Setting Glorious Goals: How to set BRILLIANT targets when you're clueless

It's all very well talking about salon targets and performance, but how do we even get started with that? How do we even know what we want our salons to achieve? 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. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friend. How on earth are you achingly well, I hope? It's turning into a bit of a catchphrase, that one, isn't it? Somebody picked up on it from one of the transcription services. Anyway, I hope August is treating you well. We're marching towards the end of the month now, aren't we? And marching towards September, which starts to feel a bit autumnal, doesn't it? It starts to feel like a different season, at least it does here in the UK. And the kids will start going back to school, things will start getting back to normal, as far as my routines are concerned. And my mission is to find something joyful in every season. I want to start enjoying all of the seasons, because I am like so many Brits, and it's crazy given where we live, but I'm solar powered. I feel so much better when the sun's out and more social. I'm out and about more. I start taking better care of myself. I care more about how I look. And I get to autumn, and I'll be honest with you, autumn is my least favourite. And I know there are lots of people who have these beautiful mental images of kicking through the leaves and enjoying the warmer, cosier nights indoors and things like that. I just, honestly, I just find it gloomy and depressing and a bit messy. Everything's kind of rotting leaves and mud. Anyway, I'm determined that I'm going to find something joyful about autumn, and the same with winter as well. I think with winter, it's going to be a bit cosier. I think that's when I'm going to get the knitting out. I think it's when I'm going to start snuggling up a bit more and enjoy those kind of cosy cottage moments. But autumn, I'm struggling a bit. So what do you enjoy about autumn? Reach out, let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear from you. I love talking to my salon owners and managers. It's honestly how I feel my week is just having conversations with salon owners. What a great way of making a living. Anyway, that brings us on to today's topic, which is in response to a previous episode. So I talk a lot about performance management. I talk a lot about targets and salon targets. And I had a couple of queries, a couple of questions where people wanted to know where these salon targets come from. So let's have a little discussion into that. Let's leap into that, shall we? How about a bit of clarity on where these salon targets come from, Uncle Phil? Well, I'm here and happy to help, of course.

And if there's anything that you'd like me to cover in a future episode, reach out. phil at buildyoursalon.com or find me over on Instagram. That's where I hang out the most. philjacksoncoach is my handle. I am on threads as well, but yeah, not really feeling the love for that. That feels a bit like Clubhouse 2.0 to me. And that was a flash in the pan as far as my life was concerned too. Anyway, let's get on to salon targets. Well, we kind of come at it from the wrong angle. Because when I go into a salon as a coach, as a business coach, and I'm coaching somebody one-to-one, quite nosy. I like to get my nose under the hood, as they say. I like to have a poke around and see what's going on in the business. And I ask people to start setting ambitious but attainable targets. I want them to be challenging but achievable. If it's not challenging, that's not motivating. If it's not achievable, that's even less motivating in the longer run. So I try and get people to set these targets. But they're just kind of arbitrary numbers. They just seem to pluck these numbers out of the air. Everybody wants a half a million business or a million pound business. Everybody wants these nice round numbers because they think it's going to buy them into this Instagram lifestyle. And I prefer something a bit more tangible than that. Even worse is when I go into a salon and they want to achieve 10% more than last year or 15% more than last year or 20% more than last year. That feels really arbitrary to me as well. Because by definition, if you're looking for growth, you weren't thrilled with what you achieved last year. That wasn't ticking all the boxes for you. So why would you build on a number that you found unsatisfactory? I don't like that either. So where do we come from? Well, I am not, I don't want to call myself a holistic coach because that conjures all sorts of images, which is very inaccurate around the way that I do my coaching. But I try to look at your business as part of your life overall. And I don't like the phrase work-life balance for exactly this reason. Because when we are small business owners, when we're solopreneurs, salonpreneurs, when we're running small teams, basically the water is too muddy. There is no separation between work and life. Part of that is because of the, it's the nature of the

