inform what the next five years might look like. So are we going to be moving house? Do we need to replace any big items? Do we need new cars, for example? Do we need refurbishment? And all of these things are going to have an impact on us personally, quite a big impact. So we set those goals first because once you've got a clear idea about your personal goals,

we then start to get a clearer idea on what your business needs to deliver for you. In terms of if, for example, in fact, I'm going to use one of my one to one clients. One of my one to one clients is saving like mad. She is sick to death of renting. She's fed up with being beholden to landlords. What's happened over the last few years, and I'm not necessarily hooked on the idea of property ownership. I think there are alternatives out there. Problem in the UK is there is a scarcity of rental properties. So the landlords hold all the power at the moment. There's a disconnect between what should be going on in the marketplace and actually the reality of it. And part of that's been a government led thing and tax legislation's changed. But that's for a different podcast, not for me, darlings. So what's happened is the landlords have got all the power. She's sick to death of landlords dictating and being a little bit heavy handed, to be honest with you, and a bit unfair. So she wants to buy a property. So she's saving like mad for a deposit. That means that we need her business to be generating big profits, not only to reinvest in the business, because there's probably some refurb work. There's certainly some team training that needs to go on. But she needs to take a lot of profit out of the business and be visible in doing that as well, because she needs to show bank statements to mortgage companies. So we're building the business in a slightly different way. It's very profit heavy at the moment. We've got big growth targets. You may not have that in your business. Can you start to see, though, how your personal goals feed through into what your business needs to do? So your five year goals for your personal life, whether around the house, cars, holidays, experiences, what you need to save, and maybe even just the hours that you work is going to have an impact on the goals that we set in the business for the next five years. That then has an impact on what next year needs to look like. So all of a sudden, those business goals are much more meaningful. The business is being built in a way that serves you, because the alternative is you start to feel like a slave in your own business. You feel like a cog in your own machine. So no goal setting to be done today. What I want you to do, though, is take a breath, take a step back and really think about what the bigger picture of your life needs to look like and how your business is going to fit into that. Trust me, when times are hard, when your back's against the wall, if there are reasons why you need to serve your business, it's much, much easier to cope with that complaining client or that team member turning up late for the 14th time.

If you know that you're dealing with that crap, because it's going to get you this thing in your life, much, much easier to cope. So I hope that's been useful to you. I hope it's a useful bit of perspective. We have our last Q&A episode of the year next week, and I've already got enough questions. So if you've got urgent questions for December, sorry, wait till next December. But please send your questions over phil at buildyoursalon.com so that I can put them into our January and February Q&A podcasts. Also, next month is our first guest slot. So I'm going to start doing some interviews on these podcasts too. If you think you've got something that would be interesting to hair salon and beauty salon owners and estheticians and aesthetic business owners, then please reach out, let me know, phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to feature you on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again. And until then, my darlings, 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.