Triumph in 2024 - set your amazing salon business goals with Debbie Lewis

Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends, and welcome to another episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. Another dose of salon wisdom coming your way. And you lucky things, it's not coming from me today. It's coming from Debbie Lewis, also known as Mrs. D. Lewis. She's an ex-salon owner, and she's seen the highs and lows of salon ownership, moving from a team of three to managing a huge team of 47 across multiple locations. She's now an ex-salon owner, though. She's the founder of Salon Angels, founder of Salon Socials, and she's a regional, goodness, a regional ecosystem manager at NatWest Enterprise, helping businesses to grow and scale across England. Let's get her on the show, shall we? Welcome to the show, Debbie. Thanks so much for having me, Phil. Quite the intro. Sorry about that tongue twister of a title. It just shows the world I'm in, doesn't it? Everything's very simple in my world. Anyway, I'm hugely thrilled to have you on the show. And actually, you didn't know this, but you are my first guest release. So I've recorded a couple of episodes with guests, but yours is scheduled to come out first. Amazing. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, we first crossed paths way back in the 1800s on Clubhouse. And I remember how brilliantly good you are at communicating online. Thank you. And you talk with such clarity and such precision, which I really appreciate. So I feel like I'm in a safe pair of hands as far as guests go. And also, it fits really nicely in. So on the podcast, we've been talking about goals all through the month. And I kind of wanted to get my version of goal setting out of the way so that people can have a completely fresh pair of eyes across their goals really through you. So before we jump into goal setting, though, I kind of wanted just a little potted history of how goal setting has played out in your career. Because the kind of journey you've been on can't have happened by accident. Well, I wish I could tell you it was all incredibly strategic and I've always known what I wanted to do. But actually, like many salon owners, I've kind of bounced from one thing I love and then turned out to be quite good at to another thing that I've loved and turned out to be quite good at.

So it's been a little bit serendipitous, but there is a method in the madness. I wish that I could sit here and say when I owned my business, I religiously sat down every year and did a strategy plan and communicated with my teams and documented everything. But I was in business for 17 years. And if I'm really honest, for about 12 years of that, I just flew by the seat of my pants, as many salon owners do. And goal setting for me was to do lists. And so I just would have these folders full of ideas and things we could do. And I'm so lucky that I had a team who were able to spin the plates with me and for me to allow me to be that kind of creative chaos. But actually, when I then looked to scale and exit my business, I learned about strategy and I learned about processes and systems. And I thought to myself, if I'd known this at the beginning, my life would have been so much easier. And it's kind of really set me on this mission to make sure that as many hair and beauty business owners as possible know that there is another way, a better way of doing things. And you don't have to mortgage a kidney to be able to go out and access the help. Absolutely. And I think I mean, you've been in business a similar amount of time to me, actually, which makes us both looking fabulous for our ages. But I am. I think there was a kind of an excuse when I first started my salon ownership journey and that nobody was really talking about goals. Nobody was really talking strategically, but there's not really that excuse anymore. So why aren't more people doing it? I think so 40 percent of all entrepreneurs are neurodivergent, meaning that they learn in different ways and different styles. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of the education system and also business coaching is delivered at academic individuals in a very old fashioned style. So I think often as creatives, it just doesn't appeal. But equally, our happy place and what we love doing is being with people. I don't think there are very many salon owners or salon professionals who say, oh, I love me a good Excel spreadsheet. I love a big document and a form filling. And often in business, what we find is the businesses who are very organized and very successful have got a hidden partner,

