Imagine having a business where you could take four months off each year, not work nights or weekends, and still make more than you did the previous year.
Sounds difficult? Maybe. Is it possible? Absolutely.
Most stylists and salon owners got into this industry to create a freedom-filled life for themselves, right? Step one of achieving that life is moving away from working nights and weekends.
But maybe the idea of moving away from nights and weekends makes you panic. You worry that your clients won’t like the change or even leave you.
Here’s the real talk: smart business always wants to improve. It’s the natural evolution of things. We can’t start doing all the beautiful things we want (like taking four months off) unless we start shifting away from having just a good business to an exceptional one.
But phasing out nights and weekends is a scalability power play. You have to make sure you’re at the right stage in your business, be ready to make the short-term sacrifice for long-term gain, and have an established clientele.
(If you enjoy working nights and weekends because it works best for your lifestyle right now, that’s totally understandable. Just bookmark this blog and come back to it when you’re ready!)
Today, we’re going to dig into the top four indicators when it’s time to start to shift your schedule.
Indicator #1: You know your market can handle the shift
The most important question to ask yourself when you start thinking about easing off nights and weekends is if your target market would have a hard time coming in if you phased out these times.
Does that mean you should keep nights and weekends on your schedule? No. It just means you just might need to change your target market.
We’ve been taught to believe those night and Saturday spots are prime time, right? But not every client wants those appointments. Some will love Tuesdays at 10 am when their kids are at school over a Thursday at 6 pm .
When we say you have to consider your market, think about your branding, how you put yourself out there, what platforms you show up on, and the structure you have in place. Do you need to change your branding and marketing plan to meet your 10 am Tuesday clients in the middle?
Indicator #2: You have the demand
This is the most crucial piece, but it’s also the piece people put the least amount of effort and energy into.
Why? Because there’s a huge misunderstanding about demand in our industry.
Think about it this way: if you’re setting 8 new guest requests a month, how many are actually coming to see you? Probably 3, right? That’s just over 30%.
Based on retention standards, the average stylist retains 30% of new guests. And that’s the average.
That means many stylists don’t even gain one new client a month. They gain half. Every other month, they gain a client.
Then because the average is 30%, some people would gain two every other month. Nobody retains 100% of new guests.
12 new clients a year isn’t sustainable, meaning the demand isn’t there yet for you to phase out nights and weekends.
Demand is based on two things:
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New guest request retention
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How far out you’re booked
And keep in mind, you have to retain these guests. If you see new guests every month but your income isn’t increasing, you’re bleeding out. (Click here to learn what to do if this is you!)
If you don’t have high new guest request retention and you’re not properly booked out, you can’t have the conversation yet about phasing out nights and weekends.
Focus on building up the demand first and retaining those new guests before you move into shifting your schedule.
If you do have that demand, this is a strong key indicator, you can begin to phase out nights and weekends.
Indicator #3: You aren’t hitting cruise control
Once you have multiple new guest requests, you’re retaining at a high rate, and you’re booked out to the place you want to be, then you can start making shifts to your schedule and getting that freedom.
Here’s the catch: when you are retaining, your marketing is great, and you’re being booked out, the temptation is to sit back and hit cruise control.
That’s a no-go.
If you take a break or hit cruise control, you’re going to start losing money. Imagine if scalability was a steep hill. You start to make progress moving up the hill, getting closer and closer to the top…but then you slow down. It gets harder and harder to start back up that hill again, right?
If you don’t have that strategy and structure in place, if you take your foot off the gas, you lose all your momentum. When you have reached the top of that hill and have true scalability in place, you can take your foot off the gas and still grow because you have the structure.
If you are continuously building your structure and strategy to reach scalability and not hitting cruise control, that’s a good signal it’s time to evolve from nights and weekends.
Indicator #4: You have a marketing strategy
As stylists, we were told that what we were shooting for was to be booked out to the moon and back, right? Living behind the chair, double booking, just keeping those shears opening and closing until the cows came home. That was success.
That sounds exhausting.
Instead of putting in random effort, have a strategy. Know where your target market likes to hang out and show up there. Talk to their struggles and provide a solution. Become their go-to person for all things hair and beauty.
Don’t just put in random effort. Be strategic. Put in proven effort to get where you want to be. (If you need help developing a marketing strategy, check out the Thriving Stylist Method!)
Because when you have a marketing strategy, it becomes so much easier to achieve your goal of a dream schedule.
If you’re thinking about growing your business by stepping away from nights and weekends, use these four indicators to see if it’s time. Because if you want your business to evolve and to achieve that freedom-filled lifestyle you dreamed of, you have to first build the structure and the strategy before you can step into scalability.
