Stepping Back from Your Business Without Sacrificing Growth

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the Modern Hair Stylist podcast. Today, we're going to be talking all about taking a break. And, I'm not going to be referring to taking a vacation from doing your work behind the chair.

So like, I'm not going to be talking about not taking appointments for a week and going to Mexico, or just spending your time at home and relaxing. I'm going to be talking about taking a break from the development of your business. So, growing the business and maintaining the business, having to deal with all the business-y sides of things. Taking education, learning new things, staying ahead of the trends, all of that stuff.

Because, as we know, as I talk about all the time, you have your full-time job of doing the actual hair, of the physical labor of being in the salon. But then you also have the full-time job, or you could even look at it as a bunch of part-time jobs, of actually dealing with the business side of things. And it can be exhausting. And so, I've gotten asked this question a fair bit from hair stylists who are business oriented, maybe such as yourself, and they want to know, like, when is it okay for me to just take a step back and just coast, and like, just maybe maintain what I have going on?

Or, just not even deal with any of the business side of things and just do the bare minimum and just show up and be the artist and work? And this has been a timely thing for me to be talking about because I am personally gearing up to be going on a two-month trip where I will be out of my home and going from location to location to location. And I need to figure out what that looks like for me and my business, how that may jeopardize the growth of my business, and also the main- maintenance of my business as well, too. And how I can make sure that is still conducive to my personal fulfillment in my life, but then also for how this business will make sure that it stays afloat, so that way it can continuously fuel these types of endeavors that are supposed to make me happy as a human being.

And, you know, that brings me to making sure that I'm clear that my overall philosophy is that you need to do what you need to do as a human being to be happy, to be healthy. Because life is really freaking short, right? And so I don't think that there's a right or a wrong answer here, and I think that we all have to do what we have to do to take care of ourselves and there's nothing wrong with that at all. But I do believe that, when we think about taking a break, I think that there's a lot of things that we can consider in order to approach those things strategically, and then also to just get really real with ourselves when we need to maybe separate discipline, like the definition of discipline, versus just not doing something that we don't feel like doing.

Um, and also just looking into the ways that we can make it so we can take breaks, eh, but then also not have to worry about jeopardizing our growth or our success overall. And so, I'm going to be breaking a lot of those things down today. And it- a lot of it, just so you know, just a little teaser, a lot of it is going to have to do with where you're at in your journey as far as your growth and progression into becoming a scaled business owner. So, if you're ready to get into it, let's motherfucking go.

So, you guys know that I believe that there are two phases of struggle that hair stylists will go through in order to achieve being a scaled hair stylist. So, the first phase is the growth phase, in which you don't have much clientele, you don't have a stable foundation per se, and you are just struggling to be able to get clients into the door and to just create a little bit of consistency and momentum for yourself. And then you go into phase two, where you're- you're a little bit more established as a hair stylist. You might have a great clientele, but now you don't have much time to be able to focus on the business side of things, and you have a lot of communication that you have to deal with, and there isn't much time in your day-to-day in which you're able to accomplish a lot, and you also feel like you are drained as far as your personal energy goes, and there's not a lot of fulfillment in your personal life.

And then, once you go through those two phases and you figure out the strategies that will get you beyond those two phases, then we enter you being a scaled hair stylist, or a scaled business owner, in which the day-to-day is all kind of taken care of. You're both making money and you have a lot of time. And so the concept of taking a break looks different depending on which phase you are in as a hair stylist. Okay, so let's start off with what it looks like to take a break for a stylist who is in phase one.

So, you are in the growth phase of your business in which you're just trying to get things off the ground. You're trying to create consistency for yourself. You're trying to build a stable foundation, right? Oftentimes, being in this position can be very disheartening.

It can feel very lonely, it can feel very hopeless, and it can feel absolutely exhausting, which will inevitably lead to burnout, making you feel like you just want to take a break, or you just don't want to do the fricking work at all because you're not seeing the results. So, you're putting in the work. Maybe you're doing the things. You're posting on social media, you're putting out great work with your clients, you're asking them to send their family and friends to you, but nothing is necessarily working or you're not getting the momentum as quickly as you'd wish, right?