that partner who takes that kind of yin and yang approach to doing all of the jobs and the to do list. And you can stay in your zone of genius. And then the very, very small minority of people who just are so tenacious and dogged that they will not give it up. And even if it's not their skill set, they'll give it a blooming good go. They're the ones that really I wish there were more of those. And I think a lot of people just do the ostrich thing. They put their head in the sand and go, I just I just do what I do. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And I want for those people to see more people like me, role models who actually I was like you. And then I got some help and I became a recovering business planaholic. And and it completely transformed my business, the way I look at businesses and now has helped me to give back because there's also an awful lot of business owners in the hair and beauty space who want to be coaches, want to be educators. But unfortunately, not very many of them and us. I include myself in that number. We never learnt it. So we're teaching it without that formal foundation. And actually, there's some brilliant education out there that I think we need to be spreading a little bit more of like fairy dust. Hmm. So you said that things started to change quite drastically in your business when you brought goal setting and strategic thinking in. What do you think specifically are the advantages? Why should we? So I now liken it to getting in a car and going on a journey. If you just got in your car and you started the engine and off you drove, you'd get somewhere. Who knows where? And it might be OK, but you'd probably waste a lot, awful lot of time and energy and petrol. Whereas if you had planned your journey and you'd said, right, I'm leaving the house at this time, I want to get to insert destination here. Actually, if you use a sat nav to get there, not only will it keep you on track and you can plan your route and you can optimise things to do along the way. But it also shows you that kind of playback of you are halfway there. You're three quarters of the way there. And often we lose motivation when we don't see reward and recognition. So sometimes just tracking against your milestones can be such a game changer in terms of motivation and resilience. So for me, it's that whole analogy of you need to decide where you want to be travelling towards to get there quicker.

And actually, I wasted an awful lot of time on a very scenic route in my journey. And I could have been making a lot more money and having a lot less headaches had I have set that mental sat nav for my business journey. I think what I see again and again is people that are really successful beauty therapists or hairdressers or estheticians. And it feels like the natural next step for them to go into business ownership. But of course, it's such a different skill set. And I don't really see many people investing in that skill set before they make the leap. So what they end up with is that process that you described where we're just kind of winging it. And most of us can do OK, but it's exhausting. Just making decisions on that emotional level all the time is just draining, I think, over time. Yeah. OK, so you've sold us. Where do we start? We're in. We're in. So actually, and I don't know what you've taught around goal setting, so I'm hoping this really complements. A lot of people start goal setting with making a list. I want to do this by this time. That might be I want a million followers on TikTok by Christmas. But actually, what they fail to do nine times out of 10 is do that whole first step of visualization of actually what do you want to achieve? So I'm going to just play this back to my business journey. When I bought the salon, it had three team members and I bought a salon because I just didn't want to work for anyone else. So there was no grand plan of being this fantastic employer. And actually, I was accidentally really good at it. And suddenly we were seeing a thousand clients a month. We went multi site. I had three locations, 47 staff. We were open seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And I had created a monster. No managers, no middle managers, no processes, no systems that meant that every time I didn't want to do work today, the whole thing came crashing down. And I was getting texts at five in the morning until 11 at night with one reactive problem after another. And I would just spend hours sitting crying in my shower tray of on the outside. The whole world thinks I've created this incredibly successful chain of hair and beauty salons and we're winning awards and we're being asked to present at various different showcases.

But I was so miserable and I just couldn't. I didn't have anyone I could talk to. I didn't have anyone I could tell. And I didn't even really at that stage know that there was even an alternative. I thought, well, this is what you wanted. You wanted to be busy. You wanted to be making lots of money and you've got here. So I guess my visioning, my visualization comes with a caveat of be careful what you wish for. Because actually, if you create this behemoth monster of a business and you haven't worked out how to remove yourself, you get what you deserve. So I can do a whole hour session on guided visualization, which we don't have time for today. But around actually when somebody asks you that question 10 years from today, if you close your eyes and you take yourself 10 years in the future and you have achieved success, inverted commas. What does that look like for you? Because for some people, that's travel, Chris Foster, you know, going around the world doing Gucci fashion shows as a hairdresser. He has a phenomenal lifestyle that for me would be hell on Earth. I don't like flying and I don't like I'm a real homebody. And then for other people, it's, you know, they just want to be busy in their chair or in their beauty treatment room. They just want to be fully booked. And then for other people, it's I want a training academy with a franchise. I mean, I didn't even know what a franchise or internationalization was. I thought it was something Tony and Guy did and that was never going to be Little Debbie's World. And actually, I realized that any one of us can do that. So I think spending some time on the visualization and the visioning. There are some brilliant workshops around crafting exactly what you want to achieve. Some people do it through mood boards. I'm not against mood boards, but I think it's it's one layer of a lot of other things that you need to look at. And most people will put on their handbags, cars, shoes, pets. And actually, it's not about that. It's about how many hours a day or a week do you want to work? What is that financial freedom level? Do you want a team? I loved my team, but equally, I blooming hated having a team sometimes. Oh, the best and worst of everything. Team members. Absolutely. And as for customers, don't even get me started on those. That's why I stopped. I know it sounds awful. And this is what happens instead of managing it. We all try to find another version of success in the future, which removes us.