beast. It's the, it's the industry that we operate in. So what happens because we're in a very intimate relationship with our clients over time, friendships form, maybe not the same as your bosom buddies, but they're a bit more than clients. They are friendly. So we start to have that slightly social aspect with our clients. Of course, social media means that our work life and our home life has been squished together in one glorious hot mess. So work-life balance to me, it implies a kind of separation. It implies in my head, it implies a kind of seesaw. It implies a 50-50 balance. And I don't think work life is like that at all for us. So I think firstly, let's get rid of the work-life balance phrase altogether. But I do want to see your business as part of a bigger picture. And what we want our business to achieve has to be a reflection of how we want our lives to look. So what I'll usually do when I go into a business coaching one-to-one is we'll start talking about the end game. What do you want to achieve ultimately in the business? Are we building this business to one day sell it? Or are we building this business to get it to the stage where it's run by staff so that we can get pretty much a kind of passive income for it and just be on a beach in Spain getting bank statements by text message? Or are we hoping that it's going to be a family business that one of our nearest and dearest is going to take over the business one day? Or is the plan that one day we're going to put down our scissors or we're going to put down our injection, our injecting needles for the final time? And then the business will close on the day that we retire. Because each of those options brings with it a certain amount of preparation work. Building a business which you're going to close the day that you retire looks very different to building a business that you're one day going to sell as a going concern. And presumably you want to maximise the amount that you're going to get for that. So straight away that starts to dictate the way that the business is going to be built. But also then once we've got the end game in mind we start to know actually when is it you're going to retire? And how much income do we need to generate before you retire? Because once we know how much income we need to generate before you retire then suddenly we know how much income we need to draw from our business. And then given the level of profitability that exists in the salon at the moment that starts to tell us how much turnover we need to generate. So those salon targets aren't coming just as an arbitrary number. They're coming from what we want the bigger picture of our life to look like. Or if you don't want to focus on the end game what sort of lifestyle do you want now?

Are we looking to move houses? Do we need a bigger mortgage? Do we want to buy that fantastic sports car that we've always dreamt of? What kind of holidays do we want? What kind of bigger picture of our life do we want to share with our loved ones and our nearest and dearest? Because that will a lot of times dictate the kind of income that we need to generate from our business. And if we know that next year we need to take home £100,000 because we want a bigger mortgage and it's time to replace that car. Well given the level of profitability, given how much money we can take out of the business we now know what the business needs to generate next year. So it's not an arbitrary number. And then the final bit of the jigsaw, the final piece that's missing in so many salons is they have team targets which are completely separate and not even close relations sometimes to what we need the salon to achieve. So what I want you to do is then take that salon target and break it down. If you know that next year we need to generate half a million in turnover, who's going to put what in the till for you to hit that number? And that's the team target. That's what we need an individual team member to generate and to produce. And that will dictate the level of training that they need. It will dictate the prices they need. It will dictate the level of utilisation that we need in order to hit those numbers. So it's all pushing towards you achieving that bigger picture of your life. It's all pushing towards your life goals. Because then what we've created is a business that serves you, the salon business owner, rather than you serving your business, rather than you becoming a slave to your own business. Sorry, a bit of a rant there. But I do feel really passionately about this. I get so tired when I speak to salon owners, business owners, who aren't achieving their life goals and they're demotivated, they're stressed, they're bored, they're fed up, and they feel like there's got to be easier ways for them to make a living. And they're right an awful lot of the time. But if you've got a business that's producing results, which mean that you can have that amazing holiday, live that amazing lifestyle, retire when you want to, share the kind of life with your loved ones that you want to, that's motivating. And when the times are hard, and times do get hard, we all know that over the last few years. But when times are hard, that's your motivation. That's what we lean into. That's what

we can keep in mind to get us through the bad days. So I hope that's helped a little bit. I hope that hasn't created too much work for you. But I call it the bottle of wine conversation. I want you to sit down with your partner if you have one. And I want you to drink a bottle of wine together and just do some dreaming. Make sure you're on the same page with the bigger picture of your life. Then you can take those plans into your business and figure out what that needs to look like too. If there's a topic you would like me to cover in a future episode, please reach out phil at buildyoursalon.com. And don't forget one of these episodes every month is given over to Q&A. Send your questions in something reasonably specific. If you want it to be anonymous, then please let me know. Otherwise, I will name you and your salon live on the podcast or here on YouTube. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. Until then, 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.