Mastering Time and Project Management for Salon Growth

So time and project management. Now, doesn't it always feel like as an ltch, as a business owner, there is just not enough hours in the day for all of the tasks and all of the things that we have to do and also for all of the projects that we wish we had time to do as well. So I'm hoping that this part of the module just helps you to figure out what tools are available to support you and also how you can maybe prioritize or make decisions a little bit differently than what you might be doing now. Okay, so we'll dive straight in now. One of the biggest salon owners fall into is being busy but not productive. And maybe you feel seen when I say that, but you know, sometimes you feel like you are running around all day. Like you wake up and your day is just non stop. You go to bed, you wake up, you do it all again but the important things still aren't getting done. Your to do list isn't getting any smaller. The projects that you'd love to make a start on just stay in your notes app or you tend to be stuck in the day to day admin and running up your business. But you business actually just isn't growing even though you feel like you are non stop all the time. So time and project management is the secret to working smarter, not harder. And that's why I want to go through this with you today. Now your diary as a salon owner should work for you and not against you. And I want to give you a harsh truth. Right now you are in control of your diary, no one else's. And sometimes in order to make a change, you have to make a sacrifice. And, and I know that right now the amount of clients that you are doing is probably funding your income. And that's something that you have got used to. But I want to take you back to a time when I was a salon owner and I came to a point where my business was just not growing. And that was because I was spending too much time at the nail desk and not enough time actually working on the projects and the bigger things and the actual growth of the salon. Now I decided to take a pay cut and to cut down my hours in order to give myself that extra time to work on the growth of the business. Yes, it was a short term loss of income, but what that did to my growth as a professional, as a business owner was huge. And there's been many times since where I have taken a step back and maybe taken less money or made sacrifice or taken a hit somewhere so that I could get the time back. Time is your biggest asset. And if right now you are given all of your time to your clients, you are not maximizing what you could be out of that. And as a result, yes, you're in in the same month over and over again, but I know that that isn't enough for you. Sorry. The same income over and over again, but I know that isn't enough for you, otherwise you wouldn't be watching these videos and wanting to grow. So if you want to make more money, sometimes you need to earn less money in order to take a huge step forward and a huge pay rise after you've been able to put the groundwork in. So, so coming back to what I was saying, your diary should work for you and not against you, and you're in control of it at all times. So the first thing I want you to do is allocate blocks of time for different responsibilities. Client time is only one of the things that you want to be putting in your diary. And if right now it's the only thing that's in your diary, then that is the first thing that needs to change. You also need set time for admin. So when are you responding to your emails, when opportunities are coming in, when are you covering your invoices and making sure everyone's being paid on time? When are you ordering and replenishing stock and making sure you've got enough things available in the salon? Cleaning products, you know, tea, coffee, refreshments, all of those things, when are you doing that? Because right now, if it is that you're just waiting until the loo roll is gone out of stock to then run to the local shop and buy some more, that's not productive because it's taking you away from tasks on the day when we could have allocated time to do that, making sure it gets done so that you can be present in the tasks that that are assigned to you when you are doing them. So also things like emails. How often have you had an email that has a huge responsibility in it, but maybe you just didn't see it because you were with clients all day, then you went home, you had to cook the dinner, then you went to bed, you woke up, you were doing it all again, it got to the weekend and then you're seeing the huge opportunity sat in your inbox that have been there for a huge length of time. So maybe it's that like your first half an hour of the day is not for clients, it's for you to sit down with a Coffee with a calm neighbor system to go through your inbox to make sure, sure that there's nothing in there that you're missing out on. But that should be clear allocated time that is in your diary. Then you also need time for leadership, for business growth. For me, for doing things like this, this business program to be doing courses, training, extra, you know, extra research, looking into what you need to be doing in order to meet the goals that you have. Team meetings, growing your team, growing your business leadership needs, set time. If you are giving all of your time away to everybody else, how are you expecting to actually grow your business? It is impossible. So I want you to protect these blocks. I don't want you to let one role steal time from another. If you're in, in the moment at your desk with a client, you