And what a shame when we've spent 20 years creating success. But actually, then all we want to do is remove ourselves. And this is where I see a lot of hair and beauty professionals fail. If I'm brutally honest, is they go, I don't want this anymore. So I'm going to do this. They pivot, but they don't plan the pivot. They take their eye off of the baby. And suddenly this is now loss leading. Staff are unhappy, can't retain. The culture's gone bad. And you're over here trying to set up another coaching education business. And actually, people can do it incredibly successfully if they do it right and plan it right. So the visioning and the visualization bit for me is the bit that no one does. And we should absolutely spend a ton of time getting right. And only then do you start looking at goal setting. And one of the things that I failed to harness when I was in business is I wanted to do all things instantly. So whenever somebody came to me with an idea, I was all about say yes and then work out how to do it later. That does make you look like an incredible entrepreneur, but it also leaves you incredibly burnt out and exhausted and actually not very good at doing anything because you're doing so many little bits. So I think learning not to be a business magpie that you don't just go, oh, shiny thing. I'm going to go and do that. It's is it on the plan? So I'm a massive believer in doing I think our our calendar year for me, November, December are bonkers. January is fairly good. February is when it goes a bit quieter, February to April. So actually, I like to do my new year as a financial new year. I don't know many business owners who can do planning during December. They are either too busy or too exhausted. So I like to do my planning February and plan out my year starting on April the first, which is my tax year. But you can do it whenever suits for you. And then I look at the whole year in what I call monthly campaigns. So what are the rocks in my calendar that I have to do year after year? Anniversaries, big events, awards, things that I can't control the date of. They're my rocks. And then around that, I put all of the things in that are important to me. So it might be promotions in the salon for New Year's, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, half term, summer holidays, Christmas. Put them all in, Diwali, whatever it is that you're celebrating, make sure that they're in your calendar and then look for the gaps.

Because where the gaps are is where you should be looking at bringing something new in or focusing on team training or completely revolutionizing your financials. The gaps are where the magic happens. But unfortunately, as humans, whenever we're busy, that's when we're the most motivated to do work. So what do we try and do? We try and set a new year strategy in December, Christmas week, because we're pumped full of adrenaline and we go, right, next year I'm going to be even more organized. It's just not sustainable. So know your operating rhythms, plan for the things that are always going to be there. And I like to do that what I call a wireframe map once a year for the whole year. And after that, I then chunk in 90 day planning sessions. So three months at a time, always one month before you need to deploy them. Because the other thing we're great at is coming up with amazing ideas and then not communicating them or not seeing them through fully. So for me, 90 day planning sessions and only doing a maximum of three things at a time, a maximum of three things at a time and ideally one. But often, again, that shiny magpie syndrome means that opportunities land and you go, well, I could fit that in. Can you? So somebody once told me when you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else because there's a finite amount of hours in your day. And actually, that's really true. If I say yes, I'll come and speak at this event. Actually, the thing I forget to do or I walk away from is my invoices or chasing up late payers or doing my newsletter. And they're the fundamentals to keep. They're not sexy, but they're the fundamentals to keeping my business going. So I need to outsource them, not walk away from them. So full year planning, 90 day planning, and then also breaking all of your business down into different segments, because actually there are lots of different departments within your business, marketing, team management, financials. If you were to break all of those down and you just achieved one goal in each area per quarter, you'd be killing it. But unfortunately, we try to do 15 things in each area sporadically and just feel disappointed with ourselves.