So what ends up happening is, is that you feel like shit. You're not getting any reward chemical release from your brain and it makes it really hard for you to actually want to continue moving forward or have any hope for the future or feel like the work that you put in is even worth it at the end of the day. So then therefore you want to take a break. Here's my tough love for you, my friend.

Every single time you fail, it is so essential...... that you see it through and that you keep pushing forward. 'Cause every single time you put in some sort of effort, you are going to learn something from that, which is going to help you in actually gaining the success that you're looking for. The things that you are doing right now are not just for instant gratification of tomorrow and getting one new client tomorrow.

It's so that you get a new client in six months from today, in a year from now, in two years. You need to be putting in the reps. You cannot expect this stuff to come so quickly. And the thing is, is that it's a lot of the time what we see on social media or the crazy stories such as mine that you hear, but the thing is, is that that came with a lot of experience and a lot of smart strategy, proven strategy behind it.

So, you may not be making a lot of money right now. However, you have a lot of time. And so use that time wisely. Show up even when you don't feel like it, even when things feel really hard and they haven't been working for you and you feel discouraged.

Do it anyway and make sure that you have a mentor and peers to lean into, that you're researching and doing good education that is actually caught up with the times and is not just based on personal experience, but also actual research and proven strategies out there. Keep it pushing. And my tough love for you, my friend, is that it is not time for a break. It is time for you to show up big and bad and hard if you actually want to make this career work for yourself.

And that is absolutely possible for you, so keep going. Now, let's talk about the established stylist. So, if you're an established stylist, if you're in phase two, in which you have a stable foundation of clientele and you have consistency and you feel good about where everything's at for the most part, it can be a little bit tricky to navigate if you should take a break or not because things may s- feel a little bit fragile or you may feel like you have a lot of responsibilities to keep up with. What has gotten you here today is your hustle mindset.

It's you focusing on the business and being passionate about it at this point, right? And so you have been in this grind of creating all of the success for yourself and it feels really scary or you may even feel guilt around taking a step back and letting things coast, right? So, when you're in this type of position, I think it's very important to make it so you have built a business that you don't feel like you need to take a break from, that you've built a business in which you have strong boundaries and systems in place in which the business isn't burning you out. So that way, you can show up consistently, and when you do show up, it's easy for you to maintain and grow the business and that you're regaining as much time as possible.

And you can do that with automations and systems and boundaries and just smart strategy overall. You may not be in a place in which you can hire out the things that you'd like to get done to maintain and grow the business, but you are in a space in which you can afford to procedurally run your business in more innovative ways that will get your time back so that your clients are doing a lot of the work for you, so that your marketing is very easy and batched out and it's targeted and when you do show up, those efforts actually work. And you can make it so the business doesn't feel so hard, so that way you don't feel burnt out at the end of the day. Now, for you, my friend, I think it's very important that you consider at least having one admin day that you are not working behind a chair, that you solely use just to focus on the growth of the business.

In the space that you're in right now, you can most likely afford that, and you can honestly make the same amount of money that you're making right now in a week with maybe a simple price increase possibly Like, I've done the math with a lot of my students who are in this position and they're like, "I'd love to take a day off, but I still want to make X amount of money." Well, the simple solution is do the math for how much you need to increase your prices to be able to afford taking off one day and then be able to make the same amount of money. And here's the flip side of that is that if you do take a day off, if you do have just one day that's dedicated to growing your business, then you're going to exponentially increase your revenue overall because you're gonna be working on the things that actually move the needle forward. But when you are working a full-time schedule behind a chair and you go home and you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna work on my business now," you're absolutely exhausted and you're burnt out and of course you want to take a break because there's no space for you to be able to actually gain momentum with your full 100% energy, right?