should be in the moment at your desk with a client and that client should get 100% of you. If you are working on projects, working on your leadership, working on some training, then nobody else should have access to that time other than the training, the resources, the things that are in front of you. If you need to go and replenish stock, replenish parts of the salon and things like that, you should be able to go and do that uninterrupted. And so by blocking time in your diary, it's going to be the first step in giving yourself space to actually do these tasks unapologetically. Now, the best thing you can also do at this stage is to start to batch your tasks. So don't scatter them all over the place. Group similar tasks together, so when your brain is in one mood, it gets to stay in one mood. So say for example, you want to be with clients for 12 hours a week, then do two six hour days of clients and nothing else so that when you are there, you can be present with your clients and when you leave, you get to come away and focus on other things. Or if you've got stock orders to do, maybe that's your job to do. On a Monday afternoon when you've got no clients in, you sit and you look at all your stock, you look at everything you've got in the salon and you go and replenish everything that you need, rather than just doing it ad hoc here and there. Chaotic. We've run out of toilet roll. Let me go and grab some from the shop before this next client comes in. Next client comes in, you're running in the door. At the same time, it just doesn't lead to growth or success, it leads to chaos. Mondays could be your admin and planner days. Tuesdays and Thursdays could be for client work. Like dictate what you are doing, when you are doing it, and do not borrow time from different roles and tasks. That is probably what is keeping you stuck right now. The benefit of doing this is that you save time, you reduce mistakes, you avoid constant switching, and energetically you can be present in each one, meaning that every single person who is a part of this gets the best version of you. Your clients get the best version of you. Your accounts get the best version of you. Your stock replenishments gets the best version of you. You make the best decisions because you're present in that moment. Rather than sat there knowing you've got a client walking through the door in five minutes, you might order five BE ups instead of one because you're just in the moment and you just want to get it done. And you're thinking, right, I'll just order too many so that I've got enough for next time. You might not have had the budget to do that this month, but you've made that decision because it's chaotic, because we're not batching our time, because we're not looking after or time management. And then you've got the mindset of projects. I want you to start thinking in projects and not tasks. So what does that look like? Let's give you some examples. So say, for example, you are rebranding or you're launching a new service, or you're doing a salon refresh or something like that. These are all individual projects, okay? They're not tasks because there is more than one task within each thing and that makes it a project. So when you have a project I want you to work on one at a time. So you might have two projects ongoing over the course of a month, but when you are putting time aside, I want it to be like, for example, you know, on Monday, I've got half a day to work on some projects, I'm gonna work on the rebrand. And then on Tuesday, when I've got an hour, I'm gonna work on the launch of my new service. But you're gonna work on them in project. And then when you look at that project, you're gonna go to that and say, right, today I'm gonna work on the rebrand. Let's break this down into smaller steps with clear deadlines. So by next week, I would like to have found somebody to do my logo, you know, my visual branding and all of those things by the week later, I would like to have put that into Canva and come up with a series of Instagram posts to do this new relaunch by the next week. I would like to have created hype on social media. Like, you're breaking this down into small steps and you're giving it clear deadlines so it all becomes easier rather than, I've got to do a rebrand, I don't know when I'm going to have time to do it. I don't know what to start on. Things just feel overwhelming. The other thing you want to do is assign clear ownership either to yourself or to team members so that things don't get forgotten. If you have other people on your team, remember your projects are not all on you. Which things feed into their roles, which things are, you know, is it possible for your team to support you with? What skills do they have that could come in handy for these different projects that you are running? Assign ownership to other people other than just yourself. If it has to be you, then you need time to actually do it. Otherwise you're going to feel like rubbish because you're not going to get these projects done because you haven't allocated the time. So to give an example, let's say, for example, you want to launch a new pedicure service. Then you would want to do a little bit of market research to know, is anyone else doing this in the area? How can I make mine difference? What sort of things are people doing right now? What, what way are all the fish swimming? How can I swim the other way? And things like that. So you might want to do some market research. You then might want to do a bit of a stock list. So understand, you know, what stock am I going to need? How often