Why You’re the Problem in Your Salon (But Also the Fix)

Burnout is not just being tired, it's that creeping exhaustion that makes you question if you even want to own a salon business anymore. If you've ever felt like walking away, your Uncle Phil is here, and this episode is for you. 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, as we head to the very end of September? My goodness, that was a quick month. And actually, a fairly good year, I have to say. I'm hearing some really positive stories about August and September from my group coaching clients. Haven't got all the results in yet, but it looks like Q3 was a good, strong one. How was it for you? Why not reach out and let me know, phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends anyway about anything that's going on in your business. Apart from anything, I'm a nosy old cow. Anyway, where are we in the year? We're heading into Q4 next, my favourite quarter of the year, because all the marketing is a good flavour through Q4. Plenty of money around being spent through Q4 as well, so let's siphon a bit in our directions, shall we? And make some decent cash before the end of the year. I always say it's best to make hay while the sun shines, my dear. Don't put off making the money until the end of the year, because all it takes is a bad weather snap, and then suddenly we've got empty columns and bills to pay. So let's keep the money coming in while it's still available, shall we? Don't take your foot off the gas just yet. That's what the Christmas and New Year's break is all about. But before we get there, I want to talk about burnout. It's something around autumn where the days start getting shorter and I start getting more people telling me that they are burning out, that they're tired, that they've got that creeping exhaustion that I alluded to in the introduction. And we're going to dig in to this pretty hard truth of salon ownership, really. But it's not just about burnout isn't about having a busy day and needing a good night's sleep. It's about being constantly stretched so thin that you start to lose your passion and your spark for the business that you once loved. And it's a really good indicator that you're burning out if you start to resent the time that you're spending in the salon. I've always said that your business needs to be your second favourite space after your bed. It should be one of the favourite places to be. And if you're kind of rolling your eyes and not wanting to turn up for work,

this is a really good indicator that we're starting to burn out. And it's no surprise that so many of my little puppets find themselves in this space because you wear all the bloody hats despite your Uncle Phil nagging you for such a long time. You end up being the beauty therapist or the stylist and the manager and the bookkeeper and the cleaner and the marketer and the plumber and the person who does all the shopping and goes to the wholesalers. And most days it feels like you're doing them all at once. Throw into that, if you have one, the constant worry of a team, plus all the clients who expect to message you 24-7 and the pressure to keep the profits up when the costs are climbing. Well, it's a recipe for feeling a little strung out. So in this episode, I want to look at why burnout is so common in our industry and then give you some practical strategies to start getting yourself back out of it. So let's get stuck in, shall we? Why is burnout such a common story in the salon business? Well, the big piece I've already alluded to is that juggling act. You're not just carrying out service. You're also the HR department, the finance team, the marketing manager, the premises, you know, the cleaner. And because margins are so tight, you feel that you need to take it all on yourself instead of hiring. And staffing doesn't always help either. OK, we might get a higher turnover, but that high turnover brings with it a certain amount of anxiety. And then we get the last minute resignations or beauty therapists and stylists taking clients with them. And all of that keeps you firefighting. And then there's the emotional labor. You're giving your energy to your clients all day, every day, solving their problems, listening to their stories, keeping them happy, people pleasing. But who's topping up your tank? That constant stretch is what makes salon owners vulnerable to burnout. So what can you do about it? I'm going to give you five strategies. And it might feel if you are genuinely burnt out, it might feel that trying to come up with the space and the mental space to tackle five strategies is too much. So what I've done is I'm going to give you a couple of examples with each strategy.

And then I'm going to give you a kind of bare minimum. If all you can manage is just one thing, I'm going to give you one of those as well. So practical strategy number one is to look at your role, because the truth is most salon business owners are doing way too much. You're not just running the business. You're doing the ordering, fixing the rotor, cleaning the staff room and blocking the toilet. And all of that keeps you busy, but it doesn't all keep you moving forward. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to start writing down everything you do in a typical week. And when you look at that list, circle or actually get two colors of highlighter, because frankly, we don't need many excuses to go out and buy more stationery. But I want you to highlight in one color the jobs that only you can do things like mentoring your team, making those big financial decisions, setting the strategy and direction of the business. And then I want you to go through and highlight in a different color. If you got run over by a bus tomorrow and you had to employ a manager for your business, what would be on the job description? Because there are things you wouldn't get away with on that job description. If you're trying to recruit a salon manager, but you're also the person who unblocks the regularly blocked toilet. Well, they're not going to want to do that. It wouldn't be on that job description. So I want you to have a look at those two lists. Everything else is negotiable. Some of those tasks can be delegated to other people in your team. Some of them can be delegated to other people in your life. Sometimes we just need a bit of partner support or woe betide, we get our kids to get off their arses and help every now and again. Some of those tasks can be outsourced. So we're going to be paying people to do that. And some of them, well, frankly, you might even decide they don't need doing. And I've seen lots of people wasting lots of time on tasks that don't need doing or certainly don't need doing that frequently. I encountered one salon owner, bless her heart, who was obsessed with stock levels. And she was continually or not continually, but certainly on a weekly basis, spending a big chunk of time doing stock counts. And then that stock count didn't really change anything. It didn't do anything. We didn't change what was going on in the business. She was still doing fairly irregular orders, I would say, monthly. So I said, well, why don't we just do the stock count monthly as well? So some of those tasks don't need necessarily eliminating, but they can certainly be minimised. So start small.

