Why ‘Lifestyle Business’ Isn’t a Dirty Word

Somewhere along the way, we got sold the lie that working yourself into the ground was noble, that somehow having a business plan was better than having a lifestyle. Well, here's the spoiler. It's just daft. In this week's episode, I'm ripping up the hustle handbook and showing you why your lifestyle comes first. Or what's the point? Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your ears again with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, here on the 1st of July. First of the month, first of the quarter as we steam into Q3. How's it been for you? Have you decompressed from Q2 yet? It's a brilliant opportunity each quarter to reset, revisit your goals, figure out how the year's panning out for you. And I wonder how Q2 has treated you and your business. Why not reach out and let me know? Phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends anyway. And between you, me, and the gatepost, I've been hearing some triumphant stories about Q2. It feels like 2025 was off to a tricky start for lots of my salon owner friends. But Q2 seems to have come back with a vengeance and actually given us a few pleasant surprises we got through June as well. Few people expecting things to slow down and get a bit trickier turnover wise. But that didn't happen. It looks like things stayed really strong through June. And I've got everything crossed for you for a fantastic July as well. So Q3 in my own business is where we take a breath. It's where everybody starts to slow down just a little bit. But there is an opportunity there, my loves. If you know that your competition is taking the day off, well, it's a good time to perhaps steal a little bit of a bit of a march. Perhaps push a little bit further than your competition is going to. So I'm not going to take my foot off the gas completely. But I know that as far as sales goes, it's not an amazing time for me to be signing up lots and lots of new one to one clients. Because generally, and it's really useful to know your clientele, but generally my clientele are parents. And when they struggle with childcare, they don't want to hear from your Uncle Phil. So I spend Q3 doing lots of writing, lots of planning, lots of content creation, ready to storm into Q4 and close lots of business across the end of the year.

So what are we talking about today? Well, this is actually a bit of a reaction. I've been seeing lots of stuff on Instagram and I know you should take what you see on social media with a pinch of salt, my love. I know that it's not real life out there and people are just putting a very biased version almost sometimes to piss me off. It feels like darlings. But I've been seeing lots and lots of content around how a lifestyle business isn't enough. We've got to get planning. We've got to have business plans. And I'm here to throw a spanner into those works, my love, because a lifestyle business is a conscious choice and it's not the poor relation. It's not a dirty word. This toxic undercurrent of shaming small intentional businesses is getting my back up, darling. And frankly, trying to convince me that we're going to swap some sort of lifestyle emphasis for a business plan is a complete waste of everybody's time, because to be honest, most business plans don't even get looked at. And frankly, I don't think selling coaching by shaming small intentional businesses is the way to go at all, because ultimately, you know, these people are flexing their 80 hour work weeks like it's some kind of badge of honor. But basically what they're doing is building some kind of prison, not a business. And I think most of us went into business ultimately because we wanted a better lifestyle. We either felt that we could be earning more money or having a better work life balance. And there's nothing wrong with that, my darling. You did not go self-employed just to burn out with a crappy pension at the end of it. So if someone's telling you that your dream is too small, I think it's probably because they've lost sight of their own dream, because it's my belief that your business is not your master. You're the master. Your business is there to serve you. And if your business has become a bit of a beast, a bit of a monster eating your time or eating your health or worse of all, eating your joy. Well, it's failing no matter how profitable it looks on paper. So however good that business plan is, if you're not enjoying the business, it's failing. We only get one life, my darling. And if you're spending it chained to the treatment room and you're not enjoying that time, well, what's the bloody point? And that's nobody else's business but yours. No one else has got to live with those consequences. No one else has got to live with the consequences of your business but you.

So I'm here to say that a thriving business is not one that just ticks all the boxes on a business plan. It's one that supports your bigger life goals. It's one that supports your hobbies. It supports your family. It supports your holidays, not demands their sacrifice. So, of course, step one is understanding what you actually want out of your business. And I think before we start chasing growth, before we start building business plans, we've got to figure out what you actually want out of life. Do we want some kind of tweak to our lifestyle? Do we want more freedom? Do we want more time, more income, more simplicity? There's no wrong answer here, but you must have one. So don't borrow other people's goals from people's Instagrams. Don't borrow the idea that you need some kind of business plan from some jumped up coach on Instagram. More is not a goal. Neither is successful. We need to be specific. Otherwise, we're going to end up staying lost. But be specific around what you want out of life, first of all. Then we can build a salon business around what kind of lifestyle you want. Let's not let the tail wag the dog. And those preferences, the way that we build our business, seeps into every element of our business, or at least it should do. So if there's services that you don't particularly like, if you dread doing a set of lashes, guess what I'm going to say? Stop offering lashes. It doesn't matter how profitable they are. We can pivot. We can change. We can build a business that serves you. Your services aren't set in stone. They're tools. They're not obligations. They're a device to get you to the kind of lifestyle that you want. Because if we're doing services that don't light you up, well, that's not going to make you feel energized. That's not going to reinvigorate you. It's not going to make you want to go to work every day. It's going to get you wiped out by lunchtime. So, of course, I want you to keep to your zone of genius, but I don't want you in that zone of resentment. More is not better. Strategic is better, but that strategy is lifestyle first. And similarly, it seeps into our pricing as well. So when we're designing that price card, well, the pricing should be funding your lifestyle. If your prices are too low, it's end of story because the lifestyle starts to suffer. So if we're doing a lifestyle first strategy, when it's not asking what people will pay, it's asking what do I need this business to generate in order to fund my lifestyle? What does my lifestyle cost? What does my business need to do profit wise?