So a bit of structure. Okay, perfect. Well, you'd be pleased to know that you're not flying in the face of all the advice that I've been giving for the last 20 years. So that's good. It's almost a relief not to be undermined on your own podcast. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, not at all. And right at the top, I call that the bottle of red conversation. It's usually me and my husband when we're not actually in the business and usually we're on holiday and that's when we just kind of dream a little bit and make sure we're on the same page with it. And I think actually that very first stage, if you share your life with somebody, you need their buy-in too. You need their buy-in on your dreams. Otherwise it's not going to work. And your team. And your team as well. The communication thing, I think actually you slid in there as a small point, but actually I think it's huge. Yeah. And I see it a lot in marketing where the owner's gone away and put together a beautiful email marketing campaign and been shouting about it on socials. And then the client comes in and says, oh, what about that promo I read about? And the team goes, I don't know. Completely clueless. Guilty. Guilty. But I think a lot of that, again, though, is time. If you're planning ahead, you've got time to communicate. But if you're running a promo because you've seen that Friday's not busy, it's hard. It's hard. Strategic, not reactive. Absolutely. Okay. And what do you think? I mean, you mentioned about trying to keep that level of energy and keep that focus and drive. How do we, three months into the plan, if things aren't going to plan, how do we get back on track or keep our energy up? Great question. So communication, number one, is key. So, again, once a year, we would, and Baringamana had 47 staff, so it was much harder to keep 47 staff apprised. And I wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but you keep coming back to, you default back to a plan, you'll go off course, you come back again. It's making sure you communicate it so that everybody understands why you're not picking up this idea. It's, this is our plan for the next month or three months. And I think staff meetings are really underused in our industry. Those touch points, we use them to have a moan about shampoos taking too long or double bookings or not cleaning rooms. But actually, are we communicating offers, opportunities, and the next month or the next three months, just to reiterate and remind. So I think the communication is key. We talk about build, measure, and learn on the accelerator program that I support at NatWest.

And what we mean by that is just because you've decided you're going to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. And sometimes we come up with really rubbish ideas. So actually, it's a really great idea to get a bit of noise, a bit of feedback from the team and also clients to say, how is this going for you? Because sometimes it's just a tweak and then you're back on track. And other times it's just a rubbish idea and you need to get rid of it. We talk about fail fast, fail cheap. Well, yeah. And I think having that slightly, what I try and encourage is a lighter touch. So seeing things as a bit more experimental because otherwise we fall so in love with the idea. It doesn't matter how awful it is. We ignore those signals that are coming from our clients or our staff because we're so emotionally invested in it. And I think that's a real mistake. Yeah. And also testing with really small. We call them MVPs, minimum viable products. You can tell I've well and truly drifted into the business world now because they use awful acronyms. But MVPs basically mean you test something in the cheapest way possible. So before you go out and spend fifteen hundred, two thousand pounds on an Instagram wall that in a year's time you realize gathers dust and nobody's really using. Then what about paying sixty nine pounds for a roller banner in the corner of reception and encouraging people to use it first. So rather than just throwing money at something and then being disappointed test and trial it in the smallest possible way. We're all really, really bad at saying, well, I want to do this. I need to wrap everything around it and throw a ton of money at it. And actually, we don't even know if anybody else but us loves the idea to your point. We call it the ugly baby test. You know, if you have a really bad idea, who will tell you? Well, absolutely. I used to. I was very lucky. I had a group of customers who I used to call my board of directors and they were all either business owners or they were senior management and they just got it. They understood what I was trying to create. And I didn't do anything in the business without talking to them first. And they were paying while I was talking to them, which was amazing. But I think the other interesting thing that I found with when you're talking about MVPs is, yeah, you can pay £69 for that roller banner. The impact that the Instagram wall will make if you spent a grand and a half on it. It's not as much more as you think. Actually, the MVP can tick a lot of boxes. Yeah, absolutely. And also, why are you doing it? Because often things are motivated by the wrong factors.

