Imagine this: After a long day in the salon, you head home, eat dinner, and spend the evening not relaxing with your family or friends, but scrolling on your phone, trying to respond to new guest inquiries, posting on social media, and, generally speaking, building your business.
Chances are, you don’t have to imagine it because this might sound like your life right now. You’re spending hours at work, but you’re still working on your business when you’re at home with your family or out with your friends.
And you’re probably borderline burning out because you don’t have any boundaries or balance in your life.
The good news? You can create those boundaries and balance in your life with a few simple strategies that create a mindset shift. So you have the time to work ON your business, IN it (yep…those are two separate things!), and still enjoy that freedom-filled lifestyle!
Sounds amazing, right? Let’s get started.
#1: Conquer your to-do list with goal setting
Social media, client appointments, financial tasks…there’s a lot of things to do when it comes to running a business. But it feels like our to-do lists are so huge that we’ll never get it all done.
The solution? Goal setting.
Goal setting gives you a real system to tackle your to-do list and move the needle forward on your business. But it can also feel overwhelming, so it’s important to take a step back and figure out how to do it effectively.
Step 1: Make a list of what you want to accomplish. If you look at that life and think it’s insane, you’re trying to do too much. Create bite-sized goals to move towards your big goal every month so you’re not killing yourself trying to move onto what’s next.
Step 2: Have a monthly goal that tackles your biggest time suck and breaks it down into smaller pieces. For example, if social media takes a lot of time, set the goal of writing 15 social media posts or showing up on Facebook Live twice. Give it an actual number you know you can accomplish.
Step 3: Know what needs to get done daily. So many of us waste time on things that don’t need to get done right away. Have a sense of what actually needs to get done and what can wait.
Your time is valuable. Decide where you want to spend it.
#2: Organize your social media
When we say “organize your social media,” we’re not talking about ordering your Instagram grid to spell out your salon’s name. We’re talking about creating systems that make posting on social media a breeze.
Oh yeah. It’s totally doable.
The first thing you need is a content bank. A content bank is a library of your content (captions and images), so you can pull together posts and even emails for marketing fast!
Content banks come in handy when you’re planning out your social media content (more on this in a second) or if you don’t have any clients or can’t get a good image of them that day. Then you’re not in a panic trying to find something to post because you always have great content you can tap into anytime.
Number two: use a social media scheduler. A social media scheduler is huge in creating boundaries and balance because instead of scrolling for an hour before you post, you can use your time effectively. You already know what you’re going to share that day, so you can just post, get in there to engage with your followers, and then move on with your day.
Maybe you’re thinking that you don’t like scheduling social posts ahead of time, that you enjoy posting what’s in the now. The great thing about scheduling your social posts ahead of time is that you still have the room to post that client photo you took today, but you have something in your back pocket ready to go just in case.
Don’t be afraid to post something that happened last week, six months ago, or even reuse content. You’ll notice many top stylists on Instagram reuse photos or talk about things that happened in the past.
#3: Create boundaries with your clients
Do you feel like you can’t get your clients to stop texting on Sundays or in the middle of the night?
Here’s the deal: when you respond to your clients in your off time to say, “I’m not working right now, but I’ll go ahead and book your appointment,” you’re reinforcing that behavior. Meaning they’ll keep texting during your off time for appointments because you’re training them to think you’re available around the clock.
What other professional industry makes appointments for clients when they’re closed? If you call your doctor for an appointment on a Saturday, you won’t hear back from them until a Monday or Tuesday, right? You are also a professional and can have the same boundaries.
So what do you do?
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Stop giving your personal phone number out to clients. Share your professional email address or the salon’s phone number/your work phone number.
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Set up an autoresponder or have a prewritten text message to send to clients who reach out to you either on your personal phone or outside your working hours.
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Consider using a call service.
Another way to create boundaries and balance with your clients is to move away from texting altogether. Why? It might be convenient for them to make an appointment…but it’s just as easy–if not easier– for them to cancel because they don’t have to call and hear the disappointment in your voice when they say they aren’t coming.
#4: Wherever you are, be all in
It’s important to set boundaries where you are. If you’re at work, be at work. If you’re at home, be at home.
Setting these boundaries allows you to be 100% present at home instead of scrolling through your phone at 8 pm, trying to watch a movie with your partner while finding an open appointment for Jenna.
This can be difficult because we head to the breakroom when we’ve got downtime in our day , right? And people are scrolling through their phones, reading People magazine…but when they go home, they have to spend time working on their business.
What if you worked on your business during those downtimes during your day? Then you’d get all the hours at home to be truly present with no guilt.
It’s tough to decide not to do the social stuff or kick back and hang out with everybody. It’s a sacrifice. But taking time during your workday to work on your business will 100% be worth it when you head home.
The key to all of these strategies is deciding what you want your life to look like and why you became a stylist. We all have 24 hours in a day. You get to choose how you spend that time. Really think about where you’re wasting time, where you’re spending time effectively, and how you can find little pockets of time during your day that could be spent differently.
