What to Stop Doing in Your Salon Next Year

Every goal-setting method I've ever seen asks what you want to add to your next year. Not me, not your Uncle Phil, I want to ask you what you're going to stop. Hello, hello, hello my salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons coming all over the internet again with another dose of my Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. And we're steaming towards the middle of November, my favourite quarter of the year for marketing. How is it working out for you? Are you raking it in? Are you going to do a Black Friday deal? Are you gearing up for Christmas? What's going to put the money in the bank for you so that you get 2027 off to a flying start? Because it's that time of year when we take stock, look back and start making plans for the coming year. We kind of have to do it in November in the salon industry because December either is ridiculously busy and we've got no time for anything or we take a big chunk of time off to spend with our family and our loved ones. No judgement either way. Some salons, it's their best month of the year. Some of them, they're kind of twiddling their thumbs a little bit because November is so busy for them. We need to get ahead on 2027. So we're talking about planning and I'm talking about planning by subtraction. Everybody does planning by adding and it's just the quickest way towards overwhelm, towards, you know, weeks not getting any longer, is it? We need to make room for the things that we ought to be doing. Last episode, I was talking about prioritising the stuff that actually moves the business forward. Today, I want to make some space for those things. I want you to subtract. I want you to reduce the amount of things that are on your list for next year. And a lot of salon owners fall into this habit. So, you know, they're all about a new service for next year, a new goal, new bit of marketing, new shiny machine, which is going to gather dust in a couple of years' time, new qualifications. And meanwhile, your week and your month stays exactly the same size. And if that time is already full, if your salon's already busy, the new plan doesn't get done. Because however good that plan is, it's getting squeezed into your evenings or it's just being quietly ignored by the time we get to February. If you work on your own, you're going to feel this the hardest because every additional hour comes straight out of your own hours. There's only so much time you have in your week. And subtraction has been running through my work for years, even when I didn't really quite call it that. I had a program called Do Less, Achieve More, which is one of my favorite productivity programs I've ever done. Then we had Get Smart, Work Less. And now the planning course that I've just built has the same advice baked into it because I think instinctively, don't judge me, I think instinctively your Uncle Phil is a little bit on the lazy side. And I think that can be a good thing in business because if there's a quicker way to do something, I'm going to find it. If there's a shortcut in your processes that will get you the same amazing results with less effort or less time spent, I'm going to find it. And I think that's a good thing when it comes to your planning. So most business advice sells you the additional stuff, the more goals, more revenue, more hustle. I'm going to come back to the opposite because I just think that we do so much, which is a waste of time. My biggest example, I used to go to one of these networking breakfasts. Now, I don't know how long you've known me for, how long you've been following your Uncle Phil, but I promise if you want to get the absolute best out of me, if you want my shining ideas, my wit, my personality, my company, 6 a.m. in a cold hotel room having breakfast with a bunch of strangers who want to flog you a website is not the best place to do it. But it was one of those things that I felt like I ought to do. I felt like I had to do. In fact, my business coach told me that I needed to do more local business networking. So I would drag my cookies out of bed at five o'clock in the morning, traipse across to the next town, sit in a room with a lawyer and a web designer and somebody who's trying to, you know, people that were just completely unrelated to my business. And I would network and it cost me so much in time, cost me so much in energy, cost me so much in sleep getting up. And I do actually get up at that time of the morning, but I don't want to bloody talk to anyone, not to at least nine. And in the end, I gave myself permission to have a really hard look at whether it was actually moving the needle on the business. And of course it wasn't because you're having breakfast with the same people week after week after week. And I don't think I could find a single instance of when it had actually put money in my till. So I gave myself permission to ignore my business coach. In fact, I went back to what I said. You said this was going to do some good and I don't think it is. And together we negotiated, but I could just take it away. Honestly, in terms of energy saved, it was enormous for me because by the time you got up, got over there, done the networking thing, got back into your day, it's the equivalent of half a day a week, every week for an entire year. I mean, God, the time I was wasting, it was ridiculous. So I gave myself permission to delete it. And it was about this time of year when I was looking at the coming year. The thought we're doing another year of breakfast with these people was just, it was crushing my soul. So here's the idea that I want you to steal. I would like you to come up with a new list, not a list of things that you're going to do this year. It's going to be called your not this year list. And you're going to write in the margin of your plan for 2027 where you can see it. I want you to write down all of the things that you are not going to do next year. Not that you're never going to do them, not that we want to lose them completely. And that's why this list needs to stay visible. If you file a decision away, you'll reopen that decision every time someone suggests the idea. Whereas if you've got it in front of you that you're not going to be doing that thing, if you've got that visible list, it reminds you that you decided it was something you weren't going to do. It's not just something that you forgot. What kinds of things might go on your not this year list? How about that new treatment that everyone seems to be adding? But in your heart of hearts, deep down, you're thinking of adding it just because they all have, not because you think it's got long term legs. Or what about opening on a Sunday, getting up to seven days a week, or those new products that you think you ought to be buying in the course that you've bought and you just haven't started or opening even a second location. All of those things can make it onto not this year. Again, not never. That's what makes it so much easier to write down. We're not going to lose these things. They're not going to disappear off our radar for eternity. They're just not going to happen in 2027. And there are three ways to put something down. The first is to just stop doing it. And that's what I did with my 6 a.m. breakfasts. I just stopped it. And a lot of people would do that with services that nobody seems to be booking or that weekly offer that you keep running or that discount code that you keep offering out. Or there's all these things that we can just stop. And most of the time, people don't even notice. The second, when we're dropping something, we can hand it over. So we can pass it on to someone else, whether that's a team member or a bit of software or your accountant or a virtual assistant. And if that one makes you twitch a little bit, go back and listen. I did an episode on why salon owners who won't delegate won't survive. Go and have a listen. There's some really good tips in there on handing stuff over without breaking into a sweat each time. Or the third way that we can drop something is to shrink it. So we keep it, but it becomes smaller. So, for example, my networking breakfast, I could have said to the organiser, I can't commit to this every week. Is it OK with you if I just come once a month? Or if we don't feel that we can drop a service from our menu, can we offer it just with certain team members or certain days or times of the week? If we're wasting so much time on social media, can we just reduce the amount of time that we're posting if we're not comfortable with deleting Facebook altogether? But what that can add up to is hours saved a week, lots of hours across a month, huge numbers, hundreds of hours across a year. And that's time that we could be spending either on something much more ambitious, something much more relevant to the business that's going to move the needle, or heck, it could be time that we just spend in bed. So it's not about necessarily being less ambitious. It's about being really deliberate and really present with the decisions that you're making, really deliberate about what's going to take your time and your energy next year. If any of that has landed with you, there are two things I'd love you to do. One of them, I want you to head over to theyearsorted.com, and I've got a download there for you called Last Year Honestly. It's a couple of pages that will walk you back through this year, covering what worked, what didn't, and what we're going to drop for next year, and what we probably shouldn't have started in the first place. Free download, have it with my love. The link is also in queenofsalons.com forward slash links. The second, put Wednesday the 18th of November in your diary. That's when the year sorted, the program opens. Recorded course for you to take at your own pace takes about five hours total. You're going to have the next year planned out on a single page that you're going to keep referring to day after day, week after week, month after month. And the handouts are absolutely delicious. Everything's at theyearsorted.com. Head over and take a look. What have I missed? What are you dropping for next year? Anything that you're going to give yourself permission to not take into 2027? Why not reach out and let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com, my email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise hour wisdom. And until then, take care.