And again, this is this is a generalisation, but a lot of and it's not specific to this industry. I work now with all industries for business coaching and actually across all entrepreneurs. We're all driven by vanity metrics. Does it look good? How will it be perceived when actually the biggest metric we should be rewarding ourselves for is profitability and actually profit in a lot of cases. It feels like a dirty word I use whenever we would have a really profitable month in the salon. I'd go and treat the team to something really extravagant because I felt guilty about making that money. And there's there's so much around money mindset that actually when you spend more time with people who are money profit driven and they are they've got a business to make money, not because they just accidentally fell into it. It's a different world. And I'm not saying it's right, but you can definitely learn things from it that will completely change your outlook on your your salon business. There's a lot of money to be made. I know there's a lot of noise at the moment about profitability and making ends meet, but there's a lot of people doing really well. I think that there's some I'm pretty ignorant as far as the news is concerned. Like once a week, I'll put Radio 4 on while I'm peeling the potatoes and that's it. I just unplug for the rest from the rest because it doesn't reflect my reality. And my reality is that I see salon owners actually making some really, really good money. So either I'm extremely lucky at selecting my customers in in amazing places or I'm an incredible coach. Of course, that could be the other option. Actually, there's people still spending money. And I think what we do is make people feel a lot better for actually not very much money at all. And I think there's always going to be a market for that. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so we've put our goals in place. We've started to work a little bit on our energy and keeping that focus during the year. Are you someone who plans on paper? Do you follow your goals on an app? How do you keep track of what's going on? Great question. Before I answer that, I just want to go back to the last segment.

The other thing I didn't say is surround yourself with others who were on a similar journey. So the power of community is phenomenal. And if you are not already linked into a community of like minded business owners, and there are many to choose from, find your tribe. And for me, that's the single biggest game changer. And it will help you to stay on track with your goal setting. But to answer the next question. Phil, remind me, what was the question? Sorry. We were just asking about how you keep track of your goals during the year. How do I keep track to stay on track? How valid? I don't like planning on apps. I like I mean, it might be because I am a child of the 70s and 80s. But I just love highlighters. I love post-it notes. I love big wall planners. And I love being able to keep things up to date and in front of me because I can fill out whatever spreadsheet you want me to. But the minute that window is closed on the computer or that book is closed on my desk, it's gone and I've moved on to something else. So if I've got all of that shizzle all over my wall every time I sit down to do my operational business manager activities, it's there reminding me. Every time I get an email saying, do you want to come and do this jolly? Do you want to come and have this fun? I look at my my map and I go, is this a distraction or is this going to help me to get where I said I was going to go? So, yeah, loud, everywhere, massive, interactive, absolutely not digital, although there is a place for digital. I'm digital during the week. Bigger than that, I'm back to old school. And the biggest thrill of my life was getting my first office and I could have the biggest whiteboard you've ever seen. And everything gets sketched out big and loud on there. But I'm a child of the 70s, too. OK, so we are whizzing over our allocated time slot and very much appreciate your patience. But there's so much to dig down on goal setting. Where do people go wrong, do you think? I think and I mentioned it at the beginning, I think people look at business as the outputs. They look at how many followers, how much money. It's all of the what should be the accidental outputs of the good activity.