Maybe just train one trusted team member to take over one small task. Maybe those stock orders or hand over the holiday rota to your receptionist. It doesn't all have to change overnight. And if you're feeling completely overwhelmed, your one thing is to find one task this week to hand over. You're just one tiny step away from being everything to everybody. And it will definitely free up more headspace than you think, even if it's as simple as getting someone else to sort out the laundry. So just find one thing that you can hand off in your business just to take your just to simplify rather your job description. Next up, I'm going to talk about pricing. And I know I talk about pricing a lot, darling. But frankly, I love money. And I think most of you do, too. Burnout and poor pricing go hand in hand. It's because you haven't priced your services properly. And I'm not just talking about the cost of carrying out the service plus a profit margin. That's an idiot's way of setting pricing. And if you've got a coach who told you to look at how much it costs you to carry out a service and add 20 percent, sack them now because that's so naive. Because you need to factor in the time that you're carrying out all of those other roles as well. It's not the same as pricing a service for a beauty therapist or a stylist. So if your services aren't priced with all that bear and borne in mind, you end up chasing more and more clients just to stay afloat. And I'll bet even if you've got a big team, you're the person who puts more money in the till anyway. So you end up packing your day. You skip your breaks. You work late. And then you wonder why you're exhausted. So let's fix it. First up, calculate your break even point properly. And when I say properly, take some bloody time. Sit down with the calculator. Get to know your figures. This is your job now, darling. Gosh, listen to me bloody ranting. This pricing gets me every time. And so when I say properly, do it properly. Include everything. And yes, your own wage. You need to be paid as the owner. Then build in your profit margin. Then build in time for you to carry out all of these tasks that should be carried out in your working day. Not what carried out while you're balancing the laptop on your lap, pretending to be a present parent, watching some shite on Netflix.

And if even all of that just doesn't wake you up to where your prices need to be, well, raise your prices just by a bit. It doesn't need to be a big, scary jump. Add a couple of pounds, three pounds on your most popular services. It can make a meaningful difference to your bottom line without scaring off those loyal clients. Maybe it frees up a bit of budget and it frees up a bit of money for that delegation that we talked about in strategy one. If all of that feels like too much, here is your one thing. Look at your most popular service. Check that it's profitable. If it's not, put the price up this week. Just one service by a few pounds. That one action could immediately bring you some breathing space. More on this after this short message. Are you ready for some predictable in your salon business? Do you want to know the secret to steady salon income? I'm Phil Jackson, your queen of salons, your undisputed queen of salon memberships. And I've helped hundreds of salon owners just like you turn their businesses from a very spiky takings graph into something much more steady and predictable. My Memberships Made Easy program will help you stop chasing new clients and wasting your time on social media, turning your existing clients into more profitable raving fans who support your business even in the quiet times. My proven membership framework gives you everything you need. Ready to use membership templates, pricing strategies that actually work, even scripts for selling your memberships by email and in person. The program's backed by my signature 90-day no-quibble guarantee. Take the program, take the bonus coaching call I'm including, and if you're not ready to launch your Memberships program at the end, I will coach you myself until you are. If you're ready to offer your clients something truly exceptional, ready to build that predictable stream of salon income, head to queenofmemberships.com forward slash podcast for a very exclusive rate on my best-selling program. Head to queenofmemberships.com forward slash podcast and let's get started, shall we? All on, build your salon. Strategy number three is to systemize and automate. And I know that sounds like an awful lot of tech. I know it sounds like an awful lot of scary screens for some of you. But one of the biggest causes of burnout is decision fatigue. It's because you're running your business emotionally, spending energy on these tasks again and again.