Then we go out and find the right people that are willing to pay those prices. There's a bit of tough love that comes in there as well, my darling, because ultimately it means that you've got to take responsibility for where you've built your business. So sometimes when I'm going through this process of setting up values first, setting up lifestyle first, figuring out what we need to be charging per minute in our business to fund our lifestyles. Sometimes I get a bit of resistance. Somebody will say something like, yeah, but my customers won't pay that or people around here won't pay that much. Well, guess what, darling? That means you built a business in the wrong place. That means we've got to go somewhere else. We've got to find a different target market or maybe a different set of services where people will pay what we ultimately need them to do. Affordability means that there's a danger of coming from a place of scarcity. It means that we're starting to anchor our worth in an undercharging kind of way just to keep busy. We don't want scarcity pricing. It keeps you small, keeps you broke, keeps you better. We want pro premium pricing so that we can ultimately enjoy a better lifestyle. And then I want you to structure your week with intention as well. Just because you can work every Saturday doesn't mean you should. Your calendar is not designed to burn out. It's not designed to make you feel that you're just a slave in your own business. It's designed for balance. It's designed to be your blueprint. It's designed to fit around your family, around the values that you have, around the free time that you want to spend. So don't let your calendar turn into this rod over which you're going to beat and with which you're going to beat yourself over the back. Let the calendar actually be liberating. Put your non-negotiables in first and let the business fit around those. So your admin time, your work time, your dream time, your rest time. They're all to your blueprint, your template. And if your business needs you to be working 24-7 to survive, it's broken. It doesn't matter how good it appears on paper, how profitable it appears or how wonderful that business plan seems to be going. And yes, that does mean that we need some boundaries in there as well. Every yes to your clients ends up being a no to something else, often your well-being. And we train people how to treat us. So if you've started to lose your boundaries, it's because you've got low respect for your time and you've communicated that lack of respect to other people as well.

So we need clear boundaries, clear policies. Clear policies aren't rude, my love. Clear policies are professional and we want to be professionals, don't we? If nothing else, we want some respect for our industry. We want some dignity in our day-to-day work. We want to feel that our time is respected. That's not you being difficult. You're running a business, my darling, not daycare. We're not here to spoon feed our clients with our services. It's got to be a win-win. It's got to be a win for them because they're getting amazing standards, amazing training, but a win for you as well so that you get that lifestyle business that you deserve. And ultimately, happy clients don't come from putting yourself out and overextending. You serve them better when you protect yourself with decent policies and decent boundaries. And again, with your marketing, your marketing should reflect your values and what you enjoy as well. If you hate TikTok, don't bloody use it. You won't see me on TikTok, my darling. If you love talking to camera, you can get the best results there. Well, guess what? Lean in. We'll make it work as part of a marketing plan. Marketing is not about being everywhere. It's about being yourself consistently and building a sustainable strategy for your marketing, free from burnout, free from resentment. But it's got to fit your lifestyle. Otherwise, it doesn't fit your brand anyway. And I've already hinted that not everyone is your client. And that means that we've got to polish. We've got to refine our target market and who our clientele is. We may even have to reject a few clients to make space for those dream clients because they do exist. Those clients that not only value what you do, but can fit in around the boundaries that you're putting in place. And that means saying no to the wrong ones. Every toxic client, every client who doesn't respect your time and turns up late, every client who haggles over your prices was once accepted by you. It doesn't mean we need to accept them going forward. So raise your standards. Watch your sanity improve. Let's not be desperate. Let's be selective. That's a power move in your lifestyle business. But most of all, stop apologizing for wanting more peace or more time or more money.

You built this business so you control what stays, what goes and what evolves. Everything in your salon, heck, everything in your life is there because you either choose to put it there or you allow it to continue to be there, which is very humbling and can be very overwhelming. But my God, it's empowering as well. So wanting more isn't greedy. It's clarity. Wanting less chaos is not lazy. That's wisdom, my love. And guilt is a terrible business strategy. So let's trade it for intention. Let's put you first. Let's enjoy a standard of life. That's the envy of your competition. And most of all, my darling, let's rip up that business plan. You don't need it. A set of values, a set of goals that sees us through the next three to six months. And then let's enjoy our businesses just that little bit more. I hope that's helpful to you. I hope that's giving you a little bit of freedom around putting lifestyle first. And just because it's a lifestyle business doesn't mean it needs to be small. There's some huge lifestyle businesses out there. But let's finally, once and for all, break this link between time and money. There are lots and lots of people, billions of people in this world who work extremely hard for very long hours and actually don't enjoy any particular level of material success. Equally, there are a whole bunch of people out there, myself included, who actually do pretty well money wise. Thank you very much. Without working a huge number of hours at all. Now, which camp do you want to be in? Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again with another dose of my wise owl wisdom. Next week, we're talking all about actually another little bit of perceived wisdom, which I want to smash, which is that cash is king. Time for us to shake off stinky old cash once and for all. So I've got a guest coming on to help me talk about that and very much looking forward to that. I do love my interview episodes. What have I missed? What's going right in your business that you'd like to share with the world? Why not reach out and let me know? Phil at build your salon dot com. You know, I love hearing from you and I'd love to be speaking to you about your journey to salon success and how you've put lifestyle first in your salon business. 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.