So I think if you think of every business you ever come across as a sausage machine, you'll love this analogy. You put the stuff in at the beginning, you put your ingredients in, you do your stuff and you get your product at the end. We obsess about the sausage. Yes, I said it. There's the sound bite. What we should be obsessing about is the ingredients that we're putting in, the consistency and the quality of what's going in, the front end of our activities and then what we're doing with it. So the processes and the systems that mean that we're getting, I can see you tittering. I'm corpsing, darling. I'm trying so hard. I knew this analogy. No, you're absolutely right. So the ingredients on the front end and then I guess kind of package it, market it, sell those sausages at the end. Absolutely. And don't sell the sausage, sell the sizzle. What does this, what does this do for your customer? Why do they need it? What's different? It's not a gimmick. It's not a, you know, how are you making them feel? How accessible is it? I used to think when I went networking that telling people I had a five star, a good salon guide rated salon with, you know, we were featured in X, Y and Z magazine and awards would get customers. No, you know what got customers? We were open late nights till nine and we had free parking and everything else is just what they come to expect. Good coffee, flowers on reception, good customer service. And I think with goal setting, we get so obsessed with the outputs, how many followers, how much money, how much profit. But actually, if we did more with the systems, the processes and the really boring stuff that is the foundational stuff that then makes it easier for us to be magical and unforgettable and operating in our zone of genius. That means that you will never, ever be sure of amazing outcomes. So when it comes to goal setting, stop obsessing on the outputs, obsess about the activities that you will do. Why are you doing them? Which ones will you pick? What matters the most right now for your customers? And it's always customer centric. We talk about a seesaw where your salons in the middle, your customers at one end, your staff at the other. Staff are incredibly important, but they're important to get the right customers for them. So I think if you obsess about your customers, the right staff will find you. So it's just making sure that everything you do is incredibly customer centric and you are obsessed with their desired outcomes. Superb. Debbie, it's been an absolute pleasure, as I knew it was going to be, let's face it.

First of all, how do people find out more about you, the things that you've talked about? What's the best way to get in touch? So actually, there's not a million reasons why you would get in touch with me right now. I'm taking a little bit of a pause from my private coaching work. We're renovating a house and I am also hugely embedded with NatWest Enterprise at the moment working on their business support programs. So I guess the first thing would be, please do follow me on social media because I get a lot of brilliant opportunities thrown my way and I will always put it out to my network. So give me a follow on any of your preferred platforms just to catch those nuggets as they fly. And then the other thing would be check out the NatWest Accelerator program. You don't have to bank with NatWest. It's completely free of charge. You get coaching, shared workspace, programs. It's just six months of your life and it will revolutionize your business. Nobody that I've ever met who's done it has regretted it. And it sets you up to get loads out of a paid for coaching service afterwards. Superb. Right. Now, just to close, I have three questions that I never warn people about. Oh, no, they're only. Don't worry. We've got another app. Yeah. First is, can I have your pin? No. First question is, what's the best thing about the salon industry? Oh, the people, the passion, passionate people. There aren't many people in our industry who don't give a damn. Everybody cares about something. So, yeah, definitely the people. Superb. Best piece of advice you've ever been given? Stop eating crisps. No. To do with business, stay in your own lane. Okay. Comparisonitis is the killer of most people's dreams and striving to do more, have more and be more. So, stay in your lane. Only worry about what you want and what you do as a business owner. And final question, if you were going to give a piece of advice to someone at the beginning of their career who wanted to follow in your footsteps, what would it be? I'm so glad you asked this one. So, it's three things. I learned in my career that you are only three things away from absolutely anything that you want to achieve. The first is you've got to want it enough and be obsessed with it enough to follow it through.

The second is you've got to work really blooming hard, harder than anyone else in the room to get there. And then the third bit is your network. So, it's not who you know, it's who they know. So, if you want it enough, you work hard enough and you've got the right people around you, you can genuinely achieve absolutely anything. Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today, Debbie. It's been an absolute pleasure. Likewise. Thanks, Phil. Thank you so much for having me and see you in the magazine. Well, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Debbie as much as I did. What an absolute treasure and so generous with her time and knowledge. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again in 2024. May I be the first to wish you a peaceful and prosperous new year. And 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.