Why Being Busy Is Holding Your Salon Back

If you've worked flat out all year and your business looks exactly the same as it did in January, maybe being busy wasn't all it's cracked up to be. 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. I think I might be being a bit poorly next week, you know, when you're not ill, but you can feel it come in. I've got that achy skin thing going on. So, apologies. Next few episodes, I'm going to have the same cardigan on because I'm going to batch some just in case. Anyway, the eagle-eyed amongst you might also notice if you're watching on YouTube or on the queenofsalons.com website that we've changed logo. I'm having a rebrand, so it's not going to be the Build Your Salon podcast. It's going to be the Queen of Salons podcast instead. I've got the .com and I'm gradually moving things over and there's a little tiny business lesson in there, my darlings. When I see people rebranding or refreshing and they come out with this brand new look for their salon or their website or their social media, they feel the need to wait until everything's perfect, everything's in place. And then finally, there's this great unveiling. And honestly, do you think people at home are sat waiting to see what your new logo looks like? I couldn't give a damn. So, honestly, this is how I think you should be rebranding. You don't have to do everything all at once. I've changed the logo. Probably next month it will be the email address and then the jingle will be the last thing that happens. And that's fine, darlings. It really doesn't matter. Anyway, what are we talking about today? We're talking about being busy because I'm busy has become the default answer because it's the safe thing to say. If someone says, how are you? And you say, I'm quiet. Well, it sounds like failure. So nobody says it, however true it might be. Busy earns you a bit of sympathy, a bit of kudos. And if we're honest, we all quietly compete on being busy. Busy is visible. It's a full diary. It's a full chair. It's the rooms being maxed out to full column. Whether you're doing hair or beauty or aesthetics, it makes it very easy to mistake busy for success. I'm going to get fed up with saying the word busy, aren't I? I can feel it in my teeth already. And if you work on your own, you're going to feel this even more because there's no one to share the load. So being busy, it proves that you're needed. And I think ultimately that's what we all want, isn't it? So when someone asks how you are and you say I'm busy, it shows that you're in demand. It shows that you're successful. There's a certain amount of posturing that goes on there. But that's just because it's comfortable. And what tends to happen is we start filling up our day with things just to feel occupied. There's a different word for busy just to feel occupied. So on top of clients, we end up tidying stuff that doesn't need tidying or recounting the stock which doesn't need reordering or fiddling about with social media. And just to fill up our day, just to feel occupied, just to feel in demand again so that we can legitimately say how busy we are. But really what we should be doing is looking at the stuff that drives the business forward. And they tend to be the things that people are putting off. They're not looking at the numbers. They're not planning their marketing. They're not having the meetings with their team because being busy helps us feel useful and avoid the stuff that actually we'd quite like to do. And honestly, I did this for years. I was that God that I always call it flappy duck syndrome when you've got a team member that kind of flounces up and down the salon and always has a piece of paper in their hand and seems to be working 20 times as hard as everybody else. That was me. And it was only when one of my regular clients pulled me up on it and said how stressful it was making her feel that I realized that even in my flappiest duck moments, that's not how we need to appear. We need to appear. We need to take a breath. We need to get a little bit of dignity and we need to glide like a swan, not flap like a duck. And when we are very occupied, when there are lots of demands on our time, that can be kind of tough. But guess what? With a bit of organization and a bit of prioritizing, we can absolutely reduce the overwhelm. When there's that old rule of thumb, the Pareto principle, the 80-20 principle, which says that actually a small share of what you're doing is actually producing most of your results. It's not precise, but it holds up remarkably well across businesses. There's a handful of clients that are bringing in most of the money. There's a few services on your price card which are bringing in most of your profits. There's a few bits of marketing you're doing which are bringing in most of your new clients. And I'll bet it doesn't justify the amount of time you're spending on social media. Not going to rant about that today. Your Uncle Phil's going to calm down on the social media thing. You know I hate it. I hate you wasting your time on it rather. And I really don't think it's moving the needle as much as we thought. Anyway, let's move on. So we've got to focus on the 20% that does the heavy lifting in our salons. And even if it feels a bit unsexy, even if it's stuff that we don't want to do, even if it's stuff that we're putting off again and again and again, they're the things that we should be occupying our time with. So if you take your 50-hour week, what's 20% of that? 20% of that, very neatly, is 10 hours. It's almost like I came up with these numbers to make the maths easy. But if you could name the 10 hours that genuinely move the business forward, what are the other 40 doing? Run it on your own week. I think you'll be shocked at how much time you're actually wasting. The thing is, salons are built on selling time. So we assume filling up more of those hours means more money. And honestly, most of the time, it doesn't, especially for the salon manager or the salon owner. Fifty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, that's 2,600 hours. If you take £30,000 out of the business, that's about £11.50 an hour. Compare that with what you're paying your team, then run it on your own numbers. You're wasting an awful lot of time on tasks that should be delegated, should be automated, or goddammit, should just be deleted from your salon business. As soon as we start separating time from money, the business plan gets really, really exciting. And I'm a big fan. If you have examples in your own business of ways that you've disconnected time from money in your salon, drop me an email at phil.buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to interview you on the Build Your Salon, on the Queen of Salons podcast, because that disconnecting time from money is the key to it, because it takes the ceiling off the business. It means that we've got infinite potential. But the whole point of business, of course, is to turn a profit. And that's why I would always set your profit target before you start working harder. Working harder without that profit goal won't fix anything. We set the target first and then work back on what your hours actually need to achieve. And if it's not putting enough money in the till, guess what? We need to swap it for a task that will. And knowing the target shows up those little costs as well, that £100 a month subscription is actually £1,200 a year. Look at your profit target and suddenly we're doing an awful lot of service, even if your profit margin is 20%, you know, £6,000 worth of service just to pay for that subscription. So go back to the numbers, get to grips with your profit margins. It's going to have a huge influence on how you're spending your time, I promise. Busy without that target is just that flappy duck thing, and that's not where we want to be. But taking a really solid look at where you are right now is vital for moving your business forward. And it's vital this time of year so that next year starts to look better, starts to look different. If any of this has landed with you, there are two things I want you to do. First one costs nothing. I want you to go over to yearsorted.com. It's a new programme that I'm launching this year to help people have the best 2027 ever. There's a free download on there called Last Year Honestly. And it's a couple of pages that walk you back through this year while it's still fresh in your mind. And we're going to look at what worked, what didn't, what we can afford to drop so that we're not wasting our time next year. And the second thing I want you to do is put Wednesday, the 18th of November, in your diary. That's when the Year Sorted launches. It's my brand new course in four sittings. It's about five hours of work at your own pace and some beautiful handouts. The best I've ever done. Proper physical handouts. You can pay the extra and have them posted to you as well in a lovely workbook. I'm kind of done with the spreadsheets. I'm kind of done with doing everything on a screen for a little while. I want to go back to a pen and a piece of paper again for a while and scribble and tear bits up and chew things over in my own mad, crazy way. So the yearsorted.com is where you're going to be heading out. And just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet. If you would like to be a guest on a future episode of the Queen of Salons podcast, please reach out and let me know. My email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen, phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends. Anyway, have a fantastic rest of your November. And until next time, take care.