How to Make Your Salon Goals Stick: Essential Prep Work for 2026

Most business owners skip straight to goal setting in January, then wonder why they abandon their goals in February. This episode is a little bit of not terribly glamorous prep work that's going to make your goal setting actually stick. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming all over the airwaves with, actually not airwaves are we, coming all over your Wi-Fi with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, as we storm towards the end of 2025. Honestly, I'm not expecting anyone to listen to this episode today. I know this is the 22nd of December and you have plenty going on. Queuing in supermarkets, carrying out a couple of last minute appointments for people that have not been terribly organised, I expect. Are you being good, opening an extra day for them? Bless them. Or are you just wrapping presents and peeling sprouts? Why don't you reach out and let me know? And I do hope that whatever you're doing, you're finding a bit of time for yourself in there too. But before we jump into our goal setting for 2026, which is going to be the topic of our next podcast episode, there's a little bit of prep work, which is not terribly glamorous, but it can be kind of fun. And I think it's going to make your goal setting for 2026 much more powerful. So think of it as kind of laying the foundations, if you like, making your bed ready to lie in it. So before we start figuring out what our marketing plan is going to be for next year, what our turnover targets are going to be for next year, staffing plans, training plans, all those things that bring that lovely New Year's energy. So firstly, I want you to just take a little step back. And firstly, I want you to have a little look back at 2025. Not with your rose tinted glasses on, and also not with a load of harsh self criticism. We need to be cold hard facts here. So I want you to have a little look back and see what made you money. Now, this will be a lot easier if you get into the habits. And it's not something that I see an awful lot of people doing, which is a real shame. But at the end of each marketing campaign that you do, take a little bit of time just to write up a quick debrief. You can even get AI to help you with this. It can ask you questions about your marketing, and then puts a little debrief together for you. So you don't want huge amounts of text, sort of half a side of A4 is plenty. But basically, what you want on each of your marketing campaigns is what worked, what didn't, what you would improve next time, or even whether you're going to run the campaign next time.

Because that will give you a good idea about the things that contributed to your business over the last year. Apart from that, what made you joy? What brought you joy, rather? What brought joy into your business into your life that we might want to be building on repeating? What felt easy, or at least easier? And what would you happily do again? So take a little bit of time, 10 minutes and a cup of coffee, and just unpack what worked in 2025. And then do the same for what didn't work. So the things that drained you, the things that didn't make you money, or didn't save you time, or cost you a bit of sanity for very little return. Or what did you keep saying that you would do, but never did? And then we're not judging. It's not failure. That's just a bit of data that we need. And what needs to stop coming with you into 2026? What are we not going to carry forward? What did you avoid dealing with this year that's still waiting for you? And we need real clarity on these things before we start setting our goals. The next thing we need clarity on is your magic number. I don't mean your revenue number. What I want is your profit number. How much do you actually want to make out of your business in 2026? Because then very roughly, if we lump in all of the costs and lump in our taxes and any profit that you want to retain in the business, that will give us your turnover target for 2026. So we just I don't want you to jump into any of that right now. All I want is that baseline number. What do you actually want to live on? What do you want your personal tax bill to look like? And also, what do you want to save? What do you want to spend on shiny stuff, holidays, all of those good things to do a bit of dreaming about what you want out of your business? And then finally, in this little phase, which is not finally, sorry, there's a step for step three in this phase between Christmas and New Year, which I expect is when most people are going to pick up these tasks, feed your brain. So grab yourself a bit of reading or grab yourself an audio book or maybe even find yourself some YouTube videos on a topic and just stretch your mind a little bit. Show yourself what's possible. And what I like to do is jump into the really big numbers.

So start reading about people that have got very, very big businesses and people. I'm not a big fan of Alex Homozy. Personality wise, he leaves me a little bit cold, but he's got a brilliant book called 100 million dollar offers. Now, I'm never going to make 100 million dollar offer in my business, but it makes you think about value and pricing differently. Or there's another recommendation which I haven't read, but it's on my list for between Christmas and New Year. It's called 10X is easier than 2X, about why small goals are actually harder to achieve than those big goals. So just throw something into the mix or maybe something that's going to help you personally. Anything written by Brené Brown is on my list. I'm reading one of Brené's books, Between Christmas and New Year, because it's actually the book that we've chosen for our book club that we're having on our Tenerife retreat in January. So just read something that makes your current problems feel smaller or something that gives you some perspective and something that not necessarily gives you more tactics. And we don't want more to do items. I just want you to stretch the realms of possibility a little bit. And then finally, and this is finally, and the reason it's a little side note is because we covered this in the last Build Your Salon podcast episode. Have a little research on your goals, on your values rather. You don't want goals without values because that implies that you might end up chasing things that may not even make you happy, may not even serve you as we go into 2026. So I gave you a little goal setting exercise last week and jump into last week's episode if you want a bit more detail. But essentially, there are value setting decks that you can get on Amazon. There's value setting decks that you can print for free off the Internet yourself if you wanted to. And these values are going to act as a filter, which will help you decide which goals you need to pursue and which ones you want to ignore. And basically, what we do is divide these value cards into three piles, things that are important to us, things that are not important to us, and things that are very important to us. And then we focus, we filter those goals through the values that are very important to us. And I go through a shortlisting exercise where I pick out the top 10 and then reduce that to the top five. And this takes a bit of time, but it's actually quite a fun exercise. It always reminds me of the Cosmo quiz. Do you remember the Cosmo sex quiz that was out in the 90s and early 2000s?

Anything where we're doing a little bit of navel gazing, learning to know ourselves just a little bit better is always time well invested. So basically what we're doing with this is trying to figure out what kind of life you want 2026 to give you, not just in terms of revenue, not just in terms of business growth. What does a good life look like? Because I always want to be the lifestyle first coach. I always want to be the person who's helping you build a business that supports your life goals, not a business that gets in the way of them. And so this half day isn't about goal setting. It's just about making sure that when you do set your goals in January or if you're going to do it between Christmas and New Year, they're based on reality. So that honest review that we did at the beginning, they're actually big enough. So we know the number. We know what we want our business to produce for us. They're ambitious enough, which is what the reading's about. And they're aligned with what matters to you. There you go. We got there. I know I tripped over my words an awful lot today, but there was a reason to it. There was a method to one's madness. So block out the time, chuck it in your diary somewhere between Christmas and New Year, sleep off your turkey roast. And you only need about two and a half, three hours, maybe four at the most, plus some reading time. Just you and this bit of work. I promise your goal setting self will thank you for the extra clarity that you're bringing. Next episode, we're going to talk about that goal setting process. I'm not going to go into huge detail with it because we've talked about this on the Build Your Salon podcast before. I'm just going to give you a quick rundown, a few pointers and a bit of a structure that's going to make your life an awful lot easier. I'm going to put that episode out on Boxing Day. I don't expect anyone to listen to it, but it's there ready for you when you're ready to jump back into the game. I do hope if you're celebrating Christmas, I do hope it is a wonderful time of year for you, whoever you are, wherever you are. I do hope you're having a peaceful and prosperous time as we head into 2026, and I will speak to you very, very soon. Take care.