And by systemizing, we're not running our businesses emotionally anymore. We're not winging it. We're not making up those decisions emotionally on the back heel all the time. We're actually able to systemize. So think about the things that you're doing daily or weekly and confirming your appointments, posting on social media, reminding your staff about their KPIs. You don't need to keep reinventing the wheel. Your salon software can do a chunk of this. And it's worth getting support on the phone or getting onto some of the online webinars that they set up and getting some of these things set up. Set up your online booking so you're not glued to the phone and you can direct people. And we're going to talk about boundaries, but we can direct people to online booking when we're out of hours. Create templates for your emails. Create templates for your social media posts and even your team communications. So you're not starting from scratch every single time. We can use AI to help you get drafts of these posts or emails if you're not using AI yet. Well, frankly, darling, where have you been? Your Uncle Phil's been banging this drum for an awful long time now and the help is out there. Reach out if you want details of my Get Smart, Work Less with AI program. I would love to be sharing some of the stuff that other salon owners have come up with to make their lives a bit easier. But we still get to make the final tweaks, but the heavy lifting is already done with AI. And if you feel that you're too stretched to even think about new systems, well, your one thing is this. Just choose one repetitive task that you can automate and get the help. So if that's appointment reminders, get on the phone with your son on software, figure out how to do it. Maybe it's the aftercare. Perhaps we can automate that. Maybe it's a bit of the social media or the stock ordering. Let's just see if we can free up maybe half an hour a week. God, that's got to be a start. Half an hour a week just to have a proper lunch break. Or half an hour a week to finish on time. That would be kind of cool, wouldn't it? Or maybe just half an hour a week to sit and not plan to do anything. Just to be a little bit lazy for 30 minutes. Strategy number four. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. I want you to plan for staff turnover. So many of you treat it as a shock when someone hands in their notice. But the reality is no one's going to stay with you forever. You might keep somebody for a few years, but let's plan for that. So when you plan for it, it stops being a crisis. Make sure you've got your job ads, your job descriptions, your interview questions good to go. Update them a couple of times a year so you're not scrambling if somebody puts their notice in.

Always be networking. Always have your door open for recruitment. Chat to brilliant stylists when you meet them or beauty therapists when you're on a course with them. Stay in touch with old colleagues that you wouldn't mind working with again. Build up that little black book so that you're never starting from zero. Because the panic comes from when you feel blindsided and you're not prepared. If you're planning, then we can take the sting out of it. And if all of this sounds like too much work, well, here's your one thing. Just write a job ad or even get AI to do it for you. Even if you don't need it yet, I promise future you is going to thank you. And then strategy number five. I want to talk about boundaries. I want to talk about how we protect our downtime. And this is the big one because burnout usually shows up when there are no boundaries or very poor boundaries between you and the business. So even on your so-called day off, you are running to the wholesalers, checking messages, or even going into the salon when it's closed to clean. You never get that mental switch off that you actually need. And if you've got it on a day off, I wonder how many days holiday you can take before we have to start checking emails, checking messages, checking the phone. Everybody needs work in this. Even myself, I've been guilty for a lot of years about just checking those WhatsApp groups that my customers are in just one or two times before I go to bed. It's not good enough. We need that mental downtime. So here's what you do. You decide on your days off and you protect them like your most important appointment. Turn off your notifications outside work. The salon doesn't need you replying to messages at midnight. And if you do it, you are training your clients to expect you to reply at midnight. It's a bit like feeding a dog from the table. Once you've done it once, that dog's going to beg forever. So get those boundaries really, really firm. Try and batch your errands and your admin into set slots. So your admin really should be an appointment that we set up and treat it as a very serious appointment, the same as you would a client appointment. So if you booked out an hour to do bookkeeping, well, let's make sure we actually do the bookkeeping. We can't turn, you know, a client comes in. You wouldn't say, oh, I don't fancy doing a facial today. Let's go and do something else. So if that appointment turns up when you're supposed to be bookkeeping, guess what you're doing, darling, whether you fancy it or not. Get on with your bloody bookkeeping. If all of that feels like too much, here's your one thing.

I want you to block out one afternoon that is completely off limits to salon work. I don't know when that's going to be. Maybe you can make it in the next week. Maybe it's in the next month. Maybe you can't even find that afternoon for me for another six months, but block it out. No clients, no admin, no cleaning. Use it to recharge properly. And even knowing that that break is on the horizon can make your whole week feel lighter. So there we have it. If you're nodding along, it's time to take that burnout seriously. Don't wait until you're ready to run away. Start with just one of the things that we've talked about. I'd love to hear your story about this. And I'd love to hear if you've managed to successfully design a salon business that brings you energy instead of draining it. I'd love to be sharing your story. Reach out and let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. I'd love to be sharing your story on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I can interview you about your work-life balance, the boundaries you've set in, maybe some of the systems you put in place. It'll be a really good chat to share with my wonderful, wonderful Build Your Salon podcast listeners. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears with an interview episode next week. 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.