Unlike the growing stylist who has a ton of time, you don't have a lot of time, right? So, try to figure out how you can regain that time as much as possible with automations, boundaries and systems, and then simultaneously make time to be able to focus on the things that grow the business the most because the goal is, is for you to become a scaled stylist with a scaled business in which you can take a break and you don't have to worry about the growth of the business because it's taken care of for you. Now, for example, for the established stylists out there who is maybe pushing their way towards being a scaled stylist, my student Lark was able to take off 16 entire days from their business and they were able to book four new clients, make $400 in retail sales, was not stressed about managing current clients and rescheduling and answering questions and all of those things, and only spent 15 minutes on their phone the entire 16-day vacation. That is what's possible when you actually put real systems and automations into place, when you build a business that you actually like and you don't feel like you need to take a break from And when you do take a break from it, you don't feel guilty about it because things are still moving forward in a clean and professional, beautiful way.

Now, here's the thing about this though. When you do take a break from your business, you can still maintain the business as an established stylistHowever, you're not maintaining growth. You aren't going on an upward trajectory, you're just kind of flat-lining, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think that there are definitely seasons for just staying where you're at and maintaining that and not declining, right?

However, what we really want to create is a business in which we can actually take a break, but the business still grows on an upward trajectory. And that is the capability that a skilled stylist has, in which you can hire out the responsibilities that maintain and grow the business. So, that way you can take a step back and you can just focus on showing up to work, doing what you do best, and focusing on the overall vision of the business and maintain momentum of rapid growth without you having to do all the work yourself. Now, with all that being said, I do think it's important to mention that no matter how much you've grown the business, whether you are just starting out or you have a really great established business for yourself, things are taken care of for you, there's always going to be seasons in which you're gonna have to get your hands a little bit dirtier sometimes.

You're gonna have to put in some short-term sacrifice to make things happen. Or there's gonna be seasons when things feel a little bit easier and you don't feel like you have to work as hard. Being an entrepreneur is a big fat rollercoaster, okay? As we all know.

Because life changes, business changes, your goals and what you want to achieve changes, right? And so therefore, like, for example, with my two-month trip, I'm not even calling it a vacation because I am gonna be working while I'm doing it, but I am gonna be traveling to these different locations, right? The way that I work and the goals that I have for my business and the projects that I'll be working on and the timelines for each of them, they have to change in order for me to make this thing work, right? And so, what I am gonna highly suggest that you do, my friend, is that you build a business in which taking a break is something that is possible for you, but that you are willing to put in the work to make that happen, right?

And so for me, I am putting in a lot of short-term sacrifice right now to make it so that trip that I'm going on is going to work and it's not gonna jeopardize our momentum or our clients' experiences. And you can do the same thing. Just make sure that you sit down and you plan things quarter by quarter, year by year. Have a clear idea of what you're trying to achieve and build a business that is conducive to making that happen without jeopardizing your success.

So overall, I want you to consider, why is it that you want a break right now? Why is it that you're feeling a little bit burnt out? Is this just a normal feeling or circumstance around just being an individual who has to work and wants to take a little bit of a break for a moment? Or are you experiencing a lot of disappointment with the effort that you're putting in to actually grow the business, which is making you burnt out of the work that you're doing and you really just need to be disciplined and real with yourself and keep working to make it happen?

Or are you in a space in which you have built an established clientele and maybe you've been hustling and hustling and hustling and showing up so much that you are completely burnt out and you haven't built a business that you can actually just enjoy and reap the fruits of your labor? Or are you in a space where you're maybe ready to hire things out so that way you can completely take a break and the momentum of growth in your business just continues forward without you having to do much at all? I also want to take a moment to just call you out if you haven't been doing your due diligence of making sure that you are taking a lunch break every single freaking day, that you are scheduling yourself within a reasonable amount of hours and you're not pushing your limits. Because of course you're gonna feel freaking burnt out if you're making that happen, right?

So, take good care of yourself on the day-to-day, because we're going to be living the majority of our lives working. So, you might as well do it in a way in which you are taking the best care of yourself that you possibly can. Okay, my friend, so much love to you. I hope that you have a blessed rest of your day.

Peace out, girl scout.

End of transcript. © 2024 Hunter Donia LLC.