am I going to need to replenish it, how much of each thing am I going to need and how often? Then you might need to do a little bit of training in that. So you might need to go and train in this new treatment or this new pedicure service. Then you might want to come up with a bit of a marketing plan. So, okay, how am I going to market this? How am I going to get bums on something, seats? How am I going to create the clients? And then you might want to have a bit of a launch date for this pedicure service. So that's how this becomes a project that is broken that down into tasks. And that's how you can start being productive with your time. Because if you don't break it down into individual tasks and you just sit There at the start of the day going, I need to work on me launch of mini Pet Cure service. How do you know what to do next? I have so many members who say to me on our live calls, I don't know where to start. It's because you're not looking at this like a step by step task process tools and apps that are going to help you when you are doing this. So simple systems make huge impact. You don't need to do all of this manually. There are tools that will help you. So some that I've picked out that are helpful for salons to use, especially if you have a team, are things like Google Calendar ways of blocking out your time. So you don't just need to use your booking system. Your booking system might be there for you to take clients appointments and then you might have an option for other. And you might block out your time for other. And then in those time slots you might want to use a Google Calendar supporting your projects to put in your tasks, to lay things out how you want to do them so that it becomes really clear for you. So when you are working on your business, you don't even need to look at your booking system because the time is blocked out. You just need to look at your Google Calendar and then you won't get distracted, you won't start looking at appointments and why has this person booked in for that? Let me move this around and by no time at all you'll have spent half an hour or an hour working in the day to day instead of working on your business. So keeping things separate in a nice easy Google Calendar blocked out, it helps you to block your time and be more productive. There are also some project management tools that I would urge you to use. Notion is probably one of the easiest ones to use. It also means you can assign other team members to tasks so you can have let's say for example your pedicure launch at the top. Then you might want to create different tasks out of that. You can set deadlines for each task, you can tick them off when they're done, and you can also introduce people to the tasks as well so you can delegate them to other people. You can keep an eye over projects, you can know what's being done and when it's being done. Or if it's just you in the business, you can keep an eye on your projects too. If you're someone that just easily procrastinates when you sit down to work on projects, using tools to help you is the answer. Then you've also got things like Your notes app, WhatsApp groups, and I prefer what's called Slack in order to communicate and track things with the team. So in your Notes app you can actually have joint notes. So let's say, for example, you just want to fire down some ideas. Maybe you've got some other people in the salon. You could use one Notes app that is connected to all of your phones. When you've got ideas, throw them in the Notes app and then when you get to your team meetings, you can bring up that Notes app and you can go through them. You might also Want to use WhatsApp groups for your team in order to communicate. I personally hate running a business through WhatsApp. For me, WhatsApp should be for personal use and I use a tool called Slack to communicate my with my team. It's a bit like old school MSN if you ever use that. Or it's a bit like having WhatsApp groups, but it's just a lot clearer. You can have it on an app or you can have it on your desktop, on your phone. And it keeps business separate from personal. For me, that is best for my neighbor system, for my team's nervous system. And it also helps us have a little bit of a cutoff between work and business. You don't need super fancy systems. As I've just said there, if you need to, you can use WhatsApp, you can use your notes, just simple Google Calendar, all stuff that you can get on your phones. The key to using these systems is consistency. Don't set up a new system and then not use it. Set it up, tell everyone involved how it works and how you want it to be used. And lead by example. Use it yourself. Don't set up a system if you know you're not going to use it. You don't want to add more work for yourself, you want to ease the work for yourself and make it easier for you to complete these projects. When you control your time, you control your business. Start with just one change. Block out some admin time this week or batch a task that you normally scatter and start to make small tweaks to how you manage your time. It will create massive results in how you run your salon and how smoothly it runs as well. So I want you to start with just one change. Go and block something out in your diary right now. Go and set up Google Calendar or set up Notion as a project management tool. But I want you to do one thing that helps you to manage your time a little bit better. And start there, knowing that this could get bigger and bigger and bigger, and your time could get managed so much better as you move